“The shallow consider liberty a release from all law, from every constraint. The wise see in it, on the contrary, the potent Law of Laws.” –Walt Whitman

Essential to liberty is the idea that we are all imbued with common sense, and should have the right to behave and create society as we each see fit. This would necessitate societies being very small, and furthermore constantly engaged in an organic process of change — of growing and dying — as any process in harmony with nature. The structure would serve the people; the people would not be a slave to the structure. However, in this model the individual has much more freedom, and thus, much more responsibility. In such a system, an individual must know himself, his connection to other human beings, and his connection to nature in order to best make decisions for himself and the future. There is no authority to comfort and provide answers. The answers must come from within. And from this place of knowing and connectedness, the community and nation can thrive.

When we think freely, when we look at the world honestly, when we question the answers that are given, it can certainly be terrifying. It feels as if our last grip on connection to something larger than ourselves will be sacrificed, that these beliefs will alienate us even further than we already feel. Yes, the truth can be terrifying, however, the truth can save us and nullify any oppressive system. The truth shall set you free and the truth is: power is not assumed it is given, courage is acting from the heart, and fear is just increased awareness. Everything is not lost. Our power as individuals is choice, and everyday we make choices. I am not asking for mere hope for a better tomorrow, I am asking for agency in each individual to rise to the occasion and create a better tomorrow. We can choose to find a deeper connection than we ever thought possible in coming together to create a just, sacred and sustainable universe for all beings.

“Integrity has no need of rules.” –Albert Camus

There was an era before agriculture. In this time, things were much less defined and depended on the connection between humanity and place rather than fearfully harnessing the fertility of the Earth. Hunting and gathering was how humanity sustained itself. In order for a society to be nourished by what was present on the land, it was necessary for them to be in balance with what the land provided. The rules of these societies were created by necessity not as a method to centralize power.

While I use the hunting and gathering model as an example of sustainable culture, I am not suggesting a regressive movement. In many ways, technology has benefited humanity and may, in the end, be a contributing factor to a revolution from antiquated social systems and economic megalomania. We must never fall into the trap of blaming inanimate objects for our own failings, we have created these tools; technology is a manifestation of human consciousness. We are called to recognize the effects of our actions and our intentions, to be responsible for what we do. Regardless of where the effect lies, even if it will only be felt thousands of years from now, it is still the result of our actions. Disconnection from the future of humanity is the ultimate xenophobia.  We cannot even see our own plight as an endangered species, and when we do glimpse the truth it is terrifying.  We would rather forsake our future for momentary pleasures and profit.

“This might surprise the millions of fans trying to guess who’s the genius behind the hit Web series, You Suck At Photoshop, but no, it’s not the comedian Dane Cook. It’s not Will Ferrell, either.”

Read the entire article from Time magazine, The Photoshop Guys Revealed!

These dudes suck at keeping a secret and sold out to Time magazine.  At least I don’t suck at that.  I also don’t suck at Photoshop.

“Narcissistic individuals constantly strive to meet the impossibly high standards of their false self, frequently feeling frustrated and depressed by their inability to do so, but also avoiding at all costs recognizing how empty they truly feel.”[1]

The desired unified worldview for globalization is one of consumer culture. This culture drives the economy by continuing to use up resources, demanding new technology at an ever-increasing pace. In order to instill a bottomless abyss of craving, it is necessary for individuals to feel disconnected from themselves and others. This wounding is insidious and occurs through advertising, media, and even the vapid nuclear family model. It is not accidental. A deliberate and systematic campaign is being waged even now to create unthinkingly selfish “individuals” who are desperately hungry. This is the objective of the industry we call Marketing. However, there is no way to sustain this endlessly consumptive linear model. Using without returning anything, without closing the loop, without reciprocity, ends the game with nothing left. Unfortunately, narcissists cannot see beyond their own needs. They are trapped in an infantile state of need. They are without the wisdom and maturity to know how to nurture what can sustainably feed them. It’s a trap, a spiral of self-destruction that keeps them separate and keeps them hungry. It’s imperative to wake up from this nightmare and live consciously. We must reconnect and take agency over our own lives and choices. We must be compassionate and understanding with each other, and together we can learn how to stand. This, a new more holistic perspective, is in order; one that can bring much needed healing to ourselves and the Earth.

“For complex reasons, our culture allows ‘economy’ to mean only ‘money economy.’ It equates success and even goodness with monetary profit because it lacks any other standard of measurement.” –Wendell Berry

The only benefit of monoculture is to allow a farmer to more easily make greater sums of money. The species of plant used is inevitably worse off for it, as it is more vulnerable to disease due to its lack of genetic variety. Of the literally thousands of potato varieties that exist, no more than twenty make up three-quarters of the total potato harvest in the United States. Monoculture makes all the steps from sowing to harvesting to selling a crop more palatable to an individual or group’s revenue. Therefore, a monoculture is a method of harnessing the Earth’s resources for financial gain, regardless of the side effects to life itself.

So what is globalization then, if it is that? It may be used as a way to reduce variety to more simply market and milk a populace for their resources, regardless of ill effects on those being used or the users themselves. This cynical view should not be seen as attempting to exclude possible good effects. However, one must also take into account the fact that international corporations have jumped on the bandwagon of this globalization movement. At the risk of sounding paranoid, why would so many corporations want to be a part of something that wasn’t going to be a boon for them? And as we’ve seen time and again, big business corporations are Machiavellian entities with very little accountability.

In the corporate world, you will hear individuals extol their belief that capitalism means maximizing their profits by any means, in order to “best serve their stockholders.” This results in corporations having an ethical blank check, as profit is the only guiding principle. Western civilization has become a materialistic society with very little reverence for life, even the lives of our own kind. The culture of separation has made it exceedingly difficult for us to care for anyone or anything “different” from us. Now corporate economist culture is making a power play to encompass the whole world with unsustainable consumerism driven by a natural human desire to feel safe and connected to others. However, despite the rhetoric, there is far less room for diversity of thought in the globalization monoculture than in the previous eras of “fragmentation.” It is much easier to market to people who share the same worldview.

“Advocates like to describe economic globalization as a long-term, inevitable process, the result of economic and technological forces that have simply evolved over centuries to their present form.”[1]

Accepting that national borders are merely a quaint reminder of an order long passed, what are the factors shaping the world we see today and imagine tomorrow? Who are the players on the battlefield? The new world order is, as we have established, based on economy. If economy is the basis of social systems, then obviously control of the economy is power. If the goal is to possess as much power as possible, than it follows that a global economy is the highest ideal. This is a concept central to what we know of as globalization.

Globalization is many things; first, given the current state of technology, distance and traditional borders are irrelevant. Using direct and instantaneous communication, information from any point on the globe is knowable by anyone else, anywhere else. Direct communication is in itself neutral. However, how one uses a tool is not neutral. No matter how you spin it, globalization is the movement towards a global economy. For many, globalization has led to the fostering of a sort of international culture, especially between those who use the Internet as a medium. Those who would attempt to shape the definition of globalization as noble goal might call it a “neoculture,” a way to transcend petty differences of the past. I, however, would term it a “monoculture,” with all the connotations that plague the word in its agricultural usage.

“The most powerful positions are those which control some crucial area of uncertainty.”[1]

One of the most disturbing ways to achieve control is to randomly award and punish. In this way, the individual being controlled is constantly perplexed as to whether he is doing well or badly. He continues to strive for the occasional windfall and condemns himself when his “luck” fails him. Since the financial roller coaster is a shared experience, there is a common bonding with others “in the same boat” and a sort of Stockholm Syndrome persists. Perhaps it is not the game, but our willingness to play it, to believe in it, to ascribe our hopes and dreams, our progeny and our legacy to it, that makes it so sickening. How many generations of sons and daughters have become lawyers, doctors, politicians, stockbrokers, in the hopes that they, too, could play the game? The game is rigged, or rather, we are not the ones playing it, we are the pieces; we are pawns moving ahead, moving back, being sacrificed. We are being played, and on some level, we know it.

Anicent Ways for Modern Times: a journey to STONGEHENGE/GLASTONBURY and the Micheal and Mary ley lines

With a little detective work, one could find that the “Inch Worm” was first seen in the early 1970s. McCabe was hired as a model maker apprentice in 1973 by simply presenting his portfolio at an interview. At this time he could not afford full-time college; however, his night classes at Rhode Island School of Design and lessons in sculpture and mold making with Doug Corsini proved his expertise with plaster casting. Such knowledge made for an easy transition to the rubber molds this industry uses.

During his time as a Hasbro employee, McCabe constructed the “Weeble People” airplane. This blue and white propeller plane comfortable seated five of the wobble egg-like creatures and their designer luggage constructed by McCabe. The Weebles’ checkered airport roof, radar antenna and personal plane were also his constructions. Though the Weebles don’t have parachutes, luckily, “Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down.”

Perhaps McCabe’s greatest achievement with Hasbro was the GI Joe Adventure Team Training Center. This 3-foot-tall tower was designed to be a challenge for the then-11-1/2-inch tall GI Joe. McCabe alone molded, glued, painted and built two of these tall metal-like towers from blueprints and personally delivered one to the toy show in New York City. Because of McCabe’s previous experience in truck driving, he was asked to deliver Hasbro’s 1973 toy show models.

McCabe found work with the brand-new National Railroad Passenger Service, more commonly known as Amtrak, in 1974. He began as a clerk in New London, where he made playful caricatures of his co-workers. It wasn’t until McCabe was relocated to the beautiful Victorian, yet neglected, Kingston Train Station that again his artwork appeared commercially.

Pen-and-ink drawings by McCabe of the inside and outside of the then-100-year-old building and its younger partner, the tower, appeared on postcards and full size paper. Printed on cream-colored paper with a linen texture, these illustrations have proved popular for more than 20 years and are still available by McCabe on request.

In 1986, McCabe enrolled in the University of Rhode Island to get his bachelor of fine arts degree. This chance to be creative and learn more about other art forms excited him, and he took every opportunity offered to him. He accidentally stumbled upon computer art, a fresh but misunderstood medium. He “still doesn’t know where computer art stands in the fine arts world,” McCabe was also able to explore his love of film. In many films, he made use of his Bell & Howell 16mm camera found at a yard sale during his high school years. His experimental films, “Dance,” “Imaginary Prisons,” “Gotta Catch that Train,” and “Farewell to a Good Friend” featuring his daughter, Elizabeth, were shown on a public access cable television show moderated by Judi Scott in 1988.

McCabe’s artistic endeavors with his daughter grew to include her friends. He realized there was a definite “void at the time of art classes for children in South Kingstown.” Thusly, he created “Learning to See,” an experimental children’s art class which was offered through the newly created South County Center for the Arts in West Kingston.

“Learning to See” was so popular that it evolved into three levels. The third level involved painting canvases. Graduates of all three levels were very enthusiastic and wanted another class. An old Dodge van was lent to McCabe, and the graduates participated in painting it “with fantasy images of fish and mermaids. This van is still seen cruising the streets today!” McCabe finds it “satisfying to see the names of these kids [his former students] in the newspaper and on the honor rolls, knowing that [he] might be a part of that.”

More conventional art classes were offered by McCabe through the Neighborhood Guild of Wakefield. These classes that dealt with perspective and tones were also popular and by his insistence made more affordable. McCabe said he was “mostly involved with art classes because of [his] daugher and [their] concentric interests at the time.” Elizabeth, then 13, acted as a teaching assistant in these classes.

McCabe has always encouraged an artistic point of view and thinks “being an artist is more about how you think and live and how well you infuse ideas into your life rather than being the stereotypical poor, starving artist.” His idea of restoring the Kingston Station after the fire in 1988, and his continued support, time and energy helped in giving our community a picturesque station we can be proud of. From constructing the Hasbro toys to the restoration of the Kingston Train Station, where he is currently employed, McCabe practices the lifestyle he preaches.

Elizabeth McCabe, South County Independent (Rhode Island), December 1998.

“Natural science is the study of the sources and control of natural energy, and social science, theoretically expressed as economics, is the study of the sources and control of social energy.  Both are bookkeeping systems: mathematics.  Therefore, mathematics is the primary energy science.  And the bookkeeper can be king if the public can be kept ignorant of the methodology of the bookkeeping.”[1]

Money is an embodiment of energy; energy is synonymous with power.  He who has the gold makes the rules.  Has this cliche lost its meaning? No, how could it when all current social systems are based on hoarding.  At the entry level, this looks like multi-national corporations.  Big black shiny buildings with big sterile lobbies and sans-serifed logos.  Impersonal monoliths of wealth and power.  Is this where the power lies?  No, this is just a container, but we’re getting closer.  Okay, how about those glorious top story windowed offices with waterfront views, is it someone in there?  Not likely, real money doesn’t show up for work.  Alright, so where does money move from here?  Banks, the stock market, bonds, and mutual funds.  Now we’re getting warmer.  Okay, how about economics, the ebb and flow of money, the tides of wealth.  Is it possible that there may be people sitting at the helm of this seemingly uncontrollable process?  Check.  These are the power elite.  Is it all just a game to them?  Checkmate.

The release of “The Secret” and the subsequent fuss after it was added to Oprah’s book list has popularized a spiritual concept — that you have the power to manifest your own reality.  That thoughts become things.  This idea is rather simple, however, like most simple things it is intensely powerful.  It empowers the individual to be the master of his own destiny and not entirely the subject of the whims of fortune.  This idea is dangerous to economics, whose purpose it is to constantly reaffirm the scarcity mindset.  Feast today, for tomorrow we may die — or sell off your stock today, for tomorrow it may dive.