Goodness Gracious Sakes Alive

"If it isn't good, let it die.  If it doesn't die, make it good."
Ajahn Chah

"We are living in a world today where lemonade is made from artificial flavors and furniture polish is made from real lemons."  
Alfred E. Neuman


The goodness factor: moral excellence; virtue; kindness; generosity; excellence of quality.  What is goodness?  While the attributes listed above touch on it, none of them nail it down.  Yet, we somehow intuitively know when something is good because it makes us feel happier and lighter inside.  It is sort of like the difference between having to take the bitterness of life's lemons straight and being able to add some sweetener.  The sweetener makes all the difference turning the unpleasant acrid taste of pure lemons into refreshing lemonade.  So how do we apply this sweetener to our culture to mitigate the acridness of our current situation?

In the simple wisdom of Ajahn Chah, we need to assess whether there is any inherent goodness.  If we think not, then we need to be prepared to rid ourselves of it and move on.  But if in that moving on, it doesn't die; then, we need to make it good.  And herein is the real nubbins of the issue.  To make something good that previously may not have been requires effort on our part.  It calls us to new thinking and new ways of doing things.  In the end, I think it all gets down to intention.  Is our intention to make it good for all of us or for just a select few?  That subtle shift makes all the difference and determines the goodness quotient of our results - the quality of the lemonade we make.

We have the potential to be so much more than what we have achieved so far.  The last few blogs have dealt with our dark sides and how that path is not sustainable for any of us.  Today, I wish to celebrate the resourceful cleverness that resides within each of us just waiting to get out.  As I write this blog, several hundred creative, resourceful entrepreneurs and business owners are converging on Buffalo, New York for the annual convention of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE).  Their mission is a lofty one - "PROSPERITY FOR ALL."  I am not sure about you but I want to gather under that banner.  Even more idealistic is this statement: "Within a generation, we envision a global system of human-scale, interconnected local economies that function in harmony with local ecosystems to meet the basic needs of all people, support just and democratic societies, and foster joyful community life."  I say AMEN!  By shifting their focus from all-about-me-and-my-endeavor-in-isolation-and-competition-with- everyone-else to hey-let's-pool-our-resources-and-work-together-for-the-common-good, they are impacting communities and bringing about a social revolution from the ground up.  They are not waiting for the "big boys" to get involved; they have rolled up their sleeves and are figuring it out for themselves and luckily for the rest of us as well.  My money is on them.

In case you are still waiting for a great leader to emerge and lead us out of this quagmire, here is something to think about: social scientists have observed that once a complex system becomes corrupted, it cannot re-energize itself for self-correction.  The best bet is to find a safe creative space outside of the dominant system from which something new can be created from the ground up.  Sounds as if BALLE is just such a crucible for birthing an economy that brings true prosperity.  Has it ever made any sense that a "healthy" economy is one that is predicated upon people's ability to consume (greed) and is constantly growing with no discernable reason for that growth (cancer)?  To paraphrase what Michelle Long, Executive Director of BALLE, said at last year's convention, it's about living life as an experiment, making it up as we go along at the grass roots.  Adding my commentary, that really means that in order to do so, we have to be present in each moment and free to respond to what that moment has to offer.  Isn't that what the gurus have been preaching all along as the path to happiness and peace?   

Here are BALLE's guiding principles: 

• Think Local First - this improves the health of the environment, strengthens community, contributes to functional democracy
• Increase Self-Reliance - this increases local resilience, saves energy and creates a foundation for world peace.
• Share Prosperity - provides living wage jobs, creates opportunities for broad-based business ownership, engages in fair trade, and expects living returns from our capital
• Build Community - collaboration, cooperation, and fair trade between communities for a sustainable global society
• Work with Nature - every decision affects the vitality of our ecosystem
• Celebrate Diversity - increases resilience, propels innovation, cultivates peace and fosters beauty and joy
• Measure What Matters - success by what brings us knowledge, creativity, relationships, health, consciousness and happiness. 

After these principles, there really is not much else to add.  I recently made a trip to northwestern Pennsylvania where oil was discovered in the mid 1800s.  The prosperity of that time is reflected in the fading structures that remain.  I could not help but wonder what this landscape would be like today if those early tycoons had used the natural resources for the good of all and not just to build huge financial empires and line their own deep pockets.  It is a question that we no longer have the luxury of postponing the answer to.  We already know that our economy and way of life is not sustainable if left to its own over toxic inertia.  It is time to let it die and that part that doesn't, it is time to make it good.  

Hurrah for visionary thinkers and doers who are already hard at work birthing a new paradigm.  It is time for all of us to join the movement to support local sustainable communities.  And while we are at it, let's put real lemons back into the lemonade as well as in the furniture polish.   

Crossing the Rubicon

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.

T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

In January 49 BC, Julius Caesar made a decision to commit an act of treason by crossing the Rubicon River, which was the barrier between Gaul and Italy proper.  There was no turning back.  With this act of defiance, he set in motion the events that led to the rise of the Roman Empire and the nascence of modern European culture. History portrays him as the victor. 

I started this blog 2 weeks ago and have been trying to get a handle on it ever since.  It is not that I lack images - unfortunately there are many all too graphic images: flattened Oklahoma cities, flooded European countries, fires, a German Shepherd K-9 dog pawing the coffin of his dead partner in a final salute: death and destruction spread wide across the earth.  My desk is strewn with articles printed off of the internet declaring: "The idea of a totalitarian government monitoring your every move is probably still the stuff of fiction, but that doesn't mean your boss doesn't have a pretty good idea of your workday habits."  It continues with, "Experts say an abundance of fast-developing new technology is making it cheaper and easier for employers to read your e-mails, check out what you've been looking at on the Internet, track where you go with a company car or cell phone and find out when and where you were at work."*  Another article raises the question: "From invisibility to superhuman strength to telekinesis, a wave of emerging technologies promise to give people powers once reserved for comic-book characters.  Which raises an important question: If humans become superhuman, will we turn out to be superheroes - or supervillains?"**

Superheroes or supervillains - which will it be?  Seems to me that we have stuffed our noggins so full of information without knowledge; knowledge without wisdom that it is not more information that we need.  I do not need superhuman powers to see that we have definitely crossed the Rubicon and there is no turning back.  The best that we can do at this point is to slam on the brakes and look at the destruction to the environment, to our civilization, to ourselves that we are leaving in our rearview mirror. 

Today as I surfed the net, I came across the poignant story of a former drone sensor operator . While he sat miles away manipulating his computer, the drones he controlled wrecked unspeakable horror on other human beings.  He is haunted by the 1,600 deaths that he and his crew are responsible for.  The graphic computer images are seared into his brain.  In another story, an Army private is on trial because unable to take the horrors of what he was witnessing, he leaked military secrets in an effort to inform the American public of actions he considered to be inhumane and to spark debate. 

The Rubicon is behind us; we have crossed the boundary and are on the road to Rome.  Are we the victors or the traitors?  And if the traitors, what exactly have we betrayed?  I would offer the possibility that just perhaps what we have betrayed is our souls and our own humanity.

How did we arrive at this point?  We are better educated, fed - in fact in every measureable way, we are better off than ever before in history.  This is true even for the poor because they have  resources today that even the very wealthy in the past did not.  So, I ask again how did we get to this point?  We are the end result of the Age of Enlightenment,which was examined in more detail in The Opening post of this blog.  Extreme rationality has resulted in a world unmoored from any human moral judgement.  Where is compassion?  Where is the understanding that what we do to others, we do to ourselves?  Where is wisdom?  We have not evolved; we have devolved to our lowest common denominator and it is ugly.

                 We are the hollow men

                 We are the stuffed men

                 Leaning together

                 Headpiece filled with straw.  Alas!

                 Our dried voices, when

                 We whisper together

                 Are quiet and meaningless

                 As wind in dry grass

                 Or rats' feet over broken glass

                 In our dry cellar

                 Shape without form, shade without colour,

                 Paralysed force, gesture without motion;  ***

Eliot wrote these lines in the bloody aftermath of World War I,  The Great War - you know the one to end all wars.  He saw the tenuous thread of hope trying to rise above the destruction that had been Europe.  And surely, his poet's soul despaired at the folly that is man and the disastrous results of his unchecked rational brain.

                  This is the dead land

                  This is the cactus land

                  Here the stone images

                  Are raised, here they receive

                  The supplication of a dead man's hand

                  Under the twinkle of a fading star.***

I am thankful that I can only glimpse in those lines the nightmare computer images that are etched into the former drone operator's brain.  The horror of what washes over me makes me cry out: how many more do we have to kill; how much more money do we need to satisfy the greed that now replaces our souls?  We have crossed the Rubicon.

                  Between the idea

                  And the reality

                 Between the motion

                 And the act

                 Falls the Shadow

                                    For Thine is the Kingdom

                 Between the conception

                 And the creation

                 Between the emotion

                 And the response

                 Falls the Shadow

                                     Life is very long

                Between the desire

                And the spasm

                Between the potency

                And the existence

                Between the essence

                And the descent

                Falls the Shadow

                                   For Thine is the Kingdom

               For Thine is

               Life is

               For Thine is the***

Life is....what? Thine is the....what?  Depending upon how each of us answers these questions and how we choose to deal with the shadow that falls between the true reality of who we are as soul beings and the actuality of who we have allowed ourselves to become as hollow men will determine whether this crossing of the Rubicon is the end or the beginning.

                 This is the way the world ends
                 This is the way the world ends
                 This is the way the world ends
                 Not with a bang but a whimper.***

Only things of substance have a bang.




Are we on the verge of total self-destruction?                       


*Life Inc. on Today, May 15, 2013 by Allison Lin 
**The Quest to Build Better People. Superheroes or Supervillians? Slate, May 3, 2013 by Will Oremus  
***T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men