Reflections

The links below will take you to reflections on current ideas and experiences that don't readily fit elsewhere. I write them as the spirit moves.

Often these pieces deal with more tentative ideas not necessarily refined or fully integrated into the larger Great Turning framework. 

When Our Leaders Fail to Lead

President Obama's announcement on December 1, 2009 of his decision to escalate the Afghanistan conflict extends a U.S. commitment to a war with even less prospect for success than the Vietnam War. It is simply a matter of when we will face up to the inevitable and leave Afghanistan to the only people who can fix it—the Afghanistan people. 

Who is Van Jones

Because of a Fox News smear of Van Jones as part of its relentless attack on the Obama administration, a lot of people are asking "Who is Van Jones?"

Seattle+10: Time to Declare Our Independence from Wall Street

Call to mark the 10th anniversary of the historic Seattle World Trade Organization protest with global/local days of Action in late November and early December asserting a popular citizen demand to end to corporate control of the political process that is blocking needed action on a wide range of priority needs ranging from climate change and financial restructuring to economic justice and health care. <read more> 

Main Street Before Wall Street

Why spend public money to prop up the predatory system on Wall Street. It makes far more sense to focus our efforts on creating a financial system that serves Main Street, the real world economy engaged in the production and exchange of the real goods and services on which the well being of working people who play by the rules depends.

Waking Up

This is a response to the attached blog from Charles Shaw on the work of the Great Turning. Here Charles describes an initiative he has helped to organize in Chicago by which a large group of Burning Man alumni are banding together to create their own cooperative community by which they share their skills to prepare for the coming collapse of the global food and energy systems as the consequences of peak oil and climate chaos play out. He notes that they have drawn inspiration from the video The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil.     <read more>

Earth Community: An Indigenous Perspective

Our species is blessed to have a surviving storehouse of Earth Community wisdom and experience that indigenous people have managed to preserve despite all the best efforts of the institutions of Empire to eliminate it. Indigenous peoples lived close to Earth and were deeply aware that their security and survival as individuals depended on their deep bond to tribe and nature. <read more>

World We Want Commentary

On May 25, 2008 Common Dreams posted the text of my April 13 presentation to the Seattle Green Festival, which elicited a flurry of commentary from Common Dreams visitors. See http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/05/25/9185/#comment-285829.   <read more>