Wall Street and Other Protests

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Are the people of the Occupy Movements Americans? Are they people from our communities? I ask because I am curious what you think. Are these people our brothers, sisters, children, friends? Are they Americans. Are they our neighbors, or did they drop in from another country? Can you or I become one them? What if our circumstances become a little different than they are right now? How many paychecks away are most of us from losing everything important to us.

In the sixties when the Vietnam anti-war movement started, people protesting the war were looked upon as anything but Americans expressing their frustrations, angers, and fears. They were labeled as troublemakers, insurgents, foreign nationals, criminal elements whose purpose was to cause rife among the good people of America, and possibly attempt to overthrow the government.

When riots swept through the slums of Detroit, a group of people wanted the same basic rights as other people, they were labeled the same way. They were trouble makers, they were trying to go against the system, they did not understand that was just the way things were.

The picture being painted of the Occupy people is anything but good wholesome American people going after their share of the American Dream. They are portrayed as overly liberal, out of touch with reality, lazy, and trouble makers. Some critics have even gone so far as to say these people want to destroy the American way of life – whatever that may be anymore.  Is this the real picture of what they are, or is it the most convenient way to mold apparent public sentiment.

I would not want to be a recent college graduate today. College is becoming something for the wealthy, no longer meant for the poor student with only drive and determination to learn and no money. Who can afford college when they are taking loans for thousands of dollars a year, only to receive job offers after graduation for a salary that will take twenty years to pay off their loans.

I would not want to not be a college graduate either. Forced into working two or more jobs, not having a day off, or any chance of taking time off work for a vacation. Do you think the people who serve you every day are making enough they can live on from their one job? Ask them if they make a living from their job and they are living a life with a future.

If you are old enough, or if not ask your parents, about the fifties and sixties economy. People were paid enough that it was possible to have a successful future with only one person working in the family. Almost any job paid enough for a family not only to survive, but to thrive.

Over the decades pay has been whittled away to the point where it is normal for both parents in a family to work, and still not have a large enough income to live without outside help. Many families have been forced to depend on their schools feeding their children breakfast. The state is helping them with their rent money, food money, and other needs that one paycheck used to cover.

Maybe it is the Greed of Capitalism, the ignorance of the average wage earner, or the banking industry marketing credit as if money grew on trees. Whatever the reason we have become a people living paycheck to paycheck. If many of us were to lose our jobs, we are most likely to end up on the street, or living in a homeless shelter. That is our ugly reality if we dare look at it.

Maybe some of the Occupy Protest Movements are whining, sniveling, lazy, homeless, and crazy. Perhaps some of them protest for a living. So what? Perhaps some of these people see the reality of their future, and the future of others behind them, and the fiscal reality being lived by those ahead of them.

Real change does not happen when times are good. When times are good everyone is happy. Every policy is a good policy because we are all eating steak for dinner. When times are not so good and we do not even have meat on our dinner plate, we start wondering what happened. When life becomes painful, a few people start thinking about changing the system.

Maybe the Occupy groups do not know what to do. Maybe they are unorganized, maybe they have nothing better to do because they are unemployed and can not find work. Maybe they have a valid point. Maybe they are living what will become our way of life if we continue to ignore what we have done and continue to do in our society?

Maybe it is time we start to think about how we can change how we do things to make life better for everyone. In this decade and for foreseeable decades Americans have to compete in a world market.

Americans need to create a lifestyle where almost every job has a wage attached where people can afford to live on only one job. America has to start balancing the cost of education against the average wage. America needs to get housing costs  inline with today’s wages instead of selling the ideas of future earnings which have turned into vapor.

We have to accept the party for the near future at least is over, and we have to learn how to thrive and survive in a world that is not the world of forty, thirty, or even twenty years ago. Our throw away economy needs revamping. We need to start creating social change where we live out of our heart and not in our greed. We are all one people on one earth whether we live in America, Japan, China, or Greece.

Contact your Mayor and Councilman and let them know what you think about the protests of the Occupy Movement. Call them or send them an email. If you do not support, let your local government know these protestors should be disbanded and arrested. If you support them, let your Mayor know that you don’t mind they are camping in the park as protest.

Making healthy change is not fun. Healthy change is not easy. We must come to terms with what we are doing to each other, our future, and the future of our children. We need to grow our Ecoheart and create change to do what is right for most of us, and not what is great for a few of us.

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Crying EcoHeart

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We are too selfish when it comes to the environment, people living in poor countries, our children, and future generations yet to be born. We want ours now. Those after us and those who are not us, well too bad about them. They are just going to have to get along with whatever they have, or more is the case do not have. It is estimated almost a billion, one billion is 1,000,000,000 people are suffering from malnutrition. Your neighborhood is not exempt from malnutrition due to the Standard American Diet, and production over nutrition.

We drive over-sized, overpowered vehicles because we want to, and it is a problem. We live in house larger than most two or three family homes in developing countries. We waste water, fuel, and food. We spend tens of minutes idling our over-sized vehicles in lines for food that is unhealthy. We do this because we are too busy or lazy to either get down, or make a sandwich or other meal at home.

Our weekly trash collection contains vast amounts of food that has either spoiled, or we do not want to eat. The rest of our trash is partially composed of packaging discarded from things we bought that we think we need. The rest is a mix of real trash and items that are still usable but we are too selfish to give them away, so we send them to the dump.

Our streams now contain hormones and chemicals like birth control pills, caffeine, anti depressants, and other medications our body can not use or we flush down the toilet. This added waste is on top of the millions of pounds of insecticide and fertilizer we dump on our lawns each year that washes away unused in the next rain.

Our lawns where our children play are hazardous waste sites. Herbicides and insecticides often are applied with the thinking that if the correct amount is good, more must be better. Over years, many lawns are approaching higher levels of contamination than identified  EPA Superfund sites.

Our interest in our children’s way of living and their children’s lives take second place to keeping ourselves comfortable. We pretend when gasoline out prices our budget, some other fuel will magically appear. Think about that. Why should an alternative fuel appear? Where is the incentive to produce alternative fuels? We drive around in huge vehicles, vehicles that can carry eight or nine adults for an average family of less than four.

We can continue to keep our head in the sand, pretending we do not see what is happening outside of our air conditioned and heated living spaces. We can play chicken little and generate media like these articles to produce fear, and cry the sky is falling. Or we can develop an EcoHeart and start living in the manner we are meant to live, being stewards of our living space, our country, and our world.

The stripping of timber in Europe led in part to the discovery of the Americas. One-half millennium later we have cleared so much timber for energy and building we are now becoming worried about developing countries wanting to do what we did. Of course these problems are happening somewhere else. We have our own sets of problems in our own back yard. What are you going to start doing? Will it be enough, and will it be enough in time?

 

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Listen to EcoHeart Calling

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Our time of using Earth resources without thinking and without consequence is over. The only effective way to bring everyone together in aware and responsible Earth stewardship is to change how we think about each other, our responsibility to each other, and our responsibility to Earth herself.

Many of us think of Earth and all that lives on Earth as being something out there, extrinsic to us. We feel we live in here. In here is that undefined place that is not out there. This disconnect from the Earth has brought us to where we now are. I do not need to provide examples of what is wrong with our world. We each have our individual ideas of what needs fixing and what does not. We are well aware of what is not working for us.

What we do not share with each other is being part of the Earth instead of living in isolation. Until enough people feel they are an integral part of the earth instead of living separately from Earth, our Earth will continue to change away from conditions we need to survive and thrive.

One way or another Earth will continue on. The existence and quality of life of yet unborn generations of Human Beings depend on what we do. If we continue to live in our isolated world of one, it is probable we will cease to exist as a life form on Earth.

If we choose to adopt a better way to view our Earth. A way of living in which we are part of the Earth and not living in individual bubbles, we can start to undo our damage to our Earth. We will feel the urge to make a difference. We will start the cycle of changing the world back into a place we can all live in and enjoy.

It is not comforting for many of us to think we and the Earth are a package deal. We would like to think if we cease to exist all life and the Earth will cease to exist. Discoveries of life thriving where we could not possibly survive, and what we know of extinct species which did not survive when their world changed prove this is not true.

We are not a package deal with the Earth. We are one species among thousands and thousands of life forms on Earth. We can kill our selves off and become extinct. The Earth will continue without us.

It is time to pull ourselves out of the bubble separating ‘Me’ from Earth and all life. It is time live in a more responsible way. It is time to set our sense of ‘Me’ aside and do what needs to be done for the good of all, not for the good of a few. How do we do that?

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Why You Should Evolve an EcoHeart

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Almost fifty years and many bumps in the road later, my understanding and beliefs about how we manage our world have changed dramatically. Teachers and other Adults from my childhood were not exaggerating or making up stories about what was happening half a century ago. While the world is not going to end, our place in the world may end along with most of the other mammals on earth.

Sharing my thoughts on why it is time for each of us to begin to bring about internal and external change is no fun either, it is serious stuff. Like you, I want to believe we will go on living forever. I want to believe all our human caused problems will work themselves out and we will learn how to respect the Earth and Each Other, and all will be okay.

I want to be a young child again; not to see how the Earth is reacting from the way we choose to use her. I do not want to be realistic and mature enough to admit we need to be responsible e if there is to be reasonable future for our future generations. Generations of people so distant we can not yet imagine. I want our future descendants generations out to live and enjoy their life.

I want the Human Race to continue. I know their future or lack of a future belongs to us. This unformed idea that we will load up into spaceships and leave earth for a new destination is a fairy tale. There is nowhere to go we can reach with even our best technology where we can live comfortably. Neither will ‘We’ load up into a space ship and blast off. Of the billions of people on earth, only a very few will have that future if it ever arrives. You and I won’t be one of the passengers. For us, we will  have to contend with what we have done to ourselves when the time comes.

It has been many years since I thought we could assume Earth will save herself from our abuse. The billions of us alive are changing the earth as we know it. Body heat alone given off by billions of pounds of us humans alone at 98.6 f degrees makes a difference to the earths temperature balance.

Our over use of chemicals, heat generated by motors, and most energy forms also contributes. We currently are more than a match for any cataclysmic. Maybe we are changing the earth a little slower than extreme recorded major volcanic eruptions of the past or meteors slamming into the earth, but was are changing our Earth daily, and it is not in a way we would prefer to change her if we were paying attention.

Before you are turned off by the thought of more blah, blah, I suggest our world as we know it is not working the way you think it is. Think about any global issues that do concern you. You are not alone with your list of concerns. The problem is there are not enough people like you who care about what you care about to make a difference.

Your individual concerns only occasionally overlap concerns and fears about our future on Earth which is shared by others. Disparate groups of people they all have different concerns. Others still like things just the way they are. Their only vision is their life, and the rest is someone else’s problem.

The only real commonalty is no matter which side of the fence we sit on, we all have concerns. This is why these type of posts and promoting change are so important. If we do not change our thinking and our way of living in isolation from the Earth, our Earth will continue to erode, becoming worse each year.

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EcoHeart for Life

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I have a few posts about living through the Heart and not the Ego. Unfortunately this is not one of my favorite subjects because it is vague and opaque, and of interest to only a few people. Many people are naturally turned off by alternative ideas about a different and possibly better way of living that does not follow how they live now. It goes against their lifetime of experience. It goes against the grain of their lifetime.

However I will eventually go down that avenue. We need to raise our awareness and responsibilities to each other and the soil we live on. Living through your heart keeps life choices simple. Choices made when living through your heart are arrived at with respect and responsibility. Decisions made through the Heart are made for all living things on this earth and the Earth itself.

Many people find new ideas or ways of thinking silly, non existent, something only for crackpots, or evil. I was one of those people. I spent over half my life thinking these types of people were dropped on their heads at birth or had some other problem that made them abnormal. I too thought their ideas were between over reacting to silly and did not apply to my life. What is wrong with these people anyway!

There was nothing wrong with the way everyone lived when I was a young boy. The Earth was ours to do with what we wanted, and the Earth would be okay. Sunday School Teachers and my regular School Teachers told me this was so. Dangerous chemicals being sprayed with abandon would break down quickly into harmless states. Garbage and other waste would decompose back into rich earth. Air was cleaned and refreshed and made wholesome by thunder and lightning storms.

My Teacher told us about something called Acid Rain. A few years after that I was told about DDT. It was okay because it was happening somewhere else, not where I lived. They fogged streets in the area and the kids would play in the fog. It was harmless fun, and no parent thought it was really harmful. After all it was a mosquito killer called DDT. What could be wrong with an insecticide that killed mosquitoes?

No matter where we live, we all live on one marble we call EarthTeachers told us we should not drink water from the lakes we swam in and local creeks we played in. That water in these places was now a sewage path full of poop and pee, and other household wastes from houses built next to the lakes, creeks and wetlands. We were told the foam in the water was not “Sea Foam” as we kids believed, but detergent from cleaners and laundry products.

Teachers said water in the creeks and streams where I lived in Minnesota were not the clean or healthy water it looked like to us. None of us kids believed that line either. We thought or decided Teachers were exaggerating, making it worse than it really was. We kids were sure Teacher’s did not want us to have any fun. Teacher’s thought it was dangerous swimming in lakes without lifeguards and this was their way of keeping us safe.

Where I lived in rural Minnesota everything was peachy keen. Those problems happened somewhere else. “Sea Foam” had been present in the water since I could remember (all of five to ten years of memories), and I was told it was Sea Foam by Adults, so that must be what it was. I never saw anyone use the bathroom in the water either from those houses.

A year later our Teachers started telling us not to eat snow any more. Because of Nuclear Weapons testing, and Air Pollution, whatever that was, snow and rain was no longer safe for us kids to eat. We did not believe that story either. When I was a kid eating snow was a rite of being outside in the winter, as was catching rain in our mouth in the summer

I believed my teachers were telling tall tales until I stepped on a large turd in waist deep water while swimming at the lake one sunny July day. Scraping someone’s crap off my foot, I realized the lake really was nothing more than a huge septic tank. My Teachers were right. I no longer wanted to eat fish from that lake or most other lakes and streams with houses around them.

Most adults who thought we could live that way forever were very wrong. Those few Teachers and other people like them had the ability to see beyond their lifetime what the world would be like if we did not change how we lived. They were dreamers with vision. These few people correctly imagined our future if we did not change how we were living.

 


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Poor Play Or Winning Poker?

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I have been working on a longer post, but wanted to post something worth your time. If you are a poker player who is losing badly, losing slowly, or simply frustrated by the game, this post for you. If you are not a poker player, use the ideas below and apply them to your life. In some areas of everyone’s life there is always room for improvement. Life and Poker need certain skills for success and generally they overlap.

Poker is very good once again in spite of what Card Rooms have done to tip the chips in their favor. All of the games I have access to are nine seat games. Nine seat games make it very difficult to impossible to play a sold game of poker and win over time. Internet poker generally being cut off from many poker players more than offsets nine player games as online players make the transition to live poker.

Overcoming the rake and the antes with only nine players means most average players are at a tremendous disadvantage. Playing solid poker at a loose table is losing poker over time, always has been. If you are willing to step out of your comfort zone, and come to terms with the new rules of poker, you can play a fun game and maybe even show an overall profit.

Some of the old rules still apply. If you are losing, throwing more money on the table is not going to make up for your earlier losses in most instances. Once a few hours of steady losses have gone by, if you can turn your game around and start winning, it is more likely the game will close on you than it is you will make up your losses. This is especially true if you play in the evening.

In the evenings, most players have a time in mind they want to leave at. For many it is between eight and ten o’clock. If you sat down at seven, and have been losing for a few hours, one of two things are going to happen if you choose to keep playing.

The game will tighten up, or the game will end up folding. The reason the game tightens up, is those words no one wants to hear coming out of the brushes mouth, “No list”. Those two words can tighten up a good game quicker than a maniac on a winning streak. The second reason is the time of night. The later it gets, the higher number of good players are sitting in the game with you.

Most poorer players have had their kitchen passes expire or they went broke (lost their daily limit) for the night. These poorer players, if the game keeps on going are placed by better players, who generally are not so willing to throw away chips on poor plays.

No matter what the reason, as the night goes on, the rake grinds down stacks quickly without the looser more generous players who think if they play right and tight they are going to win. So what to do in this situation? Look at your game.

How many times have you come back from behind later in the evening? How many times have you doubled or tripled your losses? You do not even need to open your book to know what the answer is. For most players a losing session is a losing session. Stopping when it is evident it is not your night, is the right thing to do.

To help you keep you out of this situation you need to be realistic about the game. Poker in most card rooms is no longer a game of solid play takes home the money. Solid play helps you survive longer, but eventually the rake wears down your castle walls to rubble.

I tried to explain this to a Hold’em Player who was both confused and curious. He was a good player, playing good cards. He started with 30 BB’s and his castle was crumbling as his frustration grew. I was stacking chips from from a win many players would not have seen the flop with. I am more realistic however. I know that hand values are no longer what they once were, and controlled loose play brings home the chips most nights.

The player of course was feeling the effects of bile rising disgust at my choice of starting cards. Good players do not play these cards. Good players wait for good starting hands and pump the pot. A few years back that was true. Today, good players take home some extra money, and the solid players go home broke and angry at how people play sh!t cards, have fun and win too.

Playing bad cards comes with experience. There is a wide swath between playing like a maniac keeping a balance of solid play and poor play. Unfortunately to be a winning player, like it or not, you are going to have to gamble occasionally.

What you think are semi junk cards when played appropriately does a lot of good things to your game. It is fun, it keeps the table guessing what you are playing, and most importantly you win bigger pots. If you are trying to play well and it is not working so well for you, work out a system for yourself where you can play any two cards once in a while and not hurt your game.

Substituting hands preflop means foregoing a better hand you may want to play to play for a hand no one will expect you to play in another round. This does take thinking and awareness of what the players at your table are playing and how strong the winning hands are. You must be in a loose game, not in a tough game ,or a game where three people are seeing every flop.

Clinging to the belief that good hands make winning poker is great. Playing strong hands wins pots. Playing only strong hands does not win large enough pots to pay for the gas to get to the card room and back home again. The choice is yours to make.

What are the goals for your playing poker? Would you rather have more fun and be able to keep playing, or play consistent good poker and eventually have to stop playing because it costs too much? Stick to losing boring poker, or give yourself a better chance of actually winning. If you still do not come closer to winning, at least you have some fun in the process. The object of Poker is to win money after all.

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