#28 / Word Count

I have been working on a pleading, filed yesterday with the California Supreme Court. The Court imposes a "word limit," and each pleading filed must have a word count certification.

It strikes me that we refine our first attempts at constructing new realities through a kind of editorial process, adding items we may have overlooked, and eliminating the excesses in what we may have first said, or written.

Good writing (and good realities) come from initial inspiration, but disciplined by good editing. It's best to get the word count down.

#27 / Speaking The Truth

It is my experience (and theoretical belief) that what ultimately become the realities of the world we inhabit enter into that world by our own actions, and that we "precipitate" our human reality from a large set of unseen and inchoate possibilities.

It is also my experience that the most important way that we create reality is by "speaking" it. We bring truth into existence by our words.

#26 / Save Nature

Nature.org is where The Nature Conservancy hangs out on the web. During the time I might have been called a "professional environmentalist" (I was the Executive Director of the Planning and Conservation League), I and other professional environmentalists called it "TNC." They do good work.

Whenever I go downtown now, and start walking on Pacific Avenue in Santa Cruz, from Cooper Street towards the beach, I find myself asked if I want to "save state parks?" Of course, I do want to do that. If you're downtown, I bet you will be asked, too. If you stop, and sign up to help (and I certainly recommend it), you'll find that the suggested way to "save state parks" is by joining TNC.

I think it is a good idea to join TNC, if you are not already a member, but for the record, there are some other ways to "save state parks," too. The California State Parks Foundation, for instance, has made "saving state parks" one of its main goals. They are a major participant in the Save Our State Parks Campaign. Santa Cruz locals should also know about Friends of Santa Cruz State Parks. Don't forget to join that group!

On the TNC website, you will find that TNC's main mission is not to "save state parks." The most prominent appeal on the website, at the time I'm writing this, is an appeal to "Save Nature." TNC suggests you can do that for only 60 cents a day.

It strikes me that "saving state parks" and "saving nature" are fundamentally different propositions. Our state parks are political creations; they are something that we have decided to include in the human world we most immediately inhabit. Since we created the state park system, we can also dismantle and destroy it, and it looks like California is headed down that road. "Saving State Parks" is a political task, and getting together with friends and neighbors (as well as raising money for a statewide political effort) is absolutely in order. That kind of political activity is what you see pictured in the image on this post.

As for an appeal to "Save Nature," I am a bit more troubled. In my view, the idea that the world of Nature is a human creation (to be continued, or not, based on what humans do) is what has caused us a lot of problems in the first place.

I am hoping that Nature will "save us," since the world of nature is the world upon which we ultimately and utterly depend.

#25 / Not A Spectator Sport

The City of Santa Cruz has recently announced that its City Council meetings will heretofore be broadcast live online, and thereafter endlessly "looped." Click right here for a link to where that online access can be obtained.

I have a mixed reaction to this latest announcement. Making it easier to access the activities of elected representatives is good. However, "watching" elected officials do something is different from democracy. Self-government means we have to get involved ourselves, and there is no substitute for "being there."

Democracy is most definitely not a "spectator sport."

#24 / Community Reads

The "Silicon Valley Reads" program is going into its tenth year. Leadership has been provided by the City of San Jose, the Santa Clara County Office of Education, and the Santa Clara County Library. The program has a long list of "community partners," and many institutional sponsors. This year, the theme is "Muslim and American."

I like the idea of what amounts to a community "book group." To make manifest the reality of our human situation - that we are not just a collection of "individuals," but that we are all bound together in "community" (various communities, in fact) - we need to engage in community activities and exercises. Such common activities can help reveal us to ourselves, and to make clear that we are not alone.

Genuine democracy relies on "democratic conversation." What better way to engender such conversation? Let's all read a book and talk about it!

#23 / Grassroots Democracy In Venezula

The January 30, 2012 edition of The Nation has an article by Gabriel Hetland, entitled "Grassroots Democracy in Venezuela." The article discusses a kind of democratic budgeting process actually being used in Venezuelan communities. That process is based not on a notion of "representative democracy," but on a model of "participatory democracy." Ordinary members of the community develop the budget, instead of having budget decisions made by "government officials who stay in their air-conditioned offices all day and make decisions there."

Electing the people who hire the people who run our lives for us is not truly very "democratic," if democracy means, as Hetland says it does, "giving ordinary people control over the decisions that affect their lives."

In the United States, public revulsion with "representatives" who no longer represent "us," but who are beholden to and represent "the 1%," threatens to undermine our believe in democratic self-government itself.

The Hetland article makes plain that self-government can work, but only if we get involved ourselves, and if don't assume that someone else can make our decisions for us.

The article also makes clear, by the way, that any genuine democracy takes a lot of work!

#22 / I Do Care

My sister sent me an email to indicate that she has been enjoying my ruminations on the "I don't care" philosophy, which philosophy is not, of course, exactly the same thing as the Buddhist ideal of "non-attachment." Another comment, on one of my earlier postings, quite properly made that point - and in a very clear and helpful way, I thought.

My sister's "subject line," in the email she sent, was this: "I do care." Of course, I care, too! For my sister; for my family; for my loved ones; for my community; for "all those who've sailed with me."

What got me thinking about the "I don't care" topic was not really any examination of my personal situation; it was a complaint on an environmental website that "everyone likes to say they do the right thing but very few actually do it." I wandered from there to a reflection on the more personal, and I do think, on a personal level, that a non-attachment approach can have great rewards, and that in figuring out how to get there, the spirited words of Judy Garland may well be helpful: "I don't care!"

If we do care about the fate of the world (our world and the world of Nature), the "Our Breathing Planet" website has a point. The challenges we confront are urgent imperatives, and yet our "care" doesn't seem to translate into much action. I really don't buy the "lather, rinse, and repeat" idea, which suggests that the way to get people to "care" in an effective way is somehow to impose or promote repetitious caring conduct. "Care" is like "love;" it either comes from inside, or or is related to an internal dimension of some kind. It can't be inculcated by externally imposed or recommended exercises. At least, I don't think s0.

On the other hand, my own concept of "love" draws a lot from Kierkegaard's Works of Love, and he emphasizes the fact that "love" is an "assignment." It is, in fact, a "commandment."

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind; this is the first and the great commandment, and the second is like unto it: thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."

There is a certain "external" quality to love (and caring) when it is seen as a commandment; in other words, there is something going on here that is more than an "internal" feeling. There is an "obligation" involved. Any "non-attachment" approach that might suggest that we are without an obligation to the world, or to other people, doesn't ring right, and while I am no Buddhist, it seems that one of the central ideas of Buddhism is "compassion," which could even be seen as a synonym for "caring," if "caring" is considered in its deepest and most profound sense.

Here's where I end up: we achieve "caring" (as we achieve "love") through a commitment centered internally, but tied to the external world. In the political context, we will actually "do" the right thing when we are committed to other persons in a public way, so that our internally-based love and caring is anchored to the "real" world through that public declaration.

If we care enough to address the crises threatening our world today (the world we create, the human world, and the world of Nature) then we will realize our concern and caring by pledging with others to "do the right thing." Our revolution, in the United States of America, began with such a personal pledge:

We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name, and by the authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare, that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent states; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as free and independent states, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do. And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.

It is time, I think, to pledge again. If we do care.