Little Capitalist Pig

But no-one told me. My culture, as I understand it, values independence above all things- in part to ensure a mobile labor force, grease for the machine of a capitalist economy. Our fairy tale commands: Little Pig, go out and seek your fortune! So I did. 

- p 14, High Tide in Tuscon, Barbara K.

Barbara, it seems that you've hit the nail on the head of my generational issue. As I wrote about in Community Development 101 my generation has inhaled the idea of movement as a right of passage. Uprooted from family, from home, from an environment where you know the streets, trees and shrubs out of habit and not study, we've chosen to blow where the wind takes us. On to wherever the next, better, sexier, more profitable job takes us. City life of the far-off land has been glamorized to the point that no rural town has a chance to keep its' youth. Before they can realize the difference between reality-TV and advertisements, they are already sold.

I was too. 

Go Little Pig! I breathed in.

I exhaled the hot breath of a teenager, dying to yank my fifth generation roots out of the fertile soils of coastal California.

When my father yelled at my 18 year old self- Your great-great-great grand parents moved to California to get an education! I yelled back- So what?! I'm moving to New York.

And I did. 

A conversation with Barbara K

I'm reading for the first time High Tide in Tuscon by Barbara Kingsolver. I can't believe I haven't read this before. So much of her analysis, her prose, resonates with what I think and feel and believe.

In honor of that creative inspiration and the brain synapses firing off around my skull, I'm going to do a bit of back and forth with Barbara K (and not Barbara Kummer- for those of you who know my grandmother).

Check out the ongoing conversation on the sidebar link- Conversations with Barbara K. 

Freewheelin' Again

One of the reason's I appreciate the Freewheelin' Art Show is because it gives me a fabulous excuse to make art. Funny prints, heart warming prints. And better even than the reason to make art- it give me the opportunity to share art with friends. 

Occupy Santa Cruz

Finally made it down to Occupy Santa Cruz. They've got an incredible system and set up. Committees, an internal food system, a complete media team. Props to the body itself for the organizing. They were showing V is for Vendetta in conjunction with the Guerilla Drive In- not exactly the type of revolution that perhaps Occupy is going for (ie: violent)- but a good reminder, on multiple levels of what can happen when people come together to de-colonize their minds.

No longer newbies

An update on the chicken project... the most recent photos of our now-grown chickens.

Just Label It!

In case it hasn't come across your radar, over 400 organizations are coming together right now to attempt to get the FDA to label genetically modified organisms. The US lags a decade behind all major economies in making this important step toward consumer awareness of what is in their food. Perhaps this is because we are the largest grower and exporter of GMOs. If you haven't yet gotten involved, check out http://justlabelit.org/ for information and a quick online petition. Better yet, contact your congressional representative and tell them you support the labeling of genetically modified products. The time is now, we've gone too long without labeling, and now that GMOs are in 80% of our processed foods, it's high time we knew.

Eat the Rich

In the wake of the Occupy Wallstreet # Occupy Everything protests and sit-in, I'm reposting a solid article by Brian Holmes. Holmes, it seems, was perfectly timed in his analysis- just about one month after he wrote this, several people began to camp out on Wall Street in New York City. Now, weeks later, that camp out has spread like wild fire to dozens of financial districts around the nation- and the cries of protesters are now loud enough that mainstream has begun to take notice. I predict that this movement will continue to spread. The dissatisfaction of a nation starved for equality and true democracy- will not continue to wait.

Written by Brian Holmes

POSTED ON WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 31ST, 2011 AT 6:21 PM.

Americans like to keep things simple and direct, so here it is: they rule. For the simple reason that they (the ruling class) have all the money. The top 5% of US citizens own almost 2/3 of the country’s wealth, or 63.5%. Compare that massive share to 12.8% for the bottom 80% — that is, “the rest of us,” as Rhonda Winter puts it in the excellent article from which this pie chart is taken.

Now go a little further, into the research she drew her chart from — a briefing paper of the Economic Policy Institute called “The State of Working America” — and you find that the top 1% holds over 1/3, or 35.6%, of the country’s net worth. Elsewhere, in The Nation, you will find such interesting tidbits as “In 2006, the top 0.01 percent averaged 976 times more income that America’s bottom 90%” — a thousand-fold gap between “them” and “the rest of us.”

click it for the big picture

The whole point is, though, that very few people go any further, because very few people have any idea how unequal the United States has become. We are, apparently, a nation of idealists, which is a good thing. We are also, however, a nation of blind idealists, which is a pretty bad thing across the board. A couple of psychologists named Norton and Ariely did a study comparing people’s ideas of what inequality is and what it should be with the actual facts on the ground. Anyone interested in creating a more progressive political order should turn up the attention meter right here.

Family

This past week my grandmothers partner passed away. I say partner because Jim O'Loughlin was not her husband or her boyfriend, and he was more than just a friend. Grammy aptly called him her partner, and the rest of the family agreed.

When he passed I got to witness what it's like to live near your family. When crisis hits, who sounds the alarm, who makes the call, who responds. In this case we all did. With the advent of my sister moving north from San Diego- there were many hands to be on deck when my grandmother called. We appeared to handle paper work, to book churches. We appeared to clean the house, to cook for guests, to arrange flowers. We appeared to sing at his funeral, to take up an entire pew with our bodies, to support my grandmother in whatever she needed.

That, I thought to myself all weekend, was why I moved home. That, I thought to myself, is what life is really about. It's about relationship. It's about showing up when the call is made. When you are needed. When you are called upon.

I didn't have to book a flight, or worry about whether I'd miss it because of the weather in Chicago.

I, along with the rest of my family, heeded the call, came together,  and out of support and love we became partners, more than just friends- we are family.