Golden Echoes

Seems a lot of people are either contemplating a change in career direction or have undertaken one during the lock-down. And it isn’t only those whose livelihoods were deemed non-essential and who were forced to stay home. Many of those were have been working throughout the lock-down are questioning how they invest their labor contributions

You spent a great deal of your time laboring, so it makes sense you want to invest that time wisely. Maybe the lock-down has given cause for considering the investment. Maybe the constant reminder of death and uncertainty poured out by the media during this time has led to a consideration of how our time on earth is precious and ephemeral?

If that is true then it would be a positive side effect of the mess we are in. Woot!

Life has not always been easy for us, maybe its never really easy. However, we have never watched while our children dwindled from lack of nutritious food. We have never taken turns sleeping in order to protect what food and necessities we had. And, we know enough about history, and the broader world, to be extremely grateful to have raised our children in an environment of unusual safety and abundance.

We have friends and acquaintances who have never known material comforts to the same extreme. And now, what little material comfort they had known is vanishing, or has vanished, as the world scrambles to deal with the pandemic. Jobs have been lost in parts of the world where there is no unemployment or federal stimulus checks. Crops are sometimes out of reach because of travel restrictions. Supply lines are disrupted and, most troubling, assistance from friends in the United States is in danger of waning.

You see, contrary to popular myth, the people of the United States of America are very generous and many people in the majority world have benefited greatly from that generosity.

It is not foreign government assistance or USA Rice that the people we speak with are concerned about losing, those always have strings attached and often serve the bullies and warlords more than the folks. Its the food, medicine, water wells, and a hundred other acts of love personally delivered by visiting Americans, eager to share their blessing with others. Shared blessings which have no strings, no sense of superiority, no propping up of preferred regimes, only a desire to love.

We’ve been privileged to see much of that love first hand and privileged to know many of those unheralded American lovers.

But now, America is in jeopardy, and those in the majority world know it, and are unsettled by it. They know there is no other country that generates so many individual people who give so much to love their far-away neighbors.

So America, we need to find our way through this, not just for our sake and that of our children, but also for the 265 million people who are expected to be pushed into food insecurity due to the world pandemic response. American lovers, let’s get to it.

Gray skies, water dripping,
Feels like the gloom may never end.

Today’s rain is tomorrow’s green grass and ripe tomatoes.

Are there green pastures and delightful fruit in our post-lock-down future?
Sure there are, only, they will not have been ameliorated by the virus.

They will, however, be more appreciated.

We miss so many of you and look forward to seeing you again. Face to face.

Wait, I thought it was supposed to be 2 weeks.

We all knew it would go on longer, but 60 days? And counting?

However, great concert last night!
https://hostandartist.com/artist/fort-worth-brass/live

More to come, stay tuned

We met with friends at a restaurant last night and remembered how great it is to gather together.

There was nervous joking about the current situation, tinges of anger toward the murderous regime in China whose treacherous responses of lies and coverups inflicted this mess on the rest of us. Sadness over the lack of a graduation ceremony for a member of the party who had just completed his undergraduate studies at TCU.

But there was such great joy and gladness seeing one another again. Being able to laugh and empathize face to face, no, we didn’t wear masks.

Could a growth in Direct to Consumer (DTC) businesses be in our new normal?

Even before the lockdown companies like Casper (mattresses) and American Giant (clothing) were already successfully selling directly to the consumer.  By skipping the layers of middlemen typical in modern retail, DTC companies are able to place more resource where it counts, customer and product.  Since the lockdown there seems to be a boost in people starting new businesses who don’t know about distribution layers and don’t care to learn.

We have purchased clothing from American Giant clothing and luggage from Redoxx for years.  We discovered them when looking for ways to support ‘made in the USA’ but discovered extreme value and great customer service. (Please note that value and cheap are not the same thing, these products last long and still look good after many years of use. Repeatedly replacing cheap products is very low value.)

Finding DTC products can be difficult since search engines have become billboards and small startup companies often can’t afford the word buys required to show up in search results.  Instagram and ‘influencers’ seem to be popular ways that DTCs get the word out but some of us don’t track either of those information channels.

How do you locate products offered directly to consumers?

How easy we are coerced into camps

If we sit and think about the endless divides that we are push and prodded into every day, it is mind-boggling.  It is difficult to have a conversation without slipping into one or more of these issues of deep division.  So divided are we that giving examples here would end any hope of maintaining focus on the primary topic.

There is an established power structure that enjoys the fruits of our propensity to be divided.  They do not conspire to exploit that propensity, but rather, it comes naturally to all whose imagination is limited to self-promotion and power-seeking.  So natural in fact that its application becomes ubiquitous and we find ourselves in a swirling stew of division.  The purveyors of division also understand the necessity to elevate their issues of division to the level of violating clear moral code.  People on the other side of an issue are not just wrong, they are wicked, sub-humans that lack the enlightenment of our side’s superior humanity.

It is evil when we allow those divisions to deny our fellows of dignity.  We must cultivate within us the ability to disagree with others while maintaining the proper respect which human beings deserve.  It is apparent, to even a casual observer, that this ability does not come easy.

We have a superpower.

We don’t use it very often.

It is called respect.

Respect defangs the purveyors of fear and hate.  They can only ply their trade in an environment of disrespect.  We do not allow name-calling or ridicule against those whom we respect.

We may say we respect another person or group of people, but as soon as we laugh at ridicule or remain silent in the company of slandered, our true character is revealed.  We should repent of such weak moral fiber and look inside to see what is broken within us that allows such manipulation to be effective.

Then we find our superpower.  When we do, we become impervious to the vile and wicked trickery that so pervades our society today.

The Spring of 1994 witnessed the brutal murder of almost a million people and the rape of almost a half million women inside the boarders of a country the size of the state of Maryland.

The cause – fear and hate.

Fear and hate are the primary manipulation tools employed when trying to coerce others, especially large groups of others. They are especially effective because those under their influence rarely know, and vehemently deny when confronted. In our, educated and sophisticated culture, It is always considered the “other people” who are influenced by such simple-minded tricks.

And there lies the challenge.

As we journey toward our mysterious future it would behoove us greatly to acknowledge that we are all manipulated by the purveyors of fear and hate. We must confront the fact that some of those who have influenced us the most have used fear and hate, expressed through ad hominem abusive and derogatory references, as well as comic ridicule and meme, to undermine rational and intellectually honest thought.

The challenge is to rise above the belief that only the “other people” succumb to such crude manipulation. We must become aware of the manipulative practices that bombard us every day. We should cultivate within us an alarm that responds to messages that strive to instill within us a belittlement of our neighbors. The “other people” are, in fact, our neighbors.

We are a society divided. For every topic of the day, we align behind manipulators that would have us believe those on the other side, the “other people”, are less than we. Less intelligent, less aware, less capable of detecting lies, less, less, less. What we must do is work to overcome those manipulators and accept that our neighbors, even those we disagree with, are our neighbors.

Today Rwanda thrives. Now home to over 12 million people, living as neighbors should.

The birds outside don’t seem to know what a pickle we are in.
They just keep chirping and trilling, unemployment and covid be hanged, they will sing.

The sun is painting the sky pink just like it did before and cows are grazing in the lush green grass.

Sitting on the patio you’d think the world was right, just another day dawning.
Maybe it is.