OK, so I felt a little smug. I thought, I won't ride in a car this Sunday. I had it all planned out, I would ride my bike to church, I would hang around the house, dinner plans with a couple down the road.
Well, the day before, this 50 year old man went running. Now, I run from time to time. I can run a good 5k with no problem. I can run a 10k. I can run 10 miles. But what I did was, I ran 17 miles. What in the world possessed me, I don't know. I had company, it was slow and pleasant. However, did I mention I am 50? Oh boy, did I pay the next morning.
The next morning, the Don't Drive Sunday, I awoke to rain. I wanted to go to church to honor some high school graduates, one of whom was the daughter of a friend of mine. I could not ride. Heck, I had trouble walking. So I accepted a ride in my wife's hybrid. Now I could have felt really bad, and I was not happy. However, I also knew there was nothing I could do about it.
I took solace in the fact it was a hybrid. I did not ride, drive or use a car the rest of the day. I even carried a crock pot full of soup down the hill for dinner. Just as importantly, I spent two nights using a reel mower (no gas, electric, or whatever) to mow our 1/3 acre lot. Saved about a gallon of gas. Probably more than my wife's hybrid used to take us to church.
So although do not drive day was not perfect, the idea was. It was intentional. It forced me to think about my fossil fuel consumption (the wife in the couple at dinner took great delight in turning the lights on and saying "Now you are using fossil fuels" and then turning them off and saying "Now you are not"!). All in all I feel this is the greatest success of all. I cannot simply stop the world and go back to the stone age. Nor would I want to. But I can be mindful.
I cannot wait for the next great experiment!
Tuesday, May 21, 2013
Sunday, May 19, 2013
Don't just vote ... COMPLAIN!
I have been reading the usual spate of writers telling you that if you don't vote, you shouldn't complain. Well, that seems downright un-American. Remember, the whole War for Independence (or "revolution" depending on where you stood) was about complaining without voting. Also inalienable rights. Inalienable whether one votes or not.
And what about people who pay taxes but cannot vote? They contribute. Why can't they have a say in how the money is wasted? I think Samuel Adams and Thomas Jefferson would say they should.
It seems to me, it is one's duty and obligation to complain about injustice. I refuse to believe that a prerequisite for complaining is casting a vote for a Republicrat, bought and sold by the same people. Or even voting for a third party and being coopted and marginalized.
Dissent is alive and well and no amount of self congratulations about voting can change that. I VOTE. And I welcome complainers, dissenters, protesters and people of all kind to the public debate. What are we afraid of?
Sunday, May 12, 2013
Money is a Tool....Part II...
Money is power. Or so the saying goes. The problem is, we have lost sight of the fact there are numerous other ways to gain and hold power. There is the power of the ballot box. There is the power of religion, of organization and the power of ideas. All of these latter powers have one great difference with the "power" of money. That is that each one is personal to the person or organization utilizing the power. Money is completely and utterly fungible. It can be used to finance water treatment systems for refugees or to buy cocaine.
True enough, horrible things have been done in the name of religion. Union organizations have created problems for the very workers they were to protect. And ideas can be utterly wrong. However,the purpose of religion, organization and ideas is universally positive. Not in the sense that positive is right, legal and moral. But positive in the sense that religion, organization and ideas are meant to promote some general idea. Money, on the other hand, is completely lacking in any ambition. It is only something to be used or not.
I previously discussed the fallibility of collecting billions of "tools" instead of actually using the tool. Now I would like to consider the fallibility of money as power. The thing is, money itself is nothing more than a measurement. It is an imperfect approximation of value. True power lies in the importance that the citizens give to money. If the people of the world give value, then money has the value it is given. Consider, if all the people of the world simply decided not to accept the value of money, then it would be worthless.
Now, we all know that is unlikely. Getting 20 people to accept the value of money as worthless would be quite a feat. But, consider the concept that a large group of people exercising their power of religion, organization and ideas could use money to their advantage. For instance, during the depression and throughout World War II, citizen consumers used the power of not purchasing from some businesses to force those businesses to hold prices and to hire African Americans. Essentially, they used their "money" to support their organizations and ideas. To be clear, religious organizations played a key role in many of these activities, as they did in the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.
For reasons I cannot currently explain or understand, we have lost this sense. It seems that Americans are totally different in most aspect except one. Americans value individuality and the concept of the free market so much they are willing to give up the greatest powers they have to organizations that neither share their values, nor have any morals or ethics.
It is time Americans began to use their power again. Climate change is an opportunity. Stop mindlessly using fossil fuels. If we all just quite driving for one day....but that is the subject of a different story. However, there are many other opportunities to make a statement using money. Refuse to invest in fossil fuels. Switch electric suppliers to a "clean energy" alternative. Use public transportation. Do not purchase things wrapped in huge amounts of needless plastic and request the stores you shop in to change suppliers. No one is suggesting we freeze. But recognizing when we are using fossil fuels and when we do not is a huge step. Saving those fossil fuels is even bigger.
Another opportunity is reforming the political finance system. Find out who the big donors are. Stop using their products and divest our 401(k)s of their stocks. Even if it these actions are simply done for a short while or by a select group, the message will be given and received. A recent story told of EQT shareholders who questioned whether their donations to political campaigns really raised the company's bottom line and increased their dividends and value. These questions should be made obselete.
The key to both of these exercises of power is to make sure that there is a clear link up of the message to the action. There is power in organization. There is also power in decentralized organization and individual action. Using the tool of money in ways such as outlined above, each of us individually can contribute a little, or a lot, to an organization that never needs to meet, has no leaders and cannot therefore be attacked. In other words, we simply vote with our dollars.
This is the real power of money. Unfortunately, we have become all too accustomed to abdicating this power to the sexiest advertising campaign. I urge us to think and find ways to exercise our power to achieve the world we want, rather than simply investing in what we are offered. Add any ideas to this blog, meet each other in private messages and start something. We owe it to ourselves.
True enough, horrible things have been done in the name of religion. Union organizations have created problems for the very workers they were to protect. And ideas can be utterly wrong. However,the purpose of religion, organization and ideas is universally positive. Not in the sense that positive is right, legal and moral. But positive in the sense that religion, organization and ideas are meant to promote some general idea. Money, on the other hand, is completely lacking in any ambition. It is only something to be used or not.
I previously discussed the fallibility of collecting billions of "tools" instead of actually using the tool. Now I would like to consider the fallibility of money as power. The thing is, money itself is nothing more than a measurement. It is an imperfect approximation of value. True power lies in the importance that the citizens give to money. If the people of the world give value, then money has the value it is given. Consider, if all the people of the world simply decided not to accept the value of money, then it would be worthless.
Now, we all know that is unlikely. Getting 20 people to accept the value of money as worthless would be quite a feat. But, consider the concept that a large group of people exercising their power of religion, organization and ideas could use money to their advantage. For instance, during the depression and throughout World War II, citizen consumers used the power of not purchasing from some businesses to force those businesses to hold prices and to hire African Americans. Essentially, they used their "money" to support their organizations and ideas. To be clear, religious organizations played a key role in many of these activities, as they did in the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.
For reasons I cannot currently explain or understand, we have lost this sense. It seems that Americans are totally different in most aspect except one. Americans value individuality and the concept of the free market so much they are willing to give up the greatest powers they have to organizations that neither share their values, nor have any morals or ethics.
It is time Americans began to use their power again. Climate change is an opportunity. Stop mindlessly using fossil fuels. If we all just quite driving for one day....but that is the subject of a different story. However, there are many other opportunities to make a statement using money. Refuse to invest in fossil fuels. Switch electric suppliers to a "clean energy" alternative. Use public transportation. Do not purchase things wrapped in huge amounts of needless plastic and request the stores you shop in to change suppliers. No one is suggesting we freeze. But recognizing when we are using fossil fuels and when we do not is a huge step. Saving those fossil fuels is even bigger.
Another opportunity is reforming the political finance system. Find out who the big donors are. Stop using their products and divest our 401(k)s of their stocks. Even if it these actions are simply done for a short while or by a select group, the message will be given and received. A recent story told of EQT shareholders who questioned whether their donations to political campaigns really raised the company's bottom line and increased their dividends and value. These questions should be made obselete.
The key to both of these exercises of power is to make sure that there is a clear link up of the message to the action. There is power in organization. There is also power in decentralized organization and individual action. Using the tool of money in ways such as outlined above, each of us individually can contribute a little, or a lot, to an organization that never needs to meet, has no leaders and cannot therefore be attacked. In other words, we simply vote with our dollars.
This is the real power of money. Unfortunately, we have become all too accustomed to abdicating this power to the sexiest advertising campaign. I urge us to think and find ways to exercise our power to achieve the world we want, rather than simply investing in what we are offered. Add any ideas to this blog, meet each other in private messages and start something. We owe it to ourselves.
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