Dear Renaissance Network, I very much like the direction this latest dialog is taking. Here's one thing Richard wrote I'd like to pick up on: Yet Internet, like most tools, is two-edged. Television, for example, was originally heralded as a great force for democracy - able to inform the citizenry better than ever before. In practice we find that TV serves to narrow the band of public understanding rather than expanding it. With Internet, the danger is that our actions become virtual, that the Internet itself becomes the universe of our activism. We must use the tool to escape from the tool, to move on to a higher level of effectiveness. The Internet is certainly the ideal tool for circulating memes. If it's a good meme, people can pick it up and move it along. If it's very good, this process becomes exponential... spreads everywhere. If it's not a good meme, it dies - the people's selection process. But if the memes don't help us escape from the medium, the consequence is just so many bits passing over our wires and across our screens. all the best to you, rkm http://cyberjournal.org ************************************************ Besides underlining the need for us to use the Internet as a tool, and not restrict our activism to it, he underlines the need for working within our communities to make them inclusive and ALSO to reach consensus. Not an easy task, for the more inclusive our communities are, the more likely we are to be struggling with different outlooks, opinions and so on. Perhaps the main thing I want to say is that there is real hope for us to reach these goals, for I have seen it happen in my own work. I've lived in a part of rural Nova Scotia for more than 20 years now. At the beginning, I felt really isolated, with my concerns about human rights, the environment, peace, justice, etc. But I knew that what is important is to ""Do the thing that you believe in. Do the best you can in the place where you are and be kind." Scott Nearing, 2 months before his death, quoted by Helen Nearing in her wonderful book, _Loving and Leaving the Good Life_. And so I plugged along and it looked mighty ineffective at times, but I could not give up. Eventually I got to see what great training this was, doing this work in this rather conservative area, where people are often so reluctant to speak out. For one thing, I could not hang out with other people who thought the way I did and get some skewed vision of what the world was really like. I was always rubbing my nose in views and perspectives that differed from mine. Also, I learned to work with and appreciate people who were very different from me in terms of religion, politics, etc. but with whom I still had much in common. We realized that, had we lived in a city, it would have been unlikely for us to have become friends, but that our friendships were exceptionally rich at least partly because of how different we were. Now, as I prepare to move from here, back to B.C. (where I grew up) I am seeing that the seeds of change are ready to sprout! A journalist who looked on somewhat scornfully at our pitiful little anti-war vigils does not seem nearly so cynical now; we are happily surprised with some of his editorials! The little environmental group we have, that some people thought was really just a front for me alone, is not going to wither and die when I leave. ... Some students, when I go substitute teach, tell me they heard about someone who hugs trees... others write me little notes to assert that they pollute with their ATVs, etc.... and ask me if it's true that I talk to trees... and I sense that some of them are actually quite happy to discover an adult who is at least trying to communicate with trees.... I don't want to make it seem that I feel like all this is happening because of 20 + years of work I did that looked pitifully futile at times. But I can see that my work made a difference. Just an example: when the big shut-down of the Seattle WTO happened in 1999, we were able to "capitalize" on the shock value of that to explain what it was all about, because we had already been working at understanding it for a long time. I don't know how long I would need to stay on here for this community to reach a point where we would all be working together in a direction we could agree upon. But I have learned that the bonds of love and caring can happen between us right now. ... Maybe that is why the last words of that Nearing quote emphasize the need to "be kind". When there is respect and love, one cannot help but be kind. all the best, Jan ***************************************************** PS I guess I must have mentioned to Carolyn Chute (who comes out of and belongs to a community that is, in many ways, similar to the one I have been living in here) the bit about the local kids happy to find an adult who confesses to talking to trees. For in her reply, she declared happily that she talks to trees ALL the time (and stars)... I may send her a book that Carolyn Ballard recommended, _A Language Older Than Words_ by Derrick Jensen (which underlines the importance of this type of communication). It is kind of delightful that I met Carolyn Ballard because she had been working with Richard even before I had... and although Carolyn Chute and I have never actually met (and must communicate by letter for she has "no phone, no fax, no paved road" and no computer yet either, although with her hand probems, I think/hope she may get one before long...) we "met" through Richard too. And each of us, man oh man, are we ever different from each other! :)
