Inspirational Writings and Ideas

[Leah]

Dear Friends,
Amidst all the shocking, infuriating, moving emails and news stories since Katrina struck, a few have resonated more deeply with me - and together suggest a place to put our feet as we walk forward from this event.

The first, surprisingly, was at Op-ed by David Brooks on Sept 4 NY Times called The Bursting Point. Brooks is a conservative commentator often dismissive of ideas and actions that make perfect sense to me and mine. He likened this moment to the early 70's when Vietnam, Watergate, and the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and MLK woke us from the dream of America as the innocent, optimistic, good guy nation. We lost faith in our institutions and those breakdowns opened political and cultural space for breakthroughs... some to our liking, some not. He suggests to those with a new vision for America that 'now is the hour' - strut your very best stuff.

The second was from Deena Metzger. Katrina, she said, isn't an event that happened to a few of us. It's part of an unfolding reality that's been happening for decades to all us. She suggests the best speed is slow, and the best approach is sobriety and community We need to discover, together, better responses to crisis through sitting in "council" - circles of conversations - that go as long and as deep as necessary. I quote:
How do we proceed? We do not know. When wise people are confronted by situations that are beyond them, they admit their incapacity and they call councils. We must call councils. We must call the elders, wise ones, scientists, et al, the experienced ones of the world community to confer with us and each other. Wise cultures call councils especially when they are, as we are, in grave danger of escalating the damage by taking short-term methods that can produce even greater devastationâ?€¦

We must ask each other to set aside, entirely, our personal hopes for our future, for our security, for our advancement. Let us all be like those who have lost everything. We are those who have lost everything. We have all lost everything. We have. There is no future unless we understand that we have lost everything and we have to begin again. No one and no system in the living world are safe at this moment.
The third article I will insert below in its entirety. It's from Bill McKibben, a journalist in the Cassandra tradition who for decades has given us well researched, deeply human books and articles to show us where our society's preference for money as the measure of meaning and value was taking us. He locked on to the Global Warming issue long ago and earned his right to use Katrina as a portend of the environmental whirlwind that's coming. His other occupation - a Methodist Sunday School teacher - I believe gives his journalism a prophetic yet protective quality that speaks to me.

Before Bill's article, I want to tell of a few recent experiences of my own. They may seems 'beside the point' (as much of our daily lives do in times of crisis), but make a point eventually.

The weekend before Katrina hit I attended the Fifth Annual Simplicity Forum Congress - a group of educators, activists, authors, academics, and organizers committed to "honoring and achieving simple, just and sustainable ways of life." In the middle of this intense, strategic meeting we took a break to enjoy our beautiful setting in the High Rockies. Half the group hiked down to a river and literally chilled together with their feet in the water. Suddenly a large dead tree toppled right into the middle of the group, injuring several and hitting one woman directly on the head. Quickly, people arrayed themselves according level of injury and according to skills and capacities, forming a spontaneous team of nurses, wilderness medics, transporters, runners, counselors, witnesses and such. The badly injured woman was stabilized and carried up and out, then ambulanced to the hospital. The group processed the shock while continuing to work very effectively as a team on building the Forum. Of course, in the background everyone wondered what it meant that a near tragedy literally descended into our midst. By the end, it was clear. Simple living doesn't mean that nothing bad happens anymore in your life. It's the low-ego, high-equanimity and community way you go through what happens. It allows the best to come from even bad situations. A tree falls in the forest, and people who live more simply seem to respond naturally with directness, resourcefulness and skill.

Two weekends later, I spent 4 days in the hospital for a high-tech surgical repair way beyond woodsy simplicity's capacity to deal. It was revelatory, though, in what hospitals no longer do. It sometimes took an hour for overworked nurses to respond to my call button. After the response, I'd often find the call button, pain med button and/or phone left out of reach. Hygiene was a packet of heavy-duty handy wipes given to me on day two for me to use. No teeth brushing or hair brushing. One procedure was stymied because the right tool wasn't available. My discharge doc had done his internship at a Community Hospital in LA. He said that such conditions were so common there that sadder-but-wiser nurses and aides would buy supplies at Costco - at their own expense - so they'd have what they needed to care for patients. "You're a writer," he said, "write about that. Someone has to tell that story." I realized that America is closer than ever to the conditions in less 'developed' countries where family members must accompany you to the hospital to do your nursing care. Will busy Americans, as the tempo of such breakdowns increases, need to take back their time for basic caring duties of family and community?

Katrina showed us many things. One was that the systems we have empowered to care for us have gotten careless to the point of being cruel and inhuman. Real humans want to take care of their sick and dying, but we've come to believe that someone else, somewhere else, is in charge and knows better. So people died in the streets, in the Stadium, in the hospitals, in their homes and were left for days. There are big changes we should have made decades ago that could prevent what McKibben warns is coming. Now these are dead snags just waiting to fall. Worse, though, is that we seem to lack to political and social will to make the sober, mature changes needed to deal the "trees that fall" with competence and good grace.

Simpler living seems tied to the expectation that oneself is the grown-up in one's own life. That if change is to be, it starts at home and is practical as well as philosophical. That big systems must be understood for what they can and can't do - and never be allowed to leave us more vulnerable, less able to respond intelligently. I've always said that the last place to look for financial independence is in having a pile of money. If you don't accumulate critical thinking, clear communication, loving relationships, an understanding of give-and-take, networks of friends and mutual help groups - all parts of 'resilience' - no amount of money will protect you in a destabilized world.

As David Brooks says, now is the time to face up to the dark side of America and make sober changes - and hope the forces of intelligence and good sense will mobilize more vigorously than the forces of fear and manipulation. As Deena says, in times like these wise people know that none of us knows what's going on but all of us, in deep conversation, will learn together a way through. As McKibben's article below indicates, Katrina might be the recognized surfacing of an era of breakdowns of a magnitude we never thought possible. As my small experiences indicate, if we rely less on ego and more on community, human resilience and good sense, we can mobilize ourselves to achieve small greatnesses right where we are. If we ask large systems to do only what they are best at - complex surgery, for example, or complex policy making for global conditions - and give as much resource as possible to the people on the local front lines of care, we may be able to weather the coming "perfect" storm.

Where each of us acts in this shifting landscape of crisis is really up to each of us. I trust us to know our neighbors better, to develop skills that will be truly useful in the years ahead, to open our homes to what needs our care, to stay calm, to contribute what we know and get out of the way of those who actually know better. Where can we turn in crisis? To one another, actually. Not letting large systems off the hook on their responsibilities and failures, but not forgetting that at least here in America, it's still "the consent of the governed."

Y2K. 911. Katrina. Are we listening? Every free, individual for him or herself is now a loser strategy of enormous magnitude. Simplicity, community, common sense, calm, resilience are really the core curriculum for survival. People in other lands have not had the luxury of forgetting these basics. We have. Katrina was a pop-final. We failed. But we are wired for survival through connection, council, community and what my friend Tom Atlee calls co-intelligence. It may be too late to have predictable future, but we can wise up together. For some great ideas from Alan Atkisson on a community revisioning exercise that's now relevant to rebuilding "the Big Difficult" , go to http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/003425.html

Be well, my friends,
Vicki

Vicki Robin
P.O. Box 1501
Langley, WA 98260
(206) 769-3424 cell
(360) 221-2251 land

[Leah]

This article was sent to Sandy via Vicki Robbins


Not Our America?
by Bill McKibben
September 07, 2005

http://www.tompaine.com/

Bill McKibben is the author of many books on the environment and related topics. His first, The End of Nature, was also the first book for a general audience on global warming. His most recent is Wandering Home, A Long Walk Across America's Most Hopeful Landscape.

If the images of skyscrapers collapsed in heaps of ash were the end of one storyâ?€?”the United States safe on its isolated continent from the turmoil of the worldâ?€?”then the picture of the sodden Superdome with its peeling roof marks the beginning of the next story, the one that will dominate our politics in the coming decades of this century: America befuddled about how to cope with a planet suddenly turned unstable and unpredictable.

Over and over last week, people said that the scenes from the convention center, the highway overpasses, and the other suddenly infamous Crescent City venues didn't "look like America," that they seemed instead to be straight from the Third World. That was almost literally accurate, for poor, black New Orleans (whose life had never previously been of any interest to the larger public) is not so different from other poor and black parts of the world: its infant mortality and life expectancy rates, its educational achievement statistics mirroring scores of African and Latin American enclaves. But it was accurate in another way, too, one full of portent for the future. A decade ago, environmental researcher Norman Myers began trying to add up the number of humans at risk of losing their homes from global warming. He looked at all the obvious placesâ?€?”coastal China, India, Bangladesh, the tiny island states of the Pacific and Indian oceans, the Nile delta, Mozambique, on and onâ?€?”and predicted that by 2050, it was entirely possible that 150 million people could be "environmental refugees," forced from their homes by rising waters. That's more than the number of political refugees sent scurrying by the bloody century we've just endured. Try to imagine, that is, the chaos that attends busing 15,000 people from one football stadium to another in the richest nation on Earth, and then multiply it by four orders of magnitude and re-situate your thoughts in the poorest nations on earth. And then try to imagine doing it over and over againâ?€?”probably without the buses.

Because so far, even as blogs and websites all over the Internet fill with accusations about the scandalous lack of planning that led to the collapse of the levees in New Orleans, almost no one is addressing the much larger problems: the scandalous lack of planning that has kept us from even beginning to address climate change, and the sad fact that global warming means the future will be full of just this kind of horror. Consider the first problem for just a minute. No single hurricane is "the result" of global warming. But a month before Katrina hit, MIT hurricane specialist Kerry Emmanuel published a landmark paper in the British science magazine Nature showing that tropical storms were now lasting half again as long and spinning winds 50 percent more powerful than just a few decades before. The only plausible cause: the ever-warmer tropical seas on which these storms thrive. Katrina, a Category 1 storm when it crossed Florida, roared to full life in the abnormally hot water of the Gulf of Mexico. It then punched its way into Louisiana and Mississippiâ?€?”the latter a state now governed by Haley Barbour, who in an earlier incarnation as a GOP power broker and energy lobbyist helped persuade President Bush to renege on his promise to treat carbon dioxide as a pollutant.

So far, the United States has done exactly nothing even to try to slow the progress of climate change: We're emitting far more carbon than we were in 1988, when scientists issued their first prescient global-warming warnings. Even if, at that moment, we'd started doing all that we could to overhaul our energy economy, we'd probably still be stuck with the one degree Fahrenheit increase in global average temperature that's already driving our current disruptions. Now scientists predict that without truly dramatic change in the very near future, we're likely to see the planet's mercury rise five degrees before this century is out. That is, five times more than we've seen so far. Which leads us to the second problem: For the ten thousand years of human civilization, we've relied on the planet's basic physical stability. Sure, there have been hurricanes and droughts and volcanoes and tsunamis, but averaged out across the Earth, it's been a remarkably stable run. If your grandparents inhabited a particular island, chances were that you could too. If you could grow corn in your field, you could pretty much count on your grandkids being able to do likewise. Those are now sucker's betsâ?€?”that's what those predictions about environmental refugees really mean.

Here's another way of saying it: In the last century, we've seen change in human societies speed up to an almost unimaginable level, one that has stressed every part of our civilization. In this century, we're going to see the natural world change at the same kind of rate. That's what happens when you increase the amount of heat trapped in the atmosphere. That extra energy expresses itself in every way you can imagine: more wind, more evaporation, more rain, more melt, more... more... more. And there is no reason to think we can cope. Take New Orleans as an example. It is currently pro forma for politicians to announce that it will be rebuilt, and doubtless it will be. Once. But if hurricanes like Katrina go from once-in-a-century storms to once-in-a-decade-or-two storms, how many times are you going to rebuild it? Even in America there's not that kind of moneyâ?€?”especially if you're also having to cope with, say, the effects on agriculture of more frequent and severe heat waves, and the effects on human health of the spread of mosquito-borne diseases like dengue fever and malaria, and so on ad infinitum. Not to mention the costs of converting our energy system to something less suicidal than fossil fuel, a task that becomes more expensive with every year that passes. Our rulers have insisted by both word and deed that the laws of physics and chemistry do not apply to us. That delusion will now start to vanish. Katrina marks Year One of our new calendar, the start of an age in which the physical world has flipped from sure and secure to volatile and unhinged. New Orleans doesn't look like the America we've lived in. But it very much resembles the planet we will inhabit the rest of our lives.

[Leah Lamb]

The following article came from:
The Simple Society's Alliance for Human Empowerment
http://www.simsoc.org/membership.html


The Katrina Wake-up Call:
A Strategy for Turning Disaster into
A Twenty-First Century Model for Regional Rebirth

To: The Honorable George W. Bush,
President of the United States
From: Norman Kurland, Center for Economic and Social Justice
Date: September 7, 2005

Executive Summary

Hurricane Katrina, one of the worst natural disasters to hit the United States, will likely rival 9/11 in terms of its economic impact and social upheaval. However, this colossal human tragedy also offers a unique opportunity to rebuild the affected areas
and foster a rebirth of the American Spirit. By launching a massive redevelopment program financed in ways in which every citizen of the region can participate directly in the ownership of the new capital formation and land recovery, the Executive and
Legislative branches of the Federal government, in cooperation with state authorities and the Federal Reserve System, ca encourage universal citizen participation in capital ownership.

This would create a regional free enterprise model of a "ownership society." Through a non-inflationary use of the money-creation powers of the Federal Reserve System and special tax reforms like those provided to leveraged employee stoc ownership plans (ESOPs), the proposal would relieve Federal and State taxpayers of the huge anticipated bill for rebuilding the regionâ?€?™s economy and creating ecologically sound infrastructure
to avoid future disasters like Katrina.

A major innovation in this plan is the establishment of afor-profit, citizen-owned Regional Natural Resources Bank to acquire land and coordinate future land use and infrastructural development.

The plan would offer all area citizens an array of unique "Capital Homesteading" incentives to build from the ground-up a Twenty-First Century global exemplar of a participatory ownership society. All citizens within the affected region would hav equal access to share ownership and would participate equally as shareholders in the governance of capital projects financed
under the Katrina Plan.

Finally, the proposal would finance the application and
manufacture of advanced renewable, waste-to-energy technologies that would assist in the massive clean-up of toxic wastes left in the wake of the Katrina disaster, and would launch an overall energy plan that is ecologically sound. This would re-establish Americaâ?€?™s key industries on a secure basis, as well as provide a template for strengthening the United States economy in all sectors and regions.


The Challenge.

Hurricane Katrina was perhaps the most devastating natural calamity in Americaâ?€?™s history. While the cost in human life and suffering cannot be fully measured, initial estimates of the economic costs of Hurricane Katrina to people and property from this natural disaster are in the hundreds of billions.

The American economy is already facing close to $400 billion in annual budget deficits, hundreds of billions in annual trade deficits, and an estimated $1 trillion long-term cost of the war in Iraq. And just as we begin the massive cleanup, recovery and rebuilding effort in the devastated region, some climatologists are predicting that more Katrinas may be on the way.

In its path of destruction, Katrina has laid bare Americaâ?€?™s substrata of poverty and remaining racism, inadequate and insecure incomes, homelessness, unemployment, and the man other symptoms of its current exclusionary economic, financial and ownership system. We will soon see Katrina_s reverberation on our already financially shaky social security and health caresystem, and after-shocks in the form of global wage arbitrage, shrinking oil and gas reserves, climatological threats from inadequate pollution controls, and growing budget and trade deficits.

Further, in addressing the Katrina emergency, the President of the United States cannot fail to see its connection to the waron global terrorism. Having witnessed the vulnerability of our population and infrastructure, America_s strategic planners cannot help but consider a parallel scenario of suicide terrorists delivering weapons of mass destruction in a
coordinated attack against our major centers of population,
a calamity that could dwarf Katrinaâ?€?™s destruction.

The Katrina crisis will strain America_s power to respond to
national disasters â?€¹ both natural and man-made. How then can we
turn this disaster into an opportunity to launch a comprehensive
program for regional rebuilding that would be supported by all
Americans? What are the new ideas that could help us address
the systemic and structural causes of mass poverty, the ideas
that could help us overcome ideologies of hate with a truly
American ideology of freedom, justice, and hope?

If ever there was a time to think outside-the-box, it is now.

Basic Steps for Implementing a Justice-Based Solution
to the Katrina Disaster.

1. Under the Katrina Plan for Regional Rebirth, President Bush,
with the support of the Governors of the States of Louisiana,
Mississippi and Alabama, would designate the counties and
parishes in the tri-State regional disaster area to receive
special treatment for recovery and rebuilding. A regional
model of Capital Homesteading for every citizen, would be
launched in the Katrina disaster zone. (For summary of
concept, see http://www.cesj.org/homestead/summary-cha.htm)

2. The President would seek Congressional authorization for
the establishment of a for-profit, citizen-owned Regional
Natural Resources Bank (RNRB) as the private sector vehicle
for implementing the project. The RNRB would be a land
planning and development corporation with a representative
board elected by citizen-shareholders for approving,
financing and maintaining infrastructure projects, approving
construction contracts under competitive bidding, and
marketing to attract feasible new investment to the disaster
zone. (The RNRB is an expanded version of the Community
Investment Corporation that was invented for building model
communities, as described at
http://www.cesj.org/homestead/strategies/community/cic-full-nk.html)

3. Under the plan, the three states would enter into a regional
compact to delegate their powers of eminent domain to the
citizen-owned RNRB. Such a compact would enable the RNRB to
acquire all government-owned land and natural resources in
the tri-state disaster zone on behalf of all citizen-
shareholders, purchase title to privately-owned land that
must be redeveloped, and develop a 30-year plan for
comprehensive reconstruction of the disaster area.

4. Consistent with the long-term RNRB plan for building
ecologically sound and sustainable community life for area
citizens, the RNRB would assess land rentals, auction
licenses for the extraction of resources, and collect use
and maintenance fees for regional infrastructure.

5. The Federal Reserve System would use its seldom-used
discount powers under section 13 of the Federal Reserve Act
to monetize through member banks low-cost (transaction fees
and risk premiums only) loans for feasible projects of the
RNRB. Feasibility would be determined by lenders and capital
credit insurers and reinsurers, with environmental guidelines
established by designated Federal and State oversight
agencies. Loans would be collateralized by the land and
other assets of the RNRB.

6. An independent private sector regional capital credit
insurance corporation would be established to scrutinize
the feasibility of Capital Homesteading loans, to charge
risk premiums on the loans to cover the risk of default,
and to serve as a substitute for conventional collateral
to meet the needs of new zone businesses.

7. Congress would give the RNRB tax treatment similar to that
received by leveraged employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs)
under the Internal Revenue Code, so that dividend payouts
would be tax-deductible at the corporate level and taxable
at the individual level. After servicing its bank loans and
covering its own operating expenses, the RNRB would
distribute dividends equally to each citizen-shareholder.
Thus, property incomes would increase the purchasing power
of all citizens, lifting the region_s poor from continuing
dependency on government welfare or private charity.


Anticipated Outcomes.

1. By giving regional member banks access to its discount
mechanism, the Fed would supply sufficient asset-backed
credit for all capital and infrastructure projects. In the
face of mounting Federal and State budget deficits, this
step alone would take enormous pressure off Federal and state
taxpayers and would be far less costly than any existing
sources of accumulated savings. (See Harold Moulton, The
Formation of Capital, Brookings Institution, 1935, and
chapter VII of Capital Homesteading for Every Citizen,
a book published in 2004 by the Center for Economic and
Social Justice, at
http://www.cesj.org/homestead/capitalhomesteading.pdf

2. As long as they maintain their primary home in the zone, each
citizen would become economically empowered by the privilege
of receiving a personal lifetime, dividend-yielding,
non-transferable voting share in the RNRB, a modern
counterpart of Abraham Lincoln_s Homestead Act of 1862.
This private property right in a community_s land, natural
resources and infrastructure parallels the right of each
citizen to "own" the public sector through personal access
to the vote.

3. Government_s role would shift from ownership of land to
establishing broad guidelines for citizen participation in
ownership; recommending ecological safeguards in the
rebuilding process; settling disputes not resolvable by
voluntary mediation and arbitration; lifting institutional
and financial barriers to equal ownership and job
opportunities especially for the poor; and securing
the lives, liberties and property of all citizens.

4. The availability of Capital Homestead stakes for all citizens
and interest-free bank loans for private sector development
should serve as a magnet for attracting diverse
entrepreneurial ventures for sustaining a more ecologically
sound area economy that can compete without special
protections in the global marketplace.

Initial Katrina Project Coalition.


1. In our network is Equitech International, LLC, a company
headed by a former master planner and architect at Georgetown
University. Equitech holds a remarkable systems patent for
pollution-free "Hydrogen Age" waste-to-energy technologies
developed originally for lunar colonies. Micro- and macro-
sized applications of these technologies could be
manufactured in the region and employed for stand-alone
energy systems to meet the region_s future energy needs.
(See http://www.equitechllc.com and http://www.intellergy.com)

2. Also in the Katrina Project Network is Team Syntegrity_ of
Toronto, Canada, which offers a planning protocol that
incorporates the tested concepts of the late Dr. Stafford
Beer, noted as the "father of managerial cybernetics."
This communications tool has been used by businesses and
governments around the world to compress the time it takes
for professionals from highly diverse fields to develop
solutions to extremely complex problems, such as those
that will have to be addressed in this project.
(See http://www.syntegritygroup.com)

3. The leaders and counselors of our non-partisan, interfaith
Center for Economic and Social Justice (CESJ) are ready to
volunteer to help get this project underway. We are now
organizing an initial broad-based core of environmental,
civil rights, religious, labor and business leaders committed
to designing a democratic free enterprise growth plan for
the disaster zone. The plan is based on a "post-scarcity"
model articulated by such visionaries as Louis Kelso,
Buckminster Fuller, and Martin Luther King, Jr. You can
count on our support. This core includes close associates
of these three visionaries. (See http://www.cesj.org and
http://www.eei-consultants.com)

4. A top official of the Sierra Club is now studying our
approach. We hope that the Sierra Club, the Buckminster
Fuller Institute, the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference and other organizations in our network will supply
the grassroots leadership and outreach for the critical mass
of people power and leadership power needed to move our plan
forward politically.


Expanding the Political Leverage for the Katrina Plan.

1. If President Bush sees the merits of moving forward with our
Katrina Plan, he would appoint a Presidential Task Force to
work out the details for moving forward to develop the
long-term comprehensive plan, similar to the 1985
Presidential Task Force on Project Economic Justice.
President Reagan appointed this author to the task force
where he served as deputy chairman, under former OAS
Ambassador J. William Middendorf, II. The PEJ Task Force was
charged by Congress and the President to develop a strategy
for spreading ESOPs throughout the Caribbean and Central
America as a free enterprise counterforce against communist
threats to regional stability.

2. Using the leverage of organizations backing the Katrina
Project (see above), separate private meetings would be
arranged with former President Bill Clinton, Mississippi
Governor Haley Barbour, and Senator Trent Lott to explain
to them the strategy and unique approach to financing
the project.

3. These leaders would be asked to contact the Governors of
Louisiana and Alabama to gain their support for this
alternative plan.

4. Separate meetings would be arranged with Fed Chairman Alan
Greenspan for project leaders to explain the key role the
Fed would be asked to play in financing the hundreds of
billions of dollars needed for reconstruction projects in
the regional disaster zone. The Fed would authorize special
access to the Atlanta and New Orleans Feds_ discount windows
under section 13 of the Federal Reserve Act, enabling member
banks operating in the zone to monetize credit needed for
feasible projects and broad-based capital ownership.
(Chairman Greenspan is familiar with our monetary reforms
from an exchange of correspondence he had in March and
April 1995 with Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and from our
Capital Homesteading book that he received from Dr. Norman
A. Bailey, with whom he served in the Reagan White House.)

Hurricane Katrina will undoubtedly be written into America_s
history as a watershed event on the scale of 9/11.
Mr. President, from your vantage point occupying the highest seat
of power, you understand that this crisis and its solution cannot
be isolated from the other huge challenges facing America in the
21st century. With this crisis comes an historic opportunity.
The moment demands ideas equal to the challenge and a leader with
the foresight and courage to champion a genuine vision of justice
and hope for the future.

Mr. President, we believe that armed with these uniquely American
revolutionary ideas, you can turn a disaster into your most
important legacy.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
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[leilani henry]

thanks for posting these writings, Leah. I was touched by all of them.

a few weeks before Katrina, I taught a one day seminar on dialogue for federal government employees from all agencies. I notice a lot of "blaming up" for issues and i pointed it out to the participants. I am not certain that anyone remembered the conversation, but I was struck by the blame that we saw on every level of government as a way of life to dealing with such a tragic event. In fact, it gave me goose bumps to know that my work got so close to reality!

I am reminded that each of us has an important, unrepeatable purpose in life and to not give up,even though it seems just one drop in the bucket.

What are others feeling about being connected to their purpose in the field of D & D?

leilani henry

[Sandy]

What Citizens can do to Make Communities More Secure

The following was posted on the NCDD Listserv:

In 2002 we held a "Building Homeland Security through Intergenerational Dialogue" event, working with Dr.Jim Gambone with: www.pointsofviewinc.com

Our product was a laundry list of "community-building" actions of what
citizens could do, without government assistance, to make their
communities more secure; including such things as becoming trained by the Red Cross to offer health related assistance, inventory where the elderly and disabled live per their residence, and to know your neighbor. I commend this technique as not only a means to explore community efforts focussing upon health issues, but as is obvious to better prepare our communities for events like Kitrina and possible terrorist attacks.

Barbara Brown /

[Sandy]

This came my way via Bill Potapchuk:

NEW START NEW ORLEANS: GOOD JOBS FOR A BETTER GULF

Hilary Pennington, JFF's co-founder, senior advisor on education, and vice chair, is also a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. For the center, she has written about the aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Rita and "the importance of rebuilding in a way that addresses the chronic poverty of the people in affected areas of the Gulf Coast." According to Pennington, "The most effective approach will recognize that both overnment and the private sector are needed, in new public/private partnerships that will help hundreds of thousands of people rebuild their lives and communities with dignity and enter jobs that will pay enough to support them and their families."

http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=1103705
_________________
Sandy Heierbacher
Convenor, National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation (NCDD)