The End of Wisdom? Not yet.

Senator Clemente Pinckney Atlanta Daily

A young white man went into a church in Charlston last week, sat in a prayer meeting then shot the pastor and eight other people because he wanted to start a civil war. How will he benefit from his hate now he is in custody? Of course he won't benefit - he is just another little puppet filled with propaganda, some drugs and sent out to kill.

We could say the white supremacists who filled his damaged mind with hate are to blame. Or the NRA whose members may be sufficiently ignorant to spout beliefs like one of their Board Members who blamed Clemente Pinckney, the murdered pastor, for the deaths of his eight congregants because he didn't carry a gun. Because he voted against a law allowing gun owners to carry concealed weapons without permits?

A childhood friend saw the murderer the morning before the shooting and confessed the pair had never discussed race growing up, but recently heard him spout such racist beliefs as blacks taking over the world. It's an old trope but you don't need new ideas to tear society apart - the old slogans will work for those who are disaffected and who can't do their own research. Puppets that are poor and angry are available in the millions from Budapest to America. What they do know is that life is not fair. They have the scars to prove it.

Rick Perry, a Republican presidential candidate, said the fatal shooting was a drug-induced accident, perhaps meaning to say "incident" but either way this seems to launder the dirt that is racism.

Jon Stewart confessed he could not bring himself to do jokes on his show the day the killing happened. Clearly sickened by the frequency of these incidents.“I’m confident, though, that by acknowledging it, by staring into that and seeing it for what it is, we still won’t do jacksh*t ... Yeah. That’s us.”

Who will call it terrorism when the killing is done by an American who is white - not brown or black or an immigrant from another nation, Stewart asks.

There was an interesting interview on CBC's The Current, where a fellow pastor talked about Clemente Pinckney and how his church had a long history of working for justice.  Doesn't that sound like another assassination - an enlightened soul working for social change, for equality and peace and all those things that make people difficult to manipulate because they are not living in a whirlwind of chaos, fear and powerlessness? 

In the eulogy given by President Obama he said this: Reverend Pinckney embodied a politics that was neither mean, nor small. He conducted himself quietly, and kindly, and diligently. He encouraged progress not by pushing his ideas alone, but by seeking out your ideas, partnering with you to make things happen. He was full of empathy and fellow feeling, able to walk in somebody else’s shoes and see through their eyes. No wonder one of his senate colleagues remembered Senator Pinckney as “the most gentle of the 46 of us – the best of the 46 of us.”

When will we learn the pattern of oppression that is powered by hate? When will we stop rewarding the system that oppresses century after century? 

The Case of Working with Values and Frames

Following decades of research and hundreds of cross-cultural studies, psychologists have identified a number of consistently-occurring human values.1

Early researchers into human motivations discovered a surprising consistency in the things people said they valued in life. After testing this finding many times and across many countries and cultures, they put together a list of repeatedly occurring values.2

Rather than occurring randomly, these values were found to be related to each other. Some were unlikely to be prioritised strongly at the same time by the same individual; others were often prioritised strongly at the same time.3

The researchers mapped this relationship according to these associations, as presented below.The closer any one value ‘point’ is to another, the more likely that both will be of similar importance to the same person. By contrast, the further a value is from another, the less likely that both will be seen as similarly important. This does not mean that people will not value both cleanliness and freedom, for example – rather, they will in general tend to prioritise one over the other. Values can thus be said to have neighbours and opposites.4 Based on these patterns of association – as well as their broad similarities – they were then classified into ten groups.

http://valuesandframes.org/

Bringhurst: Languages are Lifeforms too

"There are at least 82 indigenous languages in Cascadia and those could be added as a layer to David McCloskey’s award-winning map of the bioregion [Cascadia]. They belong on the map because “languages are life-forms too, just like the forests and the grasslands. They are living things. They are mortal. They die. They don’t last forever. They grow up, they change, they live, under good conditions, very long lives, thousands of years, but they don’t last forever. They are not static. So even the language map would change.” Robert Bringhurst

If there is one thing you read about literature this year it should be this. It should shake our bones and reform our dreams.

For too long we have been subsumed under the human resource category worshiping the dollar (or its power). But here is a new language, or an old language that may save our lives if we return to it.

350.org - We are Greater Than Tar Sands

On July 4th, 350.org is organizing communities from coast to coast to take action en masse along and beyond the routes of pipelines like Energy East, Kinder Morgan, Line 9, and Northern Gateway to defend the water, land and climate. 

As we approach one of the most important elections in this country’s history and another round of international climate negotiations, it is crucial for us to unite and demonstrate to our leaders that we are ready for real climate action.

If politicians refuse to lead us. We will lead them.  Check out the link to find an action close to you.