I have a thing about old letters, images, tawny browns, and filtered light. They remind me of times gone by and the first stirrings of a history written for women, about women, by women. Women’s domains no matter how they are parsed were, and largely still are, focused on the home, and relationships among family and a close community. Legacy of any individual woman depended upon artifacts, often fabric ones, and works created in a woman’s lifetime, letters and diaries, that were displayed or archived by those that remembered her or those who were shaped by her.
Embroidery samplers created by young ladies to showcase their skill with a needle and thread, as well as appreciation of home and their piety, are often the only medium for their words to echo on after a life is over.
Education and literacy had to come to be routine for the average women, and writing supplies had to be priced such that common people could afford paper, ink and the time needed for writing.
It is easy to forget that mass communication is a most recent development. Histories were carefully composed and facts sculpted for them for centuries. The information that fed and fueled our society and informed our actions and decisions was closely controlled by very small numbers of individuals until but a historical heartbeat ago.
Newspapers and other periodicals increased the amount of information regularly added to our knowledge base at an unheard of rate in the last 150 to 200 years. Propriety shaped much of the content of these publications and filters were everywhere.
In the last 15 to 20 years personal publishing developed in both print and electronic forms. Digital information transmission and storage allowed for the generation and consumption of data at a scale unimagined even a decade ago. The size of the dark web of criminal and underworld activity and deep web of information behind firewalls is unknown, but what is available on the open, indexed web is, by itself is creating not only more information than ever before, but of a type never previously collected: the bits and pieces of women’s lives that are creating the first level of a women’s history. The legacy we are writing is not only unique, it is expanding into a new niche.
As some of the women who are creating this new cultural information, we have tremendous influence over the very nature of this new thing we are building and the trajectories that will be built upon beyond our lifetimes. This new type and level of influence over communication is fortuitous as several constants of the physical world and humanity’s place on that world for the last many centuries are morphing in unpredictable fashion.
We may not be able to anticipate what the future will be, but we have opportunity to influence the changes that are transpiring with an openness and a balance that has not been available to us for millennia if ever.
Fighting Ignorance With Ignorance
Basic information on how culture works, respect for knowledge, and understanding of science is sorely missing from today’s world. Even those who purportedly are educated people doing science or creating complex global policies do not understand even the basic concepts of social science.
We cannot fight ignorance with ignorance… for oh so many reasons.
Social science does not work from ideology. Marxism and Supply-side economics both have ideology at the core of their understanding. Perhaps Keynes missed things, but he attempted to look at and describe the operation of economic systems.
Objectivity
Real reporting of news and reporting of scientific findings does not have a political viewpoint. If you see these topics mixed with politics, you are not really looking at news or science.
Reinforcement
Paying attention to things you want to lessen will probably have the opposite of the intended impact. For example, this is why I am not anti-war and instead am pro-peace. Opposition puts as much energy into the system as support. This is part of why the status quo is so difficult to alter.
Paradigm Shift
You may have heard of paradigm shift. The paradigm is the overarching premise that unites and generates thought about an organizing principle. Changing what people do cannot really happen if the beliefs that motivate and promulgate a behavior remain as they have always been.
Pressure from the outside and working from the inside will not change an organizing principle at a systems level.
What We Have
Hierarchy and territoriality typify the way almost everything works in human society. Contemporary governance, economics, infrastructure, religious practice, and almost everything else assumes competition between, unequal access, and differential worth of different types of people.
I would say things are not going so well when our religion and politics creates war, and when health, education and happiness are afterthoughts once profit is taken.
These are real pressing concerns and I would love to know what other intelligent bloggers and readers think might work to introduce real change.
Stay tuned. More is coming on this topic this week. I have a plan.
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Answer to yesterday’s question. 2000 people in Nigeria died last week in Boko Haram attacks.
Self-Indulgent Micro-Focus on Piffle Must Stop
There is a problem in the world. One problem. We are killing ourselves.
We have an inter-connected world in which tiny, myopic, and dysfunctional communities are chafing from rubbing up against communities with opposing and equally dysfunctional bases.
Once the world was a big enough place that opposing ideologies simply widened the geographic distance between themselves and expanded, as the need developed, into places where humans had not yet settled. After that was impossible we then overran or exterminated low population densities of peoples who had the misfortune of being where the better armed or larger group(s) decided to expand.
We have now come to a place where we have to find a different, better, survivable method of dealing with the desire to conquer place and people.
No I am not putting forward a solution. I have ideas as to some of the things that a livable solution might want to incorporate, but I believe that humanity as a whole will have to come up with a solution. That whole will have to value all life, people who look or think differently from themselves, and all the women from those groups. This is the only way I can find to a place where we might be able to come up with a viable way to live together and figure out how to survive the next century or two when everything that has been a given for centuries or millennia will change or disappear.
I believe, and this is personal belief that I would expect any other person to have exactly the same belief, that we are at a very a cultural, earthly tipping point where extinction of humanity and many if not most of Earth’s species along with us is on one side of a narrowing path toward a tipping point where we as a species will fall into rapid movement toward this side or another side where this unsustainable, competitive, territorial, and violence-based cultural system is replaced by a system based on other distinctly different organizing principles such as cooperative distribution systems and speech-based conflict resolution.
All I know for sure is that we cannot continue to exist if the only thing all people do is develop new ways to kill each other and ultimately ourselves.
Solutions anyone?
I know we will need a better understanding of what is going on around us if we are to evolve culturally. For example, where do you think the biggest loss of life to terrorism occurred last week? If you said France, you need to change how and where you get your news. Your task if you don’t know is to find out where over 2000 people were killed last week. Let’s all expand our micro-focus beyond our own tiny neighborhoods.
My next post will provide the answer to the question I asked in the previous paragraph.
25 Years With My Daughter Thus Far
This will not be a huge post, not intended to change other people’s lives, nor for getting page views, or for furthering other bloggy-world accomplishments, but it is about my biggest, best, most wonderful accomplishment in this world: My daughter Phoebe. She is pictured below with her fiancé, Adam.
I love her more than life itself. She taught me more about love than I ever dreamed of knowing. I am proud of her. I love laughing with her. I miss her physical presence as she attends grad school around the Great Lakes and I am here, where she was born, in the northern reaches of the Sonoran Desert.
I love you Phoebe, Happy Birthday! As always, you are the light of my life…
…as you have been since your birth!
Siblings and Older Foster Kids Need Parents
Regular readers will find this to differ from my usual post, at first glance. Social action that sees light on this blog is often political, but at this time of the year, when everyone is thinking of family, family gatherings, and tradition, I’ve decided to take a moment to consider youths whose family structure is so fragmented that they essentially have no family or are in danger of being torn apart by the foster and adoptive systems from the only loving relationship they know – that of a sibling.
This week U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, AdoptUSKids and the Ad Council are unveiling a new series of public service advertisements (PSAs) to encourage the adoption of children from foster care with an emphasis on the importance of keeping siblings together. This is legit. The program itself is 10 years old. The gist of the idea is that no one needs be perfect to be a needed, appreciated, and loved parent.
I said good-bye to a brother last month. But I had him 57 years before he died at age 66. I cannot imagine how I could have survived without family, even my imperfect big brothers. I know there are many mid-lifers who have aged out of biological parenting almost accidentally. It isn’t too late to provide love and all the imperfect parenting you have to offer to older kids and siblings who desperately need you.
Give yourself the gift of checking into adoptuskids.org. Consider: Older parents, older kids. Successful singles of a certain age who thought about being a parent but never found the right partner.
Growing up I knew a brother and sister who were adopted together. I thought that was wonderful then, and I think it is even more wonderful now. I have a friend who lost both parents in High School but she and her brother were not separated. My cousin was adopted. People I care about had people who cared enough to make them family.
Check out AdoptUsKids on Facebook. There are currently 402,000 children in the foster care system in the US. 102,000 children, under 18 years of age, are waiting for adoption. They are waiting to have you share your life, your regular old life, with them.
Plotting and Scheming Out of the Darkness
I cannot seem to finish the posts I am writing. I lose interest with tasks if I do not complete them in one pass through. It is not exactly disinterest which I associate with depression. It is sort of a numbness. Rainy and cloudy days in Tucson, Winter’s arrival, might explain my blah-ness.
Reacting to a life in which I am, almost daily, realizing things I should have asked of someone in my family before there was no one left to ask might explain it.
I am disturbed by police getting off without even a ruffle of a real brush with justice for murdering young boys and men with dark skin. The racism that is everywhere in America along with the relatively recent militarization of police forces combines into a really frightening and alien landscape.
My innermost, Pollyanna, self still believes in the goodness that all humans are born with, no original sin for me, nope, and no matter how lousy things get, and believe me, I know lousy, I have to believe that people are inherently better than they seem to be if we get our information about humanity from the airwaves and digital papers rather than from the individuals that make up humanity.
I know that individuals are good, mostly, and that individuals can have substantial influence and change the course of major processes, sometimes. I also learned many moons ago in school that behaviors rewarded by intermittent reinforcement are the most difficult ones to extinguish. The fact that something does not work all the time does not deter me from trying to make it work.
Somewhere deep down inside, I also know that women can successfully change the negative course of where our world seems to be heading. If my voice can motivate or encourage one person to act to build a better world, shouldn’t I do it? I’m wondering what I can do that will be or promote the most significant and positive change in the world.
I keep thinking that the amazing women I am lucky enough to know could do amazing things if we engaged in a collective effort.
I want to get re-involved with NOW that has sagged a bit here in Tucson with the new chapter’s founder’s ill-health.
I also have thoughts of organizing a month long blogging fest that caters to the intelligent, concerned, old enough to know better woman writer. Not necessarily a write every day blog challenge but a “challenge” with options to engage every day, every weekday, or on weekends.
Or maybe to organize a get together of women to discuss writing, wisdom, and what they feel they as yet have to write at a lovely Tucson resort. NOT a “conference.” More like an intimate brain trust retreat of sage women writers that happens to take place by a pool with drinks. No how to sell your writing for cheap to corporations.
I will plot and scheme my way out of the darkness into a better world. Been doing it all of my life.