Reparations

I am in favor of reparations for all descendants of enslaved African people who were stolen from their homelands and brought to the USA, the Caribbean, etc.

While I can’t say what the criteria would be (that’s out of my lane, as my bloodline is British colonizer on one side and Eastern European immigrant on the other), I would tentatively suggest the one-drop rule. After all, if someone could be enslaved for one drop, it seems fair that that would be the criterion for reparations too.

Or, how about a “one ancestor” rule. Like (for example) the Daughters / Sons of the American Revolution manage to screen people for membership. Prospective members just have to prove that they had at least one ancestor who fought in the Revolutionary War.

It should be no harder for determining slavery reparations. Say, a person has to prove that they had at least one ancestor who was enslaved?

But then again, that might be hard, because there wasn’t necessarily the paper trail. I have heard that it can be very difficult for Black people to determine their ancestry because it was not necessarily written down.

In any case, I’m sure we can come up with something!

Really, we should ask Black people. Rather than just the government concocting some policy, we need to make sure that Black people themselves have the biggest voice in how this is implemented.

If people are worried that it would cost more than we can afford, I would say we can take it out of our massively bloated war budget and prison budget.

7 must-see films about fast fashion

I was looking for the title of the fast fashion documentary I saw a while back that’s really good, and my search yielded this whole cool page which has seven documentaries, including the one I was looking for.

Here you go! From earth.org, 7 Must-See Fast Fashion Documentaries.

And the one I was looking for, The True Cost, was mentioned as being the best one to see if you watch no other.

I was blown away to learn that the fashion industry employees something like one in six people worldwide. And the footprint is way beyond what I could imagine.

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve always enjoyed making / mending / after-market “editing” my clothes, but for the past few years more than ever I’m super committed to buying as few new clothes as I can possibly get away with.

Climate crisis & militarism: Veterans for Peace

Veterans for Peace (VFP) offers a presentation on the link between climate crisis and militarism.

Veterans For Peace Climate Crisis and Militarism Project is part of the world-wide movement to end the climate crisis and promote climate, environmental, racial, and economic justice. Our emphasis focuses on how US militarism, the single largest institutional source of greenhouse gasses on the planet, fuels the climate crisis.”

Go here to view a short version of their 20-minute slideshow presentation, and find out how to schedule a full presentation for your group.

Please feel free to share / forward this to anyone who you feel would be interested.

Loosening the stranglehold of bottled water

Bottled water — it’s everywhere. It’s actually work sometimes to avoid the stuff, as people are constantly offering it and hardly anyone questions the huge volume of plastic trash.

Some people might wonder why I am so hard-core about refusing bottled water. If you ever see me drinking a bottle of plastic water, it probably means I’m having a medical emergency, or am severely dehydrated and there is no drinking fountain or faucet nearby.

Part of it is because I’m thrifty. Why should I pay for water in a bottle? Also the stuff is heavy to carry home from the store, and meanwhile there’s faucet water in my house that I already pay for.

But another part of that is that I just grew up not having all this plastic junk, and have never gotten used to it, and never want to get used to it.

Anyway! My own personal bias aside … Here’s a great video which might be helpful to people who are concerned about the environmental impact of bottled water:

The Story of Bottled Water, by Annie Leonard. Ms Leonard is author/narrator of the Story of Stuff video, and that whole “Story of” series of videos — which you can find on her YouTube channel.

In closing, a quote from Ms. Leonard: “There is no such thing as ‘away’. When we throw something away, it must go somewhere.”

Rich Men

When I first heard the title of this song Rich Men North of Richmond, I was expecting it to be a diatribe against the real fatcats. The politicians; the oligarchs who are holding the power; the greedy landlords; the exploitive employers.

People who have four and five and six houses that sit empty, while so many are struggling to just have one roof over their heads.

Are the types of people/behaviors I expected to hear called out.

Instead, the song takes a swipe at people who are members of our same general class. We all have more in common with each other than we have with the real fat cats at the top.

Regarding the fat shaming — that is so loaded with wrongness. Let’s start with how people are in a constant scramble just to earn a living, so they don’t necessarily have the time & money, don’t end up eating right.

Or, how about the fact that our standard of what constitutes a healthy body is very Anglocentric and frankly skinny.

And then there’s also the fact that snack foods are designed to be addictive.

Not that this lets any of us off the hook from trying our best to eat right & exercise for our health, but the addictive nature of snack foods combined with the fact that they are one of the few affordable pleasures … is a thing.

Plus yeah – what if it’s plain and simply a treat for the kids?

Whether housed or unhoused, earning just below the poverty line or just above it, we all need to stick together in solidarity and not take potshots at each other. The upper echelons, ruling classes, owner classes, count on us fighting with each other, shaming people one economic rung below us, and always striving to move up to the next economic rung. They like that because it keeps us working for them on the treadmill.

Insulting people for loving trees is weird; + strategic watering challenge

It’s funny how some people like to say “tree-hugger” as an insult, as if people who care about trees have some bizarre sentimental affliction.

And people love to put down environmentalists as being sappy or stupid. They point out to us that the planet has survived everything so far.

Has it never occurred to these people that environmentalists are not sentimental, not “trying to save the planet” — but rather, we actually cherish being able to LIVE on the planet.

Duh, of COURSE earth can survive without humans! But some of us love living here. And we won’t be able to live here if we insist on killing the BIOSPHERE that is our life-support system!

Speaking of trees, my friend Chris Searles issued a tree-watering challenge. Strategic watering, he calls it. Chris is founder/director of the ecological nonprofit org Biointegrity.

Chris is based in Austin TX USA but explains this will work anywhere there are deciduous trees, and heat. With Austin in extended heat and drought, Chris challenged people “to water the biggest deciduous tree or trees you can this weekend.” (He explains how and why in this video “BioIntegrity’s Cool Austin Challenge.“)

A few days later, Chris reported “We got rain in Central TX on Tuesday! This was not in the forecast for Austin.”

Chris asserts that he has “been able to make rain” with strategic watering.

Hmmm, that sounds crazy, doesn’t it? But check out Chris’s video “The Biotic Pump: How Forests Create Rain.” And try it yourself!

I have done “rain experiments” myself on many occasions, and it might be wishful thinking but I swear it works …

Chaos leaping into new orders of complexity

“When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order.” — Ilya Prigogine, quoted in samim.io

The above quote was posted on a friend’s Facebook timeline; I really liked it so I got curious and googled Prigogine.

Also check out Prigogine, Chaos, and Contemporary Science Fiction, paper by David Porush. “SF often registers and extrapolates the consequences of new scientific knowledge even before science does. This relationship between science and SF has become especially intriguing in the case of the new science of deterministic chaos. This new paradigm — which explains how complex, apparently chaotic systems leap into new orders of complexity — has implications not only for the technology of the future, but for our understanding of the cosmic role of intelligence and of the narratives it spins. …”

The quote from Prigogine reminded me a bit of that famous quote attributed to Margaret Mead. The one that says small groups of people can in fact make a difference, and moreover, are the only thing that ever has made a difference.

So I googled Margaret Mead to get the exact wording of the quote, and as a bonus, I found this very interesting blog post, “About that Margaret Mead quotation.” The writer actually refutes the idea that small groups of people can make a difference. He says that in fact only people in their millions can make a difference.

He gives as examples the independence movements in various African countries in the 1950s and 60s; and the civil rights movement in the USA.

At first I wanted to argue, and also felt a bit deflated because I have often quoted that Margaret Mead quote and taken courage and inspiration from it.

But then I realized both are true! This guy is right, and Margaret Mead is still right. What often happens is that one person or a small group of people get an idea and get committed to making it happen. Then they somehow contact or activate much larger numbers of people who have had the idea or been working quietly for the thing. And then, once large numbers of people have been catalyzed or activated, the thing ends up coming to fruition.

My takeaway from this is: Find your people. No matter how fringe you think your idea or aspiration is, there will be a certain number of people who totally are into it and might already be working for it. Once you find your little cluster of a few dedicated citizens, that little cluster might then go on to activate millions of people who have been wanting the same thing but have been needing some kind of spark to get fully activated.