500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider
What are you looking for? People are searching Google for “oil spill in gulf of mexico.” St. Louis, MO is the world’s epicenter for people typing in “how to find a boyfriend.” The number one city searching for “sex” is Delhi, India. The number one city searching for “peace” – Edmonton, Canada.
I’m going to follow the high (Canadian) road and try some Google searches before hoisting a cold drink and paddling a kayak into the Labor Day sunset. Here are my results, not all of them real.
Normally this Google search returns an administration that is wrongheadedly driven to job generation by building more roads, more airports and increasing our dependency on fossil fuels. That’s my read on Laura Tyson’s recent New York Times op-ed piece.
But when I did this Google search, I got something that didn’t suck. My search returned a president who delivers on his promise to build a green infrastructure for America, with solar and wind power. His administration helps move us away from oil, cars and bad mortgages and into something smarter – new online technologies and training and a green economy.
This returns yoga studios that offer classes by donation, like YogaCo and Yogis Anonymous, in Santa Monica. You simply pay what you think the class is worth. Your class is not some recurring charge on your credit card, or a health-club membership, or some other obligation like changing the oil in your car. The health club, credit card model of yoga doesn’t teach us as much about ourselves. As Max Strom writes in A Life Worth Breathing, we can’t use the methods we commonly employ in business and commerce to learn about ourselves. It’s like using a hammer to brush your teeth. Money needs to change hands for yoga classes, but just in a different way.
This search returns links about Bruce Lipton, a biologist who is leading a re-examination of Darwinian evolutionary theory. He spoke at a great event that I attended this week. Bruce says that Darwin’s concept of evolution, the “survival of the fittest,” has led humanity into competition and war. He thinks evolution is really about “survival of the fittingest” – successful species are those that adapt, fit in with nature and play well with other species. If we understand this in time, and stop killing the planet, Mother Nature might not need to cast us out of her garden.
This returns a link to this video, which is coffee porn for the overcaffinated engineer mind. The search does not return any links to Starbucks, which has a good health plan for its employees but teaches them to make an indifferent espresso, a great tragedy for dopamine delivery.
My dream Google search returns news of Architecture for Humanity’s efforts to rebuild in Haiti, Black Entertainment Television’s financing of local housing materials manufacturing in Haiti, and World Shelters’ work here and abroad to put a roof over everyone’s head.
Eastern Nebraska. Huh. Always wanted to know that.
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500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider
It might be the heat of this summer day, but do you notice those spectral beings? They look like adults, but they’re not. They are the twenty-somethings who float through college and then boomerang back to live at home, and fifty-somethings who have a mid-life crisis, then morph into Mustang owners who date teenagers. Delaying the onset of responsibility and the start of life is so common now, it’s hardly a trend; more like an epidemic. It can happen at any time, not just when you’re young. Life isn’t in drive so much; often the shifter gets punched into reverse and people are suddenly moving backwards.
First, a little compassion. According to an article by Robin Marantz Henig in the New York Times Magazine, the average 20 year old is going through a lot of changes. One third of 20-somethings change residence every year. Forty percent move back home with parents at least once. Many hold seven jobs through the decade between 20 and 30. That’s a lot of turmoil.
I had a lot of that in my 20s certainly, as my father will attest, but I never moved back home. That simply wasn’t done back then.We wanted to be out in the world, and yes, we held lots of jobs. I worked in restaurants with inflammable chefs and later, when I wrote cartoons, I worked with inflammable executive producers.
Life is supposed to be an old song that goes something like you grow up, go to school, start a career and a family and watch the sun set with a spouse who shares the journey. Everybody experiencing that lately? I didn’t think so.
I’m noticing that there’s no long and winding road. It’s more of a spiral, and it’s not spinning just the 20-somethings until they are dizzy. The dizziness is widespread. Marriages of decades implode and partners become single again. Whole sectors of the economy evaporate and people need to re-train. Natural disasters are taking away homes. Because of these changes from within and outside us, no matter what our age, we’re all adolescents again. Erik Erikson’s eight-stage model of development might turn out to be an infinite-stage model. As had been said before, we’re living life in the first draft.
“The first draft of anything is shit.” – Ernest Hemingway
Have another glass of wine, Papa, and chill. I prefer what Elmore Leonard has to say.
“I try to leave out the parts that people skip.” – Elmore Leonard
It would be great to live in drive all the time, never having to shift into reverse, and it would be great to skip a few boring parts, like Elmore Leonard does in his novels. But life’s first draft turns out to be a pretty bumpy rehearsal for a (hopefully, soon to come) master performance. Surprisingly, for me, I’m feeling for those parents who aren’t encouraging their kids to grow up right away. Some of those parents regret punching the accelerator and rocketing into marriage-career-family-mortgage so soon themselves.
I’ve been trying some breathing exercises lately (called pranayama by the yogis) and some meditation, too, and finding that instead of relentlessly punching the accelerator, a pause now and again has helped me move forward with even more purposeful energy.
Photo by joiseyshowaa via Creative Commons License
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500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider
Something weird is happening. I’m noticing that futurists are arriving from the past. Maybe I need to explain that.
There’s a young couple who have started a business empire selling heirloom seeds. The wife looks like she’d be a natural in a bonnet and the guy has Thomas Jefferson’s fashion sense. They don’t look like leading-edge people but they are responding to a leading-edge need: people want real food, and they want to grow it themselves.
Their company, Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, sells 1,400 varieties of heirloom seeds and they run monthly “pioneer town” festivals with crafts, folk music and lots of bonnets – just the kind of event that has always made me want to run away. Maybe it’s the bonnets, or folk music not being sung by Bob Dylan, but old-timey stuff generally brings on in me a kind of nausea that only listening to Radiohead can cure.
But this time, it’s different. I’m willing to welcome spelling conventions like Olde Tyme into this article because of what Monsanto has done.
You know about Monsanto, the company with a long history of fouling natural resources? It got my attention in the movie Food, Inc. with its aggressive attitude about the genetically-modified seeds it produces. Monsanto has created seeds that resist its herbicide called Roundup so that farmers can spray their fields with poison that kills everything but the Monsanto seeds they’ve planted. Cool! Well, kind of cool in an evil way, because it gets convoluted. Monsanto has patented its seeds – turning a life form into a corporate asset. The patent has held up to legal challenges, allowing Monsanto to threaten farmers who try to replant its seeds from season to season. (“Drop that seed spreader and back away from the dirt, mister.”)
Ever since dirt was invented farmers have saved seeds to replant. Monsanto says you can’t do that and reaps great profits from what farmers sow. Oh, and according to the International Journal of Biological Sciences, Monsanto’s genetically-modified corn might be linked with organ failure. So the Monsanto corn on the cob I serve might cause your liver to blow up. Sorry, would you like another Chardonnay instead? You can stay away from what Monsanto is doing by buying organic. Or you can buy your own seeds and plant them.
That’s where the heirloom seed people come in. They’ll sell you purple tomatoes and white pumpkins that look a little like organs themselves but are good for you. Despite last week’s blog, I am not advocating a worldwide return to whittling and wearing gingham, but I will be seeing how many acres of tomatoes I can fit on our porch in Santa Monica.
Photo credit: Bill Ward via Creative Commons License.
500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider
What’s small group activism? A writer and a yoga teacher head down to the Gulf to save sea turtles. That’s small group activism. Really small. Just two guys on a mission. They want to charter a boat, haul slimed turtles from the sea, clean them up and transfer them to the right facility.
Here are their qualifications:
Brock Cahill teaches yoga at Yogis Anonymous. He has a passion for the sea and especially sea turtles.
Peter Lawrence also cares deeply about the sea and is an accomplished novelist and screenwriter.
That’s it. Nothing else on their resumes, except that they are tapping into what they believe to be a huge movement of those who are turning away from bureaucracies because they don’t trust them anymore, and are turning instead to small, focused, local action by individuals.
Will you believe BP when it announces that the spill is capped and the bad days are done?
The news folks will gobble that up as fact. Not so, however, with small groups on the ground. Recovery in the Gulf is years away. The crime scene is being run by the criminal – BP – so the crime reports are suspect. BP is using a chemical called Corexit to disperse the oil. It is likely harming the Gulf and causing cleanup crews to report respiratory distress, dizziness and headaches. As Peter wrote in his email, “Of that chemical, it’s enough to say that BP owns its manufacturer and its use is banned in the UK. Lucky the Brits can use up their stockpiles in their one-time colony.” Brock reported that another small group of activists led by documentary director Josh Tickell experienced burning eyes and skin rashes after exposure to Corexit. 
Corexit is “effectively sinking the oil down into the water table where it will be much harder to clean up, and honestly, much harder on all the life in the sea. But it will look better from a satellite picture! Oh man. Shortcuts suck.” – Brock Cahill
I know Brock Cahill because I’ve taken his yoga class. I know Peter because long ago and far away I worked for him when I wrote scripts for a superhero cartoon called ThunderCats. They are both superheroes to me now, and not just because Brock can do yoga poses that I cannot pronounce and Peter is a great writer. They are superheroes because they both recognize that large media organizations have lost sight of their mission to investigate and report, fearlessly. Now the yoga teacher and the writer need to get the job done. Fearlessly.
As I write this, they are on site in the Gulf, figuring out exactly what can and can’t be done, how to circumvent the bureaucracy of the clean up and achieve Brock’s mission – direct action to save sea turtles. They’re raising money for a boat and assembling a volunteer crew. “We’ll have a marine biologist on board,” Peter wrote. “We’ll be properly equipped…” to save as many turtles as possible.
“We’re independent and determined. This is our world just as much as it is BP’s, Big Oil’s or the government’s which, last time we looked, was financed and elected by us. That is, by individuals exercising democracy. We will not take no for an answer,” Peter wrote.
You can follow Brock Cahill on Twitter for updates. He posts to his blog and Facebook page often.
Photos courtesy Brock Cahill
500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider
Watch a movie for free. Everybody likes the sound of that. Except for people who work at movie studios, marketers and big ad guys who are running around the side of that building right now and puking into paper bags – that’s how upset they are. Filmmakers are taking it one day at a time and taking one antidepressant a day.
“Free” happened with music, with stock photography (on Flickr) and now, with movies. Pricing is on a roller coaster straight into the dirt. I hate roller coasters. I’d rather deal with scary clowns. But there’s no escaping that more videos have been posted to YouTube than have been seen on television in the history of the medium.
“Do you know why they call it a medium? Because it’s rarely well done.” –Fred Allen
A lot of videos on the web are free and a lot of them are junk. But at the end of a day watching them I often sit back with a rosy sense of satisfaction and think, Man, that was junk. In other words, they get me nowhere.
What about free media that is good, and further, free media that inspires people to do good? Now you’re on to something. KarmaTube is all about “do something” videos that are intended to help everyone be the change they want to see in the world. (Yeah, it’s a quote from Gandhi.) The KarmaTube guys are like that – they want to find a way to massage your consciousness so you’ll do one small good thing that leads to other good things and then to real change.
As a documentary director, I’m working with KarmaTube on a channel of my recommendations for films that are inspiring, cinematic and nudge the world. Want to help me? Send suggestions for inspiring cause and change-advocating short films to @docuguy and I’ll recommend those that I like to the KarmaTube board. To give you some ideas, here’s a film I’ve recommended called Unshaken. Beautifully directed by Paul Pryor, it’s a moving first-person appeal made bolder by unforgettable images. Paul Hawken gives a great speech in this talking-head-fest with surprisingly powerful visuals. Check these out and more on KarmaTube.
David J. Neff is a busy guy. Once upon a time he designed online and media communications for the American Cancer Society. Now he’s writing about non-profits in 501derful.org.
Lights. Camera. Help. is project he started to match filmmakers with non-profits. Then there’s the film festival he’s doing in Austin, the world’s first, David told me, dedicated entirely to nonprofit and cause-driven films. “The films we show here have to have that call to action,” David said. He’s looking for films with a mission and those that move you. Judges will choose finalists based on cinematic considerations, but they want to know if the movie asks something of you. Any film that heavily features a cause will be considered. This includes films by or about nonprofit, non-governmental or grassroots organizations. Feature length films, shorts and public service announcements are ok to submit. The deadline is June 30th. Go for it and you could get your movie screened in Austin July 29-August 2nd.
Going from free and foolish online to free and worthwhile is progress. Still, that “free movie” thing continues to give my bottom line a headache. How do you give away a movie for free and still pay back investors? Working on it. Will get back to you.
Gandhi image credit dougdelshaw via of Creative Commons License.
