Renew America by Refocusing Political Parties on People, not Power
One: We start at the grass roots level: our local party.
Two: We go to meetings and listen.
Three: We ask questions in a non-threatening way.
Four: We listen to the answers and rephrase them in a non-judgmental way so others know we heard.
Five: We suggest and offer hands on and financial help with party outreach efforts that help the poor, who are able and willing to work. Possibilities:
First we need more creative ways to reach people: Flyers in doors of public housing, Trailer Parks, TV and Radio Public Service announcements, Face Book. Flyers in fast food restaurants, Laundromats, Hospitals , Clinics, Churches, and even in Utility Bills.
Call or visit Employment Agencies and learn about available jobs and requirements
Advertise available government training programs and offer transportation for those without cars.
Advertise available jobs and offer transportation for applicants and help with carpools to jobs.
Create programs for learning how to save money on essentials and start them at Senior Centers, Public Housing, and Churches.
Find the disillusioned and offer transportation to party meetings and activities. Have practical door prizes or “Thank you for coming” giveaways like shampoo, soap, etc. at meetings. Get to know the people and their problems. Involve them in brainstorming solutions. Get them involved in working on solutions. Utilize Senior Citizens and disabled Veterans.
Find more ways for the Parties, Senior Centers, Churches, rather than the government, to get to know and help people one on one or in groups.
Reach out to Immigrant groups, Seniors, Disabled Veterans, those in Public Housing, those on the verge of becoming homeless.
Learn through all this what part the government can best play in helping people help themselves and work on getting those in motion.
Let us not grow weary
Just what the doctor ordered.
When our days feel precarious,
and our hearts are worn down
with the fatigue of worry,
the unsettledness of concern,
your promise, O God, remains with us.
Indeed it resides within us,
burning at the center of our beings,
a flame of hope that will not be extinguished.
You are always leading us into the new.
You are continually remaking us
into a people formed in your love.
You invite us each morning to yield our hearts
to the work of justice, peace, and reconciliation.
In all times, you call forth our better angels.
Give us, we pray, the grace we need for this day
as we rise to meet the challenges before us.
May we live today from our deepest humanity,
granting to a neighbor the gift of humble listening,
extending to a stranger a smile of recognition,
offering to the other a gesture of welcome,
being gentle with…
View original post 94 more words
Different Gifts Make for Different Politics
One of the problems with education, besides economic ghettos, is not recognizing differences in personalities. Any one with several children knows they were different at birth. Most teachers of primary grades catch on eventually that no one system of teaching basics will work for all children.
Personality differences include learning style differences, value differences, actually even what we see, so also how we react to it. It’s complex. I only wish I had known more about these differences when I taught first and second grade. (See blog post: Important Things I Learned from First Graders When I Was Forty.)
Most intuitive thinkers question the status quo, see connections between differing things, explore new possibilities, are idealistic, and though some travel or do something else for a while, most will go to college. They also tend to end up living in the large cities. Concrete thinkers are more hands on, learn from their parents and practical experience, accept what is and tend to prefer small communities. We actually need to challenge all types fairly early to value skills opposite to their natural way of being in the world. The intuitive idealists often don’t recognize the practical costs of their dreams enough to develop either their own practical problem solving skills or preferably learn to appreciate and work with those whose minds work differently. And of course, vice versa. We need to affirm and enable problem solvers, but also early on involve them in problem solving ways to work toward ideals. Change is not always better, but many things can be changed for the better slowly while taking into account the immediate practical side effects for all. As long as many are looking only at the ideal possibilities and the others not only feel more secure with the familiar, but see only the problems involved in any great change, we will continue to be pretty much totally divided. Another difference is some of the population tends to live in the past, some in the present moment without much awareness of long term consequences, and others focus on the long view of the future. Do you see why we have such different views?
The biggest problem is the solution isn’t either/or. It requires valuing each others’ gifts and working together. Unfortunately, that takes letting go of some of our most cherished prejudices and admitting that no one has answers that will work for all, unless we work together.
Fellow Democrats, Please Lend Me Your Ears.
Fellow democrats, we are sounding like our opponents did before the election. Now, maybe we will understand what feeling unheard and powerless does to people’s sense of decency. Please, let’s don’t go there. It will not help anything. The time to protest is when actual laws that we cannot in good conscience support are proposed. And then protest only in the non-violent tradition of Martin Luther King .
Admit it, we ourselves have been disgusted by attacks on President’s wives in the past. Don’t do it. Complain to face book or at least hide vicious vulgarity on your pages. It simply lowers us to the level of everything that we have been against. Wake up Democrats. Fear creates monsters. We know that. Stop now or we will wake up one morning and have to face that we have become the enemy.
Losing, Letting Go, and Loving
This is pretty much all I have to say for a while. So, I will keep re-blogging it. I find that I need to reflect on it each morning when I read the papers or face book.
As Christians, because of Jesus, we know that God loves everyone: Jew and Gentile, Christian and non-Christian, the conqueror and the conquered, the faithful spouse and the adulterer, the honest politician and the crooked tax collector, the socially acceptable and the outcast leper, even those controlled by the demons of fear and hate.
We need to remind ourselves that Jesus came down hardest on those that thought that they, themselves, were the righteous ones. Why? Why did he do that? Because every single one of us falls short of the glory of God. And the glory of God is unconditional Love.
We live in anxious times when many feel invisible and powerless. And anger is more bearable than fear. But faith in the Love of God for ALL of us, not in self-righteousness, is the only way the kingdom of God will ever come on earth. It began with God…
View original post 11 more words
Losing, Letting Go, and Loving
As Christians, because of Jesus, we know that God loves everyone: Jew and Gentile, Christian and non-Christian, the conqueror and the conquered, the faithful spouse and the adulterer, the honest politician and the crooked tax collector, the socially acceptable and the outcast leper, even those controlled by the demons of fear and hate.
We need to remind ourselves that Jesus came down hardest on those that thought that they, themselves, were the righteous ones. Why? Why did he do that? Because every single one of us falls short of the glory of God. And the glory of God is unconditional Love.
We live in anxious times when many feel invisible and powerless. And anger is more bearable than fear. But faith in the Love of God for ALL of us, not in self-righteousness, is the only way the kingdom of God will ever come on earth. It began with God. It was fleshed out in Jesus. It’s up to us now.
We Are Up to this Moment by Anne Lamott
You can probably guess how I feel today, exhausted, in despair, and like hiding from it all. But my Good Dog Lady Bird and I are about to go hiking, and nature will heal us, sustain and renew us–for at least an hour. I’ll take it! Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” and the divine electrical field of love and beauty will all but leave my mouth hanging open in awe. I’ve said before that if birdsong were the only pooof that there is another, deeper, wider reality, it would be proof enough for me.
Then I’ll go hang out with some sober women, many of whom have had decades of sobriety and slow jerky-jerky resurrection; some of whom will only have a few weeks. All of them know exactly what the end of the world feels like, and maybe feel it in different form, but for every one of us, the end of the world was where new life began. Hitting bottom was the beginning of everything beautiful and true and full of integrity in our lives. We’ll stick together, get each other lovely cups of tea or bad coffee, eat our body weight in cookies, and get through another hour in gratitude. Someone will be sure to remind us that we thought we were hotshots when we first got sober, but we helped each work our way up to servants. And that is the path of joy.
Then I’ll go see the oldest woman in my galaxy, who is 93, and beginning to show it. I will sit with her and share the Grace of not not spouting platitudes or bumper sticker thoughts. I’ll just listen. I’ll tell her how much I love her. No one can make her laugh like I do. Ram Dass said that ultimately, we are all just walking each other home, and this is what she and and I do together. In two Sundays, she will become the newest member of St. Andrew Presbyterian Church in Marin City. I will go crazy with happiness that day. You can come too!
Then I’ll pick up two short crazy banshees from school, and my house will become monkey island. For three hours, I will be under constant threat of severe Lego injury. We’ll over-eat, because God came by earlier and told me that this was Her will for me: “Strengthen me with raisin cakes, comfort me with apples. And M&M’s.”
Then my son and the man I love will arrive, and I’ll bet you hundreds of thousands of dollars that there will be delicious, nourishing food tonight. Wow. That is just not true for much of the world, so before they get here, I am going to send money to Oxfam, and Tyranny Watch, and Doctors Without Borders, designated for poor Americans. On my honor. This is the Drive Through ATM way to feel hope again, because you are providing it.
Molly Ivins said that freedom fighters don’t always win, but they’re always right. I’m going to write that on the mirror. It is written on my sad old heart. We don’t know what the future holds–we really, really don’t. During the Vietnam War, Zhou Enlai was asked what he thought about about the French Revolution, and after inhaling on his Gauloise said, “Too Soon to Tell.” We think we know what the future holds, but we are a tense and irritable people. However, we DO know who holds the future. So buckle up, practice radical self care, serve the poor, and rest up for what awaits us. We are up to this moment.
Morning After To-Do List by Michael Moore
Morning After To-Do List:
1. Take over the Democratic Party and return it to the people. They have failed us miserably.
2. Fire all pundits, predictors, pollsters and anyone else in the media who had a narrative they wouldn’t let go of and refused to listen to or acknowledge what was really going on. Those same bloviators will now tell us we must “heal the divide” and “come together.” They will pull more hooey like that out of their ass in the days to come. Turn them off.
3. Any Democratic member of Congress who didn’t wake up this morning ready to fight, resist and obstruct in the way Republicans did against President Obama every day for eight full years must step out of the way and let those of us who know the score lead the way in stopping the meanness and the madness that’s about to begin.
4. Everyone must stop saying they are “stunned” and “shocked”. What you mean to say is that you were in a bubble and weren’t paying attention to your fellow Americans and their despair. YEARS of being neglected by both parties, the anger and the need for revenge against the system only grew. Along came a TV star they liked whose plan was to destroy both parties and tell them all “You’re fired!” Trump’s victory is no surprise. He was never a joke. Treating him as one only strengthened him. He is both a creature and a creation of the media and the media will never own that.
5. You must say this sentence to everyone you meet today: “HILLARY CLINTON WON THE POPULAR VOTE!” The MAJORITY of our fellow Americans preferred Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump. Period. Fact. If you woke up this morning thinking you live in an effed-up country, you don’t. The majority of your fellow Americans wanted Hillary, not Trump. The only reason he’s president is because of an arcane, insane 18th-century idea called the Electoral College. Until we change that, we’ll continue to have presidents we didn’t elect and didn’t want. You live in a country where a majority of its citizens have said they believe there’s climate change, they believe women should be paid the same as men, they want a debt-free college education, they don’t want us invading countries, they want a raise in the minimum wage and they want a single-payer true universal health care system. None of that has changed. We live in a country where the majority agree with the “liberal” position. We just lack the liberal leadership to make that happen (see: #1 above).
Let’s try to get this all done by noon today.
Revolution American Style
Growing up in my own family of birth, the worst mortal sin was stupidity. In raising our own somewhat precocious children, if they called each other stupid, my husband would ask the offending child, “Who’s stupid?” And the child had to say six times, “I am stupid.” Frankly, I was never really comfortable with that, because I would rather be beaten that told I was stupid, so I probably would have taken a beating rather than having to say,”I am stupid.” And yes, I have often thought that people, who do not see the world the same way I do, are stupid…….or to be politically correct, mentally challenged. Two things have challenged me on this: One, I was told after extensive testing in a two year program for preparation for ministry that I had two personal areas problematic for ministry. One: I test high enough on IQ tests that I probably always thought I was right in differences of opinions and the reality is that no one is right all the time, no matter how smart they are. Two: I over react defensively and emotionally to people, ie. I was oversensitive.
To be honest, I still struggle with both of these tendencies, but at least now, I struggle with them.
I still consider calling people “stupid” violence. And when, in spite of knowing I could be wrong, I think people are stupid, I try hard to: one, take into consideration that their personalities and life experience may be very different from mine and within those limits their responses may make sense. Ignorance is not stupidity. Stupidity is not curable, but ignorance is. But many people have to learn the hard way, by personal experience, not theory. In many ways, our educational system does not provide learning approaches that are effective for many, maybe even most, people. And our political system is so dependent on having access to huge amounts of money, that they don’t feel represented. Then along came “Jones”, Trump. Someone, who shares their fears that are less scary when expressed as anger, with huge amounts of money and the indifference to the establishment’s opinion that money can buy.
Read Michael Moore’s suggestions of how Democrats should respond to this challenge. It’s an eye opener and a call to change.
God’s Terrible Taste
There is no joy in………, but I will pray for both anyway
I had a somewhat amusing, slightly terrifying thought this morning. God loves both Trump and Hillary equally and unconditionally. God loves because of who God is, not because of who we are. I’ve always said God has terrible taste, because God loves everyone. God loves sinners and saints, the smart and the stupid, the kind and the cruel, the sane and the insane, the crook and the law-abiding. Boy! That means if God has His/Her way, heaven is going to be as diverse as earth. I guess I better start forgiving a lot of people, so I can fit in with all of the above. I find I can forgive people if I can picture them as a child with a childhood that was unbalanced between love and the reality of there being consequences of our choices. Often, too much love and no consequences has pretty much the same effect…
View original post 92 more words
