Day One or One Day?

If you have seen any of the 'this is how I work' episodes, my meager contribution today will seem paltry. Our third, yes I am counting, spectacular day in a row is literally happening as my fat and fatigued fingers hut and peck. So I am taking it outside for the first time this year. out to my million dollar deck where access is everything and ownership taxing. I am listening to the waterside sounds of gulls, geese and blackbirds all competing with outboard kickers, twin diesels and piston driven sea-planes. It is as peaceful as it is beautiful.

When we talk of the starving artist or the tortured author, this is none of that. When we hear that if you want to play the blues you've got to pay your dues, I sometimes cringe and sometimes agree. But none of those dire circumstances, the starvation, the torture or the blues, needs to be anything but a fleeting experience. IS THAT ENTITLEMENT TALKING? What if one is in a life/death battle for life in Syria or Peoria, tortured till you talk Mexico or North Korea, or having the fortune, good or bad, or coming into this mess in, say Mississippi, Somalia or Columbia?

Do the best you can, where you are with what you got. This applies to soldiers as well as students, the lucky as well as the addicted and the free as well as the oppressed. In his seminal opus Mans Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl says you can take away a man's every possession, throw him in a internment camp, starve him and force him to long hours of painful labor, but you cannot take away his will, his sense of self or the identity he has with who he is.

What is our identity as individuals, and perhaps more importantly as a tribe, as Americans? Who are you? How are you part of the solution? I will assume that no one here thinks they are part of the problem, so let's move closer to the central idea of our time together today.

I will speak first and suggest that the state of America today can be found somewhere between greed and glamour. Between power and prestige. Smack dab equidistant from morality, integrity, honesty and compassion, and their counterparts, corruption, fraud, dishonesty and arrogance. We are, in a word, a mess. We are sacrificing our very home for bottom line profits. Thirty states have introduced laws that make it illegal to protest. We still cannot find the truth about gun violence due to the huge bribes buying politicians. We continue to extend and find new enemies with which to wage war and feed the always hungry military-industrial complex. Our leadership lies more often than Pinocchio and Joe Isuzu. We reverse engineer Robin Hood and rob from the poor to give to the rich. We are heartless, overbearing, compassionless and cruel. We built walls instead of building bridges. We use propaganda, media suppression and gaslighting techniques almost better that Hitler and Goebbels. https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/joseph-goebbels We segregate, racially profile and use every racist trick in the book to further widen the chasm between the colorless and those of color. We divide. We use gays, abortion, education, health care, taxation, and our very environment as if they were commodities waiting for capitalistic manipulation by banks, investors, Wall Street and brokers. In other words everything is for sale. To the highest bidder.

Sucks.

This morning in spin class I offered the temporary and local solution of us taking care of ourselves. Making sure that our community, our kids, our schools, libraries, hospitals and parks are as safe and enjoyable as we can make them. Further that we take the first step towards that panacea by honoring the power that our bodies have the potential to provide. In leadership, in honesty, in friendship, in morality and in the way we respect animals, our environment and the people who might be different than us. It starts here.

And that here means now.

This is DAY ONE, not one day.

This is how I work.