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Neighborhood Summit: It's not about watering petunias

7/21/2010

On August 21 the city organized 'summit' for neighborhoods will take place (see my 5/26/10 post). I attended the first steering committee meeting so that I could see who was in charge of this. The UN sponsored Neighborhood Alliance, a group of handpicked people who purport to speak for their community; the Leadership Institute of Ecology and the Economy (two of the three cornerstones of UN Agenda 21); and the city's Community Advisory Board, another supposed grassroots group sponsored by the city but appointed by the council. Not coincidentally, the chair of the Community Advisory Board is also the executive director of LIEE, and is also the main organizer for this 'summit.'

I have submitted a request for a table at this event. Let's see if I get it.

Why is the city doing this now? They want to identify and sideline opposition in the community while identifying those who want to be handmaidens of the groups manipulating public opinion.

Here's a model for this from Wikipedia:
In Nazi Germany, a Blockleiter (block leader) was the lowest official of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP), responsible for the political supervision of a neighborhood or city block and formed the link between the NSDAP and the general population. Also colloquially known as a Blockwart (block attendant or warden), he was charged with planning, spreading propaganda and developing an acceptance to the policies of the NSDAP among the households (typically 40 to 60) in his area. It was also the duty of the Blockleiter to spy on the population and report any anti-Nazi activities to the local Gestapo office; this allowed a Nazi terror state. This was helped by keeping files on each household (Haushaltskarten). Due to such activities, Blockwarts were particularly disliked by the general population. Other duties included allocating beds in homes for visiting NSDAP demonstrators, the collection of subscriptions and charitable donations especially for Winterhilfe and organising the clearing of rubble after air-raids. It is thought that there were nearly half a million Blockleiter. Today, Blockwart is a colloquial German insult word for a person who feels the motivation to keep people in line, esp. by reporting them to officials or pressing the enforcing of rules (esp. petty rules) upon people.
(see my 6/09 post on the 'Know Your Neighbor' program)

On the Duty of Civil Disobedience

7/3/2010

Henry David Thoreau is best known for On Walden Pond, his meditation on self-reliance, but my favorite of his works is On the Duty of Civil Disobedience. This essay is often published in a collection with Walden and is usually referred to as 'Civil Disobedience.' I don't know why the title is shortened in that manner by publishers, but I wish it weren't, because his message is that there is a civic duty to be disobedient. A DUTY. Frankly it's amazing that this piece is still studied in schools, at least I hope it is. The beauty and clarity of On the Duty of Civil Disobedience lies in Thoreau's curmudgeonly insistence on declaring his right, and ours, to our independence. Not just in body, but in thought. In deed. In belief. The individual declaration of independence. The acknowledgment of personal responsibility for putting civic duty into action. A civic duty to be disobedient when actions that your government takes are known to be wrong. That there is a clear moral standard and that it is important that we adhere to it.

Thoreau was a Transcendentalist but came out of strict Calvinist tradition, and lived in a sort of loose communion with Ralph Waldo Emerson (whose Divinity School Address to the graduating class of Harvard Divinity School got him barred from entering the campus forever after. Why? Because he told the class to think for itself) and others. They were free thinkers and allowed themselves the full rein of their intellect while hewing to a strong moral code. They knew right from wrong and were not afraid to speak it.

We have a great tradition of thought in America. One not burdened by centuries of adherence to kings or churches, popes or dogma. Yet we've allowed ourselves to slip out of a deep sense of right and wrong. Why should issues of gay rights and gay marriage have confused and separated the country? Do we have such a tenuous attachment to right and wrong that we have to scourge those who would acknowledge and celebrate a state of being that has persisted since the beginning of man? Better to look at ourselves as a moral people in terms of our personal actions, and examine our desire to be part of a group to the detriment of our individual sense of what is right. I speak of the need to be part of the herd, to not raise our voice because our neighbor may hear, to cast a stone because the crowd surrounds us. To avoid asking the hard questions, such as: Why have I tolerated the restrictions of personal freedoms because of a perceived external threat? Why have I accepted that individual rights must be abridged for the overall 'good' of the nation? Why am I so afraid of not being liked that I will stand by when someone is being attacked for speaking the truth? Why am I willing to accept corruption in government if I see it in my own political party? Or my church? Or my social movement?

Thoreau's most famously quoted statement that a man must keep pace with his own drummer, however measured or far away, is part of a deeply American tradition. A tradition that we are proud of for a reason. It takes courage, and we honor that.

Musing on Freedom

7/2/2010

It's almost the 4th of July, Independence Day. Why is the US different from other nations?

I was putting my mind in the way of freedom and what it meant in the 1600's when Europeans (non-Spanish, who were already here) got in their ships and risked their lives to start again. Some of them were religious fanatics who were so narrow and restrictive that they'd been driven out of Holland or England. Some were convicts about to be hung at Newgate Prison in London and given the chance to save their necks in the colonies. Yes, the US was settled with convict labor, too. Others were merchants, farmers, traders, misfits, and indentured servants looking for a new life. And there were the aristocrats.

In the mid to late 1700's the colonies resisted the crown's rule and declared independence. Raising tobacco and cotton for England using slave labor had made the aristocrats of the new country wealthy. There was a desire to explore and take possession of the land. So the idea of freedom, the idea of independence and individuation fit well with the needs of the landed aristocracy to expand and exploit the new lands. Initially, those who crafted the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights intended those rights to apply to the landed gentry alone.

Later, the concept of Manifest Destiny encouraged those who were able to spread out and take the land. The idea that whatever you saw was yours, that the encouragement of the government was with you, and that the US Army would push out to the edge of the continent drove men to the West. At first the West was the Mississippi, and then beyond to the Pacific.

So what is my point? That our nation is different than any of the others, because it needed that concept of freedom and individualism in order to settle this enormous continent. That served this nation for 100 years. Until the mid to late 1800's, when California became a state, and the transcontinental railroad was completed, this was imperative in the larger picture of expanding the settled US land area. This is cynical, perhaps, but nation-makers such as the philosopher-soldiers who designed the American system needed a ready militia, a nation that could govern itself with free speech and assembly, and a willing populace that would expand their territory and utilize the resources of this rich continent.

Freedom made sense. Fiscal sense. And it was an experiment in political philosophy that allowed men of privilege to grow interdependent markets while permitting intellectual discourse to shape a new political model.

Yep. It made sense. So maybe it doesn't make sense anymore to those who are now controlling our government. All lands have been 'discovered,' and there's enough freedom left to come up with a new idea for the market. But the Agenda 21 message now is that there are too many of us, we use too many resources, even our exhalations are a danger to the earth. Carbon offsets must be purchased (and traded in new exchanges) in order to make amends for breathing. We're accused of being 'addicted' to oil and pressured to renounce our independent mode of travel. We're told our homes are too big, our footprint too big, we use too many light bulbs, and eat too much. We watch television programs that are almost exclusively modeled on 'winners and losers' to accustom us to judging and harden us to those who lose. We ourselves lose. We lose our jobs, our homes, our social structure, our culture, our identity. We're physically unproductive and have to exercise to use our bodies. We're disconnected from our food source and are totally dependent. We are intellectually lazy, under-educated, or overly narrow in our educations. We're deeply in debt, told that we need to spend $100,000 for a degree (and even get multiple degrees to 'stay relevant'), that we need to get in line, stay in step or we won't pay those loans off. We are compromised. With unemployment at its highest in 25 years we want to be winners, not losers, and will go along to get along.

Martina Navratilova, the tennis star, is from the Czech Republic. Recently she spoke about living under communism as a child. She said, 'if you weren't a party member you got nothing. You couldn't get food, schooling, housing or jobs. Unless you went along with the majority you were on the outside.' Globalism. Nationalism. With a global market mentality there is no sense of loyalty or obligation to a particular country. Wherever the profits are is where the money goes. With nationalism, old-style, even robber barons like Carnegie and Mellon endowed libraries and universities. There was a sense of noblesse oblige that is absent now. It's just not expeditious.

So what is the state of freedom now? Here, in America? Could Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman play their wildly rebellious and nervy jokes on Wall Street today? When I was in Washington DC a few years ago I walked the halls of Congress and cried. Really. Because carved into the walls, high up above the lintels, are statements made by our founding fathers. And I thought, if they made those statements today they'd be in jail.

Neighborhood Summit: It's not about watering petunias

On the Duty of Civil Disobedience

Musing on Freedom

And the winner is...

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