Here’s a book I haven’t read in about twenty years: The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff. Some books are interesting and worthwhile to reread in order to find out how much you’ve forgotten. I found that Hoff’s book was worth my time to read because of how many things that seemed like hermeneutics now seem as though they are a part of my body. Rereading also points to other things that would be valuable to add to the “body” of my knowledge.

把酒臨風 - Drinking with the Wind by Zhao Yizhou

In Hoff’s book, he uses the characters created by A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh, Piglet, Rabbit, Owl, Eeyore, and so on, to illustrate the Tao and the different workaday approaches to understanding the big concepts of Knowledge, Existence, and even the Smart Way of Doing Things, as they relate to, or are different from, the Tao.

In the time of Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu and other early Taoist writers, the popular alternative to Taoist thought was Confucianism. Confucianism started out as a way of setting humanity’s doings on Earth in harmony with the way things were done in Heaven by the Jade Emperor and his court.

A noble goal which became a bit bogged down and clogged up by the addition of rites and routines, traditions and ceremonies that did more to describe the actions humans needed to take to do everything “correctly” but without so much thought as to why these things needed to be done.

Here, in modern America, we seem to be confronted by the same types of “correct” ways of doing things with little thought of whether the underlying principles of this nation and, indeed, humanity, are being met or advanced. The cost of doing things “correctly” is that we are often unable to see through to actions which have not been tried before.

We are concerned that the cost of the stimulus package is too large. Yet, if the money isn’t spent, where will the cash come from to move this large economy from a point of stagnation to one in which the flow of money is a rushing stream reaching everyone in the country (can’t comment on the Tao without using a water image, you know)?

In Minnesota, talk of balancing our state’s budget revolves around cutting health and human services. Yet, if we cut aid to people in need, how will our activities end up helping people who are presently in need? It seems as if our Governor and legislature are willing to sacrifice the present health people (which will have larger cost effects in the future) in order to help them recover financially at some undefined point in the future. The thought must be that if we help the poor recover financially, they will be able to pay the accumulating costs rung up by the neglect of their health during the recession.

I think that even when we talk about costs that most Americans are willing to pay for—such as infrastructure—we tend to think of getting back to where we were: roads that are in repair, maintaining bridges, etc.

It’s possible that I’ve had too much education myself and haven’t passed the test of Common Sense, but I wonder why we aren’t just as concerned with our public money being spent to move ahead in the area of green technology or buying a better power grid which could then make additional wind, solar and tidal power investments more practical.

It seems like now is the time to do this because, I ask you, what will be the conventional wisdom in a year or two if we get out of this mess? It will be to recoup losses we’re incurring now, won’t it? No one will be wanting to stick their necks out and buy into new, less proven technologies. We may find ourselves stuck with additional coal plants but no carbon sequestration technology to help us stay up on the necessary steps to reduce global warming.

Can you already hear the voices of the short-term thinkers? Although I am putting words in their mouths, I think that it’s a legitimate interpretation of their criticisms and actions: “We don’t have the money to spend today which could ensure saving the world for tomorrow.” Conclusion: When the costs mount as a result of increased drought in the Midwest and attempts to rebuild ports on the coasts where ocean levels are rising, we will continue falling behind in efforts to stop global warming. We will, however, conveniently be able to blame the decisions made today.

While the above may seem to be very non-Taoist in that I am suggesting taking more vigorous action there is also a part of the Tao which shows its value by cutting through formality and convention and going to the heart of the matter.

This post is long enough. I think that if I were to give an illustration of how activity and the Tao are not incompatible, I’ll need to do it in a separate post.

After using the calligraphic example here to illustrate the principle of the Tao, I wrote to Mr. Zhao Yizhou’s website to ask forgiveness. Within 24 hours, I received a very gracious reply from his agent, Mr. Mischa Altmann. He gave me permission to post an example of Mr. Zhao’s calligraphy and some reasonable guidelines to follow.

More examples of Mr. Zhao’s contemporary calligraphy can be found at his website. I know very little about this art form but I was immediately touched by the marriage of delicacy and an unflinching understanding of the individual floating through a modern landscape. I think he works from a perspective of bringing his motivation or the force to move the brush out of the Tao, much as his ancestors in the tradition would have. He then creates a reflection of humanity in a contemporary setting while demonstrating a respect for the calligraphic tradition. Even if you think you have no interest in Chinese calligraphy, you owe it to yourself to take a look.

I have been listening to the news on my favorite NPR station in the area, KGAC-FM. Lots of Republican are attacking the stimulus package, claiming they are being kept out of the legislation (what part of Obama’s landslide election victory and their decline in Congressional numbers don’t they get?). So they continue their ideological support for their corporate allies and to demean, dismiss and ignore the plight of everyone making less than $100,000.

"Behind the Great Wave at Kanagawa" by Hokusai

By attempting to trash and weaken the stimulus bill the Republican Party is claiming there’s no justifiable need–whether due to their moralizing against the poor or from an economic standpoint that trickle-down methods (tax cuts, lower government spending)– to bring public money into the attempted solution for what ails the nation.

My emotional response is: do they think we’re stupid? Of course, they don’t believe that. Instead, they believe we were all unconscious during the last eight nightmarish years of this nation’s history. They believe that we didn’t watch the Republican majority increase the national debt to unheard of depths. They believe we are unable to see that an injection of public money into public works projects is substantively different from spending on defense contractors and the Halliburtons of the world.

The Republican strategy of the week seems to be to view President Obama as weak. They know that we, as the American people, are fragmented. That we snipe and backbite and declare the other person’s government benefits to be the downfall of the rest of us. This is part of the Reagan corpus of esoteric study that was left us in ancient times (the 1980s). We forget that we may be the next to be thrown out of our homes due to credit policy set by representatives bought and paid for by a banking and financial services lobby that ran through the 90s and 2000s almost without check.

We may be the next person bankrupted by our medical insurance woes. We may be the next person whose unemployment insurance runs out and scrambles to find the phone book and the telephone number for the local food bank. We may be the next…

I’m sick to death of the extremes of American individualism. What is needed is not what many Republicans might label a “return to old-fashioned values.” Because there was a collectivism and a sense of brother- and sisterhood that prevailed in the past that is seldom talked about. Can you imagine a song like “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” becoming a Number 1 hit in the current climate?

Maybe it’s because the current crisis hasn’t been with us long enough to sink in. The 24-hour news cycle is still trying to generate a file of what I would call “helpful hints” designed to get you to believe that if YOU (not your neighbor who is a loathsome bum) just do the right job search, you’ll get out of this fine. If YOU (singular, not part of the collective) just learn how to bargain with your lender you can bring your credit debt to a manageabale level, you’ll be able to continue to afford that asthma inhaler your kid needs.

And, to intentionally bring up class “warfare” for a moment, if YOU can just continue to define yourself as middle class, this great nation will sail along just fine if YOU and I all the rest of the little fish will just let the nation’s leaders, lenders and business folks continue spinning the ship’s wheel just as they will without your input. Listen to your iPod until any feeling you might have that you can spot the rocks and the reefs and the approaching shoreline passes.

The thought came to my mind on Tuesday that we need to march in the streets just to say enough’s enough. Work to get people back to work rather than covering your ideological backsides. And that message should go out to both the Republicans and the Democrats. I wish that both parties would have the courage to take positive, albeit painful, steps to help folks out. They’d have to have faith that their actions will be reviewed and judged over a longer time than just the 24-hour news cycle. It might take marching in the street to change the way they look at polls and “winning or losing.”

[This is a gut response to the zeitgeist rather than a "reasonable" response to what's going on. Don't write and tell me I have my facts and figures fouled up, I didn't base this on any. It's just a sickening feeling that I have regarding the fact that less than a month into Obama's administration and the Right is trying to torpedo him and any response he may have to the economic crisis before any competent individual or team of individuals could even organize a coherent response. I feel the Republicans are currently playing with the nation's well-being much as they did under Bush's direction. This approach boiled down to: We have an agenda and we're sticking to it. It plays well as "consistency" in the minds of the public. We will not respond to realities. Damn the consequences.]

This blog was inspired by something sent to me by a friend, Bill, who has a great ear for the horrible, metal-rending noise created in the collision of political rhetoric and the recylable aluminum can which is American pop culture.

Bill wrote “This snippet from an essay by Rolling Stone contributor Matt Taibbi describes the Palin phenomenon better than anything else I’ve read. The description of America as a ‘grasping consumer paradise we call a nation’ is particularly chilling.

‘Sarah Palin is a symbol of everything that is wrong with the modern United States. As a representative of our political system, she’s a new low in reptilian villainy, the ultimate cynical masterwork of puppeteers like Karl Rove. But more than that, she is a horrifying symbol of how little we ask for in return for the total surrender of our political power.

‘Not only is Sarah Palin a fraud, she’s the tawdriest, most half-assed fraud imaginable, 20 floors below the lowest common denominator, a character too dumb even for daytime TV–and this country is going to eat her up, cheering her every step of the way. All because most Americans no longer have the energy to do anything but lie back and allow ourselves to be jacked off by the calculating thieves who run this grasping consumer paradise we call a nation.

‘(…) The great insight of the Palin VP choice is that huge chunks of American voters no longer even demand that their candidates actually have policy positions; they simply consume them as media entertainment, rooting for or against them according to the reflexive prejudices of their demographic, as they would for reality-show contestants or sitcom characters.’”

The Sara Palin phenomena, the result of most of us distrusting those we suspect know more than ourselves, is distressing to me, but a distraction from larger problems. I’m angry because I think the reason we are not out in the streets protesting Palin as a VP candidate and other pressing matters is because we can’t separate need from want in this country. We won’t go to the trouble of providing all of our citizens with health care and don’t mind that African-American infants have a mortality rate more than twice that of European-American infants.

We have real trouble talking about poverty in this country. No one wants to admit that they are poor and few of us want to look at the fact that so many Americans (most figures quoted hover around 20%) have such low incomes when most of us have our attention turned to the executives making millions per year. The millions who make only a few tens of thousands attract little attention in a rich nation which is only rich for a minority.

There is even a serious flaw in the way in which we measure poverty and set a figure for the “poverty line” in this country. The calculation is based on a formula proposed by Mollie Orshansky in the Social Security Administration in 1963 and based on data gathered in 1955. Rebecca M. Blank a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institute states that all other major economic statistics, from GDP to unemployment have been regularly updated in light of current conditions.

In my paltry attempts at research for this post, I ran across the Heritage Foundation’s attempt to explain poverty in America. This slap in the face of common sense and the attempt to bury legitimate concern for the poor has little more merit than its attempt to say that Americans’ impoverished conditions are partially ameliorated by their access to air conditioning. The following quote, by Robert E. Rector, Senior Research Fellow, gives you some idea of how the Heritage Foundation does its best to diminish poverty’s impact by assessing today’s poverty as yesterday’s affluence:

Overall, the typical American defined as poor by the government has a car, air conditioning, a refrigerator, a stove, a clothes washer and dryer, and a microwave. He has two color televisions, cable or satellite TV reception, a VCR or DVD player, and a stereo. He is able to obtain medical care. His home is in good repair and is not overcrowded. By his own report, his family is not hungry and he had sufficient funds in the past year to meet his family’s essential needs. While this individual’s life is not opulent, it is equally far from the popular images of dire poverty conveyed by the press, liberal activists, and politicians.

The threshold the US Census Bureau used in 2007 to determine the level of poverty for a household of two adults and two children was $21,027. How would your budget have to change to fit within this annual figure. Keep in mind that the US Census is using pre-tax dollars here (though, mercifully, it “excludes capital gains or losses”). By present measures, then, 12.5 percent of Americans, 1 in 8 of us, live in poverty. That’s over 37 million people. Look at the rate of poverty for African-Americans, however, and the statistic is a disaster: 24.5%, a rate almost three times that of non-Hispanic whites.

In this Presidential race we are being told that race shouldn’t matter—most of us have moved past even the memory of the laws of Jim Crow. And yet, how do we explain away our lack of concern for such a shameful divide in this country? Though you may not believe color matters anymore, having money and resources to better your life does matter. And money and resources are not distributed evenly among ethnic groups in this country. For the children in this nation and for justice in America, money is one measure we can all see and understand how poorly it shows us as an unjust nation.

]]> http://rationalpsychic.wordpress.com/2008/10/01/why-arent-we-in-the-streets-yelling-give-us-what-we-need-not-what-we-want/feed/ 7 Rationalpsychic http://rationalpsychic.wordpress.com/2007/07/13/i-replied-to-cnn-after-seeing-an-inept-interview-mike-huckabee-talked-about-m-moores-weight/ http://rationalpsychic.wordpress.com/2007/07/13/i-replied-to-cnn-after-seeing-an-inept-interview-mike-huckabee-talked-about-m-moores-weight/#comments Sat, 14 Jul 2007 05:49:43 +0000 rationalpsychic http://rationalpsychic.wordpress.com/2007/07/13/i-replied-to-cnn-after-seeing-an-inept-interview-mike-huckabee-talked-about-m-moores-weight/ ]]>

First, here’s a link to the interview in question. It’s labeled “Huckabee Rips Moore.”

This is my response to that video:

I wanted to make a complaint regarding the way in which Mike Huckabee was interviewed regarding his mention of Michael Moore’s weight.

Although the first point made by Miles ____ regarding the former Gov.’s identity as a minister and whether or not making a comment about a guy’s weight is appropriate for him to do was worth stating.

However, the segment was five minutes long and the interviewer went nowhere else with the line of questioning even when the former Gov. gave him openings about facts and policy which could be challenged.

How long do the Canadians actually wait for health care? Elective procedures? What is the Gov.’s source of information.

Gov. Huckabee said, “The French pay more for their health care because they pay a LOT more in taxes.” Is this true? How MUCH more do they pay for the services they get? Give me a menu to compare services so I can see which system is better for me as a consumer! And, again, what source does the Gov. go to for his information?

These are the questions that need to be answered. It’s great to have “Sicko” presented to us, but it’s a lost opportunity of the media is unwilling to take up the questions that are out there and ask them of the people who are lining their pockets with insurance dollars and HMOs are making huge profits if the system is left unaltered. How much do THEY spend each year on PR?

Thanks for your time,
rationalpsychic.wordpress.net

I welcome any comments or ideas about what I addressed regarding the video and what things I could have addressed but which you think that I missed. I am thinking health care is going to rise as a larger issue if we just push a little. Yes, the Iraq war looms huge, but so does the need to provide health care for our returning veterans. I think the fate of their health care is tied to the fortunes of the subject of providing health care to the rest of the public.

I haven’t used a link before as the core of my post. However, I feel that there is so much happening in terms of political issues that they need to be highlighted more often–even on a blog like mine which I wouldn’t classify as being overtly political.

I think that there is also such a lack of discussion by anyone to the left of Sam Brownback on the formation and expression of opinion. Even with such a large, well-publicized issue as global warming there is really so much work to do. What’s been decided? Global warming = bad? The scientific evidence is becoming more and more available. The question is, what do we do with it? How do we respond? What set of values will we consider as a basis for our response?

I’m including this YouTube file with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. talking at a Live Earth event because I like his message that we have to get past the “false choice” we’re being sold by the Bush Administration that we have to choose between a viable, ecologically sound future and an economy that allows us to live above a subsistence level.

Maybe there are many of you out there who far ahead of me on this issue. That’s OK. I think that there are such a great bunch of folks who stop by here that I’d like to hear a little from you in reaction to the rhetoric presented in the video. I think his message is helpful because it takes me beyond the headlines in the newspaper and what I’m presented by the talking heads on network TV.

We need to change the focus of this society and slow things down a bit. What if it weren’t just a pipe dream to start thinking seven generations ahead? What if we thought two or even one generation ahead? It’s possible. We can write a few more e-mails and make some calls that will turn up the heat under some tushes that are beholden to interests besides our own.

Please comment and share the video if you think it’s worth the 6 minutes of your time.