Harmonic Convergence, Anyone?

Thoughts for a New Paradigm
 

           I’ve taken several on-line political surveys in the past six or eight months which include a question like this: “What do you think is the most important issue we face today?”

            The issues, of course, are provided by the survey and typically include such topics as the economy, the environment, energy, entitlements, defense, taxes. Sometimes I can check “other” and fill in a few words, and what I might have written until a day or two ago was “over-population.”

            My pet theory has been that too many people competing for too few resources distributed unequally throughout the world is a fundamental problem, perhaps even the core reason for the increasing threat of impending disasters on multiple global fronts. Given all the headaches we face, it’s easy to conjure up a fearsome future, with nature’s seasons turned against us, economies failing, hunger and thirst ravaging whole populations, pandemics of unfamiliar diseases, resource wars, mutating insects and vanishing bees....

            Pretty awful scenarios that few would argue are not possible, couldn’t happen.

            But is my assumption correct? Is over-population the root cause of these probabilities?

            Or has Nature sent seven billion souls, with more on the way, to assure enough brain power available on Earth to find solutions?

           I decided that could be a way to look at it, which then causes me to wonder if societies across the globe could be enticed to join in a world-wide priority, something like a war effort—not to destroy a hated enemy but to get along together. All of us, in every nation. Not to conquer, not to compete, not to make a profit and grow rich, but to get along.

            I remember when I was hired as an actor in a five-member theater troupe for young audiences. Except for two of us who lived in the same town, knew each other by sight, but had never spoken, we had never laid eyes on each other before. We were strangers. Yet for the next eight months we would be keeping regular, intimate company, practically living together as we rehearsed and performed and toured throughout our region.

            I wanted to succeed in my new job, of course—be good at it, come across well, impress directors and producers, assure future jobs. But most important, I thought, was for us all to get along. Otherwise, our experience together would be hell.

            Therefore, I made that my conscious priority—to get along with my co-performers. Standing out in my job in a highly competitive field was important but secondary.

            I never discussed this with the others, but, happily, we got along famously together. In fact, we were the most harmonious company in our theater’s recent history up to then, and I doubt any one of us today has a single bad memory of each other or of our time together.

I’m not claiming responsibility for that, I’m just recommending the experience. Cooperation is a tie that binds. It focuses on relationships. Its structures are circular. Competition is the sword that divides. It focuses on winners and losers. Its structures are hierarchical. And unless it is supervised, there are casualties. One casualty could be Mother Earth herself, the ultimate victim of seven billion people competing with one another for a bigger piece of her. What if, for example, the predicted tipping point is reached in Earth’s climate and the weather suddenly and permanently shifts into one of those nightmare scenarios inhospitable to human life, summer or winter? It could happen. It could be happening as I speak.

            So I ask myself: Is the over-reach of human presence on our planet a consequence of our core belief in competition as a way of life? Would cooperation be the better way?

            What if each person could somehow be tasked with the patriotic duty to find ways to get along with the others they meet—not because it’s good and beautiful but because we’ll destroy way too much of ourselves if we don’t. It’s a matter of survival with a minimum of loss. 

            It’s also a new approach, requiring a fundamental paradigm shift forced on us (as most big changes are) by necessity. I’ve even read that it’s a new idea in these parts of the galaxy, and maybe even far beyond. But that’s another story.

            The point is, we human beings have no working memory of cooperation as the organizing principle of our social life. But maybe now it’s a good idea to teach ourselves how to do it, start practicing it, and pass it on as a core value to our children. Maybe our politicians could really mean it when they talk about it as a necessary step if we’re to weather all our present ills. Maybe artists like myself could offer visions of life in a cooperative society, and plays and books and paintings based on a new world view could penetrate the theaters, the book stores, and the galleries.

            Perhaps cooperation could be even more interesting and more fun than competition, if the rewards were true friendships linked across the world.

            Nature cooperates, but human beings have a very mixed record. In the end, of course, we’re all of us forced out the exit, but is that any reason to behave badly while we’re here? From early childhood we’re coached to beat out our classmates for honors and privileges. What if, instead, we were expected and encouraged to choose at least one thing each of us can do on a consistent basis to get along with each other—even just one other person—and then act on that? The ripple effect of good will circling the globe could be very powerful. We could slow down the crazy speed of our lifestyles and catch our collective breath. And that would ease a lot of stress.

            I suppose I dream. I’ve been called a dreamer, nothing very practical about me. But I still think that the most important thing for us to do in our groups, from family to community to country to the world, is make it a priority to get along with each other.

            Is that an idea whose time has come? Or haven’t we had enough yet?

The Thinking Dog Has Questions

             Speaking from the heart, I am quite concerned about the future of our country being offered by Republicans. It looks to me like a great Repression is in the offing. And if the people are scared enough, they’ll buy it. It’s happened before.

            Then should I vote for Obama, on the theory that at least he’s a Democrat? But Obama’s record is repressive as well, except for a few cracks of light in the walls, like crumbs thrown to the dogs, if you’re looking for a world of peace.

            That’s the hang-up. Those looking for a world of peace are a tiny minority. That’s if you can believe what you see on TV. However, I marched with the Occupy Movement in Norfolk one Saturday in the fall and I can tell you they’re a minority here, easily shut down when the police were ready.

           “If enough people stand up....”

            You hear that all the time. A lot of people hope it won’t be necessary in America because we’re a democracy. But what exactly is a democracy? It’s open to a lot of interpretation.

            One-person, one-vote is supposed to be the fundamental principle, but even that is tainted here in what we’re told is the model of democracy to the world. Do we really elect the people who rule us?

            So maybe real democracy hasn’t been defined or invented yet. Maybe this is the moment all modern democrats are waiting for.

            It seems to me most of today’s political rhetoric reveals a struggle between past and future. The Republicans want to get us back to better days, the Democrats are winding down wars and talking more and more about green jobs and environmental protection, all of which are more appealing to me. I haven’t forgotten that 30 years of Republican dominance since Reagan led us into the financial hole we’re in now. Why would anyone bet on them again? They try to blame the mess on Obama because he couldn’t fix it in two years, but at worst he’s only juggled things around. It was Republican policies that ran the whole country into the ground.

            What it comes down to is that a world of peace isn’t on some people’s agendas. The challenge for peace is to make it work for those of us who want it. This is not Republican or Democrat. It’s human being to human being. Peace is the way. But peace must first be discovered. After that, it must be practiced.

            Next question: Can peace be the key to creating a true democracy?

A Special Thinking Dog Perspective

My Struggle To Escape the Bondage of Health Care

1. Health Care Corners Me

Those who know me well, or who have read my essay, “Always Safe, Always at Home,” are aware of my shameless boast that, sick or well, I never employed a medical doctor between 1974 and 2008.

But, as I describe in that essay (published as a pamphlet in 2009), one afternoon in early May, 2008, I began having persistent chest pains, and after 34 years of avoiding doctors I finally turned myself in at the emergency ward of Depaul Medical Center, the hospital nearest to where Jala and I live in Norfolk, VA.

Since that day I have seen more doctors than I can remember, beginning with a cardiologist who unsuccessfully treated my heart condition for over two months until he recommended surgery. In a six-hour operation on July 23, 2008, a skillful surgeon replaced my mitral valve, a fairly serious though not uncommon operation.

Suddenly, from no medical history at all, I had a file folder of records over an inch thick. I was now in the health-care system. After I got out of Norfolk Heart Hospital and was released a few weeks later from home health care, I had appointments to see doctors or show up at labs for tests two and three days a week. It wasn’t just my heart, either. Blood pressure, cholesterol, thyroid, lungs, colon, prostate—the docs wanted to look at all of it; and, invariably finding deficits, prescribed many more medications than I had ever in my life planned to take.

I didn’t like what was happening to me. My life had become centered around being a patient. I didn’t want to see myself as a patient. I wanted to release myself from the medical system which defined me as one. Besides that, even though I now had Medicare, co-pays had eaten up half my savings. Yet my medical bills kept coming, as did my uninsured prescription refills. And, of course, my rent.

I willed myself back to normal (or near-normal), and over the course of 2009 and into 2010 my test results improved to where I only had to visit a doctor every three or four months. My medications had been pared down to a minimum, the doses leveled off for mainentance rather than rescue. I was slowly weaning myself from xanax, which put my anxious mind to sleep each night.

But then, in early Oct., 2010, I fell from a stool in our bedroom and broke my hip.

What a bummer! There was no way out, I obviously had to go back to the hospital. One more time Jala drove me to the ER at Depaul Medical Center, where an X-ray confirmed the worst. The thigh bone (femur) had snapped off just below the ball joint of the hip—a clean break.

The diagnosing doctor, a pleasant, reassuring woman, contacted an orthopedic surgeon, who soon appeared by my litter. After a brief discussion with me he arranged for a surgery at noon the next day, a Sunday, when he would replace half my hip with a ball attached to a spike hammered down five or six inches into my femur. The next day, Monday, I stood and, with assistance, took a few steps from my bed. By Tuesday evening I was home from the hospital—disoriented, medicated, and supported by a walker (supplied through Medicare).

A part of me can only marvel at the speed of that repair and discharge. An injury that only a few decades ago was deadly serious is now a routine replacement which had me back on my feet, though barely mobile, in a matter of days.

But another part of me felt rushed. Obviously, I needed a doctor to fix my hip. And I was glad enough to get out of the hospital so soon. But the physical and psychological trauma seemed severe. Was this really going to be okay? Would I be able to move again as I always had? How long would it take?

If I “work really hard,” the orthopedist said, I should be back to my normal life in three months and be fully recovered in six. I understood him to mean I would have to push myself. That’s conventional medical wisdom, it’s how recovery happens, especially in modern orthopedics. You push yourself—like a soldier, like an athlete. Otherwise, your muscles atrophy, and you may never be able to make up for the lost ground.

I knew all this going into the hospital. But I was skeptical of it coming out. The doc may have known what he was talking about statistically, but I could tell how traumatized my hip was, all the way down to my knee. I had doubts that it could become flexible and pain-free in so short a time. But I decided to trust the doc’s experience over my doubts. I took him at his word when he said I could recover fully if I “work really hard.”

For the first month out of the hospital I had extensive home health care. A registered nurse, a physical therapist, and an occupational therapist each visited me several times a week. The nurse soon discharged me, since I wasn’t sick. But both therapists stayed with me for a few more weeks, and between them they had me exercising, showering, fixing my own meals, and walking with a cane multiple blocks around our neighborhood.

After the home-health therapists discharged me, I was ready for outpatient physical therapy, the final stage of the post-operative recovery process. From a list of available practitioners I chose one whose office wasn’t far from us. I began therapy with him a month after the surgery. In a progress report to my orthopedist, he described me as “highly motivated.” I interpreted that as positive feedback, and I kept it up. I wanted to restore my hip as soon as I could so I could go back to work, as I’d been assured was possible—if I “work really hard.”

And I did get better. I even felt a little pride in myself when I “graduated” from physical therapy in mid-January, 2011, with a certificate of achievement. Not that I was pain-free. But I could get around for the most part without a cane. I was swimming laps again at the city pool. I had a paying acting gig coming up. And I was back at my part-time job as a church custodian, which, along with Social Security and occasional free-lance performing, has sustained me since the economy and I crashed together.

2. “I Can’t Do This Any More!”

By the time I broke my hip I was down to visits every six months with my cardiologist and taking just an aspirin a day for my heart. I’d also ended an incompatible relationship with my primary-care doc. We’d accepted each other sight-unseen when I first came out of the hospital in 2008, and it was never a comfortable fit. I had an appointment to see another primary-care doc in a few months, an MD who also practices acupuncture and knows holistic medicine. I felt I was working my way out of the abyss of the health-care system, or at least to a more comfortable distance from its center.

But unfortunately the accident with my hip brought the heart doctors back to my bedside. It was to be expected, a routine procedural matter. With my history of recent heart surgery, the orthopedist wouldn’t operate on my hip without my cardiologist signing off on it. So a pre-op heart exam was scheduled.

The exam revealed that I had atrial flutter—an irregularity in the rhythm of my heart beat. The cardiologist said it wasn’t as severe as the atrial fibrillation I’d had before heart surgery, but it was an added risk factor for a stroke. To offset that, he put me on heavy doses of two heart-related medications before the surgery and kept me on them after it. Later, he added a prescription for warfarin, a popular generic version of coumadin, the brand-name blood-thinner. I have an aversion to coumadin, which is also used to poison rats. That fact troubles me. You could say I don’t like the drug’s karma.

In any case, with the heart doctors back in my life I was seeing more health practitioners than ever. When would it end? No time soon, it seemed. In a follow-up visit the cardiologist said my heart was still in A-flutter. The medications weren’t working. He suggested a cardioversion. I consented, and it was scheduled for early January, 2011.

A cardioversion is an electric shock to the heart, done just as the medics do it on TV dramas when a patient’s heart has stopped. The procedure (under light anesthesia with the voltage stepped down) doesn’t always work for atrial flutter, but for me it apparently did because afterwards the cardiologist confirmed that my heart beat was regular.

Within a day after that procedure, however, I began to feel like a wilting garden flower. My legs became so weak I could hardly climb stairs. I lost my breath just bending down to fasten my sandals.

I suspected the strong heart medications were behind it. The doses had never been adjusted, either after the surgery or after the cardioversion. But I’d cut each of them back to half on my own. Now I stopped taking them altogether. In just a day the symptoms were gone. I started taking them again, and the symptoms came back

I called the cardiologist and got an appointment right away. My heart rate, it turned out, was half what it should have been. He agreed the drugs were the cause, and he stopped one but kept the other at half the dose. Since I’d already cut the dose to half without telling him, I also stopped taking that drug altogether. Now I felt better, but I was still on warfarin. The doc promised I could get off it as soon as my test numbers were normal, but they couldn’t get the dose right. The numbers kept jumping around—one week my blood was too thick, the next week too thin. Meanwhile, the slightest bump against a door or a cabinet left an ugly purple bruise on my arm, a side-effect of blood thinners. I couldn’t stand it. I felt old and useless before my time. After several weeks with the numbers still missing the mark, something inside me was saying, over and over, “I can’t do this any more.”

That’s what I finally said aloud to the check-out secretary. She looked at me as if I must be joking. She’d been told to schedule me for another test the following week because the results still weren’t right. But I wasn’t joking. I left without making another appointment. I stopped taking warfarin, switching to a simple, single, daily aspirin.

A few weeks later, as a courtesy, I kept my regular appointment with my cardiologist. He’d seen me through a lot, and I felt I owed it to him to tell him face-to-face that I wanted to take an indefinite leave of absence from health care, let my body alone for awhile, go home, and spend time meditating and preparing for death.

I’m sure I took him back with my declaration of independence, and I’m sure he thought I was making a mistake. But hadn’t he already made a few with me? We shook hands, and I came home, hoping I’d done the right thing.

3. Conventional Wisdom Lets Me Down

During the spring of 2011 the healing in my hip seemed to have stalled. I could walk without a cane, I could even dance in a peg-legged kind of way. But the hip was still stiff and sore, and that’s where it stayed until the summer solstice. I’d taken a long bicycle ride that day, and the next day there was pain in the socket and down the femur as far as the knee. Though not as severe, it was the same kind of acute pain I’d felt right after my fall. And it didn’t go away. Not always but often I couldn’t walk without compensating for it, and as the days became weeks I found it increasingly painful to walk at all. How was I going to continue work? How was I going to enjoy much of anything of my life again?

My most persistent dread was another surgery. But I couldn’t walk around for long the way I was, my left leg stiff and swinging in a sidelong arc with every step. “Circumambulation,” the orthopedist called it. It was the only way I could walk free of that stabbing pain in my hip, and I thanked it for that. But it stressed my other hip and lower back in ways I knew were not sustainable. On top of that, it looked ridiculous.

What was going on? I thought I was following doctors’ orders. Hadn’t they insisted I get up on my feet the day after surgery? Hadn’t the therapists who came to the house praised me for going from a walker to a cane to walking in the neighborhood in just a few weeks? Hadn’t my physical therapist increased the resistance on the exercise machines precisely to make me work harder to build back the strength in my hip and legs?

So what had gone wrong?

I made the dreaded appointment with the orthopedic surgeon, who ordered an X-ray before he saw me. The X-ray would tell whether the replacement had popped out of the hip socket or in some other way gone awry.

The replacement, it turned out, was in perfect position. This was good news. But the doc wasn’t sure why I was experiencing pain. He said he could give me a steroid shot, and I consented. He wrote a prescription for more physical therapy, which I have so far declined. Beyond that, all he could suggest was an MRI or perhaps exploratory surgery. I said I’d see how things went with the steroid shot.

In fact, the steroid seemed to help some. But in a few days my hip hurt the same as it had before. I didn’t think I should ask so soon for another shot. So I made up my mind to deal with it on my own, taking things a day at a time. I now knew there was nothing wrong with my hip replacement. But on either side of it—the upper half of my hip and the upper half of my femur—there was distress, a live memory of the trauma, and a problem with adapting and going forward.

I could only conclude I must have worked it too hard. It was the simplest, most logical explanation. And if that was the case, the conventional medical wisdom to push myself if I wanted to make a full recovery had not worked for me. I wished I’d have trusted myself from the start to set the right pace and the right exercises for my recovery rather than follow the advice of the professionals. I pledged to myself to do that from then on.

I’m now free of appointments with any doctor except my new primary-care physician with the holistic bent. As things stand, I see him four times a year. I want to leave it at that. I want to try getting along as much as I can on my own again. I want to cultivate an absolute trust that if I am meant to live I will live, and when I am meant to die I will die. I am focused on reinforcing that view with meditation and mindful living. Since no doctor can save me from my mortality, I don’t want to be overly treated for it.

4. Setting Out to Sea

Heart disease is a number-one killer in America. Broken hips are a common disabler. I’d been struck down with both. Something big was obviously going on with me. But what was it? Hearts are organs. Hips are bones. They seem like two unrelated systems.

After contemplation, though, I realized that my heart and hip have something very specific in common. They each now have a replacement part. And toward each of those replacements I’ve felt ambivalence. Glad enough to be patched up, of course, at the same time I couldn’t help feeling, subtly but incurably, wounded. I’d always been able to count on my physical body to express my spirit with exuberance. Now I felt insecure in my body, unsure of my former abilities. Could I trust these synthetic foreign parts to work as well as the originals? Could they ever become as flexible and well adapted to my needs? Or had the doctors merely extended my life in a body I could no longer rely on to work as beautifully as it had for the best years of my life?

Without denying the aging process, I decided to try a new approach. I began by welcoming my new parts and supporting them with positive attention during meditation as well as throughout each day. In one of the first discoveries I made in this practice, I realized that the pain in my hip could be minimized or relieved altogether if I simply slowed my walking pace, concentrating on each step, feeling my weight move smoothly through my left hip, shift to my right, return to my left, and so on, while I breathed in a consistent rhythm.

But I also noticed how quickly my mind became bored with this mindful way of walking and took off on its own, moving ever more quickly from thought to thought like a cat chasing sunbeams. And as my mind sped up to its normal beta buzz, my walk sped up too—until a sharp stabbing pain in my hip quickly brought both mind and body back together in the present moment.

Here, I realized, is the mind-body connection in action. My hip is forcing my mind to slow down, and when my mind slows down I feel time lengthen. It no longer matters that I didn’t heal in six months. Maybe it will take me a year. Maybe two.

I feel my stress levels decreasing. I walk easier, though more slowly. I realize I am in a light meditative state. I feel happy. I save myself from another doctor’s appointment.

It’s been several weeks since the steroid shot, when I first realized I had to step back from the pressure of “work really hard” to allow my hip and leg to heal on their own terms, in their own time. During that period I have been pain-free for days in a row. But I have also had days when I was not pain free. This is a work in progress. I suppose all healing is.

Meanwhile, I’ve begun to cultivate my heart as a dear, personal friend, replacement valve and all. Especially in sitting meditations, I concentrate on holding it tenderly in the arms of my consciousness, visualizing the replacement integrating into its organic surroundings. I beam support and gratitude upon it rather than worry and distrust. I breathe life into it.

Sometimes my heart races, but if I persevere in breathing deeply and slowly I can calm it. Sometimes I get a twinge of chest pain, but it eases when I give it my full attention, breathing evenly, listening for a message rather than dialing 911.

I work now at giving my body freedom to be what it wants to be and accepting what it does and how it feels as normal for any given moment. I also work at fully accepting my body’s right to assert its mortality at any given time.

So far, my body hasn’t exercised that right. The pains and twinges pass through. I remain here—writing, acting, scrubbing toilets. Meanwhile, in these practices I’m following my own best medical advice, admittedly driven in part by economics. I don’t want to go into debt to doctors and hospitals, as can easily happen, even with Medicare, in our expensive (and wasteful) system of tests, surgeries, and pills.

But more to the point, it seems a little crude to cling to life in these times when too many people are crowding the Earth. I’d rather let death have his fair shot at me. At 71, I’m old enough to check out without feeling cheated. I’ve had a lot of good times, while the future doesn’t look so great. That doesn’t mean I’m not happy to keep living and working as long as I can. I’m not suicidal. I just don’t want to waste my time following doctors’ orders, which too often are only hit-or-miss opinions, with me stuck with the bill. Better to turn within for health-care advice, following my own guides, than to sit tensely in a medical office waiting for test results to tell me if I’m sick or free to go play some more.

The Economics of Happiness

(Is There Such a Thing?)

What kind of economic system will create the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people and species?

That question was posed in Norfolk at the Naro Cinema’s Wednesday documentary series on May 18, where the film “The Economics of Happiness” was seen by an audience of perhaps a hundred.

The film, produced by the International Society for Ecology and Culture, strongly advocates a return to the land with small farms and enterprises forming the backbone of an economy of full employment on a local level. Localization instead of globalization is the remedy, based on indigenous models where, as any number of pedigreed experts in the film argue, health and well-being, full employment, and—yes—happiness rank high above anything offered by the global capitalist system under which we all now live.

After the screening, four panelists—three of them college professors, current or retired—presented their own visions of economic happiness.

Robert Dean, a well-known Virginia Beach Libertarian, would be happiest in an economy with minimal government oversight, allowing ideas and products to flow freely according to consumer freedom-of-choice.

Tom Ellis, an English professor at Tidewater Community College, argues for an as-yet-to-be-invented “Gaian economy,” where actions are weighed against three criteria—that they be good for the individual, good for the community, and good for the planet. Since the film advocates just such a lifestyle, it is, he said, “Gaian,” offering the best opportunity for happiness because economic activity harmonizes with Nature’s self-sustaining systems.

Steve Rosenthal, a retired sociology professor from Hampton University, advocates a Marxist model controlled through democratic processes by the workers, the producers of goods and services, rather than the capitalist owners who exploit workers and the environment as mercilessly as the traffic will allow. Happiness, then, is possible when all human needs are adequately met—food, clothing, and shelter, of course, but also health care, and, more abstractly, equality, social justice, and freedom from oppression.

Peter Shaw, a business and economics professor at Tidewater Community College, is a champion of innovation and free-market globalization but also a critic of the excesses which led to the wide-spread corruption of the past decade and the collapse of the economies of whole nations. He believes a reformed capitalism, including a more rigorous moral code among capitalists, is the best system to provide an improved standard of living—i.e., happiness—for more people.

All of this, of course, was quite interesting to anyone who thinks about how to make a better world, but it became apparent as each panelist spoke in turn through three separate rounds that there was not much real common ground among them. Each presented a model for an economics of happiness which, were it implemented, would likely leave the other three disgruntled if not alienated.

An observer might wonder if there is any system which is capable of providing happiness for everyone. And that, of course, begs at least two questions: What is happiness? And can any economy provide it?

Those questions, however, were left hanging, largely unaddressed.

—————

In the film which launched the discussion narrator Helena Norber-Hodge introduces us to the Ladakhis, once a self-sufficient farming people in the region of Ladakh, one of the highest, most remote areas in the world in the Himalayan Mountains of Kashmir. Yet even here globalization has arrived, by which the filmmakers mean the destruction of a local economy by multi-national corporations which have taken over much of Ladakh’s land and resources. As a result, the indigenous, former proprietors have become, at best, low-paid employees but more often end up in the ranks of the urban unemployed in a new socio-economic order which benefits the corporations and their investors, not the Ladakhi natives.

Globalization, in the film’s terms, means that the rich get richer while the poor get poorer and the environment turns toxic, leading eventually to economic collapse because unfettered production driven by greed for profits creates a supply which exceeds demand. Once that happens, revenues quickly fall off and panic ensues as over-extended businesses and financial institutions suddenly cannot pay their debts.

Localization, on the other hand, restores local economies to their rightful place as community sustainers and preservers where everyone is employed in some occupation that benefits that community. No foreign owners exploit the land and its people for profit. Communities, therefore, are self-sufficient, or, if not, trade with nearby local communities for what they lack.

The film vigorously defends the largely agrarian, localized economic model of Ladakh as it used to be before globalization and as it struggles to become once again, if the dispossessed can only get their land back. Then, the film strongly suggests, the Ladakhis will once again be the happy, healthy folk they were before global capitalism displaced their way of life.

As facilitator and Naro co-owner Tench Phillips noted, this may seem like little more than propaganda.

But Ms. Norber-Hodge, who claims many years of association with the Ladakhis, makes the case that among those who still live in the localized manner of their ancestors there is genuine happiness. Indeed, on camera they look like vital, healthy, fun-loving people. It’s impressive that among all the smiling faces shown, young and old, everyone seems to have strong, healthy teeth.

Norber-Hodge also takes us to other countries, including England and the US, where efforts to establish or restore local economies are, in some cases, well beyond the experimental stage. A famous example is how the city of Detroit, on track to becoming a ghost town after the automobile industry left, has turned into a bit of a poster child for urban farming on abandoned lots.

It seems as if this stuff just might work, so long as a significant number of us can be happy as small farmers. But that might set a steep learning curve for most of us, including the Naro panelists. Three of the four—Rosenthal, Shaw, and, most particularly, Dean—did not emphasize environmental concerns and offered little comment on the film. Their focus was on human progress and, therefore, was primarily urban. Only Ellis, the Gaian, included Nature, not just as a stake holder but as the determining force in any economic discussion.

—————

The evening was, to be sure, an educational experience, yet for me it raised more questions than answers. Most people seem to agree that our civilization is presently operating on an unsustainable economic system, but can anyone agree on what to do about it? Do we reform the present system, as Shaw suggests? Do we slash taxes and shrink government, as Dean says? Do we become democratic socialists, as Rosenthal would like? Or, as Ellis urges, do we plunge practically blind into a whole new relationship with each other and the planet, economically, emotionally, and spiritually?

Shaw’s ideas may be the most immediately practical, but will they go far enough to heal the wounds of Mother Earth? Dean seems to favor social Darwinism to winnow those from our midst who can’t fend for themselves, which I personally find repugnant. Rosenthal’s compassion and respect for the masses does not shine very well for me through the lens of the Marxist experiments where the dictatorship of the proletariat quickly became just another dictatorship. And Ellis’ most practical idea—to vote with our wallets for those who produce sustainable goods and services—doesn’t have much meaning for those below the poverty line.

So I left asking myself, What kind of an economic system would bring me the greatest happiness?

Since I didn’t grow up with money and was taught to admire idealists who usually didn’t have much money, I came to feel that life would be better for everyone if no one had much money. In that sense, I’m a Marxist and resonate to Rosenthal’s pitch.

But I also am an American kid who nods and grins when Chuck Berry sings, “Anything you want they got it right here in the USA.” In that sense, I’m with Dean—utterly conditioned to the wonders of the box store, which Shaw reinforces with his moderate capitalism to the tune, say, of Mozart or Beethoven. Maybe we can just keep going on, fixing and perfecting what we’ve already got. Wouldn’t that be best?

But some years ago my wife and I discovered camping and fell in love with Nature. That’s where I join Ellis, and if I had to live on a village level, camping in the forest, I think I might find some happiness.

So what economic system do I think would create the greatest happiness?

Some combination, I think, of all the above. There doesn’t seem to be just one way to do things any more.

May Day, 2011


This poem expresses my reaction to the assassination of Osama bin Laden by American military forces on May 1, 2011. I thank my friend Tom Ellis for poking me to post it after I read his blog on the subject at http://dharmagaia.blogspot.com/.


It was like a block-buster action thriller!
Does life imitate art or what?
The superbly trained Navy Seals,
faceless warrior-assassins
whose names we’ll probably never know,
staged a daring raid
upon an unsuspecting target’s home
tucked cozily among the neighboring houses
in a foreign military installation,
and they got away with it.
Heroes, one and all!
Their deeds will live on in story and song—
how they burst upon bin Laden in his room
and shot him down in cold blood.
To execute an unarmed man
suspected of a crime
without arraignment, indictment, trial,
or witnesses for the defense,
then to escape with the suspect’s body
and dump it out to sea
before anyone but them could say for sure
if it was really he...!
Hooray!
This is brilliant!
Way to go, CIA!
Now the terrorists can see
what kind of stuff Americans are made of.
Democracy, transparency, the rule of law,
innocent until you’re proven guilty?
Nice words on parchment on display
under glass in moldy museums,
but frontier justice is the way
we handle real-life situations,
and however long it may take them,
our commandos always get their man.
I am ecstatically proud today
to join the mob in every town,
raise my fist, jump up and down,
take my turn before the cameras
to holler and yelp and crow and bray,
“USA! USA! USA!”

From the Heart of the World

A Must-See Film for the Restless

What would happen to you if all our technological support systems failed and you had to make a quick transition to an indigenous lifestyle?

I’ve often pondered this probability, though I’ve done little to prepare for it. For one thing, what would an indigenous lifestyle really be like?

An answer to that question appears in a prophetic film, From the Heart of the World: The Elder Brothers' Warning, made for the BBC by film maker Alan Ereira. This remarkable video can now be seen on the internet here. Those who, like me, missed it the first time around may be shocked to realize that it was not filmed in the past three or four years but in 1988. Yet in 2011 its message of warning not only seems more urgent. It seems to be fulfilling itself.

From the Heart of the World lifts the veil for us to see into a matriarchal society, the Kogi, who escaped the Spanish conquest. Nestled in their refuge high in the mountains of Columbia, they’ve kept their indigenous way of life nearly totally intact from a time when human beings lived in harmony with Nature, not in conflict with her.

In the film the Mamas—the spiritual elders of the tribe—come forward, as the trailer might say, to share a message with “little brother,” meaning us who have usurped the planet for our own greedy purposes. They tell us we are killing the Earth with our wrong way of living. We must quit doing what we’re doing now and turn ourselves around or our Great Mother, our nurturer and provider—already very sick—will die, and all sentient beings, including the Kogi, will die with her.

We’ve heard this before, of course, to the point where we may pause for a moment and gravely nod our heads. But then we get in the car for a run to the super market. Is there anything about this particular presentation to make it different from any other environmental hand-wringing?

Yes, for me there is. It’s a documentary, for one thing. We aren’t simply lectured by this or that indigenous elder, though there are lectures—some of the most simple and eloquent I’ve ever heard. But we also see the Kogi in their daily life, literally cultivating their gardens (by hand) in their agricultural society. We’re introduced to their mythology, their version of Genesis, including how “little brother” strayed so far from relationship with the Earth, our Mother, that we forgot her in our dream of power and dominance over everything external. I found these exposures strongly evocative, resonating with me in a deep way.

Most impressive to me is the Kogi take on unfettered masculinity, which to them is the demon driving our mainstream world’s incessant restlessness and aggression. For harmony to exist between humanity and the natural world—to say nothing of men and women—that energy must be calmed down. The film introduces some of the simple practices in concentration and meditation which every Kogi man performs to siphon off his inborn restlessness.

After I watched this film, I looked around me at our home. We live in a three-room duplex with a kitchen (nice size) and a small but adequate bathroom with tub and shower. These are cramped quarters by American middle-class standards but perhaps normal for many middle-class Europeans and Asians. Still, I saw almost nothing around me that hadn’t been manufactured off the back—or from the innards—of Mother Earth.

I consciously strive to live a simple life, walking as lightly as I can on the Earth. I’m a long-time vegetarian. I recycle religiously, tend a small vegetable garden, ride my bicycle, drive our car only when “necessary,” and, of course, use compact fluorescent light bulbs. But I’m still as much a captive of a misguided way of life as any flashy entrepreneur making it on Wall Street.

Of course, the Kogi could be wrong. Their voices might be the last dirge of a long-gone past. Perhaps they’re remnants of a former race which evolution has left behind. Maybe, unlike the Sioux at Wounded Knee, they’re making their last stand nonviolently, begging for preservation of their own way of life to save themselves from extinction or being forced to change.

But in my opinion they’ve delivered a vital message. If they’re correct in their diagnosis of the health of the planet—as more and more scientists and average people agree—how are we going to make the changes we need to turn ourselves around?

I’ve noticed in the media that the messages to keep us focused on our present course are getting pretty frantic. Commercials are louder and more manic, entertainment is increasingly gaudy and violent, the news pumps up every little scene into a prime-time drama. Trivia is so elevated that when something really big happens—most recently, the tsunami in Japan or the rising tide of revolution around the world—we can hardly take it in. More likely, we shut it out. We hop in the car for yet another run to the super market.

In that context, the Kogi send a message we need to hear. Yes, it’s ironic that they’ve done it with the very technology they reject. But if, by some stretch of the probable, each of us were to follow some small part of their example, there might not be the craving need for more and more technology to bring us happiness. We might develop the capacity to understand and enjoy life without all our products and amenities, not losing but gaining peace, prosperity, and security in a more settled, friendly world.

What we’re doing isn’t working. It never did work except for a few. After 5,000 years on that path, I think a new approach is more than desirable. It’s required.

Risk altering your consciousness. Check out From the Heart of the World. Then wait a few months for an updated message. Advance press has gone out that the Kogi Mamas, alarmed that we didn’t take their warnings to heart in 1988, are trying again. After training some of their own people in film making, they invited Alan Ereira back with a crew to create a second film, Aluna, which promises to take us even deeper into the Kogi understanding of how the world works and what part humans are meant to play in it.

Aluna is scheduled for release later this year. For more information, visit http://www.alunathemovie.com/.

This Week in Brief

A Reflection

The big news in the world this week is the revolution in Egypt. That has to be noted, it strikes me as a huge deal. Mubarak held out for almost three weeks, until finally the military told him it was over, and he resigned. Now the army is in charge of the country, but it’s not billed as a military takeover but an interim care-taker sort of arrangement until the institutions can be put into place for a new constitution and a new, freely elected government. It sounds a little dicey to me, for the military is certainly part of the old regime and very dependent on U.S. military aid, so what kind of a democracy will come out of that? But the Egyptians trust the military to do right by them, which so far it has—by not pulling the trigger on the demonstrators. You have to wonder what was going on behind the scenes between the generals and Mubarak. I suspect it’s not as clean as it appears. But for the moment it’s amazing. One of the oldest, traditionally autocratic and brutally repressive civilizations in western history has fallen from the inside out in a popular uprising. Is this the Aquarian Age or what?

Of course, it all started in America in 1775. That’s a thrilling realization in itself. In a certain way, it all started here in Hampton Roads. Well, not exactly, of course. But Virginia was certainly one of the vital centers of this new energy which transfers institutional authority from a king to the individual, from outside to inside of oneself. Used to be the best you could hope for was a wise king. Now the best hope is in a wise majority. It’s still touch and go! What’s needed to feed a successful democratic system is a good, rounded education for everyone, a love of learning. Ronald Reagan became the public face of the movement to shut down free education, beginning in California. It’s amazing how he is celebrated, practically canonized, when he is the one who officially established the movement to dumb down America and turn us into subjects rather than citizens. Thanks, Ronny.