XTRAORDINARY COMMUNICATION

Sustainability bubbles up from the grassroots.

(Dear yahoo group:)
My personal blog, which is due for another post , received a comment from a HopeDance webmaster that I needed to update their link. So, while there, I looked at the Transistion Town Initiative, which led me eventually to the Transistion MO page where you had posted this yahoo group. I decided to start with the yahoo group since I am already a member of several other y-groups.

Some of these ideas are ones that I have been mulling over during the past year. My blog, which I started in June, has been focused mostly on actions related to politics and peace. However, in truth, I would like to refocus it more concretely on environmental concerns, and the now emerging new reversal of the old slogan to "Think locally, act globally."

Prior to starting the blog I spent about three years as webmaster for Missourians for Honest Elections.Then the webserver was attacked by some mysterious vector or hacker and all my work for the previous six months was lost. That was when I decided to change my focus to a broader scope. This article expresses a point of view that I agree with in terms of the voting reform movement. Continued oversight is needed, but without civic participation casting our vote is worth less than we think.

The small community I live in is Maplewood, MO., an inner suburb in St. Louis County with a diverse working class population. We have a large number of reasonably priced apartments besides some more upscale residential neighborhoods, and the area has experienced an economic boom during the past few years. So we have a busy business area that extends across into The City. Since the economic slump the thought of a local community exchange has crossed my mind. I first heard about the concept regarding some town in the North East, maybe in Vermont. In that case the currency was based on work hours, e.g., one hour of gardening in exchange for an hour of cooking. Or fifteen minutes with a doctor for fifteen minutes of car repair. Some people that I have had conversations with in the coffee shop on the corner have said we might have to resort to bartering at some point, so I think it is a good idea for individuals to polish the skills they have and learn some of the older arts which we have largely left behind.

My own little place is on the third (top) floor across the street from a one block square park through which the Gateway Arch and the city skyline can be seen from the west, beautiful at sunrise and moonrise. (It is more usually photographed from the Illinois side of the river.)

Much of the news around the world is tragic with events outside my control, although I believe we must let our legislators and leaders know our points of view. To my thinking the emerging climate crisis is the cause of much of the conflict, poverty and migration, which is based on corporate greed for resources without regard for humanity. Still I see signs of new realizations, such as the Portugal town where solar power has been installed as a source of income.

We do have people around here who are interested in the slow food movement, with the local taproom/microbrewery/restaurant, Schlafly's, being their meeting place. No, I haven't yet been to one of their meetings, but it is something I hope to do eventually.

Also, in the City of St. Louis, we have a number of community gardens, more than I even realized until I started to look online. The idea of starting up a community garden (besides the one that Schlafly's grows) appeals to me, although I have some personal limitations that would require help from more able-bodied friends. These are just thoughts that are in no way yet actualized.

Meanwhile I need to focus on whether I can continue to live in this small apartment by convincing my landlord it needs serious modifications-- or if I will be able to move to one that is more conducive to my health. Besides the stair climbing to do laundry, the roof has virtually no insulation so it is cold in here in the winter and hot in the summer. Since I do not have a car I spend more time close to home than the average person. But there are buses and the MetoLink train within walking distance.

Over a decade ago I lived at a small communal living space out in the country near the St. Francois River. We did have a community garden there which was quite wonderful. It fed us as well as guests who came there for weekends. We recycled all our vegetarian garbage into the compost pile. This sort of work, I believe, is extremely useful to the planet as well as local communities in the most urban of spaces because gardening is something of a mystical experience besides contributing to decrease in use of fuel for shipping, agribusiness, etc.

Currently my gardening is limited to house plants and "cat grass," although I do have a back fire escape where I can keep a few containers during the warm months.

So, for the time being my presence on this group may be as something of a lurker, since I need to attend to personal needs before initiating a lot of other changes in my life.

Thanks for setting up this group as well posting on the Transition MO page. We are living in exciting times when change does indeed seem possible-- indeed, essential to survival. Let's not just hope but work in each our own ways to actualize the responses to climate changes which will definitely require both individual and group efforts.

Political Compost

My brain has been busy lately-- well not always. Some of the time I have spent online doing some shopping. And I was actually having some positive thoughts about injecting a tiny bit of my own money into this lousy economy, if not locally, at least some of it for good causes, including for gifts. And I had come across a couple of awe inspiring items, one of them a work of art.

Meanwhile, as usual, I did a cursory survey of the current news, and could have sworn that I read somewhere that the Chicago Tribune was going bankrupt, which is sad, while not surprising, since most print media are suffering from the web takeovers and the general dissatisfaction with the conventional news outlets, which are dominated by corporate interests and have been losing some of their journalists, leaving the country with a Fourth Estate lying on its back with all fours up in the air, almost a comical sight if it were not so tragic.

Then I heard on The News Hour that Illinois Governor Rod Blagojavitch had been arrested for corruption―OMG!! This is so close to home, the second bad governor in our neighbor state, one right after the other, and a story that is blasphemous in its assault on democracy. This kind of stuff is starting to get annoying.

While washing the dishes, the scary thought occurred to me that some of the downfalls happening around the country in local and state governments are all symptomatic of an increased vulnerability to the cynical takeover of our most cherished and hard won values, and we have brought it all upon ourselves. I am beginning to expect to see more and more of these people in positions of power falling over like dominoes, one after the other. And what is this like for the young people who are struggling to survive in a broken economy, with fewer options for education or decent jobs, as so many corporations have shifted to international robbery? And the people holding office have shifted to shiftier behavior.

Meanwhile, stories out of the African Continent are more and more demoralizing, with disease related to lack of clean water, and conflicts elsewhere related to tribal identities, which in the past were purposefully stirred up by dominating invaders. And violence has been springing up in Asia again, some of it directed at English speaking immigrants. The world is a mess, partly perhaps as a result of global economic woes, but chiefly, it seems, as a result of Western political domination. "Humanitarian" has almost become an oxymoron, if not for just a few sane persons, now mostly living on another continent than our own. The United States has slid down off its mountain top into the ocean, where the pollution was already thick with death before we got this far down.

So my personal resolution to write in a more optimistic vein fell down there with the rest of the country. Into that morass of self pity.

In the grocery store, which I went back to today, having forgot a few key items yesterday, I find that it sometimes takes me a minor heft of courage to pass by the corn chips. And in that spirit I am going to corral myself back to the hopeful again.

Despite the frustrations of living "below poverty level," with some troublesome challenges, I am looking forward to the coming New Year. We still don't know when the slide we are in will slow down enough for us to start climbing back up again, or even if we will be so blessed. But we have already heard the greatest wake-up call in perhaps the entire history of human civilization.

Perhaps this moment in time is the greatest opportunity ever for writers to register their thoughts, their fears, their outrages, their hopes and prayers. More and more of us are writing to be heard, with the free blogosphere out there now, meaning that a cacophony of opinions are sometimes waging a war for the available ears. But, wow! Together we have composted more political garbage than ever before even thought possible.

In some ways it should not surprise us that the rotting organic matter can give off an odor. If done properly good compost doesn't do that, but we are beginners at this new, heretofore unheard of avocation, a kind of collective outcry to get the rotten apples out of the barrel so they can be recycled into new life forms. We don't want to attract wild rodents, but we are just beginning to learn how to protect the resources we have, which is a totally new thing for a profligate society.

If we look in the right places we find many, many like-minded people who are more experienced at such things, some of them in alternative political parties or parallel social and issue oriented movements. Eventually we will get to the point that we will be sharing responsibilities with each other in whole new ways. And those "short-timers," waiting for us to fire them, who are so resistant to the prevailing reality, will begin to out themselves, tripping over themselves. They are already making themselves the butt of more and more jokes, until we are all profiting from their horrible mistakes by seeing opportunities to laugh. Laughter and crying are close allies of the human spirit.

A sense of humor is the greatest of all gifts. We can keep it in our pockets, more valuable than money, more readily available than food or water in trying times such as these.

Welcome to my new blog!

This morning I woke up on the couch after going to bed early. It was now 4 a.m. I have been agonizing about the Write Now blog, because we decided to make it private, and I also said that I would set one up for the people who want to be more public.

After breakfast I went to the computer & set one up just for myself, because I realized that sharing a blog was making me overly conscious of the group's needs instead of my own.