Nas2EndWork "Pamela's Blogs":
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Blog 1: "You Know How I Know You're a Slave?"
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Blog 2: "Where the Hell is Vasquez When We Really Need Her?"
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Blog 3: "How Do I Con Thee? Let Me Count the Ways...Or: What Is 'Individual Freedom'?"
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Blog 4: "Is It Never Too Late to Be the Parent I Should Have Been?"
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Blog 5: "Are We Innocent When We Dream?"
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Blog 6: "To Enlarge the Realm of the Possible"
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Blog 7: "Bury the Corpse!"
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Blog 8: "Just Say NO! Make Coke the First Corpse to Go!"
Blog 9: "Compassion Always Comes Too Late"
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Blog 10: "To Live and Die a Slave?"
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Blog 11: "Crime Is The Flip Side"
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Blog 12: "Rocket Science Ain't Rocket Science"
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Blog 13: "The Fuck-It Factor"
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Blog 14: "How Do You Organize (Our World) Without Hierarchy?"
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Blog 15: "Eating What The Earth Gives Me"
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Blog 16: "When You Become A Voice Of The Voiceless"
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Blog 17: "You Got To Sucker The Corn Or the Ears Won't Be Worth Nothin'"
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Blog 18: "Packaging Our Children For The Podrunks"
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Blog 19: "The Good Livers"
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Blog 20: "Is There Such A Thing As "Voicelessness"?"
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Blog 21: "Brandon Terrell Jones"
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Blog 22: "Our Real Work"
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Blog 23: "Gennenice Chapman Johnson"
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Blog 24: "What Is Your 'Theory of Change'?"
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Blog 25: "The Plum Tree"
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Blog 26: "Wholism Is A Health Issue"
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Blog 27: "Who's Loving You Michael?"
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Blog 28: "Getting Busy"
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Blog 29: "Depopulation"
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Blog 30: "Growing A Mass Movement"
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Blog 31: "Ridley's Choice"
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Blog 32: "Children Of The Technology"
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Blog 33: "The Devastated Earthscapes From Lawrence Summers' "Logic""
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Blog 34: "How Do We Grow A Mass Movement?"
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Blog 35: "We Have To Make A Loud Noise"
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Blog 36: "The Phoenix"
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Blog 37: "Wind-Blown Seeds Need Roots"
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Blog 38: "Embracing The Plural"
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Blog 39: "Round And Round And Round We Go But Not Merrily"
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Blog 40: "Unplugging"
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Blog 41: "Thank You Sandy From Petaluma"
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Blog 42: "You Got City Hands Mr. Hooper"
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Blog 43: "Letter to Michael Reynolds"
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Blog 44: "The Last Civil Rights Movement"
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Blog 45: "The 4 R's: The Ruses Used To Rend Us...Race, Religion, Reason, and Recognition - 1"
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Blog 46: "The 4 Ruses - 2"
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Blog 47: "The 4 Ruses - 3"
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Blog 48: "The Responsibility Of The Intellectual"
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Blog 49: "The Hidden Malevolence: AKA Michael Moore's Dilemma"
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Blog 50: "Wading Into The Muck Of State"
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Blog 51: "Seeing The Communal Alternative"
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Blog 52: "Becoming The Function"
Pamela's Blog 18
Published on Friday, June 5, 2009 by Nas2EndWork.org
“Packaging Our Children For The Podrunks”
See "...If we want our children's minds to have patience for complexity...".
by Pamela Satterwhite
We have to be made a commodity before anything else can, and we have to be freed before the earth can. (Continued at: "Seeing The Communal Alternative".)
The aim of the new college, the cheap college, should be not to segregate and specialize, but to combine. It should explore the ways in which mind and body can be made to cooperate; discover what new combinations make good wholes in human life. The teachers should be drawn from the good livers as well as from the good thinkers.…competition would be abolished… (Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas)
School in the U.S. teaches us...
...to fear our brothers and sisters...
...that the idea of "good fellowship" is but a myth...
...and that the only 'good' is...
..."to win"....
(From "The Last Civil Rights Movement".)
That this is a lie must be exposed...
...by any and all who are ready to go...
...forward to "what comes next"...
...which is also going back...
Ultimately, we will have to withdraw our children from this system…
…if we want them to be whole.
That’s a big question all by itself: do we want them to be whole?
Once I had an intense conversation on a subway train with a man I didn’t know. We were both returning home from a conference on “youth violence.” At every conference or meeting I’ve ever attended on this subject the dinosaur in the living room was corporal punishment, a.k.a. “spanking.”
He was a brother, and within black communities the Bible is thumped raw, more often than not, when this issue comes up, so he was on comfortable ground in defending the rod. (Imagine, putting some “idea” above our children’s souls, like a sword of Damocles.)
He said: “if we want our children to be safe out there in the world we have to teach them how to survive.”
When I repeated this remark to my then-seven-year old son, his immediate reaction was: “if he wants children to be safe then he shouldn’t hit them.”
Well, if we want our children to be whole, we shouldn’t divide them.
But as parents, we want to divide them…from their natural inclinations…their longing and judgment…from their ability to define themselves…and from their brothers and sisters.
Instead of telling them that we are all one, and proceeding from that premise, we tell them that they must distinguish themselves from other children – stand out…above…superior. And then we start pushing them…to be so.
In a community paper where I live, the most recent issue boasts this headline: “School Board Approves New Middle School Grading System.” The “new system” is to rank the children twice, instead of just once, having one rank for “work habits” and another for “performance,” and using numbers (1 to 4) instead of letters. It claims the parents (75% at one school) are supportive because they can see that their children are “slacking.”
Ranking is a form of abuse.
It is.
None of us like it when it’s done to us, but we are more than willing to do this to our own children…“For Their Own Good,” as Alice Miller wrote.
If our children are bored, unhappy, restless, angry…at school, the problem is the system... [included in which is "the state" we channel – see "Muck Of State"] ...we subject them to, not them.
I repeat: do we want them to be whole? To be the fullest, happiest, most powerful humans they can be?
Do we want this for ourselves?
Do we?
And why on earth would we willingly, cheerfully, enthusiastically, identify for this system the “slackers,” the ones with the “bad attitude”?
The obsession this system has for data collection is not arbitrary, not some amusing bureaucratic tic.
That Grandfather Clock is set ahead for a reason.
We have to start putting our children above this system.
If we love them.
If we want them to be whole.
If we want them to have a healthy planet to live on.
It’s all of a piece. Pull one thread and you’ll see.
It’s time to dismantle the loom.
* ...and return to our original wholeness.
04.08.10 – 04.13.10 Addendum:
In "The Fuck-It Factor" I suggest that we all consider the possibility of refusing. In the blog above I ask parents (and the children who love them) to refuse to participate in the plans 'power' has for them....
This is essential in a macro sense of getting us to our future freedom without bosses, but it's also life-saving in a micro sense...on the scale of an individual boy or girl...which, if you are the parent of that boy or girl...is pretty macro too.
As mentioned in "Muck Of State", the ancestors seem to be talking to me through "the gifts of happenstance from the 25-cent book-rack." And though this Addendum is an opportunity to thank someone more specifically than simply adding him to a list...I also see it as his gift....
It's our individual responsibility...
...to listen to what all Life needs....
...(in proportion to the sensitivity...of our hearing).
And to the extent that you do...
...you'll contain multitudes.
...But expect the penalties to be profuse...
... when you choose...
...those special glasses...
... that give you access...
...to your wholeness –
–...a.k.a., "the masses".
(From "The Last Civil Rights Movement".)
But what when wholeness is embraced...
...before you know what you're up against?
...(and even when you do...
...but good fellowship has eluded you?)
There are some...
– and this is every one of us –
...with exceptionally sensitive hearing...
– and sensitive sight –
...who see nuances of light...
...and shadow...
...and meaning...
...from birth...
...unaided even...
...by years or lenses...
...because they were given...
...an unquestioned connection...
...to earth....
...Too young to choose,...
...beleaguered and "done-to"...
...by a "system" that restricts...
...earth-given gifts...
...made to feel crazy because others don't see...
...what seems obvious to you...
...i.e., that we are everything...
...literally....
And as you're a child...
...you must add to that...
...burden of aloneness...
...the unspoken request...
...to make up for others'...
...lost wholeness...
In Waking Up I argue that a world that broadscale suppresses dreams...
...too often means...
...adults want children to find...
...and realize...
...what's vanished...
...and to be our captive audience...
...just as we are forced to bear witness to...
...the stunted souls of those whose web we're stuck in...
And as we watch our dreams dissolve like sugar in dirty dishwater, we can’t help but turn, holding all our unwanted, unutilized power in our hands, to our children’s crystalline goodness, and seek to commandeer, with all the best intentions in the world, the possibilities of our children’s lives – to direct them, to ‘our’ purposes.
We project on them, without saying a word, our wishes for our unrealized lives, apply to their goodness, without saying a word – fettering them with the request that they try, with the traditional courage of children, to comply.
We are wired for allegiance, for loyalty, for becoming superheroes in the service of our parents’ silences. We gravitate to the real sticklers: how to make them happy, smile, be whole again? This is also nature in us, we are made to be loyal to our parents, to attend to their unspoken dreams, longings and desires, the ones that ache to exist precisely because they have been so ruthlessly repressed – the deeply felt ones too precious to voice.
(From Waking Up, "Solidarity Is All")
Our power suppressed is a force quite frightening...
...turned on children...
...whereupon...
...their natural, intuitive self-determinativeness...
...is summarily dismissed...
...denied...
...trivialized.
But just as soldiers traumatized by war...
...diagnosed with PTSD...and more...
...are told by their bosses...before they break...
..."suck it up!"..."just take it!"...
...take the bomb blasts...
...take the death...
...take the silence when you bear witness...
...take the images you can never forget,...
– too often out of our own distress...
...we make of our children a similar target...
...when we're unwilling to see...
...that what "the system" calls "ordinary..."
"...life in class society..."
...to those of sensitive sight and hearing...
...is the grossest insanity....
And so too often they choose to leave...
...when they are the ones we most desperately need....
(The fantasy of "being free"...
...is so haunting...
..."freedom's" become but a taunt...
..."reality" sneers at us when we strive...
– our life-long –
...to pull it near.)
...So parents I'm here to remind you...
...that your child is John Kennedy Toole...
...And that what she or he needs......
...is a space wide enough to breathe in...
...hearts deep enough to feel with...
...vision long enough to see...
...what all Life needs...
...and the "reality"...
...that we are all family....
...and, as John Trudell says, it's time to evolve....
© Nas2EndWork (the NEW)