Your process — of creation, of thinking, of being — belongs to you and only you, and to discuss your process for understanding the world, and for coping within its spinning — is something you should never do, because nobody but you comprehends the when and the why of how you get things done to contextualize meaning.
How many of us live to be defined by our possessions? How many of us find value only in what we have achieved and won and coveted? I wrote about this nagging issue of human governance on November 22, 2006 — “Worthy of History: Only Expensive Things Survive” —
The perversion of the historical accuracy of how our ancestors lived, and how we currently live, is created by preserving only expensive possessions — tokens, icons, valuables – and in the purposeful construction of indestructible architectural monuments used by the privileged few.
History is skewed by this preservation technique because it only pretends to tell future generations how people actually lived. When we visit museums we are only seeing what the powerful majority of the culture of that time deemed important enough to save and pass down.
We only get to know what they thought was worth saving and inevitably those things are the expensive, the pretty, the unique and the tokens of the wealthy. Even pioneer and Native American museum dioramas are idealized with hardy items and the most beautiful things. The ordinary is forsaken for the power of the inherent value in the preservation of the perceived best.
Continue reading → Cracking the Fiery Core: We are Not What We Have
Should cities be in the business of drawing lines in the sand between what is free speech and what is not?
Or should the public — the community of citizenry — be the overlord of deciding what is and what is not acceptable conduct in the public square?
Continue reading → The Community of Citizenry and City Censorship
Are we only our DNA? Or is there more to us than just blood and guts? Can the essence of us live beyond our lives and into the horizon of others?
Two recent stories about The Suicide Heart and a Craving for Fried Chicken lead us into the realm of the uncanny.
Few people understand the need for pay before pleasure.
I not talking about prostitution.
I am talking about work.
Cultural values have shifted for the worse as workers require work to be “fun” instead of hard.
Even if work is dreary, we must learn to fight through the darkness and into the light.
It is our vested interest in each other that keeps us from merely earning a living and getting a paycheck.
Through the events of shared struggled we learn the value of joy and play and satiety — but without the burdens — the lightness we seek has no bearing.
Who trusted God was love indeed And love Creation’s final law – Tho’ nature, red in tooth and claw With ravine, shriek’d against his creed –
“In Memoriam” (1842) is one of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s greatest poems. 
Through poetry he found the truth and spake it.
Tennyson was Britain’s finest Poet Laureate and she shone in the Victorian Age as one of the brightest lighted minds in history.
Tennyson’s observation is a warning to us all: Nature is brutal.
Continue reading → Red in Tooth and Claw: The Language of Killing
In my article Virtual RelationShaping we discussed how we deal with each other in the real and the virtual.
Over the weekend we revisited some of the arguments in that article in my Fining Sacramento Kings Bad Taste piece where I said this in a comment:
I think when behavior is tamped down in public it gives rise to dirtier and nastier exploitations in private. One could make an argument that the public expression of a distasteful thought needs the public correction of the majority in order for perception and a frame of reference to be constructed around it for a continued socialized series of checks and balances.
When the nasty is hidden and shared only with like-minded people, terrible things happen because the light of reason is never shined upon the dark wonderings. I think we have all been numbed down by too much pressure on the perception of being wrong and wronging the whole of society in public. Making a public mistake should be fine as long as a remedy is offered and if no apology is offered then public shunning is the next appropriate step.
Transparency and evenhandedness in all situations is vital for an ongoing public discourse that may offend, that may be in bad taste, but should never be shut down because it threatens the bottom line or the constant flow of dollars between the entertained and the entertainer.
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