Open Letter

This is meant to be a chain letter. If you find the ideas in it worth sharing please forward it.
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Dear Members of Meetup and other groups working to make the world a better place,

If environmental pollution causes us to get cancer, or if global warming destroys food crops, all our massage, NVC, yoga, meditation, vegetarianism, dancing, and everything else will not save us. The figure commonly used is that 1 in 3 Americans gets cancer in their lifetime. Can anyone doubt that a large portion of the cause is environmental pollution.

What can we do?

i offer below some small actions. Will these small actions save the planet? Hell no!, but,
when our friends see us doing them, perhaps they will do them too, and when enough people get the message that environmental pollution and destruction poses a clear and present danger, a greater threat to our health and safety than Al Quaeda, Iran, North Korea, and the economic meltdown, all combined, then some big changes will happen.

It constantly shocks me how seemingly nice, intelligent, well intentioned people just don't seem to grasp the connection between the coffee cup they threw away, and global warming,don't seem to grasp the enormity and the urgency of what's going on, and live their lives in a way inconsistent with the values they espouse with their words. Enough talking the talk. It's time to walk the walk.

OK, 3 very small ideas, the big idea being, to start adopting into your every day life positive actions.

1) You know that you are going to shop. Just keep some cloth shopping bags with you at all times, probably in your car.
2) You know that you are going to eat and drink. Just bring a lunch kit: coffee cup, plate, utensils, cloth napkin, especially to Meetup and other events
3) Form carpool groups for all events.

That's it. Of course there are a host of other actions that could be taken, but let's make a start, a start to remembering that every action has consequences. Do i expect people to be perfect? Hell no. Am i perfect? Probably not in this lifetime, and, don't use that an excuse for lack of diligence.

I hear a lot of people talking the eco talk. Let's at least take the baby steps towards walking the walk, and remember:
In metaphysical terms, the smallest actions are important, symbolic actions are important. With every action you do, every word you speak, every thought you think, you are making a statement to the universe about what kind of world you want to live in.

here's a link to a funny little video, The Story of Stuff http://www.storyofstuff.com/downloads.html
--
be well,
jay

Anonymous said...

Some interesting, practical food for thought, particularly in the idea that small actions in the cumulative and aggregate make a big difference.

The idea of keeping a cloth bag in the car and a cup handy are good ones. I see more people using cloth bags at the grocery stores, but not so much yet the cup.

I partially disagree with the comment that well intentioned and smart people do not see how the little things contribute to the larger whole. Personally, I am not 100% sold that global warming is a fact or that we have caused it. It is also the thinking that there are larger causes that we do not have control over. I think we do have a responsibility to decrease our foot print, but there is still a ways to go in changing our thinking before behaviors follow suit. It's happening though.

Another thought: what about water usage? Why have we not created home and portal distillation systems to stop the over use of water? It seems to me that this is a larger contributor of health and environmental issues.

To the third point about car pools, I do not think most Americans see this as practical. I also think that too many people see it as an impingement of their individualism. It is something we should make a little better effort of though.

Thanks again for the insights :)

-Digger

April 25, 2009 4:06 PM

Jay dancing bear said...

Our whole civilization is based on waste and disposability. Material production poisons the environment, meaning poisons us.

GNP=Gross National Pollution, or Gross National Poisoning
and of course it is international

We are literally poisoning ourselves to make a living. A total new system is needed, a world economic system that is not based on material production and consumption, beyond what is necessary. No more shop till you drop.

the small things i mentioned are just tokens, just a way for people to do some small action. Perhaps asking for this is a mistake on my part, because people who do these things may believe it is enough.

http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science_and_impacts/science/

We Can Do Better!

WATCH THIS VIDEO http://storyofstuff.com/downloads.html

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All problems in human society come from very simple causes

1) COMPASSION, OR THE LACK OF IT
Everybody cares, but how far do the boundaries of compassion extend? Do we just care about ourselves and our families and friends. Do we care what happens to somebody else, especially if we will never meet or even see that someone else. Our city, our class, our race, animals; trees.

2) FEAR, usually fear that there is not enough for everybody, meaning that we can't afford to help others, because then we won't have enough for ourselves.

3) WISDOM, VISION, CLARITY, SEEING DEEPLY
different words for the same thing.
When you turn on a light, do you see the power plant upstream, the garbage dump the whole light fixture will inevitably end up in.

Every action has consequences and implications, direct and indirect. Do you understand how the simplest actions of your life, such as buying a pizza, are not simple, in fact are the result of a very complicated manufacturing and supply chain? Seeing that is wisdom, taking things for granted is foolish.

If you really thought through, as best as you could, all the consequences and implications of how you are living, you would live very differently, and, my belief, be happier and healthier.

It's all really very simple:
selfishness, fear, and shortsightedness, or compassion, courage, and wisdom.
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WHAT WENT WRONG WITH THE ECONOMY?

In the simplest of terms, the people who kept it going, the poor and middle class people who created the demand for goods and services, don't have enough money to spend to keep the whole house of cards going,
BECAUSE
the rich got so greedy, downsized so many people, didn't pay enough people good wages , moved factories offshore, and raised executive salaries through the roof while doing it.
Everything else is a detail.

Productivity went way up, profits went way up, and the owners and executives kept it all for themselves. Occasionally tossing the workers a few crumbs, usually firing them and making one person do the work that used to be done by two people.

Food chains are built on the little critters at the bottom of the food chain. When they aren't doing well, the whole food chain collapses. Henry Ford understood that it benefited him to pay his workers enough to buy his cars.

AND MAYBE THERE'S A BRIGHT SIDE

My personal belief is that environmental pollution is responsible for a lot of cancer, heart disease, asthma, and everything else.
The more we consume=the more poisons we create.
Less consumption=less cancer (and maybe you're the person who won't get it)

I think the whole idea of an economy based on production of material goods is dead, and we are seeing that in our health. This planet can only handle a certain level of toxins, whereas current economic models say that growth is good. That's wrong. Of course everyone needs to have their needs met in a comfortable way, food, shelter, etc.. but the way we're doing it very often results in watching your loved ones suffer as a result of toxins produced by the same system that employs you.
WE CAN DO BETTER!

Living Well

Ok, so you've read my earlier blog posts, and lots of other similar material, and you're saying "life sucks, and then you die".

The delicate balancing act of life is to keep the spiritual eye open to the higher truths, to live a life of integrity, to keep a good attitude, and a smile, to take care of your health, to not let stress chew at you and destroy your health, to eat well, take care of your body, have good relationships, etc
AND
to see the world as it is, to see through all the lies we are told and the frauds we are sold, to not just accept the propaganda, the brainwashing, the bullshit.

I'll tell my own story. A few years back, i was getting so upset, taking on so much stress, about all the "problems of the world", thinking about it so much, that my health started to go down. i really had the feeling that if i didn't find some way of dealing with this, that i wouldn't be around much longer.

I have a long background and repertoire of spiritual practices. I meditate, do yoga, vegetarian, all that stuff. In this case it saved my life.
I started doing a practice of sending energy up to my third eye, of holding the intention, praying, if you want to call it that, that i be allowed to see the world with the eye of spirit, because to my human eyes, it looked like it was bad and getting worse.

What ended up happening, is that i started getting the understanding, the deep intuition or feeling, that the world was a one room schoolhouse, that we are all here, and have chosen to incarnate here, in this time, in the midst of these problems, for the purpose of learning lessons. One of the biggest, and for me, probably my own personal most important lesson, is to not hate those who do wrong, to see them as the wounded, sick individuals they are, rather than as "bad" people. To see the innate goodness deep in the soul of even the most horrendous torturer.

And, ultimately, i received the understanding that we are all, as Wayne Dyer says, spiritual beings having a material experience. Our essence is not wetted by water, not dried by wind, not cloven by a sword, not burned by fire. Our bodies are like suits of clothes. If something happens, you can always get a new one.

That may all sound pretty pie in the sky to materialistic types who believe in no higher reality than what they can touch, taste and smell. Until you do some practices, which open up your energy body and higher centers, it's all just a bunch of words, until you start opening up higher modes of perception.

I personally believe that anyone living in this world, especially those trying to change the world for the better, owe it to themselves to give themselves the spiritual and psychic nutrition they need, and this is done through every day practice. I am not trying to sell any particular brand. There are a lot of different choices, what is important is to do something.

Now you can see from my other blog posts that i still react to wrongs, but I now have a sense that, as Martin Luther King said, "the arc of history is towards justice".

good luck

is america a one party state?

Is America a one party state, the CORPORATE CAPITALIST PARTY? Are the Democratic and Republican parties like the left and right wings of this party, the Wage Slavery party, with the Democratic party representing a kinder, gentler version, while the Republicans are more hard nosed.

Are they like the slaveholders of the pre Civil War South, where some of the slaveholders starved their slaves and didn't give them enough time to rest, while others saw the wisdom in taking better care of their slaves, however both shared the unquestioning assumption that the slaves existed for the benefit of the owners, that the slaves' purpose in life was to be slaves.

Let's look at our "free" elections
1) a winner take all system, which means that you only have to get part of the electorate to believe your lies, rather than having to moderate policies, as in a parlimentary, proportional representation system. The two party system discourages and silences any voices too far off the mainstream. Third parties are rendered a joke, because they have no chance of winning, thus people will not vote for them, thus, they have no chance of winning.

2) Money and advertising, in effect, buy elections. The rich are allowed to buy as many Newspapers, TV and radio stations as they want. The media then, in effect, chooses the candidates, by giving free advertising in the form of "news" to some, while totally ignoring others. This preserves the illusion of "freedom of choice", while making a mockery of it.

An additional benefit of this is that once you own the media you can lie to and brain wash the populace, Fox "news" being a good example.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6737097743434902428
Of course the deeper brainwashing is not just the lies and propaganda that media mouthpieces like Fox put out, the deeper brainwashing is the whole mindset of materialism, selfishness, war with nature, competition instead of cooperation, and all the rest of the sick, perverted and self destructive modes of living that society tries to program us for.

3) People who disagree are put either in prison or under the threat of prison. The way to do this is by making the lifestyle of the left and the working classes, especially the darker skinned people, illegal.

One way that this is done is by making pleasurable drugs illegal, while encouraging expensive addictions to toxic medical drugs with horrible side effects, actually prescribing them through the power of the "health care" system.

You get to lock up a bunch of people, take away their right to vote, and make money off them while they are in prison. Also, even for the ones you don't lock up (is it 80 million americans who use drugs? 100 million?), people afraid of jail are less likely to be politically active. They will keep their heads down and shut up.

4) And, if wages stay low, and people have to work a lot of hours, they won't have time to educate and concern themselves with politics.

5) Let's not forget an educational system that features one teacher for 35 students, and fails to teach even the basic elements of personal finance and time management, in a world where those are such vital skills, and that teaches students to learn what the test will ask and to avoid creative thinking.

6) However, when too many people start to wake up, usually because they are suffering, then elections are switched to computers, which can then easily be hacked, if you can call it hacking when the company that makes the machines and wrote the programs does the "hacking".


The two videos below are about how the elections are stolen
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7926958774822130737

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5321794022770412541


all this under the banner of free and fair elections.

To sum up, THE FIX IS IN

Case in point; Republicans under Reagan and Bush institute lawlessness, the invitation to theft and fraud known as deregulation, and give away trillions in tax cuts to the wealthy. The system falls apart, the Republicans (Tweedledee) lose credibility, so the ruling elites bring in the Democrats (Tweedledum) to give away Trillions to the people who caused the problem, under the rationale that they have to, in order to save the little people.

addendum: A case can be made that President Obama is the perfect person to continue the cause of Corporate Welfare. He looks like change, he sounds like change, but fundamentally, he represents business as usual, albeit a kinder, gentler version.

i think that President Obama is a smart, well intentioned man, whose weakness is that he is prone to conventional thinking. I think that, given the brainwashing and propaganda the American people have received for so long, he is probably the best we could have hoped for, given that essentially, when it comes to elections, our choices are made for us by the ruling elites through the mechanism of the Corporate media.

His weakness is that he still thinks inside the box; closer to the edges, but still inside the box. My hope is that at some point he will wake up and see that we need to go outside the box, and that he will be allowed to live to do that.

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Think of yourself as a scientist. Take a step back from your beliefs, and just see if the facts fit the theory. This doesn't mean that the theory i outline above is true, i'm not sure it is myself, and the truth is, I hope I'm wrong, but does it seem like it explains what is going on. You draw your own conclusions, come up with your own theories.

What can you do?
I believe that it is each person's responsibility in life to because the best people we can be. The first thing is to wake up yourself.

Avoid the temptation to buy, buy, buy. Your time is your most valuable resource. Use it to become the best person you can be. Take care of your body, mind and spirit, and actions will come naturally, as the fruit of your higher state of awareness. Martin Luther King said that the arc of history is towards justice. For all the problems, there has been a lot of progress. Time is on the side of Truth, and it happens through each person waking up, one by one.

a little bit about me

for those of you who have read this blog, and perhaps some of my other writings on my website, jaydancingbear.com
you may be under the impression that i am a knee jerk, bleeding heart, liberal do gooder. Well, maybe i am, but i don't think so.

I started out as a Republican, a real meat head type, the guy who said we should nuke North Vietnam (this was during the Vietnam war). Times have changed.

In many ways liberals drive me crazy with their politics of victimhood and failure to demand personal responsibility and accountability from all the "victims". As far as i can tell, most people are just as much victims of themselves, of their own arrogance and stupidity, as they are of anything else. Lack of resources is one thing; poor use of resources is another. As a musician who has lived on a low budget my whole life, and done well with it, i know that you can spend $10 on one meal or on groceries for three meals.

Now the big BUT

But, even though liberals drive me crazy, they are so absolutely right on in their view of how our political and economic system is rigged to make the rich richer and the poor poorer, and to produce lots of losers to fill up the prisons and march off to war. Conservatives close their eyes to how having a kid grow up with virtually no parent time, because the parents both have to work 2 jobs to survive, because the landlord gets to grind them to pay enough rent to pay his mortgage and put money in his pocket, and then that same kid goes to a school where classrooms have one teacher for 35 kids, and of course he's been subtly told he's not good enough because he's not white, well, what do you expect?

The figure i saw was that 1 in 3 high school kids do not graduate. Where are they going to end up? In prison, making a lot of money for police, courts, judges, prison guards, the suppliers of clothing and food, etc. And that's the point. The system is designed to produce these losers to make money off of.

Just from a selfish point of view, we're better off not having a bunch of fucked up, angry, uneducated people stealing our car stereos when we park, or having to trip over a bunch of homeless people when we go downtown (and let's not forget how many of these homeless are vets).

I just wish everybody would cut the shit and tell the truth: people are ultimately responsible for their own actions, and the system is rigged to produce losers.

And the environment. Don't get me started. A slow motion train wreck, the ultimate disaster. But hey, let's not interfere with business, even if we all get cancer, our homes are blown away in a hurricane, and the world either cooks us or goes to a new Ice Age.

WAKE UP. Even if everybody else is a marching moron, at least open up your own eyes.

http://www.projectcensored.org/

Clear and Present Danger

dear president obama,

Global warming and environmental pollution are a greater threat to the people of the US, and the rest of the world, than China, Iran, North Korea, Al Qaeda combined, a greater threat to our health and saftety than the economic meltdown.

The Bush regime systematically lied and deceived the American People about this grave danger, thus most Americans consider these problems to be annoying, but not life threatening. Looking at the evidence, there is clear and present danger.

I believe it is your responsibility is to go on TV and deliver an address telling the US citizenry just how serious this is. Present as evidence all the scientific reports the Bush administration censored, literally crossing out the lines of type it did not like.

I'm not going to adduce all the evidence here, just one small fact. One in two american men gets cancer in his lifetime. 1 in 2. that's shocking, clear evidence of the effects of our toxic lifestyle.

The recent use of the word pragmatic is appalling. Is it pragmatic to stay inside of a burning building, because you have work to do in your office. How big a disaster is needed to wake people up. Are you as president going to wait for that disaster, or are you going to be proactive.

I believe you are a smart, well intentioned man, who is prone to conventional thinking. What is needed to save the planet is visionary thinking, and i believe you can do it.

Yours Truly,
Jay Dancing Bear

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/01/090128-ocean-dead-zones.html

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/11/1130_051130_ice_age.html

link to my previous blog

http://blogs.myspace.com/jaydancingbear
also check out
http://jaydancingbear.com/writings/Politics.htm

Putting people in prison for fun and profit

http://www.google.com/search?q=prison+industrial+system&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

http://www.facts1.com/ThreeStrikes/Facts/

the US locks up way more people per capita than any other developed nation in the world, including communist china. why? because there's money to be made, lots of it.