Is our war on terrorism doing what it takes?

 

This Sunday morning, Pentagon head General Crowley called us again to "do what it takes" to fight terrorism.  His implication was that our vengeance must continue because more terrorists have vowed to wreak havoc on our nation.  In his thinking, responding in kind honors not only the three thousand deaths on that terrible day, but also honors the thousands—we should acknowledge millions—of innocents who have suffered since that day.

This error in national policy is dragging us down. We have forgotten a fundamental portion of God's law from our Old and New Testaments, "Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord," Isaiah 63.4, Romans 12.19, and "Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good."  We are called by our faith not to respond in kind.

The reason is the more powerful way God commands in our Bible. Many of the world's peoples look at our American response to 9/11 with concern and curiosity. To them, we have become weak, even suicidal, with our juvenile theory that we must continue paying back a bigger, badder dose of the terrorists' own medicine.

After ten years there still is no serious national discussion on alternative responses to this heinous crime we remember on this tenth anniversary; we rather assume closure depends on an exception for us to God's law on revenge and murder.  We have still not asked our most qualified theologians, scientists and philosophers to lead such a discussion.

Let's be rational. It makes no more sense psychologically, scientifically, or theologically to find and delete—read ex-judicially execute or rendition—the world's terrorists than it does to set out to bully bullies into stopping their bullying. It works at first; we had and still have the power to eliminate evildoers all over the world. But it sends an unwise message: to survive in this world of multiplying evil people and suffering good people, what one needs is more power, more lethal weapons, and an improved ability to terrorize bullies and terrorists. In other words, pre-empt God's role in handling bullying terrorists like Bin Laden.

There's a better, stronger way. Part of it is training and upgrading national police forces worldwide to be responsible and accountable to their citizen's interest in democracy.  This is happening already with some thousand or more special ops teaching troops deployed in several terrorism-prone nations. But there's more, much more needing change in our international policy.

Let's start with our terrible intelligence on the "Arab Spring" sweeping tyrants off their terrorist tactics against their own citizens. Our government and media community told us this happened because people living under these oppressive regimes were suddenly fed up to a breaking point.

It's not true. Millions in the Middle East have been reading for decades, taken to heart and followed the principles of the book by Gene Sharp: "From Dictatorship to Democracy," It's now available in thirty different languages and free on line through hundreds of links, to the consternation of the governments of Syria and Bahrain. Using his book as a manual for unseating tyrants, citizens have organized seminars with teachers such as Dr. Sharp and spawned opposition groups across the Middle East, rebuilding hope for democracy.

Our government was caught off guard. The people of Egypt rebelled against a tyrant we considered a friend. His American-made military should have guaranteed stability for his regime. Yet his army hardware was rendered ineffective. Instead of tens of thousands dying and the nation's infrastructure in shreds as in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Tripoli, only several hundred were killed. And they were unarmed citizens, easy prey for his snipers. The discipline of the citizen movement held. Mubarak lost.

Our own politicians, media and government should stop ignoring this worldwide strategy for countering tyranny and apply it to terrorism, its twin. It is homegrown American common sense, deployed now to the Middle East. Let's be proud.

We Americans will solve our economic woes and stand more proud and secure when our government views terrorism as a world problem, rather than a unique American problem. This requires the courage to change course toward the principles of the Arab Spring, and to achieve parity among the nations rather than our current vast superiority in military strength to deal with it. Plus, we have national heroes to honor such as Gene Sharp whose contribution merits acknowledgement if not full pursuit. Our national survival must now drive us to rediscover our heritage of a better, stronger defense against terrorism than the one laid out by Bush and Obama, and supported by our current political parties.

The full column, with more on a rational approach, continues: It's amazing how totally gullible our government was to Bin Laden's strategy behind organizing the bombing of the twin towers. He said it way back then, and his words are remembered among anti-American Islamists today:

"…He repeatedly asserted that the only way to drive the U.S. from the Muslim world and defeat its satraps was by drawing Americans into a series of small but expensive wars that would ultimately bankrupt them." That's Bin Laden's script for fighting us. We need a different, much better script for fighting his ilk, not to respond in kind at Bin Laden with his own medicine, but to choose a stronger moral deterrent."
The American Conservative, quoting Bin Laden on this issue, May 20, 2011, by Eric Margolis. 

We Americans will stand more proud and secure when we acquire the courage to change course and deal with world terrorism responsibly, collaboratively and collectively on parity with the world's nations, instead of as the world's bully setting out to single-handedly to defeat the ghost of Bin Laden.

http://www.aeinstein.org/ the website of the Albert Einstein Institute.

Does this mean we should change our foreign policy? If America reads this book and follows it we citizens will be changing it. See also Noam Chomsky's article http://www.truth-out.org/after-911-was-war-only-option/1315582873 : "The jihadist movement, much of it highly critical of bin Laden, could have been split and undermined after 9/11, if the "crime against humanity," as the attacks were rightly called, had been approached as a crime, with an international operation to apprehend the suspects. That was recognized at the time, but no such idea was even considered in the rush to war. It is worth adding that bin Laden was condemned in much of the Arab world for his part in the attacks."

Our Obama administration has even denied the message of our national hero, Martin Luther King Jr., claiming he would support our government's policy of targeting our own citizens for covert executions contrary to due process language in our constitution. See my blog Jan. 26, 2011, for details, "What Would Martin Luther King Say."

Foreign aid works far better for our national interests when it helps other nations democratize their own society with schooling, access to health care, access to a fair economy, fair systems of jurisprudence, and helps them and us to see acts of terror for what they are: a crime problem.  Plus, it is almost infinitely more cost effective than bombing the daylights out of three Middle East Nations (four with the coming war against Pakistan or Iran), so our biggest corporations can reap billions in profits through our obligation to rebuild what we destroy at huge taxpayer expense each time.

Also Look up Gregg Mortensen from Bozeman, his book, "Three Cups of Tea."
Check out more details of Gene Sharp's research influencing the Middle East:
http://blog.sojo.net/2011/03/21/how-to-start-a-revolution-a-new-film-about-gene-sharp/

--
David Graber
Hardin, MT  59034

Deconstructing deadlocks

A rancorous tide of deadlocked issues is rising to create a nationally historic flood. Remember when we had a more independent media which facilitated honest debate of real issues? Back then, deadlocks were deconstructed. One or both sides won because truth was employed to deconstruct the deadlocks. We had a freer press, honest investigative journalism, and much less simple regurgitation of party lines of conspiring government-big business oligarchies.

When I came home from college in the mid-sixties, I had formed a new interest in national politics. Investigative reporters with Reuters and the NY Times wrote about President Nixon's secret commitment of our nation's armed forces in the nation of Cambodia. American blood was being shed in a secret war. American bombing pilots crashed in inaccessible places. Bodies were not recovered. The official Pentagon news was that they all died in Vietnam. Nixon fought to keep the war secret, but after the Pentagon papers were released by Daniel Ellsberg and were carried by the entire media, the deadlock began to be deconstructed. Then, Watergate happened.

After my mother found out about Watergate, her faith in God and country was shaken. To her, God had placed Richard Nixon into the nation's presidency. That meant opposing him was like opposing God.

"Mom," I said, home from college on Christmas vacation in the late sixties, "If Nixon is a Christian, he's not our kind of Christian. He lies, cheats, and has blood on his hands—blood of American soldiers."

She cried. I was mortified. She had experienced the deconstruction of a deadlock which had been built by the media over Richard Nixon's integrity.

This personal deadlock with my mother was the first I had ever experienced with my family over politics. Across the country, information the media released which showed President Nixon had indulged in criminal behavior was pitted against the traditional views of people like my mother. The deadlock was deconstructed with real information. It was stressful, but keeping Nixon's secrets was far from our best interests.

We were fortunate then to have independent investigative reporters – we don't have many anymore. With the internet, we can access international sources like The Guardian, Ha'aretz or Al Jazeera. Wikileaks is piercing the wall of secrecy erected by our government-business collusion, and doing it for our ultimate national interests. Yet, Wikileaks has been soundly attacked and discredited to the max possible by our government's military-industrial complex. Some of us are familiar with this deadlock.

This brings up our central deadlock desperately needing deconstruction. Some people say our response to 9/11 was right. Others say we are wrong. It's a deadlock going way back. Deconstruction will ultimately reveal government, religious and political leaders have led us down the wrong path – leading us anywhere and doing anything to anyone we happen to momentarily hate.

What do we get from being the world's policeman? Enormous national debt, cuts of essential services and inevitable tax increases used to take over lands and send record numbers of military and private citizens to build military bases in the ludicrous quest of being the world's policeman. We invoke fear of imprisonment, torture and death in anyone who opposes the friends we have chosen to support on foreign soil. In doing so, we have ruined indigenous infrastructures far more capable of fighting against the hatred we deplore. We have failed to deconstruct the deadlocks which mistakenly diagnose our much-hyped religious and political fears as a reason to war.

As a nation, we can still build on our primary strength: our citizen's capacity to address wrongs and make them right. Neither our government nor its wealthy corporate controllers will. This is demonstrated by the immense profiteering of publicly endorsed private sectors during our recent wars.

We have an awesome history of a strength that now trumps our capacity for war. We faced down the wall of racial segregation in America and deconstructed intractable deadlocked issues with their false perceptions. We won battles in Birmingham, Atlanta, Selma, and the entire South for a fair and just society. It doesn't get nearly as much attention as bombs and bullets, but we can do it again.

Last week, the largest statue on the mall in Washington, D. C. was dedicated to the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He battled the wave of deadlocked racial animosity that escalated into enormous civil unrest and shed his life-blood doing so. In deconstructing the deadlocked racial divide in America, the primary battle he won for the nation was the battle against our second civil war. That war was beginning in the early sixties and many warfare experts said then it was inevitable. It didn't happen. The American civil war of the 1960's was defeated. See Dr. Vincent Harding's recent book, Martin Luther King: The Inconvenient Hero. It's a book founded on the true strength of America.

The end is near but the game isn’t over

Monopoly is fun growing up. Our kids liked Monopoly, or at least they thought they did. It starts out with equity, endless possibilities and a colorful stash of paper money. As the dice are rolled and deals are made, the tone changes. Eventually, the accumulated wealth of one or two dooms the rest to a slow demise. Hard feelings mount, sometimes tears are shed, and once one person has it all, the game is over. That's the way the rules were written.

A visiting cousin amended the rules. Seeing a fellow player suffering disastrous losses, she willingly sold some of her assets to balance the holdings more equitably. Soon, the other players followed the example of looking out for others' interests as well as their own. They delightedly discovered that with assets and power in balance and a level playing board, the Monopoly game could go on forever.

My kids and their friends discovered in Monopoly what our nation's founders already knew. A game that coddles the rich with insider privilege, benefiting from the work of the rest of us, gradually dwindles resources for the working class and will not last. The game soon ends.

America started out with immigrants fleeing the monarchies in Europe. They uniformly opted for a land with a level playing field. Our revolution and our constitution were fought and formulated to keep it that way. Inherited wealth was anathema to our founders because they knew from Europe it kept concentrating power and corruption. Hard work, ingenuity and neighborliness were respected far above royalty or inherited privilege. It's still that way, especially here in Big Horn County. We have a tradition of insisting on transparency of our leaders and a more balanced economy, so we the people retain the right to keep it that way.

But guess what? We've lost it. We now have the greatest disparity ever in accumulated wealth between a small group of families at the top and the rest of the families of this great nation. They are accountable to themselves and their stockholders, not the people. The resultant suffering is all around us in Big Horn County; all we have to do is look at the economic game played in Washington. Yet, there is no talk about changing back to our founding principles with firm government and public oversight. Instead, we endlessly and uselessly debate the national debt ceiling.

Our game board has gone under the table. There's a broader than ever marriage between Washington and Wall Street to amass wealth in a small group. We have had corporate executives sitting down with our elected congressmen as members of the Allied Legislative Executive Council (ALEC) to secretly write new rules for our economy so our government will monitor wealth and power even less. We have a huge military industrial complex that sucks more money out of our nation's economy than the world's next 50 military powers combined. A significant part of our nation's media is owned and controlled by a single powerful corporation headed by one family – hardly "fair and balanced." Secrecy abounds.

Our Bible, the most fundamental and important document shaping our American culture, speaks of one sin more often and with more emphasis than any other: the sin of greed. It's the sin of a few acquiring more at the expense of the many. The few have more than they need and the many don't have enough. Salvation stories in scripture are swept time after time into provision for living, in plenty and without fear. Most importantly, salvation passages highlight healing and deliverance from this sin. It also confirms our teenagers' amendments to the rules of their game of Monopoly.

Which way will we follow? In our heating-up political atmosphere right now, this issue fields the most useful discussions. How we handle the horrific imbalance between the have-too-much's and the deprived-of-enough's in this nation should be the central issue of the election. In fact, if the Bible is right at all, our nation's existence rests on the outcome of this issue in our domestic and international policies. There is no more important issue and it just happens to be central to the formation of our nation's democratic tradition as well our Judeo-Christian faith.

Let's talk it up. Let's not just sit by and watch the end of the game. Let's vote for those rich folks who run for political office only if they have the courage to take on this issue. That way, the American Dream, instead of ending, will renew our families and give real hope to all of us.

Check out the nytimes.com article by billionaire Warren Buffet, August 14, 2011: "Stop Coddling the Super Rich," at nytimes.com/2011/08/15/opinion/stop-coddling-the-super-rich.html

www.greenwoodfarmmt.org

Government by Chickens

The numerous ongoing debates over the budget deficit in Washington remind me of my chickens. You see, I bought them as baby chicks six weeks ago, investing in the hope that they would do a job. Their task was to eat bugs off the potatoes and cabbage in our garden. But, unfortunately, they were spending more time sparring, flying at each other and downright scrapping instead of pursuing bugs. I had sent this fine poultry brigade to the garden to do a job, and that job was not getting done.

It's the same in Congress. We sent a fine brigade of legislators to Washington to do a job that simply is not getting done. No one there is interested in real tax and securities reform that would benefit those of us who lost our shirts in the latest national finance scandal. Remember the Tea Pot Dome scandal? Remember the the Savings & Loan scandal? How about the 30 to 50 percent of retirement most of us lost in the mortgage banking fraud? Are we still naive enough to trust Republicans or Democrats on their headline-grabbing debate over deficit spending and raising taxes and government default?

I hate the politics of politics but, unfortunately, politics has a real impact on people like me; even more so on those more vulnerable than me and my family. No legislator dares touch the real issue – that we have a shyster system of government that protects the rich and cheats those who do honest work. Any elected official that speaks of dismantling this shyster system must be prepared to face the prospect of punishment at the polls. The folks in power are plutocrats with an elaborate propaganda program in place. Bombarded with confusing economic complexity we, the people, are led like sheep to believe that life will actually be better for us if we simply stop deficit spending and never raise taxes. And so, the shyster system remains intact.

Just like when I bought my chicks, during the latest election, I was temporarily hopeful that a new administration would squash the buggers in charge of the economics of our nation. Having been in China for two years, I frequently read the Economist Magazine and was exposed to diverse international perspectives on American foreign and domestic policy. I learned the amount our nation devoted to the vulnerable and working class of our country paled in comparison to the massive government policy changes, subsidy and bailouts for the corporate rich and powerful. I became convinced of the need for people-oversight of our economy, and toward a smaller government doing more of the vital work of regulating for transparency and honesty. Sadly, though it still isn't politically feasible to change the shyster system and our reps in congress continue scrapping over misleading and irrelevant issues ad nauseam, day after day.

Several weeks ago, six prominent pastors joined together to write an open letter to President Obama regarding this issue. They highlighted something many of us in Big Horn County don't often think about. God is partial. He does take sides, but they have nothing to do with the sides of liberals or conservatives, Republicans or Democrats. Rather, God takes sides with the poor and marginalized. It's written all throughout the Scripture, from Genesis to Revelation. (See sojo.net a moral budget July 15, 2011.)

Who tore down the system in our nation that used to give the poor the opportunity to better themselves and their families through personal initiative? How did we come to the point of giving the wealthiest one percent privileged access to expanding their wealth while funding media manipulation of all of us into a side show? We watch the cockfights between congress and the president, distracted while they erect a shadow government to protect their financial cronyism, secret insider deals and the welfare of rip-off tax breaks?

Yes, I'm talking about Bush's breaks. I just read that letting Bush's temporary tax breaks expire, as originally designed, would yield more deficit reduction in ten years than any of the proposals now being foolishly debated.

I've heard it said that when we give handouts to the rich, we are ultimately helping the poor because the rich create jobs for all of us. So why is it that over the past few years, as our corporate tax rate has fallen to the lowest amount in decades, our unemployment rate is so high? After all, we've spent almost a trillion dollars on corporate bailouts. We hear that "taxes are job killers." Well, taxes haven't gone up, so where are the jobs?

This morning, Bonnie and I threw the chickens out of the garden, all of them, along with their chicken coop. They wouldn't stop their sparring foolishness, and further, they keep eating the tiny tomatoes intended for our bellies. We the people – my family – vested with the right to govern our garden, will manage our resources for the benefit of all of us.

Those feisty chickens will be confronted with an impenetrable wall of oversight: a chicken fence, to keep them from using their well-honed beak technology to mess with our crops.

If only we could say the same thing for those in Washington.

--
David Graber
Hardin, MT  59034

Chickens and Government II

 

Finally on Monday the senseless combativeness in Washington has settled down to a new slightly more rational cooperation.

 

That's what I gathered while watching, with surprise and fascination, as our chickens began working together for their common good. 

 

In my last column, Big Horn County News July 20, I explained how they were banned from our fenced garden.  I didn't expect this cooperation.

 

They gathered into a gang and began running all together in the same direction. At first I saw no useful purpose. As I watched closer, I saw their mob-like stamping chicken feet stir up a wave of grasshoppers and bugs in front of them.  Insects were eaten at the moment of landing, no time to get hopping feet folded to spring and fly again, because other chicks behind had kicked them up. As their flight range was exhausted, down they came, into a gizzard.  Every chick got a fair chop at the economy of the pasture's protein.  My forage got a break from the bugs and hoppers.  My chickens are getting fatter. 

 

More to the point, I'm watching an avian illustration of what now could and should be happening for the good of our nation, now that we finally have some congressional compromise to move in the same direction.  And this all in spite of the snide remarks and arrogant character degradation by Fox Radio Right Wing Fair and Balanced Talk Shows, and The Sky-Is-Falling Analyses of Democrats and Liberal Pundits.

 

Yes, we really can move in the same direction; congress folk can compromise their promises and get elected on reality instead of simplicity. We can preserve our union, return to our basics as a nation, and value what gave us the right start back in our revolution against the conservative British Crown royalists. 

 

Are you paying attention? I hope the words of George Lakeoff, in a recent oped, might help us see again our nation's values to which we just might be returning:

 

We Americans care about our fellow citizens; we act on that care and build trust and we do our best not just for ourselves, our families and our friends and neighbors, but for our country, for each other, for people we have never seen and never will see.

 

That's what our capitalist economy should be about, as Adam Smith wrote when he held up the common good as the basic bottom line of capitalism in America.

 

It's time to tear apart the modern experimental nest of pundits, politicians, media moguls and billionaires who place personal power and profit above the public good.  They laugh up their sleeves to their foreign banks, and it echoes across the back 40, as they manipulate the masses of American citizenry into hysteria about government takeovers, raising taxes, the terrible Taliban in Iran, and a host of other side issues. While truly harmful, these really are symptoms to which paying too much attention has become a dangerous diversion from restoration of our real historical values. They have done an astounding job of smearing and discrediting foundational public enterprises: public schools, government agencies that support family businesses and farms where children labor, non-profit medical care, public funded elder care, and even now social security, Medicare and Medicaid.

 

In our nation this experimental nest wants to feed us chicks the equivalent of ground "protein" that's really horsemeat by-products unfit for human consumption.  We are then told to feel happy we can sit around being lazy recipients of the largess of the elite's welfare system, and don't have to leave our fence boundaries to join in with others in pursuit of a livelihood.  Most conspicuously, we chicks get addicted to the protein pellets from the outside so there is no need to tread that grass in step with others for the good of all. We are supposed to enjoy confinement, and to think life consists of being lucky not to be left outside the fence, not abandoned to survive in the low life of pursuit of protein for survival. 

 

More than any other agenda, our founding fathers were adamant that unregulated private wealth concentration was anathema to our fledgling democracy.

It's possible the decision of the Republicans in the House to stand with Boehner and back Obama's negotiated plan will lead to some new valuing of our public enterprise system, especially government's function to open the big sky so we can see each other and get coordinated for the common sustenance of all. I saw it happening with my chicks here on the back 40.  Maybe, congressmen will be booted from their fenced garden too, or learn to think beyond pushing for more government deregulation of private wealth concentration, and instead join us all supporting public enterprises for the good of all of us.

 

David Graber

Hardin, MT

 

--
David Graber
Hardin, MT  59034
www.greenwoodfarmmt.org

Turning stones into bread

Sometimes when humans do wrong, we have trouble facing the music. It's never easy to admit our misdeeds, especially when 99.9 percent of us are involved. Anyway, we didn't choose this one.

It came to me in half-awake slumber one night with the coal-laden night trains' whistles wafting upstream from the Big Horn River bridge into my open bedroom window. As I drifted off to sleep, a nightmare of millions of tons of coal rained down from the sky, rose up and flooded the property around my house like the river did last month and I was frantically and foolishly filling sandbags again.

There really are consequences to the corporate sin of turning stones into bread—black stones stripped from the earth and burned by the megaton to feed our appetite for more calories. It's not just a dream; worldwide climate trends indicate there may be little time to alleviate some of the consequences of our massive burning of fossil fuel. A simple on-line search of "world people's climate change conference Bolivia," and you will find many opinions from both sides of the fence.

It took five hundred thousand years for the earth to sequester the amount of carbon that humans now, in one year, pull out of fossil rock, oxidize and inject into the paper-thin layer of air we breathe according to Fredric L. Quivik of Michigan Technological University. The Creator did not put it underground for people to extract and insert into our atmosphere.

Our human greed motivated us to dig and drill. It's all about turning stones into bread, ostensibly to feed the world's energy needs for the greedy good life.

Here on the Back 40 nature operates mostly within natural law. No plant or breathing animate life gets too far out of balance in proportion to the calories provided by photosynthesis: the essential ingredient for survival in Big Horn County winters and hot summers. Since creation, all life on planet earth had been operating within the calorie limits of the carbon life cycle, harnessing solar energy to photosynthesize carbon into food or energy.

Once the uses of fossil energy were discovered, we began consuming calories from fossil carbon at a rate astronomically beyond the calories available in the carbon life cycle of our planet. We are now injecting carbon into our planet's air at rates unprecedented in human existence. We have gone far out of balance with God's natural carbon life cycle.

In our farming practices in America, we take pride in our efficiency, but we don't look at the calories we burn to produce food calories we harvest to feed the world. In calories consumed to produce calories for food, modern farming is more inefficient than ever. The typical modern commodity agriculture farm uses up ten calories for every calorie produced. Around the world, rapidly advancing farm technology is raising, not lowering, the calorie input proportion to production.

In recent years, climate scientists in our country and abroad have reached a consensus ignored by the media and many politicians – that the burning of fossil energy sources is largely responsible for the imbalance we now face. We have driven carbon dioxide in the atmosphere worldwide up to unprecedented amounts.

Since drastically increasing the carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, the earth has gone out of balance and dramatic changes are becoming more apparent.

These changes have caused suffering already, and other nations accuse us of contributing to the problem. Of course, there's lots of denial and misinformation on both sides as in any argument, but the privileges we enjoy require us to listen to the outcries of the multitudes suffering because of the carbon ascending into our atmosphere. It really does take an impossible dream: lowering our calorie consumption back in step with the Creator's scientifically determinable design.

Sadly, there is a million-dollar-plus propaganda campaign now snowballed into every sector of public and religious life convincing us to believe a lie: that humans are not responsible for their climate sin against God's creation. They are smugly watching their stock numbers rise as media preachers tell us God is in charge, he has blessed our sin, and will bail us out before we suffer consequences.

Michael Pollan, the food journalist, writes, "When we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating (coal and) oil and spewing greenhouse gases." Jesus was tempted to turn stones into bread too.

He rejected that temptation to sin. It's time for us to confess, repent and start making amends along with the rest of the nations of planet earth.

Dave Graber

Hardin, MT 59034

Bullying basics: Let’s stop it where it starts

The only way to stop bullying is to start looking where bullying originates. It's imbedded in our culture. Our children's media, our politicians, our business world and foreign policy teach us that we must have power to command and intimidate other humans to get what we want from them.

Now, in Montana and Big Horn County Schools, we are trying to tell children not to become what every sector of public life portrays as ideal. It's ludicrous to assume we could stop bullies in one sector, our public schools, without even acknowledging the power of teaching bullying in all the others.

From Wall Street to Congress and even down to our towns, the assumption holds that there are winners and losers and that human life ultimately follows the law of the jungle. This evolutionary ideology is prevalent in our business world today, even among adherents of creationism. The slogan – survival of the fittest – goes against the grain of being the humans our Creator intended.

Ancient tribal cultures such as Hebrews from a few thousand years ago and the Apsáalooka and Tsestsestehas of Big Horn County worked hard to teach children communal responsibility. Self-interest in power and acquisition of material things was dampened by personal validation and acceptance – worthy in family and community. Stories and games upheld the principles. It's the bottom line of the Ten Commandments. Greed, the distorted virtue of capitalist politics of the modern media mega-culture, was held in check.

I remember a story from a deceased friend of mine who used to live in Busby, Vern Buller. He started out farming in Ritchie, Montana. In the 40's, he went as a missionary heavy equipment operator to South America, in the Chaco region of Argentina. His job was building a road from Asuncion, Paraguay, through prairie timber and marshland, opening up the region for farming.

The area had already been tribal peoples' home for thousands of years. Their traditional ways of life were profoundly threatened by this intrusion. The destruction of timber and uprooting of a long ribbon of land cutting through the their homeland proved disastrous.

Soon there were casualties. Men who operated equipment were shot with poison arrows. Soon, each team of operators was assigned two or three armed guards, openly carrying weapons as a show of force. This was successful initially, but it brought on escalation. Indians somehow acquired guns and attacked a lightly armed team, capturing the men and severely damaging their equipment.

Being a Mennonite pacifist, Vern refused to work on a team carrying weapons. This created a crisis with the road building command center. However, after considerable negotiation, a cash deposit was made to secure the cost of the equipment and he and his team members who agreed with him were allowed back on the job.

They quickly moved into position to work their section of road, amidst snide comments from teams with armed guards. But the attacks stopped. All along the route it was clear the operation was still being watched. Then one day in the heat of noon, a large group of Indians surrounded Vern's team, the only one with no armed guards. They were ordered off their equipment and seated on the ground in the welcome shade.

They were searched. One of the team carried a concealed handgun. It was found. They feared the worst.

The Indians wanted to talk. They had acquired a translator. Thus began a negotiation process to alter the surveyed course of the road at particular places, meeting the needs of the Indian community to protect sacred locations.

The final months of completion saw the whole operation continue with the Indians providing each team with a security detail. Both sides won.

A few generations ago, American families had time away from TV to teach their children to get along with each other and to talk when needs were threatened. Bullies don't do this. Normal human beings do.

The only way to stop bullying is to stop teaching bullying at every level of our culture.

Somewhere there must be a scriptwriter for children's programming on TV who will write an ending where the hero accesses negotiation power as gifted to humans by the Creator. I've had enough of children's programming promoting the law of the jungle.

--
David Graber
Hardin, MT 59034

406 665-3373
www.greenwoodfarmmt.org
Bonnie's email graberbj@gmail.com

Recovering our American Childhood

When it comes to childhood in America, we are facing frightening statistics. We need to return to cultural patterns, now seldom practiced, so more of our children can grow into productive responsible citizens.

Conservatism tends to resist change, to be critical and careful with the new and different. Of course this grates against modern consumer culture where we are conditioned to follow the latest fashion from clothing to raising children. Then there are the reactionary trends to restore old furniture and clothing fashions as well as other efforts to take society back to what we had generations ago. That's what we need for our American childhood. Instead of what we used to wear or sit upon in past decades, let's become fascinated with the disappearing treasure trove of resources for raising children.

Those of us living in our personal second half century remember the way things used to be, especially if we were raised in rural families. We were economic assets far beyond the imagination of families today.

In the late 1940's, my siblings and I learned the responsibility to feed, water and chase the chickens at night that laid the eggs and flavored the Sunday pot-pie after they lost their heads. Much of our work was not fun, such as forking out anaerobic manure from critter sheds after the spring thaw or scraping smelly sheep gut casing for sausage on the butcher block beside the milk house sink.

Fun was unavoidably ingrained into the work. After casings were scraped and washed, I enjoyed helping Grandpa and Uncle Willis run the sausage press. A casing was firmly tied to the spout. Screwing down the pressure pushed the ground sausage out into the casing, forming a long rope coiled by Willis's gentle hands into a tub of salt water.

He helped me hold it carefully to quickly straighten potential kinks, but eventually the resistance was too much for the paper-thin casing, a kink formed and burst, spilling the ground meat. We children, at first shocked with the accident, learned to laugh because the remedy was simple. Grandpa calmly tied it off and had us help scoop up the spilled sausage grindings to dump back into the press. Then he would tie on a new casing and resume running the press until the casing burst again. This continued until all nine of my uncles' and aunts' families had their winter sausage supply coiled in their own tin bucket.

There was plenty of work to be done in order to survive, and while work was difficult with long hours, life had purpose. Our childhood games reflected our life and the tasks of making a living.

Together, young children created imitations of the tasks and strategies for sharing life. We were not to play games against human life, including war games. I remember being punished for playing the popular "Cowboys and Indians," for example, complete with willow bows, stick guns, and falling in the grass dead.

For many years as a young adult I did not appreciate this part of my history. I looked back thankful I had overcome the hard life of my childhood. As a teacher, I didn't have to work so hard physically to make a living. I was grateful to leave the "dumb farmer" image propagated at the time, with a college education as my ticket.

Many children now grow up in an America immersed in stress. No longer an asset, they are now in the way of parents' need to make a living. This factor is ignored as government and private and public policy programs focus on symptoms of children growing into adulthood with pervasive psychological wounds from stress.

Our alarming symptoms are increasing. We have the highest youth incarceration rate in the developed world. Our children have ADD and ADHD at continually increasing levels. Drug and alcohol abuse continue to rise at alarming rates, along with spousal and child abuse.

Premature death by accident, suicide and disease related to substance abuse, childhood and adult obesity, diet and environmental hazards where children live and dismal maternal and child health care delivery, all plague our country. It's the alarming descent of childhood in America at nearly every measure.

Yet we continue to scapegoat these symptoms as if each of them were the core problem. We don't want to look at what has gone wrong with our religious and economic systems. Let's open our eyes to our past, and repel the ideologies that say our Christian faith is defective, or capitalism and democracy are failures. They're not; we have an astounding heritage in our nation's history where our faith and values were experienced in our American childhood.

We children of my parents didn't handle any but a few coins until I made clear my intention to start college. Then I was given the chance to drive Dad's car around selling fruit trees to neighbors. Before that, I remember being entrusted with a nickel that never even reached my pocket, because Dad passed them out to each of us kids when he ground the old 49 Studebaker to a stop by the sign with the curled ice cream tip on the cone. We shyly piled out of the front-opening back seat door and lined up at the window to watch the girl in white twist that tip just right and hand it to each of us kids saying "That'll be five cents please." We didn't miss having little choice with those five pennies. That was before Dairy Queen came up with the chocolate choice. Since soft ice cream had come to town, we learned the blessed experience of spending 5 cents. Our parents and our community knew this: children do not learn to handle money wisely by being entrusted with money.

Our parents did not contrive choices for us. We grew up knowing who we were and where we belonged, because our life did not consist of making money to spend money and living in anxious hope of acquiring more money to spend on more things. Dairy Queen was a ritual, replayed two or three times during that summer it came to town. Then the ritual ended.

The life I shared with my parents, two brothers and three sisters, instead was in our working relationship with the land and its fruit, and sharing those jobs like haying, butchering and processing beeves, pork and poultry we did not sell for family income we never saw, and harvesting cultivated and wild fruit and vegetables, canning and processing to be distributed to each of my Dad's siblings' families according to the number of children.

Seeing the option of college, I was determined to leave the drudgery and smell. I honestly wanted to turn my back on life close to the land. I was tired and embarrassed with the persistent smell of my hands from washing udders every morning before leaving for school. It happened often. I walked into Chemistry class at 8:30 AM. There simply was no lava soap strong enough to take the odor away. More than one girl I wanted to impress would scoot her chair as far away as possible.

Contrast that with now.

Magpies are loud and determined. They fight off competition to do things their way.

I watched a pair building a nest near our barn. The tree was nearly dead, one destined for firewood this summer. I didn't try convincing them they were off base. I can't even approximate their language.

Our nation's crescendo of attacks on families blames parents for the rise focused on two issues. One criticizes our education reforms for focusing on the cheap goal of education for success in our market culture. This criticism is legitimate.

The other criticism focuses on the lack of Christian bias in public education. It is nationally promoted with books, videos and well-funded marketing claiming our public schools are a secular socialist conspiracy to destroy our faith in God, our foundation for marriage and family, and the very essence of our national values. This criticism, while having legitimacy, obscures the real dangers undermining the beliefs and values that built this nation.

Back when public education was founded, American politicians were more interested in being civil. The crisis issue behind our first public schools was rejection of the class warfare in Europe. The citizen-controlled government our founders created said that everyone deserves an "inalienable right" to pursue a living, to succeed in life (except women and slaves, which we have more recently assessed as equally human). They were fed up with the colonial government's elitist private education providing those with inherited wealth the tools to maintain their privilege, and, in the case of the Boston tea party, to tax the poor at the benefit of the hugely wealthy East India Tea Company that ruled the British Crown. So the rich were taxed, and public schooling for all was born.

The effort created an equalizer of opportunity par excellence. For over almost two centuries, until recent decades, our public educators have instilled in our young a social responsibility to maintain a door of access for all. Whether future dirt farmers or CEO's, each was expected to learn to be a productive member of society for the good of all. Public education then recognized that government had an obligation to address the economic disparity our society inherited from England, giving new young citizens an equal right to the economic and educational tools to live as families. For generations, it has been successful.

Recent decades have seen disturbing changes. The last two administration's education secretaries—Obama's and Bush's—have looked with shock at the dismal statistics of rising poverty, a pesky generational poverty culture, and the highest imprisoned population of any so-called "advanced" nation. They see a rising tide of dysfunctional families. They see the drain on our national budget when delinquent youth enter society, bear children, and increase our culture of poverty in America.

But instead of looking carefully at what is happening to our children, they have looked for quick program solutions in the public schools. Bush's "No Child Left Behind," and Obama's "Race to the Top" have ignored the mounting of the greatest threat to our nation's public schools: the loss of civic responsibility for parents with young children. From head start through university graduate programs, personal wealth has become the measure of success. It has taken precedence over what President Kennedy said, with his roots in our heritage, "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country."

Even magpies carefully choose the best angling forked branches for their nest. But as useful and legitimate as it is to oppose abortion, gay marriage and evolution, these obsessions obscure the loss of civic responsibility training in our education tree. Our national heritage is at stake. We must recover the story of public education itself, and even read about Jesus as written in the Christian Bible, the most important written document of our civilization.

Read the references in the New Testament on money, wealth and taxes. Jesus was clear that personal selfishness inevitably left people out. His ministry, founded by John the Baptist, was based on righting wrongs in his nation (Luke 3. 7-17). The solution was spiritual wisdom to learn motivation beyond selfishness. It was motivation for the "common good" later emphasized by the founder of our capitalist system, Adam Smith (see his book, Wealth of Nations).

Problems with evolution, gay marriage, abortion and other such issues may be real, and a motivation to pull a child out of public school. But these issues are only symptoms of the more dangerous threat to our democratic values in our nation's heritage in our drift toward marketing and personal competition for wealth in our schooling. Even though addressed with noise and politics, such discussion simply divides Christians and squelches useful discussion we should have in society over a fair, just economy, and the right to exist as human beings.

Somehow, the magpies got the message, probably with all our activity planting grass around "their" tree. They left for another tree. We need to remind our national and state education leaders up in their elitist tree that we the people know how our religious heritage, the arts, music, diversity of language and culture, all teach us respect for others and how to be responsible citizens. Let Wall Street experts return to New York with their marketing expertise. We don't need their values imposed on our schools in Big Horn County.

One honest education researcher is Dr. Mike Rose, look him up on line.

The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education

Diane Ravitch. 2011.

http://www.amazon.com/Death-Great-American-School-System/dp/0465014917/ref=wl_it_dp_o?ie=UTF8&coliid=I3M5B51HC6A4L4&colid=2UL2N592BVKVD (Author)

They should end talk of the government increasing its power to demand gender bias for civil rights of life partners. They should recognize at least limited legitimacy in Biblical exegesis along with the many American Christians who see God in Creation with or without evolution. They should recognize the legitimacy of those who oppose abortion through means other than government judicial action.

--
David Graber
Hardin, MT 59034

www.greenwoodfarmmt.org

The perfect flood – is it over?

The record flood of May, 2011, on the Little Horn, begs for an explanation. Why such a severe flood? I will try a simple one: almost 20 years of drought.

In the 1970's my son and I discovered fishing on the Big Horn. Our favorite place was the St. X bridge, with its wide gravel bars and sandy beaches extending into the water, and the steep place along the east side where larger rainbows lurked. We launched our homemade Cajun pirogue there, caught fish, and my children, young then, enjoyed splashing in the puddles across the wide riverbed.

Take a look next time you cross that bridge. The riverbed is constricted. Over the decades, grasses, then willow brush, and now even Russian olive and cottonwood crowd the river into half its former width.

At 10 p.m. on Saturday, my flashlight shining out my east door at Greenwood Farm revealed muddy turbulent water had risen four inches since 8 p.m., indicated by marks on the stake I planted in the yard that afternoon. I turned in and set the alarm for 1 a.m.. At midnight, I awoke in a sweat. In my dream I was swimming for life in a flood. Awake, still hearing rain, I grabbed my flashlight and went out to check the flood. Up another three inches, and muddy water was rushing in waves over the lane leading from our back door.

It was worrisome, but I was grateful for my family helping fill sandbags to protect our doors. I was even more grateful that our house had no crawl space, and our walls, made of waterproof concrete ten feet high, were plenty strong. I still had a sense of unease. When will the water stop rising? I made my way around the house, turned on lights, and saw flood waters almost encircling our house. A quick estimate said eight inches to go before water would reach the sandbags jammed against our outside doors.

At 2 a.m., the water level was exactly where it had been at midnight. At 4 a.m., it had dropped an inch. I was confident the worst was over.

At 10 a.m. Sunday morning, after dropping by four inches, I read the news on the computer. The Bureau of Land Management had shut down the flow in the Yellowtail Dam to around 3,000 cubic feet per second.

Many others in Big Horn County were not as fortunate, especially along the Little Horn.

I got out the old map of our farm and the nearby river, based on photos taken in the 70's. The back channel next to our house was once a significant part of the river. The island, now the headquarters of the Eagles Nest Lodge, was mostly a gravel bar. Now, Russian Olive has taken over everywhere, and I watched the water meandering slowly through that channel, still rushing madly across my yard and down my lane. It was obvious the river had lost much of its capacity to flow.

I began to understand. The habit of green things is to grow close to the water's edge. With the drought, the water's edge moved in on the river. The normal small floods added sediment to the green things along the shore, and those green things flourished into brush, then trees, then a strong riverbank. The broad river beds with open gravel bars we had in Big Horn County in the 70's are gone. With this pattern happening on our two major rivers in Big Horn County, the present crisis has become inevitable.

Did this record flood remove the brush blocking the river's flow? Did the snow in the high country lose most of its water content with this flood, or will there be another? Will the rains stop and warmer weather come at a gradual pace, allowing normal snow-melt and runoff? Is the water above Yellowtail Dam still rising?

At first, I thought maybe we've seen the end of the only perfect flood of 2011. Now I'm not so sure. Maybe these questions should motivate prayer, and prayer might lead to some action. This flood was enough.

--
David Graber
Hardin, MT 59034

www.greenwoodfarmmt.org

Debunking Greed

I'm a graduate of a Christian college where professors were strong on altruism. In economics I learned Adam Smith's philosophy based on what we understood as greed. Being a rebel, I bought the idea. I used to enjoy debunking altruism in college bull sessions.

"Even that toasted black hen," I used say to a dedicated self-giving friend, "really was preserving her own genetic code in her chicks when she sat still in the face of a fast approaching prairie fire, and died instead of flying away." I was referring to the famous story of the farmer who kicked a lump of ashes, the burned body of a mother hen, and uncovered a nest of peeping unsinged baby chicks. Her singed wings were enough protection to save her young. They were her resurrected life. She really was following a self-serving motivation to give her life, so I argued.

So in college I agreed greed is good. It's still dominant 50 years later in our culture and business practices. But now, in the last ten years, this conventional understanding from Adam Smith's 1776 book, Wealth of Nations, is no longer accepted by many research minded economists. There has been an awesome change in economic philosophy at the most scholarly levels. This debunking of greed needs to trickle down.

My son told me to search on line for a ten-minute video entitled "What Motivates Us." It's easy to find. Using researched documentation, the cute animated cartoon convincingly demonstrates we aren't motivated as much by greed or even self interest as by factors such as purposeful mission, autonomy, preservation of our human family and community, and complex challenges.

Tasks involving these factors aren't enhanced by incentive pay or exorbitant CEO compensation. Inserting the greed incentive into the mix usually lowers accomplishment. Surprising, isn't it? When tasks are cognitively challenging, requiring teamwork and a sense of mission for the benefit of others, incentive pay actually reduces work quality and output. "Whoa," I thought when I first saw this short video, "I'm catching a case of cognitive dissonance."

Well, self-interest does have a place. I see it all over this back 40, our Greenwood Farm. Weeds compete with my Garrison grass and alfalfa for germination and root room. Goose couples compete with each other for prime nesting habitat. And everyone gains with the competition, except the weeds.

But we human managers of this ground have decided greed and self-interest, while clearly credible and powerful, are not our prime motivators. If we were interested in maximizing profit per acre, we would have been much better off buying a parcel of more productive soil. The ground itself cries out for another motivation. How can we resurrect the sterile soil here to best sustain life for human benefit again after years of declining production in conventional farming? Our thinking is not just for next year's profit, but sustainable benefits for the next 10 or 100 or more years. And for this, we are in step with others in Big Horn County.

So the best question is what to do with land that cannot facilitate a greed motivation. Will altruism work here? Who would work here with this motivation?

There are lots of such folks around. For example, check out the Wellknown Buffalo Center at Garryowen. Like us, this summer they are having a group of college students volunteering to get their hands dirty working to make idealism become reality. They are doing summer school with Crow language immersion, gardening, and traditional skills of the Apsaalooke. Ours are coming to learn from our small steps toward sustainable living here on the back 40. This summer will see them working on experimental "earthship" building construction, using discarded tires and rammed earth, helping with farming, learning with folks in Big Horn County.

Like the mother hen, our motivation is preservation and life for our family, the human family. We want our farming practices to look forward to the best ways of not just feeding human beings for survival, but living productive lives in respectful coexistence with others of our kind, with the land and with all creatures great and small. Our tasks are small and not a significant challenge to our economic culture of greed. But new economic research supports our efforts. Together we can chart a better way toward a stronger and more sustainable future for our nation and humankind.

Use this link for the video "what motivates us" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc&playnext_from=TL&videos=qOyhHX6kxN4

A scholarly review of research on a similar vein:

Vailancourt Rosenau, Pauline (2006) "Is Economic Theory Wrong About Human Nature?," Journal of Economic and Social Policy: Vol.10: Iss. 2, Article 4.

Available at: http://epubs.scu.edu.au/jesp/vol10/iss2/4

This website is good on down-to-earth research-based information debunking popular politically correct ideas, this one on the myth that greed is good:

http://makethemaccountable.com/myth/GreedIsGood.htm

Here's some writing from the above website:

The two books by Adam Smith upon which our modern cultural value of greed is supposedly based:

Adam Smith: The Wealth of Nations, 1776

Smith, Ibid: Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1790

A scholarly book on the subject, in reality it demonstrates that Adam Smith was not definitive regarding his analysis of self interest in economics as a contributor to democracy:

Kenneth Lux, Adam Smith's Mistake: How a Moral Philosopher Invented Economics and Ended Morality (Boston: Shambhala Publications, Inc., 1990)

Scientific studies are proving that cooperation is a built-in human trait

Brain scans show why we love cooperating MakeThemAccountable.com

Last Updated: 2002-07-17 13:09:43 -0400 (Reuters Health)

By Alison McCook

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - New research reveals why people often cooperate with each other, even when it is not necessarily to their advantage to do so.

A group of researchers based at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, found that when a woman is involved in a situation where she is cooperating with someone else, she experiences activation in brain areas that are also activated by "rewards" such as food, money and drugs.

This indicates that our bodies may have been somehow programmed to "tag cooperation as rewarding," study author Dr. Gregory S. Berns told Reuters Health.

"Which is good, because it probably keeps the social fabric of society together," he added…

[The truth is, when you get past all the hate rhetoric, that millions of years of evolution have made us social beings. We lived in tribes for millions of years, and I assure you that members of a tribe didn't have a greed-is-good mentality. I'm no expert, but what I've read suggests that in a tribal environment generosity was admired and rewarded. And one didn't become a chief simply by being the strongest. An aspirant for chiefdom had to build coalitions of supporters, had to be willing to listen to the wisdom of the elders, and was most likely to become and remain chief if he was known as a brave hunter and warrior, but also as a generous person.]

--
David Graber
Hardin, MT 59034
www.greenwoodfarmmt.org