A common good: The gift of sharing.

I've been writing about patience & waiting in the days before December. I've also been listening to our national debate over health care. The debate is coming to an end w/the Senate floor action. During this discussion many ideas flop around, assertions made, facts determined, and opinions expressed.

The Headline: Sunday, November 29, 2009,
New York Times:

Food Stamp Use Soars Across US, Stigma Fades

The Maps:

1) Growth of Food Stamp use from June 2007- June 2009.

Front page map shows high growth in food stamp in FL, home of the head "Ditto-Head" and in ID, WY, UT, NV, & GA. (These six states have ten GOP Senators.)

2) Percentage people in each county who receive food stamps, June 2009.

Jump page map show use highest across the south from AZ thru NM, TX, OK, MO, AR, LA, MS, AL, KY, TN, NC, GA, SC WV, & FL. (These 16 states have twenty-two GOP Senators.)

I feel really good about sharing the wealth of our nation with anyone who needs. Using the Department of Agriculture Food Stamp Program should be stigma free and available to any citizen who is hungry. Even if they are Republican. I ask are these the same places where people are organizing against a right to affordable health care insurance under the label of the Tea Party Patriots? I didn't do a scientific study but looking at the lists of links by state at the Tea Party Patriots Web site and at the Wikipedia page it seems like a large number of these states are the same places. Citizens in good conscience rail against "socialist health care" yet while use the roads, libraries, fire departments, public gathering places and our shared wealth in the form of food stamps. Where are Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and the like most popular? I looked around and it looks like they are popular all over. I guess the masters of misinformation drive the discussion on this point and they'll certainly ignore this story.

In many cases these are the same people who think nothing spending millions of dollars for three days of intensive care for a malformed premature infant whose prognosis at birth, or even before birth, is for three to six months of life. Life, they say, is sacred. Often the same folks who would force a pregnant woman to seek illegal care to control the outcome of her pregnancy, on the notion that God endows life and life begins when sperm meets egg & genes are intertwined. A poor definition of life in my book. Life is a line, not series of dots, lined up. People exist along the line we don't start & end, we participate. Each moment of consciousness is a decision to continue participating. Life began 3.X billion years ago on Earth and now it is in every crevice and nook.

We can disagree about policies and programs a government should promote. We can disagree about what unseen, or unknown things to believe in. We can teach our children what we choose even if it is a lie like the Easter Bunny exists or Santa comes down the chimney on Christmas morning to celebrate the birth on earth of God made man. But we need each other. We need all of humanity to continue our life on this planet. We even need people who believe such wild stories as are being told in the ultra-conservative, "taxes are only for poor" mainstream media like Fox. We need to share our world if we are to live on it long enough for our species to survive. Self-awareness should allow us to plan the next step in human culture but only if we can move as one.

Health is key to life so it should be a basic right. We need our neighbors to be healthy or we will get infected by them. Our children deserve to be taught how to be healthy. Our government is a great place to mediate & govern the vast and complex issues that make up the public, individual health care universe. A doctor is only a small part of the healthcare system. Patients have responsibility to monitor their own health, instead we've become a nation of fools paying more for less and believing we're getting the best. It's as if we have are the Emperor in the story of the Emperor Has No Clothes. I mourn for our democracy if the loud voices who led us with the failed policies of the past 3 decades can win this debate just by lying to their fans.

One final note on the health care debate: Our nation deserves to have healthy citizens, we need healthy citizens so we can once again lead the world in: innovation; creativity; social, cultural, economic, & artistic ideas; sports; technology; and medicine. We can afford to have the best if we stand up and demand reason prevail over faith, lies, and superstition. We can not afford to continue the byzantine system of healthcare delivery we have now, it bankrupts individuals, small & large businesses across the country. We need the Senate and the House to finish their work and deliver a bill to President Obama for signature.

Gifts: Giving w/o spending.

For years the frenzy of holiday purchasing ramped up. More each year. Last year retailers sold less than in 2007. Now, predictions for national retailers is another drop for 2009. But, small, independent, locals seem to be growing. There is another aspect of this change that can't be measured by retail sale. The new gift paradigm. Gifts of ideas, gifts of technology -not gadgets, processes or techniques- and the gifts of understanding; these uplift the soul, enhance the culture, and degrade the toxic effects of compulsive consumption.

When I started to write about patience about 10 days ago I was not completely sure where the topic would go. Now, as the holiday season from Thanksgiving to Christmas (a season we called Advent when I was young) starts w/ the ghastly named Black Friday, I realize patience is just another intangible gift that can be recycled and repurposed and regifted. You can teach yourself and others to be patient. Simple techniques like breathing thru your nose or sipping rather than gulping when you thirst can build your ability delay gratification of your desires.

Gifts of intention, reflection, will-power, integrity, passion, respect, and commitment are often more appreciated than you would think when you present them with dignity and understanding.

• Try a new gift paradigm today!
• Share your ideas with me and other who read my blog.

The Wisdom of Santa

Shared life: When we began to change our social gifts

Our culture changed fundamentally when we started to mate for life. I haven't read any dating of this but, I'll guess mating for life started around the time of art, spirituality, language and larger groups (150-200 adult individuals or more) cooperating. I'll also guess that the true shared life is only possible when, to paraphrase Rilke, "we become the guardian of each other's solitude." 

To put this period in perspective, I'll guess it started to emerge from the large brained creature living between 200, 000 and 70,000  years ago. I think mimicry had had its effect on our brains. I think the corpus collosum was sufficiently developed and sexually dimorphous that our social needs met our phenotype needs to push us to mate-for-life scenarios. (it would be interesting to study brains of other mate-for-life creatures and compare them to us alongside our fidelity rates could make a really interesting graphic.) In short, I believe that we learned to live with another for life over an evolutionarily brief period starting about 200,000 years ago lasting to about 70,000 years ago.

I believe we learned our amazing ability to "see the world thru others eyes" during this critical period. Two solid ice ages put us in the mood to mate for life. And, why not? It's an easy way to make and care for offspring that you're "sure or pretty sure are yours." This is also the beginning of our top notch empathy skills (I wrote about empathy in May) Our shared life is our interconnected life. We become dependent and humans are no longer solely individuals. We cannot really be evaluated or judged without consideration for our place in society. 

Sharing life with others is truly a gift we must always give and give well!

Dance: The movement of rhythm

I love to dance. I dance everyday. I like to dance with music playing and I like to dance in silence. I dance on foot, I dance on skates, I dance with a partner, I dance alone. The main focus of my dance is movement. I like to envision my body moving in certain way. Then I try to make it happen in real life. Sometimes I see pictures of dances in the NY times and try to imagine making those moves. Always this movement has a rhythm. A flow. Even if my dance is on;y fingers on computer keys.

Everyone should dance, everyday!

Cooked food: The miracle science of energy!

Cooked food came along shortly after we learned to control fire. An ancient gift from real scientists! We used fire to slow cook, sear, roast, broil and bake. We tried new foods. If something made us sick we stopped eating it. The scientific method even before we knew what a method was.

Our diet changed. We spent less time looking for, killing, gathering, and cultivating food. Because cooked food releases much more energy from the starch, carbs, sugars, proteins and fats we had time for lots of other activities. 

Preparing food by cooking or by other methods such as fermenting, drying, sprouting, or soaking is a such an amazing advance I wonder how it came about. If you imagine the ancestors sitting around a fire with a haunch of mammoth or a dead bird you see how simple cooking might have com to be. 

I ate at my local pub the other night, I had a tempeh reuben. This is fermented soy bean cake with sour kraut, swiss cheese on dark rye bread with a side of horseradish and thousand island dressing. The magic of these high energy foods combined in this tasty gustatory treat was enough to make my mind spin. It was delicious. 

When ever you share an evening meal with family or friends, think back to the ancestors who developed cooking. Thank them for sharing.

Greetings from Santa Erik

Gifts: my interesting study traipsing across eons of our shared heritage. I've learned so much about sharing and curiosity that I'm thinking I must report my findings in a quiet corner of the web. I'm hoping this blog will include selected occasional posts with my thinking about our gift economy and the magic of human social interaction.