Here’s one:

The potential nuclear disaster in Japan and their history with being the victim of the atomic bomb reminded me today of a book on my shelf by Paul Loeb written twenty-five years ago about Hanford. It’s called “Nuclear Culture: Living and Working in the World’s Largest Atomic Complex.”

from the back cover:
“Nuclear Culture is the compelling account of the growth of the Hanford (Washington) Nuclear Reservation, the birth of the atomic bomb and the culture which it spawned, seen through the eyes of the participants. Here we meet a hight school football team — ‘The Bombers’ — whose helmets feature a mushroom cloud; bridge clubs, Brownie troops and PTAs living virtually in the shadow of A-bomb factories; and workers who find building weapons of mass destruction to be ‘just another job.’ Paul Loeb’s riveting profile reminds us as few books can just how shocking our normal existence under the nuclear umbrella has really become.”

That is a lie!

Back in 1994 Ken and Gail Heffner told us about their version of  “interactive media” in their home. If they were watching TV with their children and a commercial came on they would all point at the screen and shout, “That is a lie!”. True interactive media, eh.

A few years later I began studying advertising and our consumer, commodified culture more in-depth. A common approach for advertisers is to present something that we long for — loving relationships or true joy — and equate finding it with purchasing/consuming their product.

So the above caption is the blasphemous message that I saw the other day. The first lie is that joy can be purchased. And the second lie is that joy can be found in over-processed chicken pieces. (A third lie is how our economy is propped up by artificially cheap oil…etc.)  This is a bastardization of the word Joy — especially in this season where as a Christian I celebrate with my faith community the Joy of One who came among the lowly to bring Joy and Peace and Light and Life.

Or maybe we got it wrong. If the wise men really wanted to bring joy why didn’t they bring chicken nuggets, a Large soda, and french fries!

So fellow parents I implore you to deconstruct the pervasive ads that your children are absorbing unconsciously throughout their days. There is more power when it comes in the back door of their unconscious . So I encourage you to drop the silly rule of no pointing and encourage your kids to be watchful this Advent/Christmas season and to sing out together “THAT IS A LIE!”

I’ve found that reading poetry for me is like
finding the key under the rock
near the back door

I silently slide the key in
and twist

All the while the barrage of
left brain knocking continues
at the front door

while I smile with my feet
up in the back yard now
sipping my summer beer

One of these new foods is raw milk.  We buy our raw milk from the one local diary that produces and sells it: Jackie’s Jerseys. http://www.jackiesjerseymilk.com/ My daughter and I along with Zack and Carrie and their boys recently went on a tour at Jackie’s Jersey’s. We were able to meet and thank the cows and Bill and Jackie, who own and run their dairy. We saw their whole system from start to finish.  Theirs is a remarkably well-kept and clean dairy.

There is a lot of fear currently that is fanned into flame by media hot air that all raw milk is the same and all raw milk is harmful to your health.  There is enormous political and economic pressure from Big Diary to promote this idea, because they see this growing small dairy raw milk movement as a threat to their milk industry. I decided to read up a bit on raw milk, so picked up a book called “The Untold Story of Milk” by Ron Schmid, ND.

Put simply: “First, the cow’s diet largely determines the health of the cow. Second, the healthfulness of a cow’s milk is largely determined by the the health of the cow; therefore the cow’s diet largely determines the healthfulness of the milk (p.37).” All milk is not created equal.

“Because much of the modern and historical debate about raw versus pasteurized milk involves issues of safety in relation to infectious disease, it is important to take a look at the current paradigm, the belief that germs cause illness. Those who maintain that illnesses commonly associated with certain germs are caused simply by exposure to those germs will view raw milk as a threat and a danger. But for those who believe that illnesses are caused by a failure of the immune system to adequately cope with infectious agents, the issue shifts and focuses instead on the building of powerful immunity, mainly through nutritious food. The basic choice that lies before us it whether to choose foods that are nutrient-dense, or that have been rendered sterile.” ( Pg 43)

One of the conversations that by Schmid brings to light here is the difference between blame and personal responsibility, the difference between seeing ourselves as victims or seeing ourselves as responsible actors.  To the degree that we blame, we lose ground on which to stand; we lose the ability to have our feet firmly anchored and to take responsibility for our own health and the health of our communities.

There is much more to say and discuss about this, but alas it is time to go have breakfast with my daughter and drink a tall glass of raw milk from Jackie and Bill’s Jersey cows.

So, I’m asking myself now, and to all those who learned under Kenn, “What does it mean to be heirs of Kenn Hermann?”. How do we cultivate what was planted in us by Kenn? And take time like a good gardener to be attentive and to care what we have been given?

[this phrase 'an heir of something valuable' is from a Mark Baurlein (sp?) interview that I heard on MarsHillAudio today]

It’s an especially potent idea for me right now because I just became an uncle.  Yesterday, my daughter and I went over to babysit so that my sister and her husband could get out and run some errands.  As I was feeding Hugo his mommy’s milk from a bottle and he was gazing into my eyes, I remembered learning that a newborn’s focal length is exactly the distance from the mother’s breast to her eyes.  Face connected to food! We had it at the start.  What makes us think we can afford to loose it?

In our day and age this desire to be intentional about the formation of our children often translates to involvement in several extra-cirricular activities and  organized sports.  Our lives as adults are also busier and lived at a faster pace than generations that came before us.  So what suffers? True “free time”. Time for children (and adults) to make up stories and act them out; to make up games and play them. I still have some great memories of my sister and I making up games in our front yard, using whatever sports equipment and other props that we could find. So is it just my nostalgic longing for kids to have what I had?

Well, my friend Carrie, who is an Oregonian, and a very intentional, creative and thoughtful parent recently sent me an NPR article that I found interesting (“Creative Play Makes for Kids in Control” http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=76838288 3/14/2008 ).  One of things they discuss is how “freewheeling imaginative play”, while seemingly unproductive to our hyper-schedule sensabilities, develops something in the brain called executive function. 

Executive function has a number of elements, such as working memory and cognitive flexibility. But perhaps the most important is self-regulation — the ability for kids to control their emotions and behavior, resist impulse, and exert self-control and discipline. Executive function — and its self-regulation element — is important. Poor executive function is associated with high dropout rates, drug use and crime. In fact, good executive function is a better predictor of success in school than a child’s IQ.

Our natural impulses to play imaginatively with whatever we can get our hands on (before becoming co-opted by ‘you-must-buy-in-order-to-play’ thinking) is an essential building block in becoming a healthy adult.  So even without the research, what we do naturally is good for us — more than we knew.

Last night i saw a film at the bellingham human rights film festival called “The Big Sellout”. It showed the human effects of privitization of health care, water, electricity encouraged by the World Bank and IMF.

Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist of the World Bank and now a critic of their practices, compares modern warfare to modern economic practices. When we drop of bomb from 50,000 feet we don’t see the human faces. The same with economic policies. When they are conceived and put into practice from a distance the lives of the local people only show up as numbers and graphs.

One particular country of focus was Bolivia. From the film’s website

( www.thebigsellout.org )

“The 45 year old machinist and union activist [Oscar Olivera] led the people of Cochabamba to the streets in the year 2000, when the government of Bolivia, after being put under pressure by the World Bank, privatised the water of the third biggest city of the country. The water concession was given to the US-corporation Bechtel. In the course of the people‘s protest in Cochabamba tens of thousands of people hit the streets. They simply didn’t want to accept to pay up to a third of their income for their drinking water to the corporation. The government deployed police forces and later the military. The struggle that developed out of this became known as ‘the water war’.”Another story was of a phillipino woman, Minda, who was trying to get dialysis treatments for her son. On scene stuck in my mind. Her pulling one of those ‘take a number’ paper tabs in the hospital waiting room.

i wrote this poem in response:

RUNG OUT

take a number

it’s the wave of the future

we’ll sell the rain to you

at bargain prices that will drain you dry

*

excuse me sir

but you cannot catch the rain

in your hands to drink

if you do, make sure to weigh it first

you see, we need a number

*

see the lady dancing in the rain

we’ll strip her down

ring her clothes out

and charge her for that stolen water

*

or we may not.

it would be more efficient if

we just squeezed the water

right out of her soul.

She said, “Well I used to know them in 5th grade.”

I asked the obvious question: “So what happened?”

She held up her calculator.

The prophetic words of Wendell Berry and Neil Postman came to mind. We were given mysterious, wonderful, complex and beautiful abilities. When we defer these abilities to the machine those ‘muscles’ atrophy, forget, decay.

The other day I was pondering what may happen with the proliferation of GPS systems in cars. Picture this:

A couple is on vacation and their GPS system breaks down. Thankfully they were just watching an old movie on their cell phone that showed someone pulling into a gas station to ask for directions. There was a station across the street. They walked up to the counter and asked the owner if he could beam over a map onto their blackberry.

‘Excuse me? What is it your looking for?’

“Well, we are trying to get to Los Angeles?”

The owner pulls out a paper map and begins to point the way, describing landmarks to look for on the way. “Oh, and there’s a great pie shop right at this junction. And don’t stop at the service station down the road from there. He dilutes his gas.”

The owner looks up at the couple who are thouroughly confused. He describes the whole route again to them, but they still look lost. “Do you want to write it down?” He hands them a pen and paper. But they now seem even more distraught.

“Here. Just take my map.”

“I used to know how to read maps back in 5th grade.”

“Well what happened?”

He holds up his now-broken blackberry.

“Can you call us a taxi??”