Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Kaori Brand is a filmmaker who spent five years working here [Japan] at the United Nations University. One project that marked her especially was about the region deeply affected by the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011. In the following article she reflects on the experience of recording the recovery efforts of the fishing communities of Kesennuma and Omoe.
In practice, consensus-with-unanimity means essentially that anyone can block a proposal for any reason, and there’s no recourse—such as having criteria for a legitimate block, or requiring people who block proposals to co-create a new proposal with the advocates of the old one.
Whether you are an aging activist, annoyed elected official, or aggrieved citizen, the recently published Slow Democracy is the elixir for returning citizens to their rightful role in self governance. Our country was founded on participatory democracy. It has largely devolved into a faux democracy where we elect others to “represent” us. And when they don’t, we scream, march, blog, and organize in order to be heard. Such blunt instruments may produce short term results but they also leave permanent scars that divide our communities.
In a society where people tend to be defined by what work they do, the question: “So what do you do?” is one that I find difficult to answer. I’m a classic Jack of all trades, master at none, and naming all the skills that I’ve collected over more than four decades would require some time. I’m not saying this to brag, but more to illustrate that I’m simply one of those people who collects skills as someone else might collect stamps or coins.
Chances are you already have a strong opinion on this subject. There’s a great deal of noise, mostly but not wholly on the American right about the dangers of fertility decline. Jonathan Last’s book _What To Expect When No One is Expecting_ and Ross Douthat’s recent lament about American women’s TFR (total fertility rate – the reason men aren’t mentioned is that men don’t count in fertility calculations) is down to 1.87 children. Both writers predict fairly dire outcomes – economic stagnation a la Japan, a benefits crisis as insufficient new workers arrive. Moreover, for Douthat and other commentators like Rod Dreher, there’s a larger moral and cultural dimension that is absolutely critical…
Modern societies rely on the government to defend property rights, enforce contracts and regulate commerce. As the economy expands, so do the functions of government, along with its bureaucratic structures, laws, rules and procedures and—what expands fastest of all—its cost. All of these official arrangements show an accretion of complexity over time.
Just over a year ago I was given a ‘community cake’. A cake tin full of all the ingredients needed to make white chocolate and blackberry cake. All the ingredients that is, except for one cup of sugar. It was a birthday cake and my challenge was to ask a neighbour I didn’t know for a cup of sugar. I have to say my initial reaction was one of fear. I thanked my friend, but I was also angry that she’d put me in the position of having to follow through – you can’t do a PhD on neighbourhood sharing and then chicken out of asking a neighbour for sugar!
Here’s what’s going on in Fukushima and across the region. Funds which were available for the “emergency phase” are almost gone. The clear focus and purposefulness of what needs to happen next that was present in the emergency phase is gone. The NPOs and others supporting communities during the emergency phase are cutting back — in part because they don’t have funding and in part because they are not sure what to do. Meanwhile, things are stabilized, but the “new now” has not come into form. Many, many small scale initiatives and projects and small businesses have been launched. The government is busy creating City Plans and other plans to which most people feel no connection. Climate of cooperation is decreasing.
How many of you have something electrical or electronic broken at home? Something that not only you don’t only know how to repair yourself, but also don’t know who could repair it for you? Or perhaps, the person who claims they could fix that printer or digital camera is quoting you a price higher than what you would pay for a new device.
About five years ago a colleague of mine, Dale Allen Pfeiffer wrote an essay I can no longer locate. At the time, Colony Collapse Disorder was just being diagnosed in bees, and one of the discussed potential causes of the problem was cell phones and cell phone towers. Pfeiffer didn’t, as I remember, take a stand on this question as a cause, but what he did do was interview people and ask “If it was true that cell phones caused CCD, and knowing that we depend on bees for a large portion of our food, would you give up your cell phone to save the bees?” The answer, overwhelmingly, was no.
The latest round of political theater in Washington DC over the automatic budget cuts enacted in the 2011 debt ceiling compromise—the so-called “sequester”—couldn’t have been better timed, at least as far as this blog is concerned. It’s hard to imagine better evidence, after all, that the American political process has finally lost its last fingernail grip on reality.
People use drugs, legal and illegal, because their lives are intolerably painful or dull. They hate their work and find no rest in their leisure. They are estranged from their families and their neighbors. It should tell us something that in healthy societies drug use is celebrative, convivial, and occasional, whereas among us it is lonely, shameful, and addictive. We need drugs, apparently, because we have lost each other.
~Wendell Berry~
