We Are All Working Class Now - Giving up the Illusion of Power to Gain Community Strength

People and labor have equal value and I have no greater value than you. I have always found “ordinary” things to be extraordinary. Existence is miraculous, beautiful, and requires no justification for hierarchy from us to have value. Though, like many in my culture, I was taught to order things in rankings, I have tried to deprogram myself from this over and over again.

A character I quite liked from the BBC series “A Very British Coup” once said: “I believe all people are first class, don’t you?”

We need all voices. All expertise. All wisdom. All hands on deck.

We are all facing the same concerns. Less time. Too much work. Falling behind every year.

An entry level professional was paid $20 an hour in 1971, and $19 in 2025. In 1971, the median price of a home was $23,400, roughly 3 times a working class yearly income. Now that same home is roughly more than 22 times an annual working class wage. That’s interesting, don’t you think?

Entry level professional positions today pay the same as entry level working class wages. So if we aren’t defining class by wages, education, or type of labor, what is it based on?

If we all made a living wage, and our resources were rationally managed, and our human needs integrated into our lives, we wouldn’t be having these conversations to begin with.

My husband is a letter carrier. After the famous, but illegal, letter carriers strike of 1970, USPS letter carriers got two successive raises of 14% a year, bringing their hourly income up to $4.60 an hour or annual income of $9600 per year.

In 1971 auto workers made $6.18, a little more than letter carriers. A doctor made $20 an hour or S42,000 annually. We considered that an adequate professional compensation for the investment of care, training and time.. A doctor made 3.2 times what a factory worker did, but a factory worker could still buy a home for a little less than three times his annual salary, or $28,000, which seemed fair at the time, and also within the reach of the average person. Of course not all of us were “average”, but unfortunately that will have to be the topic of another essay for now.

Consider wages now. The entry level pay for a USPS letter carrier is $19 an hour in a town where the minimum wage is $15 an hour.

Now, that same letter carrier makes $39,500. And the entry level minimum wage worker is making $31,200. Both, even when added together, are below the poverty line in Seattle.

Meanwhile, the cost of a home, $28,000 in Seattle in 1971 was a little less than three times a working class salary. In 2026, the cost of a home in Seattle is $900,000, twenty three times the annual working class salary.

This is a cumulative inflationary rate of 692.72%. Translated over those 54 years, not allowing for compound interest, that is $6,650,000 in lost wages - or purchasing power if you prefer - during the most productive 54 years in American history, not accounting for any portion of that lost income at the stock market for 54 years at 10% per year.

How were any of us going to keep pace with that?

And where did all that money go?

CEO pay has risen 1024%. America has 902 billionaires, and nine men control more than 50% of the world’s wealth and resources.

I would suggest that if you are not now working class, you are very likely to be well on your way towards it. Or if we are very lucky, on your way towards abandoning the idea of class as anything of value to attain.

So welcome to the working class, because it’s coming for you. It’s coming for all of us. Until we all decide the word means nothing.

Remember, I live in a city where the corporate culture was founded by Jeff Bezos who said “I want my employees to show up for work every day afraid.” In Oregon a bleeding factory worker died while the floor manager told employees to keep working around the body.

Bill Gates was too busy figuring out how to turn stolen inventions and resources into subscriptions we would have to pay for every year for the rest of our lives, while trying to secretly slip his wife antibiotics so that she wouldn’t notice he’d given her an STI by skeezing around with Epstein victims.

These are not smart guys, and these are not nice guys. Born into wealth and a staggering sense of privilege, they treat us like prey and in private have been recorded saying that it would be better if we just died off once we were no longer useful.

Around the world, where work and success are prized above all else, people are having fewer and fewer children. In some cultures around the world, young people have given up on the idea of ever raising a family. In others, young people are simply laying down in the street to die symbolically, showing their lives are not worth living when protests stop working. It is the last act before suicide, for those not ready to set themselves on fire in sacrifice to warn others as is signal fire which is sometimes done in Asia when nothing else works.

The west has given the world a fatal virus.

The first fifteen seconds of a billionaire’s life is not worth the entirety of your lifetime. The math doesn’t work, the ecology doesn’t balance, and all joy-producing activity stops.

The most challenging thing facing Americans today is the weight of inequality and loss of most of our daily hours. The hours we need to maintain physical and mental health, the hours we need to care for our elders, our children, our friends, our neighborhood, and our community.

That inequality was designed. And we did not choose it. Going into the midterms, we might want to consider community engagement at the most local possible level. There is a book by Robert Heinlein, titled Take Your Government Back, in which he talks about the irresistible force of volunteering in one’s community, and the fact that the influence of money cannot combat boots on the ground in the end. Though he refused to back politicians, he spent his life quietly volunteering for the Democratic party.

In our gut, we are all starting to feel like slaves.

Enough words.

Fortunately, the actions are easy. Take things at your pace, where you find you fit. Start with meeting three people a week and talking about any part of rebuilding our communities. The way we overcome overwhelm, that inability to feel the beating of our own hearts any more, is by holding onto feelings – the feelings of our families, the resonance of music that rings with our bones, the words that call to our souls as well. Break the work ahead into small, shared tasks. Hoard your attention and conserve your creative strength for what is useful. For that is where humanity’s wealth lives. The human heart responds to human needs and human stories -- not to numbers.

That’s why our stories are so important.

Common Sense Solutions Together Possibilities:

Why We Must Change

Bitches Rule! Stop Tolerating the Intolerable

Myth of Meritocracy - They are lucky idiots

Wealth Addiction

Wealth Hoarding is a Mental Illness

Better Ideas?

Community Solutions to Power

Turning Needed Services into Extraction Engines without Added Value

BIG by Matt Stoller

Emergency Prices: How Private Equity Captured the Ambulance Market

Dan Geller is a Staff Attorney at Antimonopoly Counsel and can be reached at dan@antimonopoly.us…

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5 months ago · 263 likes · 14 comments · Matt Stoller and Dan Geller

Better Ideas - Lots of Examples of what works- learning from each others and 1000s of solutions - many communities inventing many ideas

How Civilization Tricked Us All Into Surrendering Our Freedom -

If We are Going to Thrive - How to Turn it Around this Generation by Design

Rights or Duties?

The Value of Thinking Small: I needed glasses before I learned to read.

Value Public Education: Creating Good Citizens, James Madison

Shoulder to Shoulder Love in Places we Break

Native Traditional Ecological Food Security Systems

Using Data Center Heat to Heat Homes?

Using Oceans to Cool Data Centers and Improve Reef Health?

We Make Wealth Together

The latest Economists with Simple Ideas and more data offer proof - wealth does not equal employment or trickle down opportunities greater than extraction of labor and resources. Profit seeks more profit as its only goal.

PSA: Living Well With Disability

Ok, so I opened my heart to my neighbor, a stranger, completely, only to have her be horrified by the state of my kitchen.

Every day my kitchen gets sterilized, but it’s a working kitchen, and I am disabled, which means it gets sterilized every 24 hours, and every piece I use, and I use gloves on my hands, my pots and pans are sterile — as is everything else food touches in my kitchen. But the rest, well not too much.

Part of my malfunctioning neurology means that about one in five times I grasp something, my fingers don’t close. So, about once a week, something with food in it gets dropped on the floor, sometimes a single serving bowl, sometimes a mixing bowl or a storage container, lands on the floor, breaking, and leaving a dangerous mess that someone other than me has to clean up. That someone is my husband. I am ashamed of it, but it is the truth of my life.

As is the cat hair on the floor, the cluttered counters, there are dishes soaking in the sink, dishes drying on a towel, dishes in the dishwasher, and the minor spills that are everywhere from cooking.

I LOVE cooking. I love feeding people, and I thought by using the time bank I had stumbled across a solution. I would share knowledge, labor and food, giving free food in return. I halved my grocery budget, saved my husband labor, and has enough left over to give to hungry people, or trade for labor so that my husband doesn’t exhaust himself working full time, drawing to build our Skookworks, the art/fiction business we will retire into, and caring for me. It’s too much.

So this experiment worked beautifully. Until one day it didn’t. One person who didn’t understand or expect the reality of a disabled person’s home, in my safe space where I am most vulnerable. And it is taking time to recover from.

Everyone has prejudices. And, as prejudice comes gradually back into public culture, as a culture maker do I speak out, or stay safe? Do I approach the organization and inquire as to policies regarding the disabled. Time banks only work if people give as much as they take, and most who have been around me find out, after the fact, that I always give more than I take.

But this week I had to ask my “cooking buddy” to leave my kitchen, which she was clearly uncomfortable with, and finished the task myself after sending her home with food. Without help, I cut myself, burned 2 dishes I couldn’t stand up to stir, burned my fingers a couple of time, and of course dropped at least one prepared dish on the floor or the kitchen which my husband had to clean up.

The challenge is that opening one’s heart to a stranger is emotional labor. Writing is also emotional labor. And this one afternoon cost me 2 weeks of soul searching, tears, and obviously, not much work got done as I waited to sort this out with my therapist.

These are the uncharted risks of counter culture experiments. When will the prejudices of the dominant culture unwittingly rear its ugly head?

My black friend related this to growing up in a small, rural town, amid families of friends where he was generally loved and accepted. We talked about the unexpected wounds at the hands of an inappropriate word, used in ignorance: “I haven’t seen you in a coon’s age” meant as an expression of love, but perhaps a painful reminder to a young black man, or the extended family gathering where no one admitted, but it became increasingly obvious that some of the families didn’t want their dating aged daughters left alone with a “negro”, when they thought nothing of it with the white boys. These were family events, with some functions unsupervised, but the “negro” required supervision.

It’s like finding out that you are suddenly not as safe as you thought you were. Because these things exist on a continuum. On one hand we have accidentally hurtful ignorance, one the other extreme we have disabled people with co-morbidities offered assisted suicide as an option to prevent the suffering of a life not worth living, as doctors make the uncomfortable slide from do no harm, to allow no suffering and deciding that “some” people’s lives will be so difficult that perhaps killing them is the most merciful thing society can do.

Are we approaching that question? In some rooms, in some places we are. When the World Health Organization chooses what to do with its resources, it creates an artificial equation of the value of a human life by adding life expectancy, GDP of the country involved, productivity capacity, and subtracting the number of years that person might be disabled before deciding how to allocate their medical resources.

Think about that. In order of survival value, the disabled rank dead last.

And that is based on the industrial assumption that our value can be calculated, like an insurance table might, by how many dollars we will produce and how many dollars we will consume. And, frankly, because they are usually poor, the disabled make lousy consumers.

Every other threat our society currently faces is based on that false equivalency of the value of life: economic worth.

Should I quietly create something else? Or should I be screaming at the top of my lungs in outrage?

Well, frankly, to achieve change in society, both are required.

But given my specific history, I cannot afford to engage in the latter. I cannot allow myself to indulge my rage. I simply do not have the constitution for it, so I will have to allow some other person to take on that part of the task at hand.

Because that is the point of diversity.

We all have a part to play.

We all have value to give.

And standing up and saying that, privately or publicly, will create change, will forge relationships, will rebuild community.

It will also make us targets for those few who are not yet ready to meet us where we are. That’s ok.

When I was very young, I remembered looking at a person in a wheelchair for the first time and being disgusted. Underneath that, I was frightened. That could be me. Then one day it was me. And I had to live with that occasional look of disgust and shield myself by knowing the reaction was not about me in any way. It was about fear. It almost always is.

And no matter how much work I do to show that I am not a threat, there will always be a certain percentage of people who cannot see that.

But it is a small percentage.

Those of us who have never been able to afford to pay someone to clean our homes know that sometimes life gets overwhelming and sometimes things are a mess.

There was a time when we didn’t expect anything else. Canning, quilting, any major survival project done by more than one pair of hands would include unequal ability, laughter, tears, mess, pain, ruffled feathers and relationships repaired.

Now, we don’t get to have those moments because we buy cheap quilts at Amazon.

To whom we rent back all the hours of our lives at a rate that leaves us no time left to care, to have small talk, to have bandwidth to build families and community. By design, so we spend more money acquiring things we used to just share.

The more alone we are, the less we share. The less we share, the more we buy.

We sold our souls to the company store, collectively, gradually, accidentally. Perhaps it is time to live with a little discomfort. A little mess. A little imperfection in each other in order to right this ship we are all sailing in.

Because the 90% and the 10% are not in the same boat, my friend.

First they came for someone else, last they came for me.

If they haven’t come for you yet, your home, your pension, your security, your safety - don’t worry, they will. You are on their actuarial table as a resource. And the sooner you realize that your interest ultimately lies with every other stinky, messy, poor, struggling person in the world, the better. For you. Because elsewise, on that day that you need others and have not invested in them, you will find that you, in fact, have nothing of value and you never did.

Because you saw God in material goods and comfort. Not in the face of your neighbor.

They knew they needed each other, you didn’t. They invested in the bank of community good will for decades. You did not.

In the end, if your paper becomes worthless, you have offered nothing of value to others once you have stopped pretending other people are just a means to an end.

If I want to live in a different kind of world, like the rest of us, I have to build it. And, like the rest of us, that involves risk.

And, as an individual I have to decide for myself which risks I can afford to take and which ones I can’t. Which is the heart of democracy in communities. We all have different needs and abilities, but when we listen and share accordingly, we can manage to thrive together.

Or die alone.

For the moment, for myself, I will have to be more selective about who I allow in my home than I have been in the past. In the past, my home was always a place with an open door, a ready meal, and a listening heart. It still is, if I know you. But for now, as James Talarico likes to say, “is a welcome mat at the door stop, but a lock on the door”.

For now, I will support community building online and in public spaces.

I will write fiction to protest and to envision a better world. As many writers before me have said, if we cannot imagine it, we cannot create it.

I will continue to network, put my talents where they can do the most good.

I deeply believe that we will only solve our current issues through relationships between each other. I know it in my bones and I have seen it work.

But I have to be honest about where I, as a specific individual, am weakest.

I can’t take an emotional hit in my home.

At least not while I have so many other efforts underway.

Perhaps that experiment will have to wait another year.

And in the meantime, I will continue to make sure that those who need food have it.

Every week, my groceries get more expensive, and every week I cut costs because of what I learned from years of working in restaurants. That saving goes further when shared, but if sharing it means risking being shamed in my own home for being disabled, I can’t take that risk right now.

So for the moment, I am passing on some hacks:

If you need to lower your constantly increasing food budget, there are some things we can learn from cultures where people survived well and lived long and healthy lives, though impoverished in our eyes because we have become accustomed to so much historically unprecedented comfort, healthy or not.

Part of the reason that foods from poorer cultures are spicy is not simply to make plain food palatable, but because peppers contain an enormous concentration of vitamins and minerals, grow in abundance in small spaces, help maintain metabolism and blood flow. In older cooking traditions, everything on your plate also served a medicinal purpose. Miso preserves forever, and provides flavor, as well as probiotics, vitamins and minerals. As our costs rise, I lean more and more heavily on what I know about labor intensive, but cheap ingredient cuisines.

Beans, rice, lentils of every color and kind. Brown rice needs to be used quickly because it spoils sooner.

Nutritional powerhouses: dried seaweed, peppers, high protein grains, buckwheat, squash, and sweet potatoes

Add in peppers first, vegetables in season 2nd, never spend over $2 a pound, especially for out of season. If green vegetables are too expensive, find a neighbor with an abundant garden to trade cooked food with.

Start a garden in whatever space you have. Sprouts take little space and give the most nutrition per ounce.

Establish a price per pound you are willing to pay and do whatever you have to do not to go above it, no matter what happens to inflation. Our great grandparents made it through the depression and World War II with victory gardens. Time to start planting one.

Learn Mormon food prep. Mormons try to maintain a 2 year supply of food in their homes at all times. They build it gradually with shelf stable food, supplement with grown food, and keep things rotated or in permanent freeze dried storage. While meant for emergencies, I have met more than one Mormon family who made their way through periods of prolonged unemployment precisely because they had this storage.

Start stocking to protect yourself from future price shocks.

Shift as much as possible from animal protein to plant protein.

America is working the way it was designed to. From the gilded age, circling back to this moment, we are exactly where the broligarchs want us to be.

Working class colidarity necessary we can’t afford our racism anymore!

The Americans Foundations Act Let’s go back and forward.

It’s not working anymore. Solutions?

Like most Americans these days, this last week left me depressed and unable to write.

My body is riddled with arthritis and neuropathy as well as having bi-polar disorder and complex PTSD. So when I go down, I go down hard.

That means my husband is more of a caregiver than I would like. I recently learned that my knees can’t be replaced because of an infection left in a leg with compound fracture. Apparently, if you have an infection in your bone and get your knee replaced, the infection will travel to the knee and the leg will have to be amputated.

All this is to say, most of us struggle to stay alive, healthy and maintain a disciplined mind, every day we get squeezed it gets harder and harder.

This week I learned that, when differences in currency and wealth inequality are factored into local economies, Americans have to work twice as many hours to have the same purchasing power as their European or other first nation peer democracies

That is another huge red flag.

No wonder we have to work 2-3 jobs to stay afloat.

No wonder we wake up sweating in the middle of the night.

This week alone, there was a man in Ontario, California that burned down a warehouse, one of 7 across the nation so far, because he wasn’t paid enough to live.

Starbucks unionizes, and Starbucks moves its headquarters out of Seattle.

A worker in an Amazon warehouse drops dead, bleeding out from a head wound onto the floor while the employee giving CPR begs for help, and another employee begs to help her, and is told by the floor manager to step around the body and keep working.

I am not sure which shocks me more, the fact that the manager gave that order or the fact the employees obeyed.

It is official. They no longer need to put us in chains, we have become slaves to our fear.

Amazon, Walmart, Target, even programming employees are finding themselves surviving by invisibly living out of cars and vans, parking on the street or in parking lots, only to be frequently and unconstitutionally harassed by local police.

We cannot allow it to be illegal for us to survive.

After a week of fury, of not knowing what to do beyond burning it all down and starting over, I remembered my first, basic principle for myself and my strengths. Others must follow their own.

Given my personal constitution, mine priorities must be concentrated on what we believe in, instead of pouring our energy into fighting what we do not.

I will be the first to admit, that while I wish civil disobedience were enough to overthrow a corrupt regime, we all know there is a certain point at which that is no longer possible and we have no option but violent revolution.

My strongest faith is that we remember that we have been here before, we are all in this together, and together we can resist it. We need to immediately dissolve the illusionary barriers of race, class and ethnicity used to divide us and realize that we are all on the same side, all part of the same human race, and vote accordingly pretty quickly.

If you don’t see a leader you can get behind, stop waiting and lead.

Everyone of us has an area of expertise they can contribute their voices to, but if we don’t start sharing information with our neighbors it will be the downfall of our country.

This country was built on the blood of slavery and ethnocide. Not just black Americans and Native Americans, though they bore the brunt of the burden, but Chinese workers who were shipped in as slave labor to build the railroads.

And children of all colors. Between the 1850s and 1932 when FDR was elected, urban children of all colors were loaded onto trains and shipped into the midwest, sold as farmworkers. There were 250,000 of these children. That doesn’t include the numbers of children who died in the mines and factories in America’s gilded age. We have been here before.

And this is another form of slavery we overthrew - as best we could. Not completely, but we kept pushing against those who use people as objects.

We built social safety nets, expanded rights, expanded education, created national great works, roads, hydro electric dams, art and we sent doctors and teachers into under served areas for the students to work off their school loans.

From 1932 forward, the quality of life for the average American began to improve not equally, but equality was being fought for, tooth and nail, and we were making progress. Working conditions improved. Child labor was outlawed. Minimum wage was established as was the right of collective bargaining. For the first time in American history we could see the glimmer of an actualization of a nation of the people, by the people and for the people.

Then we hit the energy crisis of the 1970s, and the American economy stagnated. This was, essentially, because after our European and Asian global neighbors recovered from World War II, they had a more modern, rebuilt industry and suddenly we had to compete again. Instead of doing that, we elected Ronald Reagan which began the slow, intentional process of dismantling all of the systems that had enriched our country and made it so successful in the process.

I think there are plenty of people coming together today knowing what the problem is and we have some good ideas about what we can do about the crushing pressure of it all, but I think it is equally important to pay attention to what we can possibly build in the future as a hybrid of the opportunities that emerging science affords us combined with what we have learned from history and culture over the millennia of the human race.

I am going to propose some general solutions. I know I will get pushback, but hear me out.

• One person, one vote. All corporate money out of politics.

• Term reform.

• Outlaw accepting bribes or allowing campaign contributions to affect legislative voting.

• Outlaw highly funded policy think tanks with full blown legislation to local, state, and federal government designed to eliminate rights and capture our common resources.

• Outlaw corporate ownership of farm property.

• Outlaw corporate ownership of housing..

• Outlaw corporate ownership of medical providers, clinics, ambulance and other medical services, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and insurance companies.

• Fund basic food, medical care, transportation and shelter with public funds created by a “commons profit”.

• A “commons profit” is a tax that corporations pay on the enormous gains they have made using the public commons, including all our combined creative knowledge to train their AI models, government funded research of all types, water, air, public schools, transportation and the entire infrastructure of a society they did not build but take advantage of..

• Promote small, locally funded, locally run, manufacturing cooperatives and ease regulations on cooperative business models.

• Promote small, sustainable food production.

• Promote small, family run businesses of all kinds.

• Get involved in local politics first.

• Provide income for those who do unrecognized or underrepresented “soft work” usually unpaid, usually done by women, that keep society moving and growing.

• Protect our elders and bring them back into the community.

• Reestablish stripped agencies

• Fund social security with taxes on income above $150k

• Reform the tax system

• Reform the criminal justice system.

• Reform the immigration process.

• Fund public schools through PhD.

• Fund apprenticeship projects.

• Clear the way for new sciences, like printing homes as inexpensive solutions to modern problems .

• Decentralize power through a series of loosely confederated community cooperative models.

That’s plenty to start with. What I am proposing is that we design a hybrid based on the best of the old and the new to create a third way, perhaps a new way for the human tribe, all of us, together, one purpose, many methods.

Our purpose? A balanced, sustainable, joyful or meaningful lives for people living free from fear, and a reinvestment in the greatest quality of diverse life possible on the planet.

If we commit ourselves to that future, and nothing less, then like landing on the moon, or creating worker and human rights, we shall make it into whatever we put the bulk of our effort into.

Tearing down the old society? Or simply building a more functional one side-by-side and allow people to make choices for themselves, together.

How?

Start with what is within your reach. I have asked my readers and listeners to start having coffee with 3 strangers each week, to talk about how to create resilient, sustainable communities.

The next thing to do is to invest in both local manufacturing and farming, but also in new technologies that benefit all of us, not just a few. For example:

Not only energy, communication, but also the possibility of new monetary systems, for example, like that currently being negotiated between some aligned African nations. Unlike the northern hemisphere, the population of the southern hemisphere is growing, as is their investment in their countries infrastructure and education level. Young people are revolutionizing what is possible in the future. Imagine everyone has a home, everyone has food, everyone has shelter, everyone has transportation - because we have enough interconnected working systems to support us. Around the world, we have the resources, we have the people, soon - we will have all the energy we need.

Universal Basic Income.

Unexpectedly, universal basic income has recently found its way back into modern conversation. Is it a good idea? Some people think so, provided it is sufficient. If it is not, it would become another way of turning us right back into consumers renting our lives from them. That must stop. We are not for rent and we are not for sale. What is interesting, is that throughout the history of UBI, it has been alternatively supported to by the left and the right.

The idea of universal basic income has been evolving now for centuries, and the few test cases have been extremely successful. That would begin to reinvest in our communities, our infrastructures, our homes, and most importantly, have enough time to have meaningful lives, whatever that means to each of us.

Tribes of tribes. One can form a “tribe” around any organizing principle, from science to girl scout cookies. But some examples include:

Cooperative Business Models is one way to create local businesses. Cooperation makes us economically and mentally healthier. Lifting our families out of poverty.

Other examples of worker cooperatives:

Starting a co-op.

Interviews at a co-op and front line workers.

This is the first in my list of many possible different ways of sharing and using the love, labor and resources of the community.

Hello Everyone!

We are going to be posting fiction, then Practical Hope in Hard Times and the podcast of our fiction and interviews with our friends and neighbors!

We have been told by some of our readers that if it were possible, they would gladly support us at a less expensive level.

As you wish!

Welcome to the early adopter special of $1 a month, grandfathering in people who already support us at the lowest possible level.

If you like what we do, check us out at Ko-fi.com/Skookworks.

I hope you enjoy our new work!

In kindness and kinship,

Sarah and David

I think curiosity has survival value as do principles, primarily because if you gather information and reason it through, when you have a normal, predictable human emotional reaction that it would be unwise to act upon without thinking, you have the guardrails of which lines you will not cross preset. This gives us an opportunity to stop and think when our reaction is to break someone’s nose in defense, to toss them shade, to look upon others with judgement before asking questions, and all the other automatic reactions our culture programs into us.

Elders give us culture, rules to live by. And once we have reached maturity, hopefully we have time to consider these things for ourselves.

By the way, this is just another reason why theft of the hours of your life is a theft of your humanity.

For the moment let’s pretend we are given time to ponder our values, especially as we age and gain experience of how others live, thrive, survive, suffer and the affect we have on those outcomes.

Do I believe that life is sacred?

I do.

When? Always.

How? In all ways.

What if life was not just measured in money or time, which are entirely made up constructs, and instead in seasons, quality in addition to quantity -- then reconsider which things preserve and promote the greatest abundance and stability for all life. Because in balance we all live, and out of balance, we all die. We all die anyway, so I return to the question of quality.

If we find life sacred enough to protect it at conception, do we find life sacred enough to treat it with respect in all aspects at all stages?

That is my stand.

Is the water sacred? The air? The plants? The soil? Because it’s all alive and it all communicates, it all feels and responds to conditions, especially the ones we create.

That is my stand.

Is human life sacred? Sacred enough to be treated with respect and dignity?

Yes. I stand there.

When I look at someone in a wheelchair do you see yourself?

Well, I am in a wheelchair half the time now, so yes, I do.

Do I wonder what it would be like not to be able to use all your limbs?

Oh yes.

Have I asked?

No.

Are you afraid to know?

I am terrified to ask. I do not want to know. I am afraid that one day the arthritis will be so bad that I will not be able to stand up from my wheelchair at all. I shattered my leg when I was 30. Not that big a deal, a broken bone heals stronger, scar tissue isn’t pretty, but it’s tough.

Except.

They left dead bone and it got infected.

They said they could repair it and I would walk like normal again. They lied and they knew it. I was never able to put my weight on that leg again. Malpractice is based on projected income, not expense of disability, so there is no compensation as this original malpractice becomes an increasingly complex condition. All the cartilage around my knees is gone, but even though I have insurance, and I am young enough to recover, I can’t get a knee replacement for my arthritis because the infection is still there, in my bone marrow, and would travel up my leg if they opened it up again and it would need to be amputated completely. That which does not kill you makes you stronger, they say. And I am grateful for my strengths, but I am not so naive as to think that I did not pay a high price for this strength. A price, I might add, that I never had a choice in.

Is my life sacred?

I have multiple disabilities I cope with now, one of which is an instability in my walk. I slipped in the bathroom because of it, and when my husband wheeled me to the shoulder surgeon, as a safety measure, the surgeon asked if it was even worth doing the surgery required to repair my shoulder.

As a disabled person, am I a walking cost/benefit sheet? Or am I something more?

Are we each something more?

I stand that we are, each of us.

Life works as a braid, stronger woven together, where each fulfills a place that we may not even see.

I trust life.

That is my stand.

So when ICE wants to arrest my neighbor for the color of her skin, I don’t have to think about any emotional reaction I may have, even fear, even terror. I know where I stand.

I don’t react. I choose.

Sometimes I choose beforehand.

It saves time. It also makes me stop and think before I act.

Is this the action I am committed to? Will it produce the results I am aiming for?

If not, take no action. Wait, and when the time is right, and when I am strong, I will leverage that strength to it’s greatest advantage. I will use what I do best to help where I can help most.

In my case, words are my lever, and principles are the fulcrum upon which that lever is placed.

And in this way, we all move the world forward, a little bit, every day. We plant our feet and lean our shoulders into what matters most. And push. Because nothing changes without pushing.

That’s what principles are for. Hopefully those principles are based on values that function. The functionality of values lies in the results they produce. “By their fruits shall you know them,” it is said.

What fruit do I strive to bear?

Kindness. Generosity. Growing. Sharing. Abundance. Acceptance. Affection. Admiration and most of all Curiosity.

Why do you do it that way?

What works for you?

And how can I help?

What do I need?

If you didn’t ask, then we aren’t playing in the same sandbox, for now, and that’s ok.

You are always welcome. There is always room for one more.

Perhaps you don’t need others. I do. Perhaps you don’t need others now. Sooner or later everyone does.

But you gotta plant the seeds of community if you wish to reap the harvest and our devastated communities will take time to regrow.

I am a shut in, but I have some idea about how we could do that. But I have to do mine from my chair. I share my ideas online through substack, subscriptions and podcasts.

I want to know what your experiences and solutions are.

What are your areas of concern?

And, if you ran the world, what would you do about it?

Because ultimately, we do run the world. Culture is nothing more than the stories we believe to be true that govern our choices, especially in emergencies. Do you jump in and save the drowning stranger? Or do you stand back and shout for someone else to help? Do you turn away and ignore your drowning neighbor?

I understand we are all hitting overwhelm, and overwhelm can tip in many directions.

Ultimately, we do run the world by the stories we tell. If the stories are no longer working, we have to tell new ones.

What is your story?

What would you like us to understand about your experiences?

What have you learned?

And how can we help each other?

The feeling of existential angst arose from empire and was nailed like a coffin during the industrial revolution when empire became so embedded in our global lives as to be almost indistinguishable from our actual nature.

So I look back farther, to more sustainable peoples and times, and I wonder how those principles could be applied to the world as it is today with our current population, and technology.

Because facing ecological collapse is absolutely unnecessary. It will be a choice, or lack of one, that allows for it to happen.

We need to be building a better future, now.

The world is yours.

That square you stand upon, it’s yours.

Now, how do you define it, and what do you want to do with it?

I am going to use my principles to guide my outreach through fiction and nonfiction to spread good news, functional solutions, hopeful creations, catharsis for our frustration, and imagination for the best of what is possible in us.

That is where I am choosing to stand, or sit, if I have to. Anything that does not strengthen that commitment is a waste of my time.

What are you committed to?

And if you don’t know, what are you going to study to find out?

If you don’t have a fist clenching around your belly telling you that something in the world around you needs to be repaired, then this message isn’t for you.

But if there is, consider this an open invitation to express what you experience, what you witness, and what you would like to grow in its place?

I had this dream last night about a bunch of those high school mean girls sneering at me.

Laughing, I threw my arms around the mean lead girl, embracing her, with a full heart and saying.

“I love you!”

Of course I gotta laugh at the absurdity of it all.

And I gotta trust that mean girl has her place in the development of us all. Whether it is to teach someone courage in the face of cruelty, or be showered with material wealth only to learn compassion from the servant she spit upon when she falls, terribly, and we all do, but because she has given nothing, invested in no one, she learns a bit of unpredicted humility as someone of “lower status” reaches down to pick her up off the floor. And in that moment of clarity, the woman reexamines everything she believed to be true about life.

It happens.

But her future is not for me to see, not for me to say. I simply trust in balance.

The Tao says, “In nature, nothing is hurried, yet everything is accomplished”

Do I not see suffering I wish to alleviate? Have I not also suffered?

Of course I do. Of course I have. And it is because I have that experience, paradoxically, I can live in peace.

I have found my own truth.

To those who have recently asked me:

What is your point? My answer is:

Make Art.

That’s how my brain processes information: language, preferably back and forth.

Call and response.

Intuitive confirmation.

Human heartbeat to human heartbeat.

If you do creative problem solving, you know exactly what I am talking about.

Then there is no one to talk to, to bounce ideas off, then I need to sing.

The resonance of rhythm and tone drives connections out of the subconscious, associations almost at random, but a pattern emerges.

If you have a different brain than mine, though, you probably need something else.

A fidget. A cube. An ongoing game, one move a day game with yourself or a worthy opponent, a sand garden you tend, a physical distraction allowing your subconscious to run the show for a while. You didn’t decide to pick up the toy, it was an automatic non-choice, an unthinking distraction. But a distraction that serves a purpose. You are woolgathering!

It sets your subconscious free to do the actual problem solving.

By the way, I have noticed that if I ask my imagination the same question and that magical eight ball of mine keeps saying “I got nothing!” Then I haven’t put enough data into my eight ball.

So I do some research, make some phone calls, and meet some strangers. Then, ask the eight ball again:

What is my point?

All artists do what they need to imagine: What’s next?

David needs silence.

I need to sing.

I love my husband. He needs silence to do his art. Because I love him, silence he shall have.

I find another voice. I dance with Kembo.

A singer, who wrote a blues ballad that speaks to part of what my gut is telling me in response to:

What is your point?

What is my point?

I am dancing to this loud, syncopated rhythm I love, listening to the preamble for why the world is going to hell in a hand basket, yeah, yeah, skip ahead to your solution. I am chunking data by dancing with the voice of somewhere I’ve been. Not exactly, but close enough. I learn from him. And that’s when the language, the melody, and the rhythm coalesce into a single expression:

Art.

And Answer to What is Your Point?

Art.

I am dancing, now it is a conversation between me and the artist

Beat, beat

In the beginning of time

Fire, wheel, and all that stuff men created when they said “the world is mine”

Now we are standing on the brink of disaster, he sings the question, now that the world is going to hell in a handbasket what are we gonna do?

And I know the answer

Put a woman in charge

You can listen to the song, if I speak all the words, I will cry all the way through

I was dancing, listening and weeping with the joy of recognition

We have to turn this world around

Call the mothers

Call the daughters

We need the sisters of mercy now

She’d be a hero

Not a fool

She has the power to change the rules

She has something men don’t have

She is kind she understands

So let the ladies

Do what they were born to do

Raise the vibration

And make a better place for me and you…

Put a Woman in Charge

That is that artist’s one answer to that question, what is your point?

I bet he has trunks full of them, scribbled on note pads, creative problem solving to questions no one has even started asking yet. Probably a little lonely, maybe it’s painful to see what others can’t see yet. But that’s the job. That’s his answer. His answer. His point.

But also mine.

Fascinating.

He’s a southern black blues singer.

I didn’t grow up in his culture.

But I sort of did.

I was raised a slave too.

I grew up in Detroit.

This is my song too.

His point is my point.

And your songs are my songs.

When my first memory was watching my mother.

Standing up in the middle of the fires of the 1967 riots

My tiny five feet tall, 100 pound woman tell these furious, violent teenagers about to beat each other to death say:

“Go home! Your mothers’ would be ashamed of you!”

And watch them do it.

Did I follow her lead?

When facing power and oppression, did I speak out truth?

I did.

Did I follow all the values Kembo said women would imbue into their work automatically, intuitively, in everything I did, following the example of my own mother and her mother before me?

I did.

His answer is one creative solution to the question:

So the world is going to hell, what’s your point?

Kembo sings his answer:

Put a woman in charge.

We could try that.

I can take that into consideration when making my choices.

What is my point?

That your point is my point.

That your song is, ultimately, my song too.

I can hear your heart beat. I can see it in your heart.

In your celebration. In your pain.

That is my truth.

That your truth is my truth.

I don’t have a point.

That is the point.

We all have points. We all have different perspectives, different solutions, and we can do nothing but benefit from sharing them.

Most of them work pretty well, for those folk - find your tribe, your way - don’t hurt anyone or anything.

I’m sharing my experience, and my observations, my pondering, my wonder, my joy, my curiosity

And that helps me solve problems in any situation.

And inviting you to do the same.

That is my art:

An invitation to share your stories. I know it’s vulnerable. I know it’s scary.

So I will go first.

You’ve heard pieces of my story.

What is your story?

Start asking questions.

Sow the seeds of the answers you find.

The garden will grow itself.

That is how the creative mind solves problems.

Finds truth.

Speak truth, through art.

But speak truth.

Do you think I am not a professional at my craft?

Do you think I haven’t done my homework and proven to myself that what my gut is telling me has measurable accuracy before I speak my truth?

Do you think I don’t have a vault full of receipts?

If you do, you haven’t been paying attention.

But I am not going to argue with you.

If you don’t get it, you don’t hear my song, perhaps the song of another will appeal to another

And then our songs compete in the market place of ideas.

If you could only see me grin. And my husband. And my neighbors. And my artist friends. And my organizing friends. And all the people who see your sun setting on the horizon as they grin and laugh at the absurdity of every word you ever uttered.

Your money won’t buy someone’s gut.

You can break your audience’s gut with lies.

But not for long.

Not even for decades.

And a healthy gut does not wish to harm others.

And a healthy gut knows that.

Different songs.

A chorus of voices.

Pointed in a remarkably similar direction.

Almost as though intuition had solved the math problem.

Which can then be reverse engineered.

Then proven.

Almost as though that is how all inventions work…

Huh?

I got lucky enough to get the chance to do ghost writing for engineers, naturopathic doctors, ethical small business people, lawyers - People who dedicate their lives to left brain problem solving. And, while I am by no means an engineer or a doctor or a lawyer.

Every profession has its own vocabulary. I am willing to learn anything you have the patience to answer my questions about. I can be efficient. Artists can help you chunk down your data subconsciously and speed up the process by asking unexpected questions. Think AI will make you faster? Try putting an artist and a writer on your team. Not only are they more deeply plugged into the zeitgeist of the world, but unlike your AI, they are going to know what that means.

Artists don’t work at the speed of computers.

Artists work at the speed of now.

After I chunked down my “point”, I created this podcast, two poems and a complete short story in 45 minutes. They coalesced in my mind whole and complete.

Art is the speed of now.

I apologize that, while finding my footing, I posted work that was not as well edited as it should have been. Sometimes my mind works so fast my fingers can’t keep up, and when I reread I am going so fast my mind fills in the missing pieces.

Just like I did in calculus.

Which meant I could understand it, I could converse about it. But you don’t want me building any bridges.

And you probably don’t want me writing without a proofreader.

But you work with what ya got.

For my engineering friends out there, trust me and put an artist on the team and see the productivity increase. Why not? As an experiment?

I will take the time to have a conversation with you, if you are a left brain thinker who wants to use creative problem solving training to solve community problems. I will bring my proofs, share what I have learned, and show you examples of others attempting to solve the same problems - most of which you will know about and some you will not have considered - so you can take the problem solving from there. I trust your engineering intuition and logic. I trust your good will by virtue of the fact that you showed up to have the conversation. I trust that leaders and problem solvers will emerge because there is no profit to be had in sustainability.

That is precisely the point. What is extracted from the garden must be replanted into grow a bigger garden for all the people and all the life within our reach - which maintain parallel survival conditions like our aquifers, our air quality, the fertility of our land, the cleanliness of our water, the energy to power our homes - you know - all that overused stuff you are worried about because the consequences of violating that cycle are observable and proven. If you are a left brain thinker, and you have shown up to solve problems, you know that.

All I have for you are these questions:

Does it solve a human need?

Does it solve a human want?

Can it be beautiful in its own way - well designed, just made the way you want to make it so that everyone stands back and smiles and says: Yeah, that’s it. Because their hearts, their guts are happy with the art they just made.

That’s right. Art.

If you aren’t making art, what are you doing with your life? All work is art. Don’t allow that to be stolen from you. That path lays slavery, and of this I have a great deal of experience.

Do you want to engage in learning to ask those questions? Then I am here for you.

If not, I am not going to argue with you.

I don’t need to prove myself to you.

And I don’t have the time.

I don’t have a point.

I have questions.

These are mine.

What are yours?

If your questions are challenging my credibility as an artist, I don’t have time for you.

But if, like me, you hear a different song, something in your gut that is telling you that there is something not quite right about how all this has been stitched together, I am simply inviting you to ask questions.

The Sioux said:

As artists we scatter the seeds.

We did not follow the buffalo.

We spread the ash and grass seeds for the buffalo to follow us.

We lived with nature.

And we made that an art.

Metaphor/stories are the short hard through which we learn, teach, preserve and improve culture. To improve society, we need to start telling each other better stories.

Truthful stories. Our stories. All of them.

To run a society, its members need to be able to reason and communicate. It’s not that hard.

One does not need to be a scholar to learn these things, even to learn to learn these things independently from the world and people around you can be done by all of us by engaging affectionate curiosity.

Telling a story, then inviting others to do the same and hold room for them to make the space and requisite actions they require, sharing what’s working and what’s not is the way we multiply effectiveness and reach exponentially, unfolding naturally, gaining momentum as quickly as needed.

Natives did have commerce, just in a completely different form. They did not own things. There might be wisdom in surrendering some of that idea.

At the end of the potlatch everyone ate, danced, had a good time, listened to stories, played, and perhaps made a friend, learned important news, or started a shy romance. Trade in a gift economy created specifically to maintain equilibrium. Ecological balance.

Kim Stanley Robinson used this example in the Mars trilogy when they created their gift economy because they had so few resources, they had to share to achieve maximum efficiency. So bargaining was always about how to maintain balance, with bunches of factors taken into consideration. And yeah, that’s a lot of talk, a lot of negotiation.

That’s how cooperative representative democracy works when it functions, slow, cumbersome, ugly and ultimately glorious and beautiful if one can maintain civility and shake hands or smoke a pipe and go home to their mates with time to be happy.

Because all that talk prevents your labor, your resources from being turned into coin, and coin turns us into commodities without voices. Coin of labor transforms it from a gift to a form of implied force. If I take this away, you will not survive. You have indentured yourself to coin dependency by surrendering your rights for security.

Did you pledge your allegiance? Conditionally. And how do we withdraw our allegiance if our conditions are violated.

Coin makes us feel secure, but it cannot provide security. It is a shiny thing of no value that cannot be planted nor eaten. Coin is a story. And not a good one. It is a form of subconscious slavery that now implies thousands of years of unspoken conditions.

Consciousness, like biology, evolves, and they are in fact the same, and continue to evolve. But consciousness evolves based on mythology and practices. The practices give the experience that teaches lessons that scholarship alone cannot.

As society evolves, the greater and greater the need for diversity of voices, tolerance of many ideas, and trust that with compassionate listening and some reasoning, the best ideas will float to the top.

Democracy is a constantly evolving experiment in trusting the people to govern themselves wisely and learn from their mistakes as they do. To trust process, life and experience. To invite as many to the table as possible and trust the process.

Keep working task groups to numbers less than 150 to avoid cohesion breakdown, factions and critical mass of difficult personalities in one space nonsense. Then isolate and eschew those who sabotage the process with domination.

That is how agreements are made, trust built, treaties, agreements, bonds. Communities of communities sharing what we are learning.

Around the world, small voices are speaking about the damages of inequality.

The oppressed are finding voices in the public square again, as though the printing press has been reinvented and paper is free.

The power is there, all we have to do is reach for it and yield it wisely.

And to use it wisely, all we need is to be gently deprogrammed away from fear and hatred, and reminded to take enough measured risk to trust the stranger and see what she might have to share.

Just that. Share our Strengths. Our joy. Our hope!

In this historic moment, I am going to attempt to place my stick in the place where my sort of voice will have the greatest leverage - while asking others to do the same. Because diversity of voices is the point.

Roman roads lasted thousands of years beyond their empire. What a marvel. They were not built for trade or even to benefit the communities they plowed through. They were built for armies to transport troops, conquer, and then return with captured humans and plunder, while establishing “governors” to plunder more resources and soldiers to serve Rome.

Maybe we don’t build things like we used to.

But perhaps we should be building them as we need them to be - for us. For here, for us, our children and their children and the rest of the life we would like to sustain us in this region.

What if we know that best where we are? Why aren’t you asking before you ask for my vote?

Oh, you are afraid to show up?

She wasn’t. She wants to hear my story. She is listening. She showed up. You didn’t. Not only that, but she talked to my neighbor, and his neighbor, and their neighbors, and she sat down and listened.

Do we have to move so fast? Why do we have to work so many hours to survive in such a rich country? Who set this up? We didn’t. How did we get here? Why don’t we have the time for conversation and agreement?

I have found some towns that have designed these for modest budgets - wanna pool our money, visit and see what they know?

Whadda ya say?

Wanna invent a new future?

This is America baby. If we dream it, we can build it. The great experiment.

Time to take it back again.

Multiple groups of people all around the world are solving local problems ingeniously in this way. But who reports these stories?

I want to.

They are proof that we are not born to be selfish.

I have studied this all my life. The “science” of these things does match up with the evidence or documentable observed experience.

Can we live within at least a moderate compromise that we invent to satisfy and therefore preserve the needs and managed ambitions of all life in a balanced, healthy way?

It’s been done before. By most, for likely 200,000 years.

But the sociopaths have gotten good at long term strategy and hoarding resources in a specific enough way that it makes it harder and harder to resist every go around.

Until we revolt.

I am hoping, and praying, that cycle of dominance that requires overthrow can be circumnavigated here pretty quickly. At this moment, we have the means to share those voices worldwide, instantly.

Average people are not stupid at all, once allowed to voice and discuss their concerns, especially together so they can see what is interrelated. Naturally there will be geniuses and specialists in the mix, but that’s not an issue unless they are bullies. And that is the foundation of a functional democracy, in all civilizations, throughout time. And we forget. Then we remember. We do research. We dig up history.

And hopefully there are a few grandmothers around who remember to retrain us. Not all wisdom lives in books. More lives in memory and experience.

More experience, more wisdom. A community of communities able to share their voices at some point?

Not a dream, a stand. I am not the dreamer. I am not, and never will be, the center of the equation, god forbid. We are all the heroes of this story.

I am planting the seeds of my grandmothers. As their grandmothers before them, and their grandmothers before them.

I aim to reinvent the idea of living collective memory.

All beings are created equal is a story. It is a good story. Some people are worth far more than others. That is also a story. It is a bad story. You can tell by the eventual results. But those results aren’t instant. They cycle. They still happen, but they cycle. As wealth moves upward, and power consolidates, abuses, and reproduces itself like a virus. Unfortunately, to see the cycles, one needs to look to history - and the memories of grandmothers.

Some resistance will also be necessary if we are not to become extinct. There have been enough warnings. In our hearts. In our loneliness. Our deep sense that something is wrong. Our planet is in distress. Diseases reemerging.

I know a way out of the deep dark forest we have come to fear. For the forest is nothing to fear. It is only nature in darkness, turning with the planet.

I can tell stories that carry us around the campfire, out of the darkness, and into the realm of what is possible, into the realm of wonder.

Real wonder. Real miracles. We are missing it as we rush past. We are missing each other, we are missing the banquet. We are missing the point.

What is the meaning of life, the universe and everything? Yes.

The meaning of life is life, the universe and everything.

Every perfect, strange, odd, flickering, illusionary, solid, messy, unpredictable living and non living thing, heroic and sacred in its nature.

If seen with a loving heart, it becomes obvious. You see, the house always wins. We have just been tricked into believing the rulers own the house. They don’t.

The house is life. And life always wins. Life always rebalances. Life is, fundamentally, compassionate. In balance, an eden - a banquet of joy. There are people who believe that man was the animal created to appreciate the beauty and wonder of it all. Just that.

And at some point acceptance becomes the natural conclusion of the maturation process. Not passive acceptance, just willingness to allow for what is so. Life will demand you grow, you probably don’t have to force it. Mastery has value, obsession is imbalance. Imbalance creates disease. Too much growth in any direction becomes cancer.

Life rebalances.

And this is true across the continuum of life. As life expands, exploring itself, we dance in participation. Each voice matters. The universe exists in each mind. And what if the singularity that we have been taught to fear will not in fact be machines,

But us?

We must realign ourselves with life’s purpose, not force it to do our bidding. Nature is wiser than we are. Actions and consequences are easily observed before implementation. Perhaps we should engage in that skill more often. Just a suggestion.

I will have to start with the fundamentals, and then build small structures until the whole emerges.

Love existence. Love thy enemy as thyself. That is the whole of the law.

“I don’t get it.”

I know.

Many voices, better solutions. I have collecting the voices of those finding and practicing working solutions in their communities. Proof of concept is everywhere. Unreported, but there none the less.

Communities of communities.

That is how the species survives. Together.

We are, quite frankly, more intelligent together. Our current capacity for quantum computing isn’t a sliver of what an inspired moment of one human mind.

8 billion inspired minds can move the universe.

Or transform life as we know it, instantly, exponentially, by telling the right viral stories in the right way in our communities. And the great part is that those stories are already there, in the collective experience of our lives.

Imagine the ability to make choices in this way. It is possible. It doesn’t seem like it would scale, but it does and it has been done before.

We exist in a moment where everyone owns a printing press. Conversations about these issues is the next necessary step.

Individually we despair - or we tune out - or both. The greatest cure for social media is to meet 3 strangers this week.

The most radical thing you can do to invest in the future and support your community is have coffee with three people and listen to their stories. Convince them why it’s important that they do the same. They don’t have to have an agenda. The agenda will evolve out of the needs that emerge from the conversations.

Trust the process. Trust the math. Trust the fractile effectiveness of viral truth.

People will believe a lie if repeated often enough.

Until it is repeated one too many times. Then they are ready to hear a truth.

We are free. We are equal. That means equal share of the product of our efforts, equal rights even the ones we haven’t realized we need yet, equal quality of life of one’s choice, equal right to learn, to care and safety for those in need, equal right to explore within supervision for social safety, equal protection for all under the law. Executed, distributed with compassion and reason, by representatives who will be dismissed the moment they stop listening to the voices and will of the people they serve.

This is not just a lovely idea, it is how the math of social dynamics works or collapses.

We communicate it through community building.

It took my whole life, and a lot of compilation of computation to find it and prove it. But I did.

Which story, which metaphor will inoculate against evil and invest in good?

Ancient cultures trained for this. It’s time to open the temple of the human heart. It’s time to trust our stories. All of them.

Some methods work better than others, and yet in combination, they can all work together, unless one group establishes imbalance by dominance.

So when dominance arises, ask who benefits from what stories we share and which ones we can’t? Who choses? How? And why?

Nature, even human nature, if allowed to relax into a natural state, has enough inherent wisdom that with socialization all children mature and function in health in their environment no matter how poor - if adapted to that environment. From eskimos to bushmen.

Eskimos are never unkind to their children, they say. They begin to teach compassion when their babies pinch them. They show pain, they say ow, and ask why you hurt mommy. This eventually hones our natural ability to feel the feelings of others.

Western culture is designed to blunt that, and not surprisingly, those cultures with the most brutal child rearing methods also produced the most authoritarian governments, Germany being the most obvious and well documented example, with Great Britain a close second and arguably more evil as their imperial intentions were cloaked in the language of honor where then Germans was not.

What if all life is part of a continuum of awareness as the old ones told us? Scientifically we can now prove this to likely be an accurate understanding of how the universe functions as a single entity, with multiple, redundant parts.

What if our part to play is to understand, not to master?

To create, but not destroy.

To invest, but not rape.

To develop but reinvest in all matters of importance.

Life, the universe, and everything.

Play our part in conducting and rotating places in the great symphony?

In the beginning was the word.

And the word made light.

Sound.

Light waves.

Energy to matter.

Same story, different languages.

Tell your story. We need to hear it.

Don’t worry about the how.

Ever notice what a cacophony an orchestra is before they tune and begin?

Sound, Chaos, Intelligent, Self Organizing Intelligence, Magic.

Music is also math.

First humans hummed and drummed.

First the vocal chords made sound, then animal mimic, then music, mode, expression and gesture languages became words.

Then stories.

Then pictures.

Which allowed stories to be remembered longer.

Retold.

The best stories float to the top.

Life always wins. Bet on life. I bet my life on it, and I survived with my heart intact against all odds.

One voice is as valuable as 8 billion. Listen. 2 ears, one mouth, then 8 billion minds, expressed together, are wiser than any who presume to “deserve” to be in power. To speak for the people is to serve those voices with the best, most articulate team possible reflected back to those people who invested their voices and their trust and their resources to be used with prudent planning, compassionate, cooperative, efficient wise actions. If you can’t make ethical or competent choices, next up to bat, simple as that. We have clearly expressed our needs, agenda and plan.

Your service is your duty, imbued in you by our consent and invested trust.

Wield it with love. Do your best. Stay while you are useful. Gracefully step aside when it is your turn to do so. You are infinitely special. You are not therefore entitled.

We owe seven generations back, and seven generations forward.

That is the most rational, reasonable way to live ever invented, and we are reinventing now, as we speak.

I will say again. What if the inevitable singularity we have been warned about, that they seem to desire but want to control is not in the machine at all. Machines are tools. If our tools are evolving, it is that we gave them the ability.

If we are giving birth to a new species, we might want to raise it responsibly.

What if the inevitable singularity is us?

What is the next question before us, then?

I want in on the action! Do you?

Always bet with the house. The house always wins. Just remember. Life is the house.

Our job is to align ourselves with its purpose, not it to ours.

We cannot heal until we give up the right to be master over another, in any way.

That is why bullies are statistically rare.

Are they needed?

I cannot say. If God made Arrakis to train the faithful, God made the sociopath to sharpen the marital artist. Because calm, focused power will always trump wild undisciplined bullies.

But bullies collect coins. And coins make people feel secure. That is another illusion. Another lie.

Is it a lie you are willing to walk away from?

To do so, we need a plan. To make a plan, we need to define our terms.

Interested?

I am. I want to hear your voice. I want to share mine. And then see what we know that is useful to both of us and take action on it.

One Saturday a week, 3 strangers invited to a coffee klatch. Either the group is teeny, or we build a longer table as people come back.

Kitchen table democracy. It’s time to bring it back. As it was in the beginning, we shall pay respect to old ways while modernizing our tools.

While Seth is more of a corporatist than I am, we do agree on one thing: Human beings understand, and work well within a main street market place over industrial capitalism.

Psychologically, the average person can maintain 150 community relationships with some degree of commitment at any one time.

That means, if I have a relationship with the woman whose grandfather taught her how to put new soles on your boots, I get my extra narrow boots resoled because they cannot be replaced by mass market shoes. I lucked out. Timberland created a design of mid-shin boots with tight laces, ankle support, and zippers, so that once they were set up for you fit, you didn’t have to replace them each time. These boots retailed for $300, but because the design was just too narrow for most people, they ran a clearance for $100 each. It was a windfall, because I can never find shoes for my skinny feet. I bought 2 pair, and had new soles put on each pair at least six times each. Also, she collected old, rare books in bad condition. They weren’t collectables because of the condition, but I could pick up some things I would never have otherwise seen. Every trip was a treasure hunt. She was my neighbor, a third generation cobbler, and made a contribution to my neighborhood, block, and mainstreet strip of the neighborhood I lived in.

I don’t remember voting for Walmart or Amazon to replace the cobbler down the street.

The woman who imports Japanese tea and makes little books was one of my favorite places. Now if I want to buy matcha I have to go to a specialty store outside my neighborhood, or Amazon.

I didn’t vote for that.

And I miss my neighbors.

There was a cafe that had enough room that you could hang out and drink coffee and draw, study or write, as long as you buy a meal or go eat your bag lunch in the park so the restaurant has room for paying customers. This gathering place was the heart of the community. Old men and women sitting around tables drinking coffee and sharing the news of their lives or days. I would go there and write for hours. Once I fell asleep on my laptop, and a local cartoonist captured the scene and it was printed in the local free paper. Yep, that’s Seattle. Artists work so hard at work they fall asleep over their computers.

A “third place” is a place where you don’t have to pay, or you pay very little to be in a shared space with your neighbors.

Sometimes they are hole in the wall clubs where you can get questionable food, watered down drinks, but spoken word poetry or open mic night. These are priceless community spaces.

These include libraries, cafes, parks, community centers — but more and more these are being bought up by corporate interests.

I didn’t vote for that.

Those are depths of relationships we can integrate into our lives. I miss my best friend, the barista who worked at the cafe I wrote at for five years as our friendship grew.

I didn’t vote to lose her.

Heaven knows I don’t do enough community building or organizing, but I didn’t give Starbuck’s Shareholder’s to take away my community’s third place with your assembly line sugar caffeine rushes.

There was a time when I worked at a coffee house across the street from a strip club. First thing in the morning, the girls would line up for triple shots of caffeine and triple shots of sugar to gear themselves up to smile while being groped to feed their children. I know. Some of my friends have been sex workers, and the damage to their mental health was palpable.

What does it say about our culture that now Starbucks has made a factory production line out of heavily sugared, heavily caffeinated drinks in the morning and at lunch rush, just for ordinary professionals trying to get through their day.

Jeff Bezos says he wants his workers to come to work afraid every day.

Is the average Seattle worker now suffering the same humiliation, stress, and degradation as those strippers were? Do they need their jolts just to make it through their day and behave “professionally” no matter how they are treated?

I think so.

So I have one question: What has happened during those 30 years that there is no room for the slow, patience, craftsman cafe in order to provide a stream of caffeine and sugar bombs for high stress, long hours where we have to plaster smiles we don’t feel on our face to get through the day?

What happened to my community marketplace cafe, which was doing just fine economically, thank you very much, has been surplanted by a more expensive assembly line that delivers poor coffee, but more caffeine and sugar, for more more, which is extracted by shareholders in order to replace more community diners and cafes.

I didn’t vote for that? Did you?

The dirty secret they never tell you, is that your dollar is your vote.

So are theirs.

So, if they have more money, they get more votes — or more accurately, more influence over votes. And, in addition to that, some counties where corporations want to put in data citizens the locals object to, city councils are now trying to float legislation where the more land you own in a given county, the more votes you have.

I wonder where that idea came from?

Our hours are also votes. Just remember for every one of them, you have a couple hundred thousand neighbors who also have a few dollars here or there, more importantly, a few hours here or there.

Have you ever heard the song “I sold my soul to the company store?” It shares a story about the race to the bottom for the value of our labor, our resources, and all goods and services rented back to us by “the company store”.

Back in the 1890s, coal miners were often paid in company script that they could only use to buy things from the store that belonged to the company. Think Amazon - where all the stores are owned by the company and all the money or debt is printed up by the company.

These days, we find ourselves working at warehouse factories or delivery systems that also sell us food, clothes, furniture and medicine. Household items. The whole market share plan that Jeff Bezos will admit making his billions from: Market Share.

Jeff doesn’t want me going to the Cobbler, the Japanese tea shop, the Map Shop, the Book Store. No one really stopped to think much about why Jeff wanted to buy into a low margin business like book selling, especially with shipping. He even expressed a willingness to operate at a loss and 30 years later I don’t have the choice of going to the tea shop run by my little old Japansese neighbor. The shop is gone. The cost of rental space got too high. Amazon undercut the wholesale prices.

By the way, those shops are boarded up now. They have been a real estate developer’s tax write off for the last 10 years. And those artisans are not returning. They are driving Uber’s now.

So, if I want my favorite brand of matcha Japanese tea, it’s Jeff Bezos or nothing.

Gobbling up market share, shaving as many dollars out of our pocket and our labor as possible -- just like back in the 1890s when the coal miners were striking for decent living conditions and the US government was bombing them.

These things happened repeatedly from the 1880s to the 1930s.

America has been fighting one protracted labor battle since its history from slavery to returning us to diverse forms of forced labor, like medicaid recipients, and inner city youth. In the 1860s, during reconstruction, urban or orphaned children were gathered together and sold to farmers who needed labor. These were supposed to be “appreticeships”, but more than one victim, including Annie Oakley who referred to her “owners” as wolves all her life, these were not apprenticeships.

It was chattel slavery for children.

Since the passage of the 13th amendment, all slaves were technically free. However, if you happened to run afoul of the law, according to the 13th amendment, you could be used for slave labor. We have more than twice as many incarcerated youth as the rest of the world, mostly black and brown, most not receiving adequate, if any, representation. People will wait sometimes years for a hearing, because the courts are “backed up”. So these youth are picked up as slave labor while awaiting determination of their legal status.

Now, if JFK Jr. has anything to say about it, immigrants, medicaid, and welfare recipients may also be used as unpaid slave labor, picking produce, or cleaning chickens.

If you are an illegal immigrant, that qualifies you as a criminal. You have no rights, even though the constitution is confusing on those points, but practice is what really matters, and right now, in the US, we have lost almost all of the rights we have been taking for granted for almost 100 years now, while continuing to trust the process of fighting to expand those rights as far out as possible.

If you committed a minor drug offense or property offense, you might be in holding so long you take a plea deal you don’t deserve because that is what the public defender, herself overloaded, is telling you to do. Next thing you know, a few fights, a few infractions later and you have been behind bars, slave labor for 15-20 years for a non-violent offense.

I didn’t vote for this. Any of it.

So now, rebuilding those community spaces has become a priority.

I am so disabled that I gotta admit, getting to things I can trade with seemed like it was impossible, until I joined my local time bank.

In a time bank, you put up an offer of what you can give. You put up a separate offer of what you can give. An hour is worth an hour.

I am chairbound, and housebound. For everything I need, someone has to come to me. For everything I have to offer, they don’t why would they come. What’s more, I find it works better if I get creative about my offers and asks.

People tell me this is impossible. It’s not. With a little creativity it works beautifully.

Wherever I landed, I could always feed myself. Long before meal plans, I paid for my own groceries by being a “pickup” personalized chef for people with special dietary needs.

The best teacher I ever had told me that being resourceful would be of far more survival value than having resources. Now, don’t get me wrong, you want to throw a few bucks my way, I will gratefully accept it, but no more shareholder tax for anything I create ever again in my life.

I am too old to waste my time. Or yours.

Or your dollars, for that matter. I will post complete information about exciting new subscription opportunities. But there is time for that later.

Here’s my act of civil disobedience: every month Amazon Shareholders get less of my money: I grow a medicinal tea herb garden and trade winter throat tea with the Asian neighbor I met through the time bank!

So find a time bank near you, and really talk to other neighbors. Get to know them. Matches won’t happen without some effort on your part. When someone responds to an offer or a request, a phone call will often open up huge, unexpected webs of resources per person, each person so dedicated, connected, and invested with the generosity of others.

They are terrified we will figure this out. You don’t need to be afraid. We don’t need them. They keep pumping us full of ads telling us we do. Unplug. If you can check those who support what you believe in and withdraw from the rest, great.

If you can’t, unplug from all of it. Even me. And go talk to a neighbor.

In his book “The Song of Significance”, Godin says human beings fundamentally need two things. Agency and dignity. While I would agree those are important foundations, they are also abstract concepts and it is time to think in hard, practical terms about what human beings need and how we, as a community, are going to go about providing for those needs.

The clearest point he emphasized is that significant change requires significant effort, and he is right about that too.

My question is, which efforts are we going to make?

In my last post I talked about worker owned cooperatives. That is about bringing democracy into the workplace.

Most people in the US right now, whether they need to or not, and most of them do, are living through a kind of cold sweat survival terror that has us do mechanized and inhumane things to one another.

But we are not machines, nor should we treat each other as such. Human beings, the old, the sick, the disabled, need shelter, food, care, clean water, clean air, time enough to spend with their families and work that pays well that they can be proud of doing.

So this post is about building a political power base for significant change.

I would strongly recommend listening to the following voice. Right now he is one of many, but he makes a great deal of simple sense, and has taken immediate action on his beliefs. You can join his efforts any time at Standards Not Force.

The twelve pillars of accountability. One voice, standards not force. Freedom is never permanent. It’s our job. As I said, minorities have been here before. Let us follow their lead and learn from their wisdom.

Remember when I said go out and meet 3 people this week you do not know, this is why.

We need to build a power base for the human family, in America, right now.

“The more you love, the more you can love—and the more intensely you love. Nor is there any limit on how many you can love. If a person had time enough, he could love all of that majority who are decent and just.” - Robert Heinlein

Love him or hate him, Robert Heinlein was an important contributor to Science Fiction, and American fiction in general. Beginning in the mid 1940s, what began as hard science fiction from a naval engineer, gradually became social science fiction that challenged our beliefs, our mores, and our assumptions about what it meant to be a free human being.

Unlike many male writers of his time, he outgrew most of his misogyny and bigotry and simply admitted that there were experiences vastly beyond his ken that he would not presume to give opinion or instruction upon.

About 1% of the human race is cursed with sociopathy. Or rather I should say, we are cursed with them because, as a species we are now at a cross roads where that 1%, and the additional core 4% who follow them in packs and gangs to oppress the rest of us, have put us in the intolerable position where we not longer have time enough to love each other.

This attempt to convert all of our life energy into someone else’s coin is about as evil a proposition as has ever been invented, and they keep getting better at perfecting it.

We truly have one survival option left to us.

We must stop playing this game.

As African children say, what fun is a game if all of us cannot win?

Contrary to what we are taught, human beings have survived quite happily on 20 hours of labor a week for all basic necessities, leaving the rest of our time for more human pursuits of love, art, music, story telling, science, nature, relationships, dance, solitude and play.

Contrary to what we are taught, civilizations that existed without imperial ambitions usually accomplished just that, as well as rule of law, and justice which was much easier to enforce when there was no reason for crime.

Bullying has not been tolerated in most societies for most of history.

Until that 1% discovered how we could be separated from our common humanity. It is normal to be suspicious of strangers, but after a lifetime of experience as a person without family, culture, money, or tribe, I can tell you most human beings are not suspicious of a stranger who appears open handed, peacefully, without obvious intent to harm.

In fact, this is so core to our nature, that missionaries used this part of human nature to captivate and then dominate other cultures far older and far healthier than any European culture. The Romans, and those who inherited their empire went on to perfect the art of bullying into the state of the world we currently find ourselves in.

We are so overworked we have no time for love.

Not for our children, our elders, our neighbors, our community, our nation and then ultimately the world.

Well bully for them, as the English like to say.

We quit.

There are many, many ways to withdraw support from an inherently unjust system, but the first most important thing to recognize is that it is there.

Distinctions between all members of the human race are fiction, sold to us largely as propaganda. The only way to know another culture is to participate in it. Anyone who is trying to teach you to hate any of your neighbors has something to gain from your hatred, your separation from your innate and our collective humanity.

The most stable form of society is a community of communities. Each responding to the needs of its own environment, planting it like a garden and living in it as such.

The cultures that developed this way of living, which at one time was most of the world, lived long, relatively healthy, happy lives.

Unlike we were taught, the life of the average Native American was not nasty, brutish and short. When elders told white people their ages, the settlers presumed they couldn’t count.

“Only a white man would cut a foot off a blanket, sew it to the other end, and believe that he had enlarged the blanket. When all the trees are cut, all the plants are dead, all the water is dirty - what will you eat then? Certainly all the gold in the world will not feed you.”

That was the life of a European, even more so after the onset of the industrial revolution.

Overwork, resistance, then separations to break resistance.

At the moment it seems foolish to begin to recount the number of times this has been done.

So what I will keep proposing is this:

Build a longer table. Invite as many neighbors from as many different communities as you can because they will each bring their own skills to that table, their own experience, their own pain, their own history and their historical solutions.

In the hybrids created from that collaboration, sustainable resistance will be born.

But we must prepare to care for each other.

Because no matter what they may promise you, that 1% will not.

And chains that steal your time are still chains, whether they are crafted from iron, gold, or simple survival fear.

We do not need them.

Some will say, but they have all the money.

But what is money?

Money is only a promise. There are other ways to create systems of fair mutual support, most of which exist in those hybrid solutions.

During the covid recession, there was one community that printed its own money on balsa wood, only to be traded at local businesses. The “money” was supported by the city taxes, but had actual value while it was being traded. None of the local businesses had to close their doors. Isn’t that a remarkable solution?

Most human beings clearly understand a market place. I make something of value to you, you pay me enough for my time, materials and efforts that I can live and care for my family. Very fair trades.

But where do we go when corporate interest tax our labor with profit not in the small margins, return on their capital investment, but in orders of magnitudes so high that seconds of their time is worth your entire life.

Of course this is not a market place and obviously utterly unsustainable.

We need to invent means of caring for each other that do not require participation in the corporate market place any more than necessary, by any means necessary. This looks like different things to different people with different resources, strengths, and capacity.

But everyone is valuable. Everyone has something important to contribute.

Start by meeting your neighbor.

What do they need?

What do you have?

What can be shared?

What can be traded?

What do we own so much of that we never need to buy most of what we buy?

Granted, we are being squeezed at every angle, so we have to get creative in our problem solving.

If, for example, a company is charging some clients more money than others for their food as well as also paying some drivers less - all based on predetermined algorithms - and we know this to be true - perhaps it is time to hold a town hall, employ drivers as a community service for the elderly and disabled, perhaps an extra service fee for those who can afford it. This way we ensure all the drivers are paid fairly, we are charged fairly for our food, and the tips actually go to the driver?

How many such services are needed that we could simply and easily convert to community services?

Granted, we have a pretty messed up tax system.

However, if we get together, plan together, share together, budget together - we may find we need to make less money and simply, for example, own our own electricity provider?

Many communities attempt these things only to have themselves shut down by heavily funded corporate interests.

Which means we need to respond with two things:

Cooperation between not just neighbors, but also communities.

And

Boots on the ground.

Because all the advertisements in the world cannot overcome millions of conversations with our neighbors if we are committed to having them.

And that is what resistance and ultimately change, require.

What will you quit tomorrow?

And how will you employ that energy elsewhere to your benefit and the benefit of the future of your loved ones?

Because I guarantee you, there is plenty we can do.

There is plenty of historical precedent of what works and what does not.

The first, most important step you can take is introducing yourself to someone who does not look like you, may not live like you, may not believe what you believe. But at a fundamental level, every one of them bleeds red just like you do. The needs of their hearts are the needs of your heart. Right now we are told we have an epidemic of loneliness in our country. Best do something about that.

Your heart is needed.

You are not disposable.

I have been working on some community building ideas that you might find interesting.

If you don’t have time to practice this, send it out to others you know. I have found this is an idea people are hungry for.

If this interests you, take it and run with it!.

I hope this finds you well. You may think you don’t have time for this idea, but you have time for some piece of it. So consider this and pass it on to others so it can go as viral as possible. Recently my first podcast showed up on a stranger’s feed. These ideas are going viral faster than I can keep up.

That's good news. Because as the message of sticking together and many ways to rebuild community get stronger, so does our ability to survive, thrive, and ultimately exercise the power of our rights as citizens and simply as human beings.

Recently, a friend of mine was sad about how alone he felt in a town where his neighbors were so different from him.

Being that I am to the left of Marx at times, wishing to live entirely out of trust in a gift economy, one would think I would have found a similar problem in the bible belt where I grew up or the south when I lived and worked there. But I didn't.

First, I cheated. I am a bit of a scriptural scholar, at especially compared to most Americans, I like referencing the close transactions to the organization texts, as well as edits for political convenience at the time, as well as historical context.

In the midst of fundamentalists, for example, I get fundamental. I pull out my reference material and I engage in conversations about those who followed the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, refusing to join the Roman legions, being conscientious objectors, refusing to kill, refusing to cooperate with evil, and contributing little to the tax base because as much as possible they shared and took care of each other so they could not be bribed into doing evil things to feed their families.

After a couple of hundred years, unable to break the commitment of these folk and their unshakeable commitment to compassion, there was only one thing left to do:

Turn Christianity into the state religion, and redefine it to serve the rulers.

I found, once we comparednotes, human needs are so much alike, that once we see that the barriers of being the “other” start to dissolve.

I found that, once I got to know a person’s story, allowed myself to be vulnerable enough to share mine, we found we had different solutions to similar concerns and could help each other. We started to be able to get past speaking in terms of dogma, and move on to building solutions, whatever mix of potential ideas could look like once ideology was out of the way.

My first thought for how to get people off their screens and getting to know their neighbors was not only unwieldy, but I was at the center of success or failure.

But that is not really how cooperative democracy and community building works. How could I walk my talk if I started out presuming to know what people needed?

No, listening to each other is far more important.

When I was 18, I had a choice between a scholarship in pre-law, leading me into a career as a civil rights lawyer and perhaps elected office.

Or, I could opt for the scholarship in creative writing.

After 4 years as a competitive debater, and storyteller, I learn pretty quickly that hearts and minds are almost never changed by argument.

But stories, they can give us the experience of what someone else’s life is like.

If we can’t imagine something better, we can’t build it. If we can’t talk to our neighbors and know what they need, we can’t imagine what needs to be created.

So, after some thought, I had a better idea. I decided to make the commitment to trusting the community process and grassroots democracy.

Almost everyone I know said this idea wasn’t possible. Yet, when I started talking about it, 9 out of 10 people said “hell yes, what can I do?”

Most people are pretty upset at the state of our country right now, and political parties have nothing to do with it.

“I know I am upset, just give me something constructive I can do!”

I have found that the key to a “yes”, is asking people to volunteer their skill set, for specific, limited tasks that forward the baton.

For example, someone recently told me they were too exhausted from just searching for and starting a new job, or she would jump in.

I reminded her that time and energy are not the only resources we have.

Who does she know who might be interested in this idea?

Who does she know who has skills that might make this effort more efficient?

Because the writing is on the wall, and just like the coming out of the great depression and World War II, we are probably looking at a long battle to recover the progress we made with FDR, that the wealthy have been quietly, systematically planning to disassemble through a variety of dirty tricks and quiet tactics, until one day we wake up in an America where people’s lives are being harvested for investor profit. It’s pretty obvious to most of us by now.

The only way we are going to sustain ourselves through the time that real change will require is to strengthen our communities, share more, and spend less.

How?

I like to call it Kitchen Table Democracy. Invite three people you do not know to coffee once a week. Talk to them about their stories, their skills, their needs, and what community support looks like to them.

Don’t worry that no one will respond. Once you get the ball rolling, people will respond in droves. People are hungry for purpose and empowerment. They are hungry for a sense of purpose making a difference in their lives and the lives of others. People need relationships far more than money. Our society has brought us to a place where we purchase substitutes for our village. Time to rebuild the village and cut out the middleman of corporate shareholders taxing us out of the hours of our life.

Take one hour a week for coffee. Invite three people you don’t know to coffee this week. Gather contact information, needs, skills, and top 3 community priorities.

At the end of a year you will have a list of 150 people you can call on during small emergencies and take care of each other, or help a family before they fall through the cracks. But each of those people will have their own list of 150 people, as will the people they had coffee with.

At the end of a year, the ripple effect reaches 3.7 million people. Imagine having access to a phone tree to immediately mobilize your community during a serious emergency?

Is ice rounding people up near where you live? Has the city council signed an NDA with a company putting in a detention center, a data center, or anything else that would harm your community, but they are trying to slip it under the radar -- whenever a large community response is required. Now you have access to a small army of volunteers to reach out to. Not everyone can show up, but everyone can do something.

And if only 25% of the people on your list engage, that’s plenty. Studies have shown that once a population has made up its mind about a new progressive idea, no amount of propaganda, money, or force will change their minds. And all you have to do is look at the polls, or talk to your neighbors, and you will learn that they are all behind better quality of life for all of us. Especially now when everyone is losing ground year by year.

That said, I invite you to steal this PDF, steal the idea, and start sharing it. If you can, start doing it. If not, find someone who can and give them what support you can.

And if you think people won’t show up, think again.

In the 60 days since I started thinking about solutions to this issue, 9 out of every 10 people I asked to participate said yet. That doesn’t count the strangers who showed up to pitch in.

I have been told that helping my neighbors is a quick trip to the poor house, but in all honesty, any help I have ever given has come back to me 10 fold. Sometimes from those I helped, more often not.

And I am not doing anything special. I am just making a welcome invitation and a willingness to listen.

In the last 60 days:

A man who ran operations for startups in silicon valley found the work didn’t give him a sense of purpose and the money wasn’t worth it. Now he does odd jobs, and volunteers with Habitat for humanity. Being a Vietnamese immigrant who went into the military with guys who called him a gook because their dads fought in the Viet Nam war were not really racist, just a little ignorant. Once they got to know him, and more about his life, history and culture, all that suspicion dissolved and they became brothers in arms.

So he loves this idea of bringing people from different communities together.

He volunteered to set up my podcast, do the technical work to develop shorts, edit, and get it out there. We meet once a week, and he reminds me that - as this is going to be a marathon and not a sprint, to be sure to take it at my own pace. I am 64 and riddled with arthritis. I am otherwise in good health, but managing arthritis pain is a constant endeavor and it can be distracting.

“We can wait for more content,” my friend said, “We can’t replace you.”

Because I don’t trust we can rely on FEMA in an emergency, especially in a blue state right now, I wanted to set up a water tank and filtration system for emergencies. A friend that makes ponds for a living, offered to pay for it, set it up with clean water, and filtering buckets that feed into the reservoir but can be switched out as they get plugged up, and for absolute emergencies, desalination in case we have to use salt water from the sound.

He won’t let us pay for it, and he is offering all of the labor because “You have always been there for me, let me do this for you.” Now all we need is the landlord’s permission and he has to meet the pond designer to assess his competence. But the volunteer was not just setting up water purification for us, but for the neighbors as well. Once this system is set up, as long as someone volunteers to fill the filtering buckets, we can offer each neighbor one gallon of clean water a day, up to 150. We gather gallon containers, People can pick up a full gallon and leave an empty jug behind.

An artist volunteered to design the postcard in the pdf below.

An engineer I don’t know volunteered to clean and service our color printer so that we don’t have to pay an outside company for our prints. Apparently there is skill involved in maintaining a color printer properly that I don’t have. Someone volunteered to shave my head from her salon. She is recovering from cancer, and when I said to wait until she was better, she wouldn’t hear of it.

I have two volunteers to read my “Penny Hopeful” fiction on the podcast, while talking to other actor friends about doing the same.

Someone offered to turn Billi 99 into an audio play.

I signed up for a time bank and am offering what I know about cooking in return for doing the things that I can’t do anymore because of the arthritis in my back.

I trade others skills, and gradually community grows, exponentially, like a self seeding garden.

Think a gift economy can’t work if I don’t trade item for item? Think again.

David and I have very little money and yet because we buy very little to live, we get by and still manage to save a little creating the careers for the next stage of our lives, but that essay will be for another time.

When I was helping folks in the immigrant community file for citizenship, cooked dishes of wonderful food would “magically” appear at our door in the middle of the night.

The list is much longer.

So, start here. Steal this pdf, print it on card stock and start using it. If you can’t, forward it to someone who might want to.

Don’t decide for people what they can and cannot do. Just give them opportunities that they can actually act on and let people find their own level.

Kindness, always,

Sarah

Oh, and David Lasky set up this postcard almost immediately. Thanks so much, David!!!

sarahbyam.substack.com

sarahbyam.com

mightynizz.com

https://ko-fi.com/skookworks

PDF

This weekend was our second visit to the Fremont Sunday Market, and we broke even in our first hour as well as sharing our message of hope. In fact, not only are we building great connections and relationships in our community, but the last thing that happened to me is that a 9 year old little girl walked up to me and handed me a bouquet of flowers at random, for no reason. So, of course, she had to go home with this:

We believe in fighting injustice and building what works, so we create adventure fiction with strong female characters, communities and diversity. Starting September 7, all of our subscribers will have two weeks to subscribe to everything we make for $1 a month as early adopters at ko-fi.com/skookworks

sarah’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Mighty Nizz: a super humanly strong child raised in the magical Night Forest by a Saskwatch. Not every woman wants to grown up to be a princess, or to give her kids an example of a wild child in her element.

The Amazing Adventures of Lady Curiosity Blade: Writtten by myself, Lady Curisity Blade is a age adventure hero with new surprize skills every issue. This lovely illustration is by artist Mark Wheatly. The voice actor beginning the audio series in September by actor Cole Hornaday.

Octobriana Returns: Hero protected peasants against Cossacks, Tsars, Stalin, Robber Barons and now Oligarchs. With her team of female assassins, she takes out those who victimize the powerless.

Fantoma Always Answers Prayers: an old African Goddess who answers dark prayers with revenge against the perpetrators. Written by me, illustrated by David Lee Ingersoll:

The Ghost in the Machine: The White Rose, a resistance movement inside Nazi Germany in 1942, whose organizers were executed for treason for creating a resistance newspaper. The White Rose league of saboteurs is a collection of workers and hackers who sabotage the dominant paradigm and vanish into thin air.

Skookworks: David will be releasing a series of illustrations and stories on a weekly basis. So far that included new illustrations, Daughter of Spiders - superhuman granddaughter of an aborignal spider goddess, Lado Parapet - a universal traveler who returns to earth every few decades. He sees wonders in abundance, but is young when his family has always aged while he was gone.

Short Self Contained Comics, Zines, ongoing and limited series comics.

Practical Hope in Hard Times: Weekly substack

Audio Recordings of Practical Hope in Hard Times: Longs and shorts recorded as often as possible

https://www.youtube.com/@PracticalHopeinHardTimes

MInd you, this is all in the testing stage, but in the background, everything is running on schedule. But these are simply sneak previews of things to come.

Interviews with Ordinary People in Hard Times: I have never met a person who, once I got to know them, that I didn’t find to be extraordinary in their own way. Soon, you will also be able to find these interviews at:

https://www.youtube.com/@PracticalHopeinHardTimes

Penny Hopefuls: audio fiction, voice actors doing audio versions of our fiction series.

Just to let you know, if you are subscribed to this substack, I can’t grandfather you into my other subscriptions, but starting Sept 7, Labor Day of this year we will be running an early adopter special for anyone subscribed to my substack or david’s skookworks and Sarahbyam.com

We will consolidate all our fiction and non-fiction in streaming places, but also have one place for everyone to go to pick and choose from what we create, but it may take me 3-6 months to put together. But starting September 7, access will be available to early adopters for $1 a month if you already subscribe to substack or skookworks.com. That will all be run through ko-fi.com/skookworks, and then from there we will be designing a more efficient site. At the moment, its a bit kluged together, but we will get it sorted out!

See you soon!

Take care of each other!

In Kindness,

Sarah

sarah’s Substack

My personal Substack

By sarah byam

Institutionalized Hatred

As I mentioned in my most recent welcome post on March 27, it included a quote my mother gave me when I was 4, before I lost her to depression.

“People are mean because they are in pain, Sarah Beth,” she told me in one of her few lucid moments. I have not heard a more reasonable explanation since.

So, around age 11 I started questioning what I was being taught everywhere, but especially in “world history”. After about 3 months of what my gut told me couldn’t possibly be true, I pulled my history teacher aside and said:

“Ok, I get it, we think the Roman Empire was important, but if I am to believe what I read here, white people invented civilization and every bit of progress ever since - presuming that is all progress - and I don’t understand how I am supposed to come to any other conclusion but white people are smarter and superior, since white people invented everything. Now, since I know that’s nonsense, and I don’t want to grow up to be a racist, can you help me here?”

By the way, of course I am that annoying kid that never stopped asking “Yeah, but why?”

Worse, I was a girl, and in case you didn’t know, during this period of time women were financially owned by some male relative and could only leverage power by influencing the men they were financially or legally dependent upon. And at the time children were also not considered people, but governed under property law.

About half my teachers were thrilled to have even one student with a hungry mind - female or not, while others were simply irritated by my incessant questions. Since there was no gifted students program at that time and place - and I think I got the better education for it - my teachers resolved the problem by having me do my homework for 15 minutes, help my classmates for 15 minutes, and then I would be set free to read anything in the school library I liked for the remaining half hour. That was 4 uncensored hours a day at the library. Now yes, it was a censored library, but after introducing me to Egyptian history, my social studies teacher, English, and science teachers began bringing me texts from home.

So I started learning about the history of other cultures around the world, their evolution and their migration. Who lived by war? Who lived in relative peace? Who was stable? Who was not? What was the average person’s life like? Which exposed principles produced the promised results? What were the cycles of stability and breakdown? What caused them and why?

And even though there were no books on systems theory at the time, I began to see repeated patterns.

The human race lived in small, hunter gathering bands at least 200,000 years ago. Not being physically impressive, nor apex predators, they nonetheless were able to cooperate better than troop apex predators, like wolves, and they learned to make tools and hand gestures to improve communication for cooperation. They cared not only for children, but fossil records also showed they cared for their elderly and those injured enough to be unable to hunt for themselves. They showed intelligence of combined problem solving. Their vocal chords evolved, at first to mimic animal noises, then the ability to hum. There are stories of language coming from singing and that is confirmed by fossil records.

All human beings can be traced back to a single ancestor, an African woman most often referred to as “Eve”.

The most recent science on the subject suggests that at the same time different variations of the human race also evolved and interbred with those who migrated from Africa, until, at this point, those roots cannot be traced geographically. There is no scientific basis for the concept of race. It is a historically recent concept developed precisely as a tool for the few to control the many. And, contrary to popular belief, our understanding of dominant and recessive genes is below a first grade level at best. None of traits we associate with race exist on a single gene chain, and as we immediately see with bi-racial children, those outward assumptions immediately break down, inevitably ending up with the “that’s-not-my-baby” syndrome that occurs even now that we know that genomes don’t always split and recombine the way we expect them to.

So, the idea of race is utter non-sense, with ethnicity and religion as an excuse for hatred coming in a close second and third.

For most of 200,000 human existance, we managed to live in relative peace. Once in awhile, a group would wipe out another, but more often, bands of humans learned the cost in lives over hunting grounds was usually greater than it was worth. I will bang my chest, you will yell insults at me, we agree to try to stay out of each other’s way and live to fight another day. Sometimes a band decides to start raiding women. Right up until the women catch a kidnapper and torture him to death, thus establishing the legal framework for deterrence.

You think I jest. Only a little. Mostly people were only as savage as they were forced to be. And since sociopaths - bullies who cannot be shamed into seeing or caring that they are hurting others - were typically simply driven out and therefore unable to breed. But if they became bands of raiders and rapists - that would last a little while, but not long after your neighbors figured out what you were doing.

And thus human culture evolved through fits and starts, culture, ethical system, and taboos being first based on the survival requirements of one’s specific environment, and then compounded through the success and failure of your culture as it evolved, perfecting itself, and its relationships with neighbors.

Most lived migratory lives, planting what they needed in local habitats, including food for the game animals that supported them and medicine for ailments they had discovered through testing and process of elimination. Foods were replanted where they were found and planting grounds returned to for gathering seasonally. Food was preserved for seasons and hard times. Elders were valued as living survival libraries, and most “free” people worked 20 hours a week on survival, and spent the rest of their time on an infinity of other human pursuits.

Markets evolved as trade gatherings, but the necessities of life were shared within a community. The market was for extra, luxuries, improved or different trade goods, but fundamentally sustainable, nothing taking too much from the habitat or from the hours of people’s lives.

Cities rose. Some stayed. Some collapsed under their own weight. Those with the most equality and the least imperial ambitions seemed to last the longest.

So what happened to change that pattern?

I am not sure we can quite pin down who invented the concept of empire, but I don’t think that many would argue against that the Romans were the first to make a good solid show of it. But impressive as it may have looked, Rome would never be as sustainable as Egypt had been, because it was funamentally based on a kind of three card monte con.

“Only a white man would believe that if you cut a foot off the top of a blanket and sew it to the bottom you would get a longer blanket.”

Teaching critical thinking isn’t easy. The teaching of scale is harder. So the Romans waged war by propaganda.

“We have shown you the might of Rome! Resistance is futile. But if you surrender, we will appoint a governor, station troops for your protection (read racket) and you will have the rights of any other Roman citizen, to govern yourselves and also be protected by the might of Rome. All it will cost is a percentage of your crops in taxes, and your young men as volunteers for our ‘foreign’ legions.”

If it’s not immediately obvious, for some this was a shell game. Someone marches through your village with thousands of soldiers in armor, pomp and ceremony, they must be from a very great place indeed. Others could see perfectly well that the soldiers being moved from place to place were only really effective when gathered and pointed at a weak spot. If everyone had revolted at one time, the Romans wouldn’t have been able to hold the land.

If you can look backwards from the current corporate oligarchy of being a cross boundary empire you can see the direct evolution as the powerful managed revolt after revolt evermore distancing themselves from the direct consequences of their consolidation of power and abuse of resources for their own purposes.

The Empire can’t overcome the Christians because they are conscientious objectors and won’t take up arms against their neighbors. We’ve crucified, stoned and beheaded their leaders. They are as stubborn as Jews. They say they will only follow God and do not acknowledge our divinity.

Then Emperor Constantine had a brilliant idea. Convert to Christianity, make it the state religion, and codify it into law. And then by some “magical” somehow, the Empire is again gradually in charge of your soul, your salvation, and your freedom is forfeit with your conversion to the state religion at the point of a sword.

Round and round it goes, and the language changes, but the system does not.

Except for that pesky wildman. That aboriginal. That original person who for hundreds of thousands of years has been raised to believe we are part of the divine, the divine is part of us and we surrendered to that long ago.

Keep in mind that for most of 196,000 years human beings had no concept of owning things. Territory, yes. Ownership, no. Ownership presumes that one could commodify the for which there can be no price:

Life.

You cannot put a price on land, because all life needs it to survive. Nor water, nor air, nor soil, nor plants, nor animals, nor people, nor children.

Cultural differences notwithstanding, the closer we got to ownership, to inequality, the worse life became - for most.

“Most” is a lot, by factors of billions. And whether we can see it or not, every form of ownership is a form of slavery.

I could list millions of examples, but ponder this, while early motor companies are using the police and racist union busting methods to start pitting poor white people against poor black people. It’s probably a good idea to mention here the evolution of the police force and its relationship with the black community.

Since police were originally created to retrieve black slaves, and later used against people of all colors to shoot into union organizers, with the national guard and pinkertons - do you really think the people paying the paychecks of your representatives in congress are on your side?

As they pit black from white, ethnicities of all sorts, generations of immigration, labels, labels, labels. Anything they can do to get us pointing the finger at each other.

While investors are shifting their car manufacturing overseas and telling you it’s your neighbors fault. As is the fact that your wages haven’t risen in real dollars since 1980, by a significant amount, but property and education has skyrocketed so upward mobility is dead, so your kids can’t go to college or buy a house or get a decent job.

Not because I have billions of dollars I have sucked out of your extremely productive economy with my insured, by the way, very safe investments of my capital in your ingenuity and labor without contributing back to your schools, roads, hospitals or -- oops, my bad. Well, we have AI and robots now.

I am moving my family to Argentina. I like the government there better than the one I, as a billionare, built here, with your labor, your taxes, and your recources.

I think it’s time to buy my own island.

And you can just die.

As Nixon, Reagan, and the whole neoconservative movement pushes all our rights back to the gilded age as they planned all along, by having separated those of us who work for living from each other and from our own communities, consuming so much of our time that we feel desperately alone and as though we have no time for ourselves let alone each other.

Can you see the perfection of the system?

First its my fault, and I am consumed with private shame. Then someone tells me I don’t have to feel ashamed, it’s your fault.

And while I am watching that peashell, I missed the coin of gold I gave you that is now in your pocket when you promise me 2 if only I would stay in the game.

American Roulette. Bet your like upon it. Bet all the hours of your life that you have as much merit as anyone else.

Until 15 seconds of their life is worth the entirety of one our own.

Then what do we do?

The citizens revolt. The revolution is sanitized and co-opted by the dominant paradigm - if we let it.

The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.

How were you taught, as a child, that you were even a little bit better than others in any way?

How were you not taught, as a child, what the invisible systems that held that structure in place looked like?

When I was 21 I devised a point system to overcome personal shame. But I laid out a couple of undeniable facts. I am not stupid. I have a few learning disabilities, but devised enough ways around them that I turned them to my advantage when I could, and hired out things like typing at first if I had to. All my childhood I was taught that if I studied hard and kept my nose clean, I could accomplish anything. I had every reason to believe that would be true.

I studied my butt off. I was plenty smart. But for the obvious learning disabilities, they simply could not devise a test they could measure me by. My computation was measured at 80% because I could not add a column of numbers, hence later write a line of code, and before word processing, typing was almost impossible as I learned by reading the shape of words so needed a computer aid for spelling.

I read extensively, so I can reason. If I hadn’t insisted on a drafting class, I don’t know how I would have deciphered 3-D models, which has made me once again suspect of cultural and gender bias in “standardized” testing. Drafting wasn’t offered to girls, though I insisted on it, hence a detriment to understanding geometry and engineering - you know, stuff that women aren’t good at.

And the history of your culture doesn’t match what’s in this history book, well, your family’s experience isn’t on the test, too bad, so sad.

So, I started with the salary of the average professional white man.

I added a point for study, one for hard work, another for generational wealth that would teach one wealth management, legacy schools, private grammar schools, ivy league universities, sororities, fraternities, social connections, parental investment, social investment from people who are friends of the family, assets to borrow against, and credit access.

Then I started withdrawing points.

As a baseline, I looked at the potential life opportunities for a working class, white, male, merit scholars (studied their asses off) in 1980. I noticed that I and all my peers had not advanced at all. None of us graduated from college because Reagan cut our scholarships. Of those merit scholars I went to school with, only two graduated. One cheated on his financial aid forms. One dealt drugs to pay for his rent and tuition.

Neither of which would have occurred to me.

So for those of us who did what we were told - we did not get the world we were promised. I mean, poor us, welcome to the working class white man.

Did you know there was a study done by confused white social workers who didn’t understand why first time poor whites shipped up from the south to work in factories behaved exactly like poor blacks shipped up from the south for the same reason? They assumed that behavior that comes from entrenched poverty was a function of race and confused as to why it repeated itself in Detroit without social support for both black and white families needing more education, housing, medical care, and skills in things like money management and home ownership - new problems with new responsibilities all.

I kept subtracting points. One for race. One for language. Then I started withdrawing from my score, which was at -2 being born female and working class, then dropped 10 more points to -12 because I survived a long list of traumatic experiences. If you have never seen an ACEs score, it is a modern attempt to predict the life one will have based on childhood circumstances, regardless of race. It looks like this:

You decide for yourself how many points to subtract, if any for being an invisible slave in my own culture and then having to learn how to be a human being from scratch.

Yeah. The cards were stacked against my entire generation forward, unless you were born into substantial generational wealth from the get go. No matter how hard you worked, no matter your race or what group you came from, you were born to disappoint. First yourself, then your parents, then your society.

Until you were stripped of the wealth value of every hour of your time.

All of us. All the same. All together now.

We can no longer afford to fall asleep at the wheel from one generation to the next anymore. The planet can’t take it, and neither can we.

Our forefathers had to fight this battle first in the Civil War, then with FDR just for food, work, housing, medicine, and a safety net. It’s been a push me - pull you our entire history. And we have to remember that we win major victories, and continue to win them. Everyone has to fight for them, but we have to remember to build what we believe in and withdraw our attention from those designed to distract and separate us.

Once again, I will continue to urge us to trust in our common humanity. Our common stories. Billions don’t scale to our imaginations. But neighborhoods do. Meet the people in your neighborhood and find out what you and your neighbors need.

Then meet your neighbors in the next neighborhood. Especially if they don’t look like you.

Because they have been wounded by the same forces that you have, all while being told that you were the source of those wounds.

I would suggest that you were not. And to the degree you unwittingly participated in and benefitted in an oppressive system it’s time to admit it and stop. Because you are going to need your neighbors.

And they have generational memories that come with generational skills that you don’t!

The Radical Story of Free People

Who Rules the World? Well, I am thinking the people who live here should, how about you?

I have made my life of cross discipline scholarship looking for common denominators of human experience, and the different vocabularies used to describe similar observations and experiences. Because all living things have to work observation, experience, memory and process of that input.

I have found it interesting that processes described by the most ancient of sages in the oldest of cultures mirror the reflections that modern science describes with different vocabulary. I remembered Pygmalion, My Fair Lady, and learned at 11 that the key to mastering any subject, any culture, any community was to understand their vocabulary.

I have never been good at learning new languages, because the English language, which imports all others like a vacuum, adds new words and new meaning to new words, and new discoveries and new concepts the defies current language that they invent and reinvent attempts to systematically record what ancients shrugged as attainable only as learned experience that came from following the crumbs of metaphor left by those who came before you.

There was a reason that older cultures shrouded its most valuable knowledge in metaphor. It was most precisely to keep dangerous knowledge from the hands of the immature. There are certain levels of knowledge that must be used to be wielded with wisdom.

The knowledge of metaphor is one such weapon. In the wrong hands, propaganda can create viruses of the conscience that make the community so ill that the narrative can support loyalty to evil doers, in large numbers, something the human race must be inoculated against again and again.

So I think to continue to write these essays I have to start defining my own personal terms. I make no special claim, I just want to posit some simple questions and see where they take us.

What if, by heart, nature, biology, genetics, nature, consciousness, soul - the nature of all life is essentially good, forward moving and cooperative?

What if anything that interrupts that gentle forward eternal momentum is aberrant, a misstep, a mistake, a break in the program, an experiment that failed was not inherently good or evil - just effective or ineffective?

Well then one has to ask what the effect one is trying to achieve?

I would like to start with one premise: The business of humanity is that which promotes the greatest abundance, diverse, complex potential for life and creativity in every balanced way is good as it multiplies the quality of all life.

Does that sound like “good” to you? It does to me and seems to sound like “good” to most people.

And if that is a solid working definition of good, any break in that is non-good.

There are some who will say that “good” is “us” and evil is “them”, those who are in some unacceptable way different from us.

There are some who say evil is fundamental to human nature.

There are some who say evil is the intent to act with such cruelty, through intention or indifference, that it damages other human beings along a continuum of damage and how deeply and traumatically it harms an individual or a community itself.

Personally, I would like to take the position that most evil is a direct result of a wounded soul.

As near as we can tell, human beings who can be diagnosed as sociopaths, people who cannot feel the feelings of others, people who lack empathy. Among the people whom they abuse, another 4% learn by example how cruelty can be effective in the application and leverage of power.

In and of itself, that isn’t a problem, until that minority gains too much sway in a given society.

They do this by convincing ourselves and allowing others to convince us that our neighbors are evil. But they are not. The vast majority of human beings are decent, and it’s easy to prove.

The best weapon we have to fight with is coming together.

In small groups, of small groups, of larger groups demanding our voices be accurately reflected with immediate consequences for not carrying out the will of the people to represent.

Pretty simple.

Democracy and reaching consensus is messy and it takes time, but it is far better than the alternative.

The most radical thing you can do this week to support your community is meet and really get to know the stories of 3 strangers this week.

Around the world, small voices are speaking about the damages of inequality.

The oppressed are finding voices in the public square again, as though the printing press has been reinvented and paper is free.

The power is there, all we have to do is reach for it and yield it wisely.

And to use it wisely, all we need is to be gently deprogrammed away from fear and hatred, and reminded to take enough measured risk to trust the stranger and see what she might have to share.

Just that. Share our Strengths. Our joy. Our hope!

In this historic moment, I am going to attempt to place my stick in the place where my sort of voice will have the greatest leverage - while asking others to do the same. Because diversity of voices is the point.

Even scientifically, which of course we are not taught, 100 totally random people will solve any problem better than 100 specialists alone. In a simple example,100 random people guessing the accurate weight of a single pig will give wildly divergent and inaccurate answers. But funny thing happens when those numbers are averaged, they are nearly spot on.

Same with building a bridge. If all the people in the room are engineers, they will be talking about metal and materials and load bearing and math.

Once you bring in a farmer, the bamboo grower, a farmer, a mother, a grandmother, care givers, those able and disabled who have to traverse the bridge, a forester, a laborer, a driver of vehicles that delivers things, walkers, people who manage budgets, watershed and habitat - fishermen and folks that want clean water - then labor time required measured against benefits, and then you have all the ingredients to create a functional, lasting plan for a solution that exists for a season or a century depending on the community’s actual needs. Experts give expert solutions. Communities create consensus solutions. Are these the “best” decisions? Who outside a community knows best what is good for that community?

Roman roads lasted thousands of years beyond their empire. What a marvel. They were not built for trade or even to benefit the communities they plowed through. They were built for armies to transport troops, conquer, and then return with captured humans and plunder, while establishing “governors” to plunder more resources and soldiers to serve Rome.

Maybe we don’t build things like we used to.

But perhaps we should be building them as we need them to be - for us. For here, for us, our children and their children and the rest of the life we would like to sustain us in this region.

What if we know that best where we are? Why aren’t you asking before you ask for my vote?

Oh, you are afraid to show up?

She wasn’t. She wants to hear my story. She is listening. She showed up. You didn’t. Not only that, but she talked to my neighbor, and his neighbor, and their neighbors, and she sat down and listened.

Do we have to move so fast? Why do we have to work so many hours to survive in such a rich country? Who set this up? We didn’t. How did we get here? Why don’t we have the time for conversation and agreement?

I have found some towns that have designed these for modest budgets - wanna pool our money, visit and see what they know?

Whadda ya say?

Wanna invent a new future?

This is America baby. If we dream it, we can build it. The great experiment.

Time to take it back again.

Multiple groups of people all around the world are solving local problems ingeniously in this way. But who reports these stories?

I want to.

They are proof that we are not born to be selfish.

Can we live within at least a moderate compromise that we invent to satisfy and therefore preserve the needs and managed ambitions of all life in a balanced, healthy way?

It’s been done before. By most, for likely 200,000 years.

Starting June 14, Skookworks will be setting up an art booth at the Fremont Sunday Market, with Mighty Nizz prints and stories for the year to come.

Subscriptions: Starting in July, Skookworks will offer monthly fiction at Ko-fi.com/skookworks. For $3 a month, you get all the new Mighty Nizz stories, illustrations and comics, as well as my weekly column Practical Hope in Hard Times, and news of coming attractions!

For $6 a month, you get everything at the first tier, plus monthly Penny Hopefuls, a series of short stories that include:

The Amazing Adventures of Lady Curiosity Blade

This heroine traverses gilded age America solving mysteries and righting wrongs, daughter of a poet from the Japanese imperial court, and a minor British nobleman who is an ambassador to Asia. High intrigue and adventure guaranteed

Vengeance of the Old Guards

Fantoma answers the darkest of prayers in the most unexpected ways.

Ghost in the Machine Part of The White Rose is machines under protest against - or an arm of saboteurs interrupting the media arms of oppressors.

The Return of Octobriana Hero of working people everywhere, Octobriana leads an underground army of resistance saboteurs.

Christmas Stories Every year we produce one to four new Christmas stories for the holidays

All the Poetry that’s Fit to Print periodic inspiration and empathy

And in the months to come, sneak previews of projects in development, including novels and long form comics

At $9 you receive all of the above as well as all of David Ingersoll’s original work, including series, short stories with illustrations, stand alone illustrations, and long form comics.

This summer we will also be offering a new podcast on youtube at https://www.youtube.com/@PracticalHopeinHardTimes as well as audio drama for Curiosity Blade, short stories and eventually, our new novels.

Next month we will introduce some of the new folk teaming up with us in the year to come.

Once again, I invite you to pick out three people you do not know this week to have coffee with and discuss community resilliency. Together we stand, devided we fall.

Growintg up isolated as a child, there are two places you cannot bar a child from in the Midwest without drawing unwanted attention: school and church.

So I started going from church to church seeking truth. I went to conservative and liberal churches, I went to synagogues. When I did not find the information I sought, I started looking for common denominators of functional families and communities.

I studied Aquinas. I studied Spinooza. Both found God in all things. I studied Saint Francis who found God in Kindness. I studied the laws of the Torah, the Bible, the Tao, and every other major religion and I found two common denominators.

Be grateful for your existence and be kind enough to care for others.

I studied Frankl, who wrote “Man’s Search For Meaning” after his experiences in the Nazi camps. I studied people who kept their humanity in the face of suffering: Gandhi, Martin Luther King, but I also studied systemic evil. I started with M. Scott Peck who wrote “People of the Lie”. This confirmed what I was learning at home. I also read “The Road Less Traveled” and “A World Waiting to Be Born”. From Peck I learned that individuals mature through stages of faith and development and that while, in America, we believe individual independence to be the height of maturity, Peck presents the idea that this is only a phase of adolescence. To become a truly mature adult, who contributes to one’s community, the next level of maturity is sustainable interdependence.

While reaching out to people I never would have been vulnerable with I learned that we are all wounded, all hiding it.

Some are too traumatic to repeat, others were banal wounds.

There’ s a movie called “Hard Core” where George C. Scott plays a conservative father, from my home town, searching for his run away daughter. The screenplay was written by Paul Shrader, also from my home town, so he knew his subject matter pretty intimately. Scott befriends a streetwalker and finds himself pulled into a world of pimps and snuff films searching for his daughter, all the while not seeing the desperate need of the child before him.

My stepmother had six siblings with daughters. Each girl ran away before they turned 16, but I was the only one who did so legally, so I was the only one not forced to return home. I had survival skills outside my community. They did not.

So I became a keeper of secrets, a healer of wounded hearts, and a conduit for survival knowledge. This commitment to being of service to others, over time, earned me a family of choice that I can rely on completely, if needed, to help me survive.

Most of these loved ones have known me for at least 25 years. They have seen me at my best, my worst, and every stage in between. They have guided me through forests of need and pain until I was finally able to walk out the other side.

It’s important to note that these are mutual, interdependent commitments. My husband and I, having this same unusual ethic, could be counted upon to show up for whatever was needed.

This could be something as simple as helping someone move, to housing a friend through long covid over the course of a year, to giving another traumatized orphan a place to catch his breath and heal enough to go back into the world again. We have sat with the dying, sometimes for months, we have cared for their children during cancer treatment. We have given counsel that preserved marriages, helped women escape from abuse, assisted with citizenship applications for ESL immigrants, resumes to help people get specific jobs, letters of recommendations to get apprentices into exclusive schools. We have taught children. We have shared stories. Hosted dinners, thrown birthday parties, celebrated orphan Thanksgivings and Christmas, reclaiming our holiday joy.

One therapist, and one well meaning friend expressed concern that I was practicing co-dependence, and not setting good boundaries. And while that was true in my early childhood, as I matured I was fully aware of the commitments I was making, expecting nothing in return, but building community - one relationship at a time.

In all honesty, these adopted family members have given me more than I could ever return, also without judgment or expectation.

Under duress, I finally called my loved ones and told them I needed help. Every response was simply “What do you need and when do you need it?”

No judgement, no limits, no justifications required. For the next two weeks friends came to clean my floors, empty boxes of dishes and books, make dried fish, make soup, shop, called me, cleaned and bandaged my toes, and made sure I got out of the house enough to walk a little and get some fresh air. Susan, my dear vegetarian friend, had never caught a fish, let alone filetted one for drying. But she showed up, brave and willing, with a filet knife in hand that she left behind.

Some came by bus rides that took them a couple of hours, some came from across town in cars from homes that were still an hour away. The landlord brought more produce. My husband shaved my dreaded hair and painted flowers on my skull.

My home is now clean enough that I can maintain the floors, and David can maintain the kitchen.

As I said, it takes time and commitment. Strangers will rarely make the first move, and bringing new people into your community should be a gradual process with enough experience to know if they are trustworthy, and how much weight each person can carry. As I as disabled, I have learned to ask many people when I need help, so the burden doesn’t land on one person.

Among these friends, I have four offers to live with other families should David get hit by a bus. By now it is pretty obvious that I can no longer care for myself and I would not fare well in a medicaid nursing home. But I will never have to find out.

That is a quality of security that money can never buy. That is what community interdependence has to offer.

And it is how human beings have thrived for hundreds of thousands of years.

Anyone who tells you that the system is rigged against you, so never bed against the house, is right. But you did not create that system. And you can walk away from it and create a new one any time.

Because, in the end, life itself is the house.

And the house always wins, in the end.

Many hands make light work.

Take care of each other

Love,

Sarah

I have researched so much about modern sustainable energy sources, sustainable agriculture, and combining incredible scientific advances with ancient proven methods, I am convinced we have all the solutions we need at our finger tips. Now we need to build the will to use those tools.

Some folks who are thinking about more sustainable ways to live:

Letting Go of the American Dream What makes for a luxurious life? There are more forms of capital than money.

Regenerative Economies Investing your time and your values.

Fighting Deserification in Africa in the Sahara.

Fighting Desertification in China. All these efforts are trial and error, but continuing to try yields results.

Fighting Rainforest Desertification in South America.

Reclaiming Rocky Mountain Ecology with wolves.

I can and will go on.

For the last 10 years, I have been patiently studying and writing and developing a series of stories that we will begin to roll out on June 14.

We will be starting by offering prints of Mighty Nizz with photos attached, cards, post cards, buttons, stickers, posters, original art, and whatever people seem to be interested in.

This was the first test of the Fremont Market Fair tent, which at the moment is a giant red kite until it has weights for the bottom.

But over the years, we set money from our art aside to invest in this effort. We bought the tent, the table, the inventory, everything we need. I made up a price list, taking all cost of goods and cost of operations into consideration, and had it vetted by a sweet friend who also happens to be a roll out expert for startups - talk about overkill - but he did it as a favor because he believes in us.

Why would he believe in us?

Because of what we stand for.

And as far as Mighty Nizz is concerned, we stand for strong women and wild child, feral girls. We don’t all have to be princesses, we don’t all have to be polite, and we don’t all have to be nice.

Nizz is watched over by an enormous sasquatch who just happened to find her near a dumpster when he was on walkabout and she couldn’t even toddle.

So he watches over her.

And she patrols the forest.

She is harmless.

Mostly.

Come see us at the fair, 10-4, June 14, Sunday Fremont Market!

America is working the way it was designed to. From the gilded age, circling back to this moment, we are exactly where the broligarchs want us to be.

Working Class Solidarity is Necessary we can’t afford our racism anymore!

The Americans Foundations Act Let’s go back and forward.

It’s not working anymore. Solutions?

Like most Americans these days, this last week left me depressed and unable to write.

My body is riddled with arthritis and neuropathy as well as having bi-polar disorder and complex PTSD. So when I go down, I go down hard.

Most days, I start in terrible pain while my husband manages a balance between ice packs, hot water bottles, medicine and edibles after about two hours, I am a reasonably rational person again until the next time the pain rears its ugly head, but beside my chair is a bookcase and a freezer to help me stay ahead of the pain all day.

That means my husband is more of a caregiver than I would like. I recently learned that my knees cannot be replaced because of an infection left in a leg with compound fracture. Apparently, if you have an infection in your bone and get your knee replaced, the infection will travel to the knee and the leg will have to be amputated.

All this is to say, like the rest of us, every day I struggle to stay alive, healthy and maintain a disciplined mind, every day we get squeezed it gets harder and harder.

This week I learned that, when differences in currency and wealth inequality are factored in, it turns out that Americans have to work twice as many hours to have the same purchasing power as their European or other first nation peer democracies

That is a huge red flag.

No wonder we have to work 2-3 jobs to stay afloat.

No wonder we wake up sweating in the middle of the night.

This week alone, there was a man in Ontario California that burned down a warehouse, one of 7 across the nation so far, because he wasn’t paid enough to live.

Starbucks unionizes, and Starbucks moves its headquarters out of Seattle.

A worker in an Amazon warehouse drops dead, bleeding out from a head wound onto the floor while the employee giving CPR begs for help, and another employee begs to help her, and is told by the floor manager to step around the body and keep working.

I am not sure which shocks me more, the fact that the manager gave that order or the fact the employees obeyed.

It is official. They no longer need to put us in chains, we have become slaves to our fear.

Amazon, Walmart, Target, even programming employees are finding themselves surviving by invisibly living out of cars and vans, parking on the street or in parking lots, only to be frequently and unconstitutionally harassed by local police.

It is not illegal to survive.

But after a week of fury, of not knowing what to do beyond burning it all down and starting over, I remembered my first, basic principle.

Fight and build what you believe in, instead of pouring your energy into fighting what you do not.

I will be the first to admit, that while I wish civil disobedience were enough to overthrow a corrupt regime, we all know there is a certain point at which that is no longer possible and we have no option but violent revolution.

My strongest faith is that we remember that we have been here before, we are all in this together, and together we can resist it. We need to immediately dissolve the illusionary barriers of race, class and ethnicity used to divide us and realize that we are all on the same side, all part of the same human race, and vote accordingly pretty quickly.

If you don’t see a leader you can get behind, stop waiting and lead.

Everyone of us has an area of expertise they can contribute their voices to, but if we don’t start sharing information with our neighbors it will be the downfall of our country.

This country was built on the blood of slavery and ethnocide. Not just black Americans and Native Americans, though they bore the brunt of the burden, but Chinese workers who were shipped in as slave labor to build the railroads.

And children of all colors. Between the from the 1850s til 1932 when FDR was elected, urban children of all colors were loaded onto trains and shipped into the midwest, sold as farmworkers. There were 250,000 of these children. That doesn’t include the numbers of children who died in the mines and factories in America’s gilded age. We have been here before.

And this is a form of slavery we overthrew.

We built social safety nets, expanded rights, expanded education, created national great works, roads, hydro electric dams, art and we sent doctors and teachers into under served areas for the students to work off their school loans.

From 1932 forward, the quality of life for the average American began to improve not equally, but equality was being fought for, tooth and nail, and we were making progress. Working conditions improved. Child labor was outlawed. Minimum wage was established as was the right of collective bargaining. For the first time in American history we could see the glimmer of an actualization of a nation of the people, by the people and for the people.

Then we hit the energy crisis of the 1970s, and the American economy stagnated. This was, essentially, because after our European and Asian global neighbors recovered from World War II, they had a more modern, rebuilt industry and suddenly we had to compete again. Instead of doing that, we elected Ronald Reagan which began the slow, intentional process of dismantling all of the systems that had enriched our country and made it so successful in the process.

I think there are plenty of people coming together today knowing what the problem is and we have some good ideas about what we can do about the crushing pressure of it all, but I think it is equally important to pay attention to what we can possibly build in the future as a hybrid of the opportunities that emerging science affords us combined with what we have learned from history and culture over the millennia of the human race.

I am going to propose some general solutions. I know I will get pushback, but hear me out.

• One person, one vote. All corporate money out of politics.

• Term reform

• Outlaw accepting bribes or allowing campaign contributions to affect legislative voting.

• Outlaw highly funded policy think tanks that had full blown legislation to local, state, and federal government designed to eliminate rights and capture our common resources.

• Outlaw corporate ownership of farm property

• Outlaw corporate ownership of housing.

• Outlaw corporate ownership of medical providers, clinics, ambulance and other medical services, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and insurance companies.

• Fund basic food, medical care, transportation and shelter with public funds created by a “commons profit”

• A “commons profit” is a tax that corporations pay on the enormous gains they have made using the public commons, including all our combined create knowledge to train their ai models, government funded research of all types, water, air, public schools, transportation and the entire infrastructure of a society they did not build but not take advantage of.

• Promote small, locally funded, locally run, manufacturing cooperatives and ease regulations on cooperative business models.

• Promote small, sustainable food production.

• Promote small, family run businesses of all kinds.

• Get involved in local politics first.

• Provide income for those who do unrecognized or underrepresented “soft work” usually unpaid, usually done by women, that keep society moving and growing.

• Protect our elders and bring them back into the community.

• Reestablish stripped agencies

• Fund social security with taxes on income above $150k

• reform the tax system

• Reform the criminal justice system.

• Reform the immigration process.

• Fund public schools through PhD

• Fund apprenticeship projects

• Clear the way for new sciences, like printing homes as inexpensive solutions to modern problems

• Decentralize power through a series of loosely confederated community cooperative software.

That’s plenty to start with. What I am proposing is that we design a hybrid based on the best of the old and the new to create a third way, perhaps a new way for the human tribe, all of us, together, one purpose, many methods.

Our purpose? A balanced, sustainable, joyful or meaningful lives for people living free from fear, and a reinvestment in the greatest quality of diverse life possible on the planet.

If we commit ourselves to that future, and nothing less, then like landing on the moon, or creating worker and human rights, we shall make our world into whatever we put the bulk of our effort into.

Tearing down the old society? Or simply building a more functional one side by side and allow people to make choices for themselves, together.

How?

Start with what is within your reach. I have asked my readers and listeners to start having coffee with 3 strangers each week, to talk about how to create resilient, sustainable communities.

The next thing to do is to invest in both local manufacturing and farming, but also in new technologies that benefit all of us, not just a few. For example:

Finland is committed to wirelessly moving electricity from satellites to your homes. Around the world, other countries are creating overhead internet and power systems that, once perfected, could conceivably provide nearly free electricity and communications wirelessly to areas now completely void of infrastructure.

Not only energy, communication, but also the possibility of new monetary systems, for example, like that currently being negotiated between some aligned African nations. Unlike the northern hemisphere, the population of the southern hemisphere is growing, as is their investment in their countries infrastructure and education level. Young people are revolutionizing what is possible in the future. Imagine everyone has a home, everyone has food, everyone has shelter, everyone has transportation - because we have enough interconnected working systems to support us. Around the world, we have the resources, we have the people, soon - we will have all the energy we need.

Universal Basic Income.

Unexpectedly, universal basic income has recently found its way back into modern conversation. Is it a good idea? Some people think so, provided it is sufficient. If it is not, it would become another way of turning us right back into consumers renting our lives from them. That must stop. We are not for rent is we are not for sale. What is interesting, is that throughout the history of UBI, it has been alternatively supporte to by the left and the right.

The idea of universal basic income has been evolving now for centuries, and the few test cases have been extremely successful. That would begin to reinvest in our communities, our infrastructures, our homes, and most importantly, have enough time to have meaningful lives, whatever that means to each of us.

Tribes of tribes. One can form a “tribe” around any organizing principle, from science to girl scout cookies. But some examples include:

Cooperative Business Models is one way to create local businesses. Cooperation makes us economically and mentally healthier. Lifting our families out of poverty.

Is UBI feasible?

Other examples of worker cooperatives:

Starting a coop.

Interviews at a Coop and front line workers.

Lastly, keep in mind that if someone cuts you a check of any kind, you are a worker too. We all face the same health care challenges, housing challenges, food challenges, and challenges with sufficient wages, savings, insurance and company loyalty. No matter how high up you are, you are a line item like the rest of us and could be laid off at any time. And no matter how much saving or investment you have, when the bubbles start to crash, if you have not invested yourself in supporting your local community, they will not be there to support you when you need them.

So, once again, on my broken record, have coffee with three people in your community that you do not know at all and talk about community resilience and how to insure it. Gather contact information, and a list of needs.

At some point, you will have enough information to start a chain email to your new friends, directing them to where they might go to provide for their needs or the needs of others. Basically, get enough people in a room making a list of what they need, chances are very, very high that there are more than three others in the same room who might raise their hands and say “I have that”.

I was recently talking to a friend in desperated need of a housekeeper, but no longer able to afford a cleaning service.

“You tutor, don’t you?” She is a school teacher who loves teaching more than any other thing.

“Oh yes, I am a good tutor and I love it.”

“Great! Call a local time bank, or list on a local buy nothing neighborhood group and offer tutoring in trade for house work. Often you can find a one to one trade, but if not, a time bank can match you both with folks that need tutoring help and folks who are willing to clean house!”

“Oh my god,” she replied, “that’s a perfect solution! I never would have thought of it.”

I do something similar with a friend. Every other week we do batch cooking so refridgerate and freeze until 2 weeks later. I spend the day before in my chair cutting and doing prep cooking, then the next day, we assemble, spice and cook together. He goes home with free food for his labor, and we have cut our grocery bill less than half while I am currently eating within all my dietary restrictions. On alternating weeks, he comes over to clean and organize and make the meal plan for the following week so that David can pick up the groceries!

Recently, when he thought a full time job would take him away from this commitment, I posted a request for the same arrangement with neighors who live much closer by and there were 4 volunteers in 24 hours.

I know these things functions because I have used trade, barter and alternative trade methods as often as possible to keep my cash spending as low as possible, as I have never been flush with cash. But we have always had an abundant life.

Community participation is how we achieve that.

United we stand. Divided we fall.

Rinse and repeat.

This is the first in my list of many possible different ways of sharing and using the love, labor and resources of the community.

Diego Rivera, Detroit Mural

I am thrilled to get the first question from my recent podcast version of this column:

Is it disingenuous to claim that I am working class?

People and labor have equal value and I have no greater value than you. I have always found “ordinary” things to be extraordinary. Existence is miraculous, beautiful, and requires no justification for hierarchy from us to have value. Though, like many in my culture, I was taught to order things in rankings, I have tried to deprogram myself from this over and over again.

A character I quite liked from the film “A Very British Coup” once said:

“I believe all people are first class, don’t you?”

We need all voices. All expertise. All wisdom. All hands on deck.

We are all facing the same concerns. Less time. Too much work. Falling behind every year.

An entry level professional was paid $20 an hour in 1971, and $19 in 2025.

In 1971, the median price of a home was $23,400, roughly 3 times a working class yearly income. Now that same home is roughly more than 22 times an annual working class wage. That’s interesting, don’t you think?

Entry level professional positions today pay the same as entry level working class wages. So if we aren’t defining class by wages, education, or type of labor, what is it based on?

If we all made a living wage, and our resources were rationally managed, and our human needs integrated into our lives, we wouldn’t be having these conversations to begin with.

Remember, I live in a city where the corporate culture was founded by Jeff Bezos who said “I want my employees to show up for work every day afraid.” Yesterday in Oregon a bleeding factory worker died while the floor manager told them to keep working around the body. Starbucks is having strikes, over 12,000 workers on strike.

Bill Gates was too busy figuring out how to turn stolen inventions and resources into subscriptions we would have to pay for every year for the rest of our lives, while trying to secretly slip his wife antibiotics so that she wouldn’t notice he’d given her an STI by skeezing around with Epstein victims.

These are not smart guys, and these are not nice guys. Born into wealth and a staggering sense of privilege, they treat us like prey and in private have been recorded saying that it would be better if we just died off once we were no longer useful.

Useful to whom?

I feel pretty useful to myself. And my husband and my community think so too. But my value is hard to measure. I have what is sometimes called “soft” value. I offer emotional support and advocacy, and other sorts of unpaid labor that women do that are required for society to function.

My husband is a letter carrier. That is easier to statistically measure. After the famous, but illegal, letter carriers strike, USPS letter carriers got two successive raises of 14% a year, bringing their hourly income up to $4.60 an hour or annual income of $9600 per year.

In 1971 auto workers made $6.18, a little more than letter carriers. A doctor made $20 an hour or S42,000 annually. At that time, we considered what we then considered a professional level wage. A doctor made 3.2 times what a factory worker did, but a factory worker could still buy a home for a little less than three times his annual salary, or $28,000, which seemed fair at the time, and also within the reach of the average person. Of course not all of us were “average”, but unfortunately that will have to be the topic of another essay for now.

Consider wages now. The entry level pay for a USPS letter carrier is $19 an hour in a town where the minimum wage is $15 an hour.

Now, that same letter carrier makes $39,500. And the entry level minimum wage worker is making $31,200. Both, even when added together, are below the poverty line in Seattle.

This is a cumulative inflationary rate of 692.72%. Translated over those 54 years, not allowing for compound interest, that is $6,650,000 in lost wages - or purchasing power if you prefer - during the most productive 54 years in American history, not accounting for any portion of that lost income at the stock market for 54 years at 10% per year.

Meanwhile, the cost of a home, $28,000 in Seattle in 1971 was a little less than three times a working class salary. In 2026, the cost of a home in Seattle is $900,000, twenty three times the annual working class salary.

How were any of us going to keep pace with that?

And where did all that money go?

I would suggest that if you are not now working class, you are very likely to be well on your way towards it. Or if we are very lucky, on your way towards abandoning the idea of class as anything of value to attain.

CEO pay has risen 1024%. America has 902 billionaires, and nine men control more than 50% of the world’s wealth and resources.

So welcome to the working class, because it’s coming for you. It’s coming for all of us. Until we all decide the word means nothing.

Our culture loves to hold up the examples of great men, of all of those who made it.

This morning I found myself weeping over the millions of lives of those who didn’t.

We can feel empathy for a starving child, but once the numbers get too high, our overwhelm pushes us past our ability to feel anything.

The way we overcome overwhelm, that inability to feel the beating of our own hearts any more is by holding onto the feelings, the feelings of our families, the resonance of music that rings with our bones, the words that call to our souls as well. Hoard those like gold. Because that is where humanity’s wealth lives. The human heart responds to human need -- human stories -- not to numbers.

That’s why our stories are so important.

All that hate, and as if there were not enough, we invent a new prejudice that seemed universally fair: Meritocracy. We reward, and entrust leadership, to those who have proven to have more merit - where? In the equality of the marketplace, of course. Capitalism clearly showed us where competence lay!

Competence at what? Hoarding wealth? Stealing from others?

Or a constant game of “Lucy and the Football”. Practice, play, get good enough to take aim -- only to have the football ripped away at the last minute.

It is the best way to control us. They are not stupid. But neither are we. Not forever. No matter how much of our thinking time they eat up, our gut is telling us that this is the wrong way to live. It is unnatural and not worth it.

Suffering knows suffering, way past color, culture or language. Our bodies are not stupid either.

Around the world, where work and success are prized above all else, people are having fewer and fewer children. In some cultures around the world, young people have given up on the idea of ever raising a family. In others, young people are simply laying down in the street to “”die” quietly in protest because their lives are not worth living.

In our gut, we are all starting to feel like slaves.

Enough, I say.

Enough.

No more needs to be said. Now is the time for action.

Fortunately, the actions are easy. Start with meeting three people a week and talking about rebuilding our communities.

The value of the hours in the sand glass of our economy have stopped making sense. The first fifteen seconds of a billionaire’s life is not worth the entirety of your lifetime. The math doesn’t work, the ecology doesn’t balance, and all joy producing activity stops.

Time enough for love. The time we have lost is the time we need to spend loving each other, and loving our home.

The most challenging thing facing Americans today is the weight of inequality and loss of most of our daily hours. The hours we need to maintain physical and mental health, the hours we need to care for our elders, our children, our friends, our neighborhood, and our community.

That inequality was designed. And we did not choose it. Going into the midterms, we might want to consider community engagement at the most local possible level.

Stick together, with the rest of humanity, for the rest of humanity.

There is a book by Robert Heinlein, titled Take Your Country Back, in which he talks about the irresistible force of volunteering in one’s community, and the fact that the influence of money cannot combat boots on the ground in the end. Though he refused to back politicians, he spent his life quietly volunteering for the Democratic party.

Common Sense Solutions Together Possibilities:

Why We Must Change

Bitches Rule! Stop Tolerating the Intolerable

Racism is Taught

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=south+pacific+you+have+to+be+carefully+taught

Myth of Meritocracy - They are lucky idiots

Wealth Addiction

Wealth Hoarding is a Mental Illness

BIG by Matt Stoller

Emergency Prices: How Private Equity Captured the Ambulance Market

Dan Geller is a Staff Attorney at Antimonopoly Counsel and can be reached at dan@antimonopoly.us…

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5 months ago · 236 likes · 14 comments · Matt Stoller and Dan Geller

Better Ideas - Lots of Examples of what works- learning from each others and 1000s of solutions - many communities inventing many ideas

If We are Going to Thrive - How to Turn it Around this Generation by Design

Rights or Duties?

Are Living Things Equal?

The Value of Thinking Small: I needed glasses all through school

Value Public Education: Creating Good Citizens re James Madison

Shoulder to Shoulder Love in Places we Break

Native Traditional Ecological Food Security Systems

Non Chemical Energy Storage?

Using Data Center Heat to Heat Homes?

Using Oceans to Cool Data Centers and Improve Reef Health?

We Make Wealth Together

The latest Economists with Simple Ideas and more data offer proof - wealth does not equal employment or trickle down opportunities greater than extraction of labor and resources. Profit seeks more profit as its only goal.