I am old enough to compare today with yesterday, the yesterday of the Beattles, the flower power, the meeting of strangers in person and for the most part being safe with them.

When I first began to use the internet, not that long ago, in 1997... I was part of a message board discussion about pain. When I couldn't sleep, I would read the threads of various conversations and on ocassion leave a comment myself. It was a helpful discussion board and I got to know one woman as a personal pen pal during a time when we both were in need of fellowship with one who knew what it was like to walk in similar shoes, on rocky paths.

A couple of years later, I began a support group that met the need for that commonality of experience that we as humans sometimes crave. There were ten women in the group from various geographcial areas in the states and four of us were quite regular. It too was a message board. It ran its course, but lasted eight months. A time when all of us were going through particularly difficult times in our personal lives. I felt stronger because I could lean on them from a distance... and I also knew I was a blessing in their lives.

I was separated at the time from my then husband and raising children, one his, one mine and a baby that needed protection. It was a time in my life when I was at another crossroad... making decisions about where I would look for work and where I would move. I felt God, that higher power, was leading me. It was a time I needed to be strong for all under my care. I put one foot in front of the other and kept going. The journey was spiritual, emotional, cognitively educational... and physically it meant moving 900 miles north and northwest of where I was situated. The job I accepted was one with many opportunities to grow... in all areas of my life and to be part of a small town community in rural central Oregon. Sometimes one is aware of the fact that an experience is a slow down and smell the roses type experience or it will pass you by so quickly... you will not have been present in your own life.

Today, I am again in one of those crossroad periods of life. It may be more difficult and I do need to be more careful due to the world economy. It may be that my crossroads and choices are solely an inner journey of decision rather than a physically challenging relocation type journey. However I hope for both. I have greatly enjoyed the contrasts of geographical change and cultural differences... then and now. When I have been the one who did not speak the language or know the particulars of a culture, I slow down and smell the roses, so to speak, and nothing is taken for granted.

I miss the village. The villages I have known are Deya in Majorica, Plainfield and Richmond in Vermont and Madras in Oregon. Don't get me wrong, I like Saint Paul, Minnesota. But I miss that knowledge that what I do matters. A city is a different type of existence. At least for me. This is why we humans carve up the cities into communities of sorts.... either physical ones with geographical boundaries or common interest communities where we participate in common causes. Because in a village, everyone really does matter on a different scale, a scale that meets a need within me, I think this is why I pine after New Zealand. Even though I was a nanny / housekeeper or farm labour on a permaculture farm without a lot of contacts with others, I could see the ramifications of my actions and my words... and I felt the impact of other people's choices in a very personal way. This is what I want to get back to.

I am sad that New Zealanders have the 6th largest foot print in the world as far as their impact on the environment. I was speaking to a man in Auckland via phone recently and he said it was because many New Zealanders have so much, that he/she doesn't understand the need. Sadly we often do not recognize what is there until it is no longer. Slow down and smell the roses... whatever the rose represents to you.

Anyone out there who would like to build a community in New Zealand with me? Seriously.

Dear Readers of my blog,

The Republicans have left Saint Paul where I live. Thank you.... for going home. Most of my online friends are from other countries. I sure hope you know that individuals like me are hoping that Obama and Biden become the next President and VicePresident of this country. If not, I am truly concerned for the planet. Well, I wanted to stop by and write something. It has been awhile since I have had the time. I hope to read more of what others are doing in their countries... for peace and ecology.

Pray for the people of the USA that they truly vote for the only two people running, Obama and Biden, who are for peaceful solutions and solving the planet's crisis, rather than drilling for more oil and invading other countries like the Republicans. Help!!! No more Republicans. NO More. We need to be serious about caring the planet and everyone on it.

Angela Davis speaks on How Does Change Happen?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pc6RHtEbiOA

From the lecture of Angela Davis: "It is really important to work with your imagination, to use your imagination, to think beyond the moment. But... it's not enough --simply to imagine a different future. We can walk around with these ideal words in our heads while everything crumbles around us. And so I would say, critical habits involve collective intervention as well. If we take the critical impulse seriously, it involves a dual commitment. I would say first of all --to use knowledge in a transformative way."

"Of course, we assume that the knowledge that matters comes from places like this...[universities].... But, I would like us to think about knowledge in a much broader way. This is one site for the production of knowledge. But, knowledge gets produced in other sites as well... And, especially for... [those coming from backgrounds that know what poverty or racism means]... It's extremely important not to discount the learning that happens in our communities, the learning that happens on the job.... When I say, "knowledge," I'm not talking about the specialized knowledge, I am not talking only about that specialized knowledge, I am talking about knowledge in the broader sense."

"As I was saying, the critical impulse, which I want to suggest we need to develop, involves a commitment to use knowledge in a transformative way. To use knowledge as a way of helping us to remake the world, to remake the world so that is better for all of its inhabitants... and I am not only talking about human beings. This critical impulse means that we have to absolutely refuse to attribute any kind of permanency --to that which is. Simply, because it is. There's another aspect of what we might call a critical posture towards the world. And, in my opinion this where feminism comes in. And, I will talk about feminism a little later. But, I want us to think about feminism much more broadly than we usually do. I want to think about feminism as encouraging us to adopt critical habits toward the tools we use. And I'm talking about, when I say tools, I'm talking about the conceptual tools. That means our concepts, our vocabularies, and not only in the academe... but also among in organizing practices..... We have all these difference languages.... we assume that some are more important others.... we have all these different vocabularies and we don't share the meanings of these words. I can say "struggle," and I know that there are some people who will understand exactly what I mean when I say struggle. To other people, struggle? What is that?"

"Now, before I move on to talk about some of the aspects of our contemporary world that desperately need changing, I want to make two important points."

"And one has to do with the tendency to erase the contributions of those of those who have perhaps done the most to bring about progressive change. And, the second point, has to do with the difference between the change we want, the change we struggle for on the one hand, and the change we actually achieve... the changing change that we actually achieve...."

Then, later in her lecture, Ms. Angela Davis, goes on to say, "Often those who contribute most powerfully to movements for radical social change, our erased from in the histories that are transmitted from generation to generation. Civil rights movement as an example....."

LISTEN TO the lecture. It is very worth your time. I have typed up the first portion of her lecture above so you may read it along with listening to her.

Angela Davis points out that it was people like you and me who influenced others... others like the young man, Martin Luther King, Jr., to get involved in the Montgomery protest. "Rosa Parks was an organizer; she wasn't a tired woman.... She was a trained organizer. It is a story about people just like you." Ms. Davis talks about other movements.... and individualism and how dangerous it is. Then she talks about George Bush in Washington, D. C.

Second point she wants to make is that "the victories we do win are not always the victories we have fought for." Ms. Davis shares some personal knowledge of past civil rights understanding concerning the Black Panther movement, etc. People --like you and me-- even with our personal problems, help spark movements. She is not romanticizing the time, but demonstrating the amazing way of manifesting solidarity with people in Asia or in South Africa.... "There were real problems with the way the Black Panther Party unfolded... They did not have the vocabulary or the concepts to think about the masculine that was at the heart of the movement at that time. The ramifications that followed were amazing. They did not stop police violence or racial profiling, but they achieved a lot of other changes." She talks about the women's movement.....

"The contributions of the women's movement, a lot of different women's movements...."

Raised radical demands...

Jobs or help without strings attached.....

Ms. Davis begins to run short of time. Towards the middle of the last part she talks about the thwarted efforts of socialism in eastern Europe. That despite the failures, they made amazing changes in respect to people's lives. (We may disagree with how she presents a young women's idealism concerning the USSR, but the point is I think about the contrast of what people in the USA dreamed of --but could not access in the USA due to poverty or other excluding situations.)

Returning to the discussion of the lost of history.... "Victories are never permanently engraved in history."

"Social meanings are socially constructed. We cannot leave it up to the state to create those meanings. Meaning state in the broadest possible sense; government in Washington.... and California...."

Labels like "terrorists" have a personal meaning to her... (if you know who she is, you will understand.)

"Social meanings are socially constructed and we cannot leave it up to the state to produce those meanings. And, because we are always encouraged to conceptualize change only as it affects individuals.... there is this dangerous individualism" to which she referred earlier.

"This dangerous individualism is bound to transform the collective victories that we make. If we imagine these victories as community victories, and they are transformed into individual v then we seek out h examples...." Then her lecture becomes very contemporary with a contrast of examples of "who we put up as heroes that forgets about the structural changes that were actually intended by those struggles. Individuals like Condalizza Rice can say.... look where I am, look what I accomplished.... now "I am running around the world making war."

"...in the 60's and 70's... even if the structural change that we wanted did not occur... even if relief was not brought to subjugated communities the way we wanted ....what we did manage to do is change the terrain of struggle. We reconfigured the landscape on which we now try to increase the measure of freedom all communities enjoy."

Ms. Davis is "quite concerned about questions of vocabulary, the need to think about the conceptual tools that we use, the need to adopt critical habits --habits that require a kind of constant criticism not only of those things that we want to change, but of the way we want to change them and of the tools we use to conceptualize that change."

She uses a contemporary example, the word, "diversity." It upsets her; not that she does not believe we should not have diversity. But...

"The word diversity has been colonized so much of what we were once able to talk with much greater specificity. All we have to do now is evoke diversity. And, what does diversity mean?......."

Ms. Davis is not an opponent of diversity. Ms. Davis states she is "an advocate of strong conceptions of diversity." And the way she summarizes it is that "you can have difference that truly makes a difference, and that's the kind of diversity" she wants; "difference that's going to make a difference. But you can also have difference that doesn't make a difference. Difference that allows the machine to keep functioning in the same old way and in a matter of fact sometimes even more efficiently and effectively. George Bush is so proud of the fact that his Secretary of State is a black woman."

"If we embrace weak notions of diversity, it is a concept that promotes a hidden individualization of problems and solutions that ought to be collective. It is a concept that can, unless we redefine it and in its strongest version, that can leave structures of inequality and injustice in tact. And, what is immensely importance for our purposes this afternoon, diversity is a concept that provincializes our relationship to the world."

"We live during an era that is called globalization, right? There is suppose to be this instantaneously global transmission of knowledge, the products that we purchase for our daily use are produced and distributed by in large on the global market. We wear the sweat of global workers, specially young girls and women. We wear their sweat on our bodies. We consume a disportionate amount of the world's energy. And therefore, we live as if the rest of the world were simply there for the purpose of serving and confirming as what is represented as our way of life."

"George Bush, the man throughout the world that stands for the worst...... most exploitative elements of this country. Personally embarrassed of having to be represented in the global arena by such a figure as George Bush."

"Embarrassment is too weak of a term. Absolute revulsion that wars are being conducted in our names, and that torture is being justified in our name, and that democracy has become a watch-word for the most abominable violations of human rights."

Ms. Davis stated that never in her, 62 years, could she "have imagined that the progeny of ulter right wing conservatives would produce the kind of situation we find ourselves in today. Not only war and torture, but a political discourse that aspires to persuade us that democracy can become this watch-word for terror, for torture, and for the wholesale denial of individual and collective rights. One might go so far as to say that the strategies of the Bush Administration involve evoking the fight to save democracy as a justification for the rapid erosion of democratic rights. And so there is torture that is unrecognized as torture, there are secret prisons that are not revealed and when they are revealed, they are justified...."

"There is this prospect of fencing off the Mexican border to prevent people from entering this country whose lives have been destroyed by the impact of global capitalism. And, of course we need to tell Arnold S..... that the prison situation is horrendous. California is at the very bottom of the list. 2.2 million people are behind bars [in the USA] which means that the United States incarcerates more than any country of the world.

Paradime. New modes of democracy... or capitalism. "Democracy? When you listen to George Bush, when he says [the word] democracy, replace the word with the word, "capitalism;" it makes a lot more sense, the strategies [he proposes] make a lot more sense because this is not really about democracy. This is a depressing situation. It is really depressing. But it doesn't have to be depressing. It is --only if you assume that the way things are today is the way they will be tomorrow. Back to what her mother told her, "This is not the way they're suppose to be and they do not have to remain this way."

Four more pages of notes that she did not get to... She attempts to summarize. "Feminism need not be only about women, nor about gender. We can think about feminism as a methodology that can better enable us to conceptualize and fight for progressive change. The type of feminism I am talking about calls upon us to seek out connections, to make connections that ought to be obvious... but are not because of the ways in which our perceptions of the world are so deeply idea-logically influenced...."

"Individualized and state connections..... even though we see the routines of the state."

I recommend you listen to her lecture yourself. However, I have attempted to write down the highlights for those of you whom do not have a computer that has speakers.

She ran out of time to finish talking about her work. She gives examples of people who are denied their liberty and are either in prison or in exile.

She ends with a plea, "Please get involved, please try to make a difference, please try to turn this country around."

"...how important it is to transport certain habits of imagination..." --Angela Davis

This is worth your time. Sit back and listen with your heart and mind.

If you have ever desired the opportunity of attending a lecture by a professor of the highest integrity and intellectual ability, Angela Davis delivers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pc6RHtEbiOA

Also of interest is this speech about prisons in the USA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yh8ZrGhzJIM&feature=related