An open space for global conversation
Lindsay Newland Bowker brought the fact of declining general public support for #Occupy to us yesterday in a status post that was soon off the site's front page. She asked what it means. My thought is in my title for this blog.
We live in a time that mixes confusion concerning wants and needs with profusion of offers to satisfy both. Once someones complain or cry foul, people want to know what is available now that is better. They will give it a look. They will kick the tires. Unless it's not there, in which case they'll count to ten or one hundred, to cut a bit of slack.
In the land of Disney and Jobs, it seems to be the natural role of others to produce all that we don't produce (at our workplaces, if we're lucky). The division of labor works for extracting, processing, manufacturing, distributing, marketing and sales, but not for making a new society. That is work available and calling to every living human being.
I believe our project is to steadily convert the complaints and cries to a warm invitation to more in the way of being, less in the way of acquiring and trashing.
Indeed, David. I see a pattern of "complain and blame" and invite us all to do what one of my inspirations, Peter Block suggests, and move instead into ownership. This space, and this movement, are what we each choose to make of it.
We might ask, for example, what we have done to contribute to the very thing we complain about. Or what the stories are that we keep telling ourselves about what is happening and what payoff is that we receive for our attachment to them.
Block also talks about moving from being consumers to being citizens. The on-the-ground Occupiers are modeling this for us beautifully. The consumer expects "systems" to provide for them, while the citizen recognizes that it is only through the building of community that we can truly meet our deepest needs and wants--the ones that really matter.
Appendix A
A big part of being more is emigrating to where we are and participating fully. As long as one entertains the notion of making alternative global arrangements, one is spinning wheels.
David,
Just catching up
Missed this post ( and many others)..eloquent and wise ..so wise..being more is emigrating to where are and particpating fully.standing and being in the moment and acting there with courage ..bulding on what the moment offers.
Envisioning Global alternative arrangements has its place but what is front and center is the crisis unfolding right around us, eroding our lives in every moment..we need to be fully engaged we need to be holding up naming and supporting the everyday heroes that are doing something about it..like the Judge I celebrated in my post today who refused to accept a settlement between SEC and CitiCorp, like Tammy Baldwin who is trying to get a resolution on the floor to oppose the administrations plan to grant banks immunity from criminal prosecution in a shamefully platry "settlement", like Dodd-Frank, like those chmapioning the 28th ammendment to declare that corporations are not citizens, like Chellie Pingree's bill to suuport local organic growing, like the Occupy kids at Harvard who walked out of a famous professiors class in economics and wrote an eloquent piece on why this kind of tecahing perpetuates evil..
These acts of courage are the transformation coming into being ..these few are modeling the courage we all need to have..modeling what you are pointing to David.
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