FootprintsintheWind.com

One way to meet the problem of violence and anger and terrorism in the world is to meet it head on. Butt heads in some way or other. Kill it. Drop bombs on it. Imprison it. Push on it more than it can push back. Overwhelm it. Smother.

Another might be to get to work. Invest sweat not blood. Find ways to meet the violent, angry and terror laden persons and engage them in something constructive that meets their needs. (Do you suppose they like terror for itself? More likely, do they think it will get them something they need for life—food, money, power?) Help them outgrow the problem that led to their suffering. It may be costly for us. It might mean we have to invest lives—rather than throw them away; we might have to meet people—rather than blow them up; we might have to spend millions on feeding these workers and their families—rather than billions on armaments.

Or might there be another way? What does experience tell us works?

:- Doug.

To our good friends–

We have a world of free-floating anger. We have many angry young men and women. They do not have constructive things to do (although much needs to be done), and they are held back, they feel frustrated. Wow, how money is part of all this! Our currency system, based in scarcity and control and limitation, feeds this anger. If we could find a way to all get busy, there would be ample good work to do (there already is) and people would be fed, soul and body. If we take care of each other, we would take care of each other. What the economy of money provides is the luxuries, seldom the essentials of life. If we were all friends, we could see a need and meet it. Your house burned down? Then we have a house-raising, we cut some trees, and build it. You do not have anything to eat? Here, I have some. You want to help out? Here, there is something needing your special talents. The place for money is to allow us, like e-mail lists, to have asynchronous conversation, and especially impersonal exchange of goods and services. As it developed our money encouraged the impersonal nature of our interchanges. Today the servant has become the monster which threatens to become our master. Yet we cannot go back to the old days because most of our backyard forests have already been cut. So we have to invent new ways to get the jobs done, keeping in mind that scarcity of money does not mean scarcity of heart to get the job done, nor resources for the task.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 671

The world has gotten too big too complex for one person one brain to hold it all in sense. It is now necessary that we begin to connect minds together.

Please pass it on.

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Disorganization is not preliminary to creativity: it comes interwoven, blown through.

:- Doug.

What is creativity but a disorganizing of what existed before? If we are to have creative communities, we must disorganize.

:- Doug.

Dialogue is the very entry into life. We go about our lives day to day along the surface. Where and when did we become anesthetized to life and the living of it? Dialogue provides a hole through which we can meet life. It is scary—we do not know what we will find. But the hope and the threat and the reality of it is that here there be life. Ours. We will have to give up our faked life. This is a death. We will be faced with the opportunity to grasp a life fully engaged, lived at full abandon, somehow only received when from out of our heart we toss it away.

:- Doug.

Is it possible that the hate the immigrant receives is a result of the free-floating anger we have in this society? Anger easily coalesces into hate. The immigrant marches have given a place for people to focus their anger. That is because the immigrant is unknown, the unknown causes fear, and fear is the coalescing point. If you can’t control someone you fear, at least you can hate her.

:- Doug.