Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Cultural capital is rooted in society’s values and traditions. Sadly, over the past few generations in the West, we have departed from the time-honored (and honed) customs and rituals of our ancestors, and adopted a much more “it’s all about me” approach to life.
…a Microsoft researcher warned openly this month that AI, even in its current state, is ripe for abuse by aspiring despots: perfectly suited to the centralizing of power, tracking of populations down to the last individual, the demonizing of outsiders, all while radiating authority via a faux neutrality. “This is a fascist’s dream,” said Microsoft’s Kate Crawford, pulling no punches. “Power without accountability.”
While the Trump administration says it wants to help low-income Americans, it just put forth a budget that puts wealthy Americans first, Chuck Collins told Rising Up with Sonali. “They’ve been trampled by the traditional Republican shrink government agenda: deregulate corporations, transfer wealth to the wealthy,” he said.
This article outlines the scope and limits of Buen Vivir, which can be translated as ‘good life’ or ‘good living’. This ‘good life’ has always been a pluralistic concept, namely ‘buenos convivires’: different ways of ‘living well together’.
Although the interventions are small-scale, it does seem possible to glean from these processes lessons and methods that can be used to foster another way of building urban public space based on collective praxis.
I think that is essentially what Transition has been saying all along; the combination with resilience science allows the message to be put across with much more force and rigour, and hopefully inform how practical efforts can better negotiate and transform political barriers.
But if we really want to change these things and not just feel righteous about being on the right side, then we have to address the ground from which they spring. To do that, we have to let go of war thinking with its accompanying dehumanization, and enter the question that defines compassion: What is it like to be you?
How do we revalorize the idea that the community, from which we are not separate, though we are an individual species within it, is “Nature,” aka the biosphere, and every aspect and part thereof? And finally, how do we re-learn the value of reciprocity in our relations with the natural world, our community?
Searching for ways to reconnect and renew, a non-profit organization called the Community Learning Partnership is providing students, instructors, and community groups a model for preparing the next generation of local leaders and activists.
It is not an idle myth, that the poor will always be with us, but a vital myth, a powerful and essential means of sustaining our culture and the business of it as usual. It is a myth that has haunted me throughout my two and a half decades of feeling and actively expressing both compassion and indignation in relation to the persistence of hunger, homelessness and poverty in our affluent nation and abroad.
The veil has been lifted. The administration’s budget proposal for 2018 eviscerates agencies which could have mitigated some of the climate change devastation ahead. We have confirmation that the White House is sawing off the branch on which 99% of Americans sit.
First of all, we are at a moment when we’re in political crisis, we’re in ecological crisis, and the ability to imagine a different world, to imagine different solutions to the world we’ve created, to imagine different ways of dealing with the problems we have has never been more pressing.
