I need taro-py

i'm departing from my ongoing road tale for this post. this one really is a rant! last night there was a meeting where michael moore's video 'capitalism, a love story' was shown, with discussion to follow, on what i thought was meant to be an exercise in building the best-case scenario for a new nation. hawaii (the nation, not the state) has the opportunity to actually create something out-of-the-box and truly life-affirming and aina/kai/wai-friendly. i made the mistake of thinking that people want to go there. and in a sense, they do, but not right now. maybe later, when some of the pressures are off, or as soon as this other thing is done, or as soon as obama is able to do something useful and not corporate-driven, or as soon as... well, you get the picture. this was the hardest thing i've ever had to do, primarily i think because i made some assumptions up front (silly me) that everyone was fed up. but even though some will admit systems failure on the part of governments and corporations in terms of the rest of us, the truth is that the system hasn't failed for many others, esp. those in control of resources. so what i had hoped would have approximated poka's idea of discussion within the 'dream state', all i heard was how to fix the abysmal mess we're all in, rather than how to create something that might work better. everybody's got their two feet in two worlds. i admit i'm there, too. i have a job that i need to keep myself in a house and food on the table. the job isn't too bad. i get to do what i want, mostly. and some people are impacted positively by what i do. but the university, like all school systems inside the 'system', is failing to meet the needs of the future, of a world that hasn't yet owned up to how ongoing use of diminishing resources robs young people not even born yet of things they need to survive (read: clean air, water, healthy food, shelter, basic stuff). the university system helps us to be what the system needs us to be (read: just another brick in the wall).

back to the meeting: the film was good, interesting, and the wrong one to launch a discussion about 'what next'. might have been better to show something that impressed on people why fixing the system wouldn't work, why it would be impossible to fix a system that is not necessarily perceived as broken. because truth is, it actually does work very well. and that's why no one is excited about planning for survival 'after' system failure. it won't fail, even as the banks go bust and the unemployment rate is up to 50% and houses are empty while people live on the streets or in parks. the system is doing what it was designed to do. no systems failure unless you're on the receiving end and have nowhere to go. i feel like a crazy person thinking about all this and wondering why no one else thinks it's important enough to address now.

one other thing i learned from last night's meeting was that people inevitably go where it's comfortable to launch resistance. no one seems able to do two things at once--resist and plan. resistance always seems to take precedence, and the planning part goes down the tube. and it makes people feel like they're doing something, so they feel better. it was depressing for me to talk about the need to get the philosophical stuff down first, and build that thing we want (whatever it's called) on top of it, knowing that everybody was giving me looks like 'what?'. how come no one notices that the needs of the individual is something that underpins societies that are selfish? societies that steal, make war, cause harm to its own members? societies built on self-interest and short-sightedness? what about the needs of the group? what about respect and caring, sharing and responsibility? what about aloha and aloha aina? if we laid that down as foundation, and built on top of it, what would we get? certainly nothing like what we have now! so the rant is because we never got there. we never had the discussion. and we may never have the dicussion, especially if activist types, which most of us were, don't want to go there. there is a certain amount of comfort and status in being at the top of the activist movement inside the system that currently exists, the one i think is in system failure. we don't know how to step outside and take a good, hard look at who we are and what we are doing.

i think i should retire. this is turning out to be far more difficult than i had imagined. and it's lonely, too. and i'm too old.

Writing from memory, now

couldn't write while we were on the road, but i get to catch up now that i'm home and all the photos have been uploaded to shutterfly. here's link below to pics from our arrival in phoenix until we took off for globe: http://share.shutterfly.com/share/received/album.sfly?fid=e141a399683e2375&startIndex=0&sid=0QbtmTRu2bMmMq

we did the swapmart/flea-market trips, of course! and i ended up buying fried bread (which was ono), incense, and a couple of other small things. then we were off to globe, which was a long way off for me, but not too far for others who grew up in an area where 'far' meant really far. we passed lovely mountains, and all the tall stones looked like people to me, like they were sentinels guarding their sacred land from invaders (a bit too late, unfortunately).

also, i happened to look out the window of the hotel we stayed at in phoenix (aloft) and noticed their mass transit system. it was fabulous looking and very quiet. wish hawaii were as progressive and artsy as phoenix. even their highway walls have south-west type designs built into them; not ugly and cement-looking.

there's something about sitting in the back seat of a comfortable car while traveling 150 miles on smooth road that makes people sleepy. i include myself in that 'people' group. i kept dozing on and off, and finally woke up when we got to the first stop on the road with the turkey jerky sign. while maria and evern bought stuff, i went into the little trading post shop behind the jerky seller. tons of interesting stuff in there, but i didn't buy anything. i did look at signs, however. and took zillions of pics.

eventually we got to globe, stowed our gear at the quality inn, and ate dinner next door to the hotel. in the morning we drove over to the san carlos apache reservation to meet vern and her husband and to visit one of the families whose young daughter (12) was preparing for a 'dance', a kind of coming of age ceremony in which traditions are passed on from the older to the younger generation. they were way out on a piece of land that looked both beautiful and isolated, far from everything. the young lady dug post holes for setting up her wickiup and in the process uncovered a beautiful arrowhead (good luck!) and some other artifacts. her family had already constructed a kitchen and posts with a kind of wire fence for a wall around the compound. some of the male relatives were bringing in willow branches to weave in and out of the wires on the posts and when we left they had completed just a small portion. while we were there, a member of the tribal council came by to visit the family and to wish them good luck.

what does this have to do with anything? at 12 years old, this young girl has the benefit of being inside a system that promotes traditional practices. she'll be in a position to mentor some other young girl when she gets older. we don't have anything like it. that's very sad.

Aloha from Phoenix

i can't believe i haven't posted anything for nearly a year. my bad! but in that time, a crapload of things have happened. so i welcome myself back, as well as any readers (with nothing better to do than read this rant) interested in looking at my self-reflections. aloha from phoenix. i'm on a road trip with two other women, evern and maria, and today is the first day of what might very well be a life-changing experience, a chance for each of us to recharge our waning spiritual essence individually and as a group (read "we're all burned out from too much work and not enough ancestral and universal connection").

in the last year life has changed drastically. my husband of 18 years went on home to his kupuna, na aumakua and na akua. guess he had had enough of driving me around and being dragged along to various and sundry protests and meetings. he didn't know how to say no to me, so of oourse he became as much of a regular fixture as me at some of these rather long and boring things, so that at some point he simply refused to come in the door and hung out outside talking to old friends on the phone. anyhow, this post is as much about him as it is about me.

james died at home, sometime between breakfast and lunch. i'm reminded constantly of what a sweet thing he was. a nice guy. a loving husband. a good friend. seldom grumpy. always busy. constantly engaged in self-reflection. so this is something of a tribute to him, as much as it is a journal of reflection for me, being on a road trip, and all. in many ways i brought him with me.

sometime later, after i get home, i'll post the eulogy i wrote for him, and that i read at his celebration of life at nuuanu valley park. he passed on sept. 9, the day after fall semester began. so that sorta bombed out my semester and the truth is i'm not sure what the heck i was doing for the next few months. but friends and colleagues, ever faithful to both me and james, took over my teaching duties. to this day i have no idea what they did in my classroom. students were lovely--caring and compassionate. understanding and forgiving of my forgetting sometimes what i was doing. lucky me. and sad me.

james' celebration of life was lovely. it was a potluck in the park, complete with music and kind words, chants and other craziness. it was also a protest of sorts of all the things in the world that were screwed up. and it wss also a celebration of the life of our queen. for that i mahalo all the diehard activists who can be counted on to do their thing. on that day in the park, they did their thing and james would have been proud. and from what i heard afterward, he really was.

one of the reasons for this road trip is that i couldn't, for the life of me, stop working as long as i was home and connected to my computer. so, sans computer, i hit the road (via hawaiian airlines) with friends, thanks to my angel hanai brother, and am now writing up a journal entry after a year's absence. so with a different kind of connection, seeing as how it's not my computer and i have to schedule time on it, i write merely to log in my own experiences for future reference.

i have a new camera, but failed to bring the connector for uploading pics, so these get to be done later. at some point i'll load up the thousands of pics i'm taking and posting the link for viewing to this blog.