A GREAT CHANCE

There wouldn’t have been any political support on restrictions for Nuclear Power before the accidents at Thousand Islands and Chernobyl. In the same way, there wouldn’t have been political support to stop offshore drilling some months ago. The world’s insatiable need for oil and the alternatives with drilling in National parks or the exploitation of oil in tar sand made it almost impossible to introduce strong restrictions and care for offshore drilling. Such restrictions needed an accident to awaken our attention. This accident (the gulf of Mexico incident) should not only have focus on who is too blame, but even more on the inevitable risk on oil, period.

Instead of wasting breath further on the blame factor, this is a great chance to start work on reduction of all fossil fuels like oil, gas and coal and the way we do everything. We have a chance to build a society that is energy efficient and relies on other sources of energy with lower environmental impacts and risk. Such as solar, wind, bio mass...

Since there are limitations on these available amount of these other energy sources and also environmental disadvantages, we have to reduce our consumption of energy. This will create a need to re-think how we organize society and our level of activities and personal desires.

Can we still live a good life without an ever-increasing consumption of goods and energy and wealth? This is the time to reevaluate the so-called American Dream. I can’t help but wonder, with all the ills that society is currently suffering from – greed, depression, poverty and wars – if there isn’t a connection?

Is it possible to disconnect the value or respect for a person from his individual wealth and level of consumption? What if we valued a person by:

1. The time spent caring for another individual

2. Contributions we do to society or his fellow beings

3. One’s level of personal development; measured by the simple (and delicious) fruits of his daily actions – things that consume no energy whatsoever… like singing in the woods, like walking along city streets, like smiling to a stranger, like reaching out to talk to a young person sitting on a busy corner with a sad poster in front of them asking for money?

Suggestions: the money that the Alaskan government used to send everyone a check for 5,000 $... to be used for a central fund towards???

And what if everyone got a massage, or and Alexander Technique session or a singing lesson???

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AMERICA IS GOING MAD

AMERICA IS GOING MAD

I hate America so much right now, really loved what Maureen Dowd wrote in the NY times op-ed column August 21, about how dysfunctional the US is at the moment:

“…Obama is the head of the dysfunctional family of America — a rational man running a most irrational nation, a high-minded man in a low-minded age. The country is having some weird mass nervous breakdown, with the right spreading fear and disinformation that is amplified by the poisonous echo chamber that is the modern media environment…"

I so wish I could bundle up the ones who are suffering now and show them the many "worlds" I discovered working this summer. There are some amazing communities around now, people living alternatively, outside the money-capitalistic system. One of the places I worked at this summer (teaching Alexander at tango camps) was called Ponderosa. Located in former East Germany near the Polish border – a very unlikely place to say the least and I was so surprised by the amount of Americans living there!!

Many Americans are so afraid of the way we live in Europe, as if it is"socialism" or communism... and really it is just living without the deadly fear, that I so remember when I lived in the US.

I know these words of mine are mostly empty and cannot offer real help, in this ever-so-confusing time. I just need to let you know that there are many people trying now to create another way and it gave me enormous courage this summer.