Blogs

The United States seems to be veering dangerously close to Constitutional crisis. And within this budding crisis, both major parties claim to be standing up for the true intentions of the nation’s founders. So, who’s right?

The answer is: neither, and both. The founders laid out a quite a brilliant and comprehensive plan. But their vision is often misinterpreted and oversimplified at all points along the political spectrum. Many have some of it right. Few truly grasp the broadest original intentions, in all their wisdom and critical relevance for today.

Try describing something you see in the place where you live without using a metaphor. Right now, I see a tree outside my window, with brown, red and green flecks on its bark. It’s leaves are being moved by a gentle breeze and shadows are casting across it at different points, changing very rapidly. Now I see the reflection of sunlight on one of the leaves of the tree, which has a dew drop that is yellow in one spot because of its refraction of the sun. On the limb of the branch above the one with the yellow hued dew drop, I see a brown squirrel, moving swiftly downwards towards the base of the tree. Now it’s on the ground. The ground on which it’s moving is…..

Wow, it’s really hard not to fall into a metaphor…

Ecovillagers Alliance is a nonprofit initiative of educators, organizers, systems engineers, and storytellers. We came together from a crazy quilt of past attempts to establish community control of land and buildings by different models—co-ops, land trusts, co-housing, communes—none of which quite addressed the inhumane realities of modern urban real estate. So we went back to the drawing board to ask: what instrument of neighborhood real estate stewardship would be democratic, just, and sustainable?

The stories we tell shape our culture. Journalism as a civic art, to be of real assistance to democracy, has a few things to overcome.

I have come to see capitalism as the ideology or worship of capital, of money. Absentee investment is the root of so much in the way of dissociation. Money for money’s sake, and not for what it can do. Instead, we should look at intimate and engaged investment, that puts the power of money to good use.

One of the challenges we face in realizing a reimagined democracy is the force of narrative. The dominant narrative, the one purveyed by mainstream media, corporate communications, and political campaigns, is for the most part an institutional narrative. It isn’t really for or by the grassroots at all.

In my work with large organizations, one of the questions we often ask is, “How would we work differently if we really understood that we are truly self-organizing?” The first thing we recognize is that, just like individuals, the organizations we create have a natural tendency to change, to develop.

During election time, we can easily get lost in the notion that voting and politicians are at the centre of democracy. And yet, democracy is so much more.

Today, democracy’s detractors point to the US experiment to denigrate the idea. In Canada, our politics have to a degree followed suit.

“The future of journalism is to play a fundamental and important role in an ecology of community development works and capacities and professions,” says Peter Pula, founder of Axiom News and pioneer of Generative Journalism.

Peter is now co-leading a local initiative to bring citizen-led dialogue and community development in direct partnership with the media.

During times of upheaval, we need stories that are inclusive, generative, and inspire us to engage. Some journalists are starting to provide them.

Sex is great. Especially when you are young… All the hugging and kissing and stuff that young people do… keep doing when they get older, except that now… sometimes… by a process that remains quite a mystery to me, they also get pregnant… It is a mystery how that happens.