I think that it is pure reason’s role to continually consider and re-evaluate what practical reason has left us.

I feel that the first would have little purpose if the second did not exist and the second would not exist if the first did not exist.

thx-

Danah, I encourage your steadfast and faithful efforts to hold on to your beliefs in the face of such discouragement as misappropriation of the fruits of your creation. Yechh!

But I also discern something bigger afoot. Change and Growth often challenge and disturb us, as we feel ourselves being pulled out of our comfort zone into the next phases in life.

You’ve made an impact as an academic in a new, dynamic field. Why not extend your impact in another field? Think about the possibilities. Your current discomfort may be a voice suggesting change.

We need passionate, engaged, informed thinkers with natural leadership skills – you, in a word – more than ever. Sitting on the sidelines and commenting and studying, no matter how fulfilling it may be intellectually, is bound to grow frustrating for someone with your youth and energy. What is your current angst telling you to do? I may be completely off target here, so forgive me.

As for the upcoming election, as a society we face yet one more chance to make our voices heard and take back control of the system we hold dear. We can begin to undo the wrongs set in motion in Florida in 2000 by changing the party in power – let us hope that the People will step up and vote and set our democracy back on track. If not, we will have to regroup for 2008. There is a national referendum every two years, we just have to take advantage of it.

Democracy is not only a gift, but also a struggle and an ongoing experiment. We have no guarantees that it will continue to work, especially if we don’t each and everyone of us take responsibility for making it work. The repeal of Habeas Corpus is an ominous warning sign and shot across the bow, a signal that there is something terribly wrong in Denmark.

And Life is a struggle, always has been – we learn that and grow to accept it as we mature. You can call it cynicism, or the loss of idealism – I see it as inevitable as one grows, its more realism and maturation, the gaining of wisdom and perspective.

In the end, we have what we have, the hand that Fate dealt us, and yet we all have a modicum of control, if only over our own attitudes and what we choose to do. We all should work to make the world a better place, within our little circles of control, as Covey would say. And then there’s my favorite Joseph Campbell Zen-like quote, when I feel down: “As you go through life, a bird will shit on your shoulder. Don’t bother to brush it off.”

The Real Rosa Parks
by Paul Loeb

We learn much from how we present our heroes. A few years ago, on Martin Luther King. Day, I was interviewed on CNN. So was Rosa Parks, by phone from Los Angeles. “We’re very honored to have her,” said the host. “Rosa Parks was the woman who wouldn’t go to the back of the bus. She wouldn’t get up and give her seat in the white section to a white person. That set in motion the year-long bus boycott in Montgomery. It earned Rosa Parks the title of ‘mother of the Civil Rights movement.’”

I was excited to hear Parks’s voice and to be part of the same show. Then it occurred to me that the host’s description–the story’s standard rendition–stripped the Montgomery boycott of all its context. Before refusing to give up her bus seat, Parks had spent twelve years helping lead the local NAACP chapter, along with union activist E.D. Nixon, from the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, teachers from the local Negro college, and a variety of ordinary members of Montgomery’s African American community. The summer before, Parks had attended a ten-day training session at Tennessee’s labor and civil rights organizing school, the Highlander Center, where she’d met an older generation of civil rights activists and discussed the recent Supreme Court decision banning “separate-but-equal” schools. During this period of involvement and education, Parks had become familiar with previous challenges to segregation: Another Montgomery bus boycott, fifty years earlier, successfully eased some restrictions; a bus boycott in Baton Rouge won limited gains two years before Parks was arrested; and the previous spring, a young Montgomery woman had also refused to move to the back of the bus, causing the NAACP to consider a legal challenge until it turned out that she was unmarried and pregnant, and therefore a poor symbol for a campaign. In short, Parks didn’t make a spur-of-the-moment decision. Rosa Parks didn’t single-handedly give birth to the civil rights efforts, but she was part of an existing movement for change, at a time when success was far from certain. This in no way diminishes the power and historical importance of her refusal to give up her seat. But it does remind us that this tremendously consequential act might never have taken place without all the humble and frustrating work that she and others did earlier on. And that her initial step of getting involved was just as courageous and critical as her choice on the bus that all of us have heard about.

People like Parks shape our models of social commitment. Yet the conventional retelling of her story creates a standard so impossible to meet, it may actually make it harder for us to get involved. This portrayal suggests that social activists come out of nowhere, to suddenly take dramatic stands. It implies that we act with the greatest impact when we act alone, or at least when we act alone initially. It reinforces a notion that anyone who takes a committed public stand, or at least an effective one, has to be a larger-than-life figure–someone with more time, energy, courage, vision, or knowledge than any normal person could ever possess. This belief pervades our society, in part because the media tends not to represent historical change as the work of ordinary human beings, which it almost always is.

Once we enshrine our heroes on pedestals, it becomes hard for mere mortals to measure up in our eyes. However individuals speak out, we’re tempted to dismiss their motives, knowledge, and tactics as insufficiently grand or heroic. We fault them for not being in command of every fact and figure, or being able to answer every question put to them. We fault ourselves as well, for not knowing every detail, or for harboring uncertainties and doubts. We find it hard to imagine that ordinary human beings with ordinary flaws might make a critical difference in worthy social causes.

Yet those who act have their own imperfections, and ample reasons to hold back. “I think it does us all a disservice,” says a young African-American activist in Atlanta named Sonya Tinsley, “when people who work for social change are presented as saints–so much more noble than the rest of us. We get a false sense that from the moment they were born they were called to act, never had doubts, were bathed in a circle of light. But I’m much more inspired learning how people succeeded despite their failings and uncertainties. It’s a much less intimidating image. It makes me feel like I have a shot at changing things too.”

Sonya had recently attended a talk given by one of Martin Luther King’s Morehouse professors, in which he mentioned how much King had struggled when he first came to college, getting only a ‘C’, for example, in his first philosophy course. “I found that very inspiring, when I heard it,” Sonya said, “given all that King achieved. It made me feel that just about anything was possible.”

Our culture’s misreading of the Rosa Parks story speaks to a more general collective amnesia, where we forget the examples that might most inspire our courage and conscience. Apart from obvious times of military conflict, most of us know next to nothing of the many battles ordinary men and women fought to preserve freedom, expand the sphere of democracy, and create a more just society. Of the abolitionist and civil rights movements, we at best recall a few key leaders–and often misread their actual stories. We know even less about the turn-of-the-century populists who challenged entrenched economic interests and fought for a “cooperative commonwealth.” Who these days can describe the union movements that ended 80-hour work weeks at near-starvation wages? Who knows the origin of the social security system? How did the women’s suffrage movement spread to hundreds of communities, and gather enough strength to prevail?

As memories of these events disappear, we lose the knowledge of mechanisms that grassroots social movements have used successfully in the past to shift public sentiment and challenge entrenched institutional power. Equally lost are the means by which their participants managed to keep on and eventually prevail in circumstances at least as harsh as those we face today. As novelist Milan Kundera writes, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

Think again about the different ways one can frame Rosa Parks’s historic action. In the prevailing myth, Parks decides to act almost on a whim, in isolation. She’s a virgin to politics, a holy innocent. The lesson seems to be that if any of us suddenly got the urge to do something equally heroic, that would be great. Of course most of us don’t, so we wait our entire lives to find the ideal moment.

Parks’s real story conveys a far more empowering moral. She begins with seemingly modest steps. She goes to a meeting, and then another. Hesistant at first, she gains confidence as she speaks out. She keeps on despite a profoundly uncertain context, as she and others act as best they can to challenge deeply intrenched injustices, with little certainty of results. Had she and others given up after her tenth or eleventh year of commitment, we might never have heard of Montgomery.

Parks’s journey suggests that change is the product of deliberate, incremental action, whereby we join together to try to shape a better world. Sometimes our struggles will fail, as did many earlier efforts of Parks, her peers, and her predecessors. Other times they may bear modest fruits. And at times they will trigger a miraculous outpouring of courage and heart–as happened with her arrest and all that followed. For only when we act despite all our uncertainties and doubts do we have the chance to shape history.

[via http://www.zmag.org/Sustainers/content/2000-03/14loeb.htm

The Real Rosa Parks
by Paul Loeb

We learn much from how we present our heroes. A few years ago, on Martin Luther King. Day, I was interviewed on CNN. So was Rosa Parks, by phone from Los Angeles. “We’re very honored to have her,” said the host. “Rosa Parks was the woman who wouldn’t go to the back of the bus. She wouldn’t get up and give her seat in the white section to a white person. That set in motion the year-long bus boycott in Montgomery. It earned Rosa Parks the title of ‘mother of the Civil Rights movement.’”

I was excited to hear Parks’s voice and to be part of the same show. Then it occurred to me that the host’s description–the story’s standard rendition–stripped the Montgomery boycott of all its context. Before refusing to give up her bus seat, Parks had spent twelve years helping lead the local NAACP chapter, along with union activist E.D. Nixon, from the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, teachers from the local Negro college, and a variety of ordinary members of Montgomery’s African American community. The summer before, Parks had attended a ten-day training session at Tennessee’s labor and civil rights organizing school, the Highlander Center, where she’d met an older generation of civil rights activists and discussed the recent Supreme Court decision banning “separate-but-equal” schools. During this period of involvement and education, Parks had become familiar with previous challenges to segregation: Another Montgomery bus boycott, fifty years earlier, successfully eased some restrictions; a bus boycott in Baton Rouge won limited gains two years before Parks was arrested; and the previous spring, a young Montgomery woman had also refused to move to the back of the bus, causing the NAACP to consider a legal challenge until it turned out that she was unmarried and pregnant, and therefore a poor symbol for a campaign. In short, Parks didn’t make a spur-of-the-moment decision. Rosa Parks didn’t single-handedly give birth to the civil rights efforts, but she was part of an existing movement for change, at a time when success was far from certain. This in no way diminishes the power and historical importance of her refusal to give up her seat. But it does remind us that this tremendously consequential act might never have taken place without all the humble and frustrating work that she and others did earlier on. And that her initial step of getting involved was just as courageous and critical as her choice on the bus that all of us have heard about.

People like Parks shape our models of social commitment. Yet the conventional retelling of her story creates a standard so impossible to meet, it may actually make it harder for us to get involved. This portrayal suggests that social activists come out of nowhere, to suddenly take dramatic stands. It implies that we act with the greatest impact when we act alone, or at least when we act alone initially. It reinforces a notion that anyone who takes a committed public stand, or at least an effective one, has to be a larger-than-life figure–someone with more time, energy, courage, vision, or knowledge than any normal person could ever possess. This belief pervades our society, in part because the media tends not to represent historical change as the work of ordinary human beings, which it almost always is.

Once we enshrine our heroes on pedestals, it becomes hard for mere mortals to measure up in our eyes. However individuals speak out, we’re tempted to dismiss their motives, knowledge, and tactics as insufficiently grand or heroic. We fault them for not being in command of every fact and figure, or being able to answer every question put to them. We fault ourselves as well, for not knowing every detail, or for harboring uncertainties and doubts. We find it hard to imagine that ordinary human beings with ordinary flaws might make a critical difference in worthy social causes.

Yet those who act have their own imperfections, and ample reasons to hold back. “I think it does us all a disservice,” says a young African-American activist in Atlanta named Sonya Tinsley, “when people who work for social change are presented as saints–so much more noble than the rest of us. We get a false sense that from the moment they were born they were called to act, never had doubts, were bathed in a circle of light. But I’m much more inspired learning how people succeeded despite their failings and uncertainties. It’s a much less intimidating image. It makes me feel like I have a shot at changing things too.”

Sonya had recently attended a talk given by one of Martin Luther King’s Morehouse professors, in which he mentioned how much King had struggled when he first came to college, getting only a ‘C’, for example, in his first philosophy course. “I found that very inspiring, when I heard it,” Sonya said, “given all that King achieved. It made me feel that just about anything was possible.”

Our culture’s misreading of the Rosa Parks story speaks to a more general collective amnesia, where we forget the examples that might most inspire our courage and conscience. Apart from obvious times of military conflict, most of us know next to nothing of the many battles ordinary men and women fought to preserve freedom, expand the sphere of democracy, and create a more just society. Of the abolitionist and civil rights movements, we at best recall a few key leaders–and often misread their actual stories. We know even less about the turn-of-the-century populists who challenged entrenched economic interests and fought for a “cooperative commonwealth.” Who these days can describe the union movements that ended 80-hour work weeks at near-starvation wages? Who knows the origin of the social security system? How did the women’s suffrage movement spread to hundreds of communities, and gather enough strength to prevail?

As memories of these events disappear, we lose the knowledge of mechanisms that grassroots social movements have used successfully in the past to shift public sentiment and challenge entrenched institutional power. Equally lost are the means by which their participants managed to keep on and eventually prevail in circumstances at least as harsh as those we face today. As novelist Milan Kundera writes, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

Think again about the different ways one can frame Rosa Parks’s historic action. In the prevailing myth, Parks decides to act almost on a whim, in isolation. She’s a virgin to politics, a holy innocent. The lesson seems to be that if any of us suddenly got the urge to do something equally heroic, that would be great. Of course most of us don’t, so we wait our entire lives to find the ideal moment.

Parks’s real story conveys a far more empowering moral. She begins with seemingly modest steps. She goes to a meeting, and then another. Hesistant at first, she gains confidence as she speaks out. She keeps on despite a profoundly uncertain context, as she and others act as best they can to challenge deeply intrenched injustices, with little certainty of results. Had she and others given up after her tenth or eleventh year of commitment, we might never have heard of Montgomery.

Parks’s journey suggests that change is the product of deliberate, incremental action, whereby we join together to try to shape a better world. Sometimes our struggles will fail, as did many earlier efforts of Parks, her peers, and her predecessors. Other times they may bear modest fruits. And at times they will trigger a miraculous outpouring of courage and heart–as happened with her arrest and all that followed. For only when we act despite all our uncertainties and doubts do we have the chance to shape history.

[via http://www.zmag.org/Sustainers/content/2000-03/14loeb.htm

One may be in legitimate hurry but the police on the corner traffic block note only **one thing**. The infraction.

Like Schoenberg who started with Beethoven’s last string quartets as a **jump off** point, so to do we begin with the **actual existing** infrastructure(material/social) of the human world. And move **from there**.

But even “structure” carries some baggage with it – thus we’re perhaps better off with the rhio/moss – like term “sociality”.

One of the titanic meetings of the 19th Century saw the above composer meeting Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the highest point in western literature since Shakespeare, in 1810.

The composer brusquely passed the Archduke while the latter (obsequiously for some) paid tributes with much **savoir faire**. This has fostered much appropriate debate on human proprieties.

To be fully human, **not** the elevated god or the biblical fire(“the Next Time”), you must stand and **hold** your ground **in between**.

You must define the terms.

The origins and benefits of “cynicism” lie in our genes. It keeps us on the propensity from getting too carried away with what another may be excited(high energy) about.

As far as “waking up to find society good”: some would consul against this(though its origin is entirely noble) as this could perhaps be emblematic of a cyber-culture enthusiasm/”world-on-a-stringism” that thinks society is **just there**(**point and click**) like a fact of nature, when in fact it must be**produced**.

And it takes an awful lot of “matza balls” to keep a human alive in the “First World”. Near endless material supplies needed. Even us wired surfers need the context of globalization.

One would be reproved for saying such a thing to you as you’re **in the industry** already; you hardly need to be reminded of that which you know so well.

Regarding your feeling of “not having the same energy as in yesteryear” to confront grand problems: Society **wrongly** thinks that your contributions and perspective **now** categorically trump earlier ones; – an “ageist” assumption, though in point of fact your work now **resonates** with the “meat and potatoes” of sociality incomparably **more**. The world wants **your time**and more of it… as the skills are rightly deemed **high**.

Freedom is unloved by people. This is due to our incomparably strong genetic hardwiring towards **closure**. A perception of “opening old wounds” is the first risk to any who wish to bring **change** – however timely and meaningful it is. The old William F. Buckleys(actually a nice and sensitive guy) of the world would, however circumspectly, charge you with this. People are generally quite happy with their lives. And(this is true) there appears to be a **remarkable** degree of political and economic stability in the U.S.(**storm clouds** lurking here – foundations actually quite shaky). The “hotheaded malcontents” are always around like troublesome family.

An example: http://articles.news.aol.com/news/_a/at-work-nice-is-on-the-rise/20061016135309990017

Is compliance becoming addictive? I certainly hope not.

** I ** respond:

Most are caught up in the “survival game”(an **astonishing** fact in the American developed world as of 2006!) – and being able to get their head **above** is a necessary prerequisite for at least the potentiality of having one’s background “all set” to pursue social goals that are **supra – self**.

It is not **them** that is happy but their indoctrinated **social software** that is kosher with the life experience.

This is a witness to what Blake termed: “Mind – Forged Manacles”.

It(Freedom) is always to be resisted – but always triumphant.

It genuinely seemed as if we here in the “First World”(however wrongly) had passed the point where the best intentioned people were **ground up** by disgusting reactionary forces. The last example of this being the Civil Rights Era, and that incredible and moral moment at Stonewall 1969.

Now once again, it seems as if the prospect of manifest **redefinition** will face the reigning social order – and with it, the price it will extract.

Society prefers **consonances** and dislikes **dissonance**.

Down into the depths again..

(Though this picture paints a little untruth as “identity” exclusion has always ever been with us.)

Immigration has lost gas. This bespeaks badly of the American electorate to be sure. Lost to consumerism.

There were programs for turning out droves(re. the marginalized at issue here) to the voting booths but this seems to have petered out into fantasy land, and not panned out at all.

People(the “staid/solid citizens”) who have the right to vote simply do not want to deal with this lugnut of a **redefinition** of American identity as they are too absorbed and very **well – trained/indoctrinated** in what the world wants them **to be**.

And the minute you accept the role you’re done.

Short of a dragnet, which would surely be very unjust, these millions are a permanent part of the **social fabric**.

The distance that these postings offer may help **a la torque**.

And truly, health care is the number 1 problem in the USA.

The ‘viability of systems’ and their extra – relational **to be** is at issue here.

And to turn to the top of our politics:

The current chief Executive sees himself in mythological terms. As a “bolting diety and ‘warfather’ of ‘thunder and lightning’” out to right the wrongs in the world. The thing is the presidency actually **allows** you to construct that very grand and stupendous narrative.

He likes shaking things up(hence his **love** for unfettered global capitalism) but this tends to draw social ire.

Indeed, nothing other than **theft** explains his being in office. After all, that’s an act not uncommon to gods.

Governance is to be reminded that it is not **a parent** but **a referee**. A guardian of rules and fairness but **not** the primary player in life.

It gets the “last slice” in fact. It can only ever be **precise** if it is to be right.

And the prospect of “eternal conflict of local interests” is accepted as it is almost inhuman to imagine otherwise.

Humans can only ever assert themselves as ‘atoms in the cosmos’ do.

Doug Coupland said it best: “There may not be a place for you in the new world order”.

(He also has many great comments on human “insect-like” behavior; and seas of “selfish silver heads” at slot machines. etc.).

You provide a fun, yet substantial, perspective. And of course, mastery in your field, at the forefront. Other factors do intrude.

As the above composer: Seize history(and the day) “by the Throat” and make it give you what you want!

But the culprit and quarry here is first and foremost(and perhaps **ultimate**) the “enemy within”.

That can be done on the fly though.

And there is perhaps, one suspects, and hopes: a “middle, *third* way”.

Inertia serves the masses most well – and the future may belong to them.

The context is theirs..

Yes, things are important and things are very wrong but for most parts of this planet,things are much worse and have been for centuries. That should make us more appreciative of what we have(or can lose), which should really make us more interested in our govt. Yet only 25% of us eligible adults do so.

You can’t fight the ocean but you can sail your boat in the general direction that pleases you:)

Obviously, your vision is sound and good. You know that and everyone else knows that.

A true leader is no one other than a person with a strong vision. All a leader has to do is communicate that vision so that people can understand it, and then take action on it.

From the support you have in the comments above, you already have a community of people who also believe that your vision is good and sound. Many have even embraced your vision as their own.

Who cares if everything isn’t right today? Who cares if all the problems we face are overwhelming us? Who cares if *everybody* doesn’t understand?

We don’t care about all of that because we see a path to utopia through you. We know that you have your finger on the pulse of our culture from a perspective of truth.

So it’s time for you to quit complaining about somebody validating your work by copying it. That person will fade into obscurity long before you are gone. Everybody who matters already knows the source.

I don’t think that you aren’t already a leader. I saw your UNC speech from a couple of weeks ago. Sister, your pop, your style, your culture, your research, your brain, your words all rock. And you commanded the room.

You now need to start tying together the community that you have built. You need to identify the talents and then send them out to execute your vision in their own special creative way.

You are very obviously blessed. You need not waste that. You need to spread it around.

You need to start *doing* now.

jim

******* To the community *******

AM I RIGHT ABOUT DANAH????? Is she not a leader?