Date: Fri, 23 Jan 1998 17:39:24 -0600
From: Betsy Barnum 
Message-ID: <34C92A2C.41E2@polaristel.net>
Organization: Upper Mississippi Valley Earth Institute
Subject: Small things
To: positive-futures@igc.apc.org

The coffee discussion touched on a point that has become very meaningful and important to me: the idea that what I do actually matters.

There have been some comments that discussing the drinking or not drinking of coffee is a small issue--a tempest in a drip pot, you might say. I'd like to present a different point of view. To me, *nothing* is too small an issue.

Last year, as some of you will remember, I went through a period of despair and anguish about the deteriorating environment and worsening human suffering, and my smallness and feeling that I couldn't do enough or act quickly enough to make a difference. The wonderful folks on this list responded to my cries with compassionate words and personal stories. I saved those responses on my computer--they are precious to me and I still reread them from time to time.

Thanks to stories and words from you all and others, and also to other factors like time and prayer, I came out the other side of that personal crisis with a conviction that is still gaining clarity every day: that my life matters. Everything I do matters, everything counts.

There isn't anything more within my reach to address than how I live my life--my own attitudes and behavior. I know I'm not going to save the world single-handedly--the notion is absurd. But if I want things around me to change, *I* have to change. Gandhi said a couple of things that I find very much to the point (may not be exact quotes):

I can't cause Bill Clinton to endorse a serious treaty on global warming; but I can drive my car less and turn off lights. I can't force any big coffee marketer to buy coffee from worker-owned co-ops that don't use sprays and don't exploit the land; but I can choose to buy coffee that *is* grown this way and not to support companies that don't.

But it's even more than voting with my dollars, or changing some specific behaviors, hard as that can be (just like I still drink coffee, I still drive a car, and I, together with my 17-year-old licensed driver son, drive it a lot more than I'm comfortable with). Personal change happens slowly, a process toward a life that is more and more in line with my principles. This process happens through a day-by-day accretion of individual small choices that gradually build a different life.

Another metaphor that works well is the onion, with its layers. The outer layers of my enmeshment in the destructive system (this is *my* onion, yours may be different) are relatively easy to pull back--insulate my house to save energy, ride a bike for local errands, buy milk in returnable containers, eat lower on the food chain. Once those layers have been peeled back, new ones are exposed. These are a bit more difficult--seek out organic and locally grown food, reduce use of dairy products from factory farms, buy very few new clothes or household items, downsize my car. Each time I make a change, small or large, it opens the way to more changes that each bring me closer to living lightly and in closer accord with my values.

I realize that not everyone shares my intense dissatisfaction with Western culture and the global economy. The environmental crisis is for me the leading problem--but the human misery being wrought by the religion of free trade--the human misery that has accompanied the advance of Western society for hundreds and even thousands of years--is also a condition I feel I must do what I can to address.

Voluntary simplicity is a concrete, do-able way to make my life matter in both of these arenas: the destruction of the Earth, and the global economy (I also benefit personally and spiritually). I feel strongly enough about this that for me not to continue peeling that onion is simply not an option.

Today it seems that many people feel powerless to do anything about the problems they see around them, whether it's environment, crime, education, government corruption or anything else. "I'm too small, what I do isn't going to make a bit of difference, these things are all out of my control." The chronic results are despair, hopelessness, suppressed fear, stress and unhappiness. This is, in essence, what I felt last spring, when I appealed to the list to help me find a point of equilibrium amid the huge forces that are operating in the world.

It now seems to me that the best antidote to this kind of hopelessness is to realize that each person can make changes in their own life, and that, far from being "too small," each person has tremendous power to make a difference. We can vote with our dollars; we can influence other people; we can learn to live a different way that doesn't just hide from the overwhelming problems, but lets us find peace in the midst of them and at the same time slowly push the change we want to see.

As someone in another discussion I participate in put it, society and the economy are made up of individual relationships and transactions. By changing the way I conduct my relationships and transactions, I am creating a new society around me. I am also demonstrating to other people that there *are* other ways to relate and transact. Ripples go out and meet other ripples from other places where people are changing their ways of relating and doing business; potentially, systemic change can come about from this. Even if it doesn't, I have helped to create around me the change I want to see happen.

I think of each action, each choice, as a brick in the foundation of the new world I'd like to see come into being. Bricks can be huge actions like changing one's job; they can be seemingly small actions like choosing consciously whether or not to drink coffee. How I raise my kids; whether I buy a sweater made in a sweatshop. A letter to the editor; mindfully stirring this pot of soup in this moment.

Each choice, each issue, is a brick without which the entire edifice could not be built. Each choice is a layer of the onion that, being peeled back, reveals another deeper choice to make. Things may not turn out the way I envision; it's quite likely they won't. But working positively to build something new gives me energy every day. Knowing that everything I do, without exception, has an impact on the world empowers me to make choices and actions that build toward a positive future.

Well, as usual I went on longer than I intended. See, small things really aren't small after all! ;-)

Thanks for listening,
Betsy

--
Betsy Barnum
bbarnum@polaristel.net
http://www.oocities.org/RainForest/1624

*****************************
"One speaks of living on the earth but in truth life is held within the earth. An atmosphere woven from life circles the planet. Every movement, every breath, every response, the least thought is shaped to the curve of this mass. Even time and space bend to it. Like a child in a womb, all we know exists inside this outer body. And all is dependent on it."
--Susan Griffin

Date: Fri, 23 Jan 1998 22:42:50 -0800 (PST)
From: Jim Anderson 
Message-ID: 
Sender: owner-positive-futures@igc.apc.org
Subject: usury, capitalism and Miss Piggy
To: Positive Futures ,
        Bruce Brummitt 

(Bruce & Cheryl)

You ask several important questions here. All of which point in a certain direction. I hope you'll indulge me as I deal with them separately and, maybe (one can hope) come to some kind of point at the end.

1. What is usury?

This idea, I'm afraid, contains a long and unsavory history of anti-Semitism. Barbara Tuchman says this about it:

"No economic activity was more irrepressible than the investment and lending at interest of money, it was the basis for the rise of Western capitalist economy and the building of private fortunes - and it was based on the sin of usury. Nothing so vexed medieval thinking, nothing so baffled and eluded settlement, nothing was so great a tangle of irreconcilables as the theory of usury. Society needed moneylending while Christian doctrine forbade it...For practical purposes, usury was considered to be not the charging of interest per se [although that was the nature of the 'sin'] but charging at a higher rate than was decent. This was left to the Jews as the necessary dirty work of society..." ("A Distant Mirror")

Since Jews were forbidden to pursue most forms of gainful employment it fell upon them to become the moneylenders. And from this arose pogroms, expulsions and confiscations as the kings and nobles, while using their services and profiting from them thereby, turned the ire of their subjects upon the Jews and their 'devilish' practices. So, when their debts became too burdensome or when certain Jews became too wealthy and were ripe for confiscation, rumors and propaganda would be spread and persecutions would happen with the result that the debts of the nobles would be cancelled and Jewish property confiscated.

2. Which is more important... labour or capital?

This depends upon who's answering.

One one hand we have Karl Marx, "capital is dead labour, that vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour." And on the other hand we have Rush Limbaugh, "Profits are good. Profits work." (And Miss Piggy, "More is more.")

Without investment capital these computers we padiddle would not have come to be and without investment capital there would be no places of employment which give us opportunities to 'make a dying.'

Both labor and capital are part of the great economic theory of production which involves the interactions of Land, Labor and Capital and the proper proportions of those inputs in creating efficient economic enterprises. Furthermore, there have been wars fought over the relative values of those inputs. This is not an easy question.

And then there are the ecological economists, with whom I agree most strongly, who say things like, "natural resources are the very sap of the economic process. They are not just like any other production factor. A change in capital or labor can only diminish the amount of waste in the production of a commodity: no agent can create the material on which it works. Nor can capital create the stuff out of which it is made." (Herman Daly in "BioScience" magazine Oct 1995 v45 n9 p621)

3. Is the stock market truly representative of the state of the world's economics?

No.

Although there are many who would go on and on about the beautifully efficient way in which the free market, obeying the Invisible Hand, allocates resources in a miraculous and magnificent way and that any attempts to somehow 'interfere' with the workings of this sublime machine are utterly misguided.

I'm more inclined to the view that the stock market represents the varying mass movements of greed and fear on the part of investors, investment managers and corporations who have large sums of money at risk. It values equally the production of cancer causing chemicals, the medical equipment and pharmaceuticals used to treat patients who have contracted the disease from those chemicals and the coffin and cemetary space used to bury the deceased cancer victim.

4. Is this how we view a positive-future?

Ahh... Is a positive-future a brave new world of recovered yuppies who have retired from the rat race and now live on the interest income of the wealth they were able to amass while in that rat race? The question then becomes - who generates the productive assets which keep this interest income rolling in?

There is a Native American statement that comes to mind (I can't remember it exactly, or who said it), "Only when the last river is dammed, the last tree is cut down, the last salmon caught... will the white man realize he cannot eat money."

There seems to be two streams of VS thought. One is the recovering yuppie idea of how to cut back from a life of stress and six-figure incomes and give up 'stuff' and save enough to achieve FI.

The other seems to be learning how to live "off the grid" and achieve an independence that involves a kind of connection with the earth where money and investment income is much less important.

And, of course, there is neither black nor white in this. I think both ways are intermixed in most VS people's lives.

Jim Anderson

We dance around in a ring and suppose
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows

Date: Sat, 24 Jan 1998 08:06:27 -0800 (PST)
From: andersen@spiritone.com (John O. Andersen)
Message-Id: <199801241606.IAA03471@ridge.spiritone.com>
Sender: owner-positive-futures@igc.apc.org
Subject: Re: usury, capitalism and Miss Piggy
To: Jim Anderson , positive-futures@igc.apc.org,
        rbaird1@fscnet.com, dmurton@bayhouse.sch.net, scotto57@hotmail.com

Thank you for a most articulate posting on this important topic. You've made some very good points, and I can imagine that when I discuss these issues with others, I will likely mention some of the quotes you included.

>I'm more inclined to the view that the stock market represents the varying
>mass movements of greed and fear on the part of investors, investment
>managers and corporations who have large sums of money at risk. It values
>equally the production of cancer causing chemicals, the medical equipment
>and pharmaceuticals used to treat patients who have contracted the disease
>from those chemicals and the coffin and cemetary space used to bury the
>deceased cancer victim. 

>Ahh... Is a positive-future a brave new world of recovered yuppies who
>have retired from the rat race and now live on the interest income of the
>wealth they were able to amass while in that rat race? The question then
>becomes - who generates the productive assets which keep this interest
>income rolling in? 
> ....
>There seems to be two streams of VS thought. One is the recovering yuppie
>idea of how to cut back from a life of stress and six-figure incomes and
>give up 'stuff' and save enough to achieve F[inancial] I[ndependence]. 
>
>The other seems to be learning how to live "off the grid" and achieve an
>independence that involves a kind of connection with the earth where money
>and investment income is much less important. 

And, I might add that we shouldn't forget that Voluntary Simplicity is really just a North American thing. In Europe, for example, VS doesn't have the impact or interest level, because most of the people there have lived simply (by North American standards) all of their lives.

John O. Andersen

This is: http://www.emucities.com.au/member/davd/Positive-Futures.html