Are you guys sure about this?

I was a County Commissioner once. I let with a pretty high opinion of local government, or at least its potential to serve people the way they want to be served. So I wince every time I hear "Government" slammed as some kind of lumbering monster, with no sense that the process is very different, with very different accessibility for citizens who care, at the national, state and local level.

Once in a while, though, local leaders do something that seems to prove the critics' point that they don't know what life is like for folks struggling to make a living. I pointed out a clasic example in this week's column and suggested a remedy. I'm wondering if anyone cares.

Today's Patriotism

This blog's called "Really Taking America Back." Last week's column is about that, too. And about patriotism. And how they might be the same thing.

How much sense does this make to you?

When it comes to health care, who and what is "radical"?

The health care debate we're watching just about stuns me. With all the damage the for-profit health industries, especially the insurance corps, have done to individuals, families, businesses, with the demonstrably better outcomes in virtually every other prosperous countries, all of whom involve government in insuring their people, the fact that we still might not even get a "public option" for people who want it, is very hard to accept. In this week's column I call the situation radical, and implicitly ask if reasonable people can think otherwise. The comments from readers following the column answer that question: yes.

And you? What's "radical?"

Dense? Yeah, maybe so

One of the folks posting on the Tidings online forum after this week's column called me 'dense.' You know, it just could be. I've read a lot of online responses to the question that I've asked for two straight columns now: What is it about the human body that we don't want our children to see? I still don't get it, and I don't think I'm all attached to not getting it.

I'm moving onto other things, no wiser than before. Got anything on this that hasn't shown up before?

Cover your Kids' Eyes...

I gave this week's column the title "Still Clueless After All these Years," knowing that I was lobbing a fat slow one over the middle of the plate for readers less than thrilled about my take on life. Sure enough, here was one of the online comments: "I must say that BEFORE I read his comment, it made me laugh out loud to see the photo of Golden, under which are the words "Still Clueless After All These Years"."
Yeah. Well, I am clueless after all these years a the charge so many seem to have about the human body. Or at least enough people to shape the social norm.
I asked the question in the column not to be a smartass, but because I honestly want to know straight-up why a naked man walking around Ashland is such a huge deal.
Do you know?

Are we forgetting a little something here?

If you read this space much you've probably picked up on how much I like the move towards local economies. It's the lynchpin to stepping through the chaos of coming months and years to a world that offer our kids and theirs a chance (who knows how big) at decent lives. So why is it that every month I'm shipping $30-50 that could stay in my community to Chase Bank? Because I'm a convenience weenie, maybe? See here if you can relate...

It's All About YOU? I think not.

No, actually it's All About Me. Or at least it's ridiculously easy to think so. I caught myself cold doing that the other night, and wrote about what it did to my evening... an evening I'll never get back again.

Interplanetary attempts at commmunication

Most of the newspaper columns I write draw some juicy disagreement. That's good. I'm not wild about the name-calling stuff that points out what a moron I am without bothering to look seriously at the issue or topic at hand, but getting challenged on my analysis and perspective is what op-ed journalism is all about.
Occasionally I'm baffled that two people living on the same planet could see things so differently. That happened this past week, and I wrote about it.
(The limited format of this online column, with no italics, makes it a little hard to tell who's saying what where. I don't like that, but maybe it fits the chaos of the public conversation...)

Do we get what free speech means?

I wonder sometimes. And I wonder about the widespread fear that hearing twisted vicious messages will make us, particularly the younger among us, more twisted and vicious. I think the young Neo-Nazis I wrote about recently do a pretty good job disproving that premise. This week's column strongly hints that others see this differently, and some of them work in state government.
What exactly are we afraid of?

A nudge from 'me' to 'we'

Here's one that's starting to percolate in Ashland: one of the reason that power and water rates are going up (the city owns these utilities itself) is that people heeded the call to conserve and use less.
That just doesn't sit well with some folks.
I don't think you have to spend too much time reflecting on this before it's clear that there's no trickery or bad faith a work here. This week's column tries to offer perspective before the serious shouting begins.

Does this one have an answer?

The appearance of some young not-too-sophisticated Neo-Nazis in Southern Oregon, which I wrote about in the previous post, triggered a juicy community conversation. Apparently we're still not jaded enough to ignore or tolerate this kind of ugliness. But the best response to it? I admit here to not having a good clue to the answer to that one.
Do you?

Not in our valley

When the Medford paper prominently reported on the appearance of a new "official" white supremacist headquarters in the small town of Phoenix, I wondered who would pay attention. That was the spark for this week's column.
It turns out a whole lot of folks were paying attention, and were quick to take a stand. In these swirling times, I took that as an encouraging sign that there are some things that we don't make too complicated.
Thanks to those who stand up.

Hand me a teabag

There were some odd, even ridiculous aspects to the "Tea Party" Protests on Tax Day last week, and some cynical political tactics, too.
There was also an opening to a transpartisan political conversation about what's wrong with our economy and financial system, the kind of conversation we badly need if we're going to move through all this to a tolerable economy and society. As per the title of the column I wrote to expand on the point, we can think better than this.

Persistence

I've persisted in making the point that persistence is the most important quality missing from political and social activism. We haven't overcome the big obstacles to realizing democracy because, with few exceptions, we haven't kept at it the way, say, big-money lobbyists do.

Well, here's an exception. He proves the point.

Food fighting in Ashland, again

Were you around for the battle over the Ashland meals and beverage tax in 1993? It made much of the struggles we've seen since look like high tea. And there's probably a reunion tour coming up, the topic of last week's column.

In it I vented some skepticism that the meals tax is much of a problem for many people. What's it been like for you?

Putting together two real big pieces

It's hard not to notice two things going on at the same time right now. To pull from the beginning of a long-ish magazine article I just finished for Sentient Times, "The first is that large numbers of people who may never have felt fully comfortable with where they’ve parked their retirement savings and investment accounts are desperately wondering how to keep what’s left of them from vaporizing in the global meltdown. Over time some of these folks have been watching the “relocalization” movement — the cluster of efforts to strengthen and grow sustainable locally-owned enterprises so that resources circulate in the community instead of leaking to far-off corporate headquarters — with more and more interest. That’s condition number one. The second is that a growing number of creative local people want to start enterprises that would support their families (and other families as well, in some cases) and serve their community in healthy ways. What often holds them back is the absence of capital to start or expand their businesses."
So how to put these two pieces together? The answer, I think, is a vital key to building healthy community out of the ashes raining down on us. If the longer piece linked above is more than you want to read, I digested in in this week's Tidings column.

Now we know how they felt...

If you think back on it, as I did in this week's column, the big timber collapse of the late 80s and early 90s was a pretty accurate sneak preview of what it means to live beyond our means.
We're all loggers now.

Cluelessness on parade

You remember this guy?  "What we've got here...is a failure to communicate."

   A few Oregon public employees have been reminding us of that by complaining that losing a few work days to "unpaid furlough" is an unbearable burden.   

   But in the scheme of really grim contemporary events, is that cluelessness a big deal?   I think it's more of an annoying distraction.  This week's piece asks whether downstream blaming or making decent decisions upstream is more likely to get us what we want.  

   

It's not like a drive-up window...

A month ago I laid out in general terms the Big Stick Theory, i.e, those who wield the biggest stick in the halls of power get their way in our form of government.  If instead of whining, we'd like to that to be us, we have to 1) assemble the biggest stick we can,  2) learn to use it carefully and selectively, and 3) commit to carrying it permanently.  I wrote earlier columns about 1 &2; this one's about commitment.  It's where we Boomers, IMJ, have most obviously dropped the ball.  

       Does this square with your experience?

Naive? You tell me.

Last week's column was naive. That's according to a reader who weighed in online. What he actually said was "As with all government policies, the devil is in the details. Agreeing on ends doesn't mean agreeing on means. Golden's 'vision' of an army of like-minded citizens wielding a 'big stick' is naive at best."
At best, yet. I actually think there's some good thinking there, especially in the ends-versus-means business. "Naive?" Well, he made me think harder about it, never a terrible thing.
So here's what I think.

On Big Sticks

I have a pretty simple view -- and the line between simple and simplistic can be thin -- on what it will take for the so-called Voice of the People to matter in this country. It's about sticks, and has three parts, beginning with this week's column. One reader thought it was naive, which turned out to be a good launching pad for a second column, soon to be released.
Naive?

Priming the pump

In Ashland there's a lot of chatter about whether the pushing innovative sustainability projects should be the business of government or private people and interests. The answer is 'yes.'
There are some intriguing possibilities waiting to be borne out there . Seems to me city government could provide the nudge it takes to turn ideas into reality, all for what's sometimes called "decimal dust" in the annual budget. This week's column describes how.

Are we making any progress

It all looks so dumb to me, this snarling at other folks who care about the future and the planet as much as you and I do, because... well, that's where I get stuck. How come we take our eye off the ball so easily whenever we get dinged? It's a mystery--until I'm the one who gets dinged.
"Take nothing personally-- least of all ourselves!" You remember where that's from? And what do you suppose could happen if we all took that advice?
It's a stunning thought.

Yeah, it felt great, Now what?

I think there's a useful way think about if, and more importantly how, all the good juju of the inauguration and ascendancy to leadership of a good man can actually fuel the changes e;re craving. This column lays out the basic framework. More to come.

"Sustainability?" It's kind of the whole deal

If we wanted we could probably spend a lot of time and words debating what "sustainability" is, but a) that gets real boring, and 2) we've got more important things to do, and time's short.  In an important way, sustainability pulls together just about everything we're talking about, or should be.  Or that's how I see it. 

Puzzling the Martian again

I'm starting to use my weekly column to look at some prevailing consumption habits that would stagger a visiting Martian anthropolgist. One that comes up for me practically every time I visit the post office is about newsprint and other kinds of paper. I know you've noticed it. I wrote it up in the most recent column to see what might stir.

Any thoughts?

New Year, Mayor, President, Chance and Commitment

The year's new. So is the world.

Everyone who dares to think openly knows that we won't thrive, or maybe even survive, without a big shift towards sustainable habits and lifestyles. And "sustainability" means...well, there are plenty of dictionary definitions, but I'm not sure any of them grab us in a way that energizes. Maybe, like art or obscenity, we only know it when we see it. That's why I asked readers in my New Year's column to ante up very specific ideas about sustainable change.

What's yours?