Posts tagged Jack-Adam-Weber
WAKE UP
Nov 15th
Poem By Jack Adam Weber
Guest Writer for Wake Up World
Wake Up
Challenge yourself to come out
Of your small world of small pleasures,
The addictions that are not yours
(ask yourself why they are not)
That keep you numb to a larger umph.
Wake up.
The sky is falling
Again on your heart,
Like a bristly blanket
Over your shivering life that will
Make you itch from the inside out
Until you have scratched your way
To a gory demise equal to
The suffering in our oceans,
Our forests, our soils and rivers,
The people around the globe
Who are not free
To speak, to walk where they please,
To eat what you would throw out.
Did You Fu*k It Up?
Oct 25th
LANGUAGE WARNING: This Article Contains The F Word
Please do not read on if this word offends you
25th October 2011
By Jack Adam Weber - Guest Writer for Wake Up World
Katie Goodman’s video has inspired me to write down why I think the world is fucked up…as well as how I help to unfuckitup.
I experience the underlying reason for the world being fucked to be because humanity runs from its pain, particularly its emotional pain and historical traumas. When we carry significant unresolved pain inside us we perpetrate the world. We are exiled from our own bodies and hearts because pain and trauma create a prison for our tenderness, creativity, intuition, and wisdom.
With an impoverished inner life we therefore turn outwardly to entertain and thereby distract ourselves. We try to accumulate power through things, money and manipulation—to try to fill the void inside us—which can only be truly filled by the passionate, creative force of living spirit when pain is acknowledged and released. In my estimation, this dynamic is exemplified in the corporate giants who poison, rape, rob, plunder, and otherwise violate the world.
Re-Greening Our Hearts (Part 4)
Oct 24th
A Practical Path for a Successful Planet
If you have not read Part 1, please read it first here
If you have not read Part 2, please read it first here
If you have not read Part 3, please read it first here
24th October 2011
By Jack Adam Weber - Guest Writer for Wake Up World
It is time to reclaim our lives by taking back our physiologies, our minds, and our hearts through good thinking, creativity, meaningful work, community, simple pleasures, more leisure time, and holistic living. We need to spend more time in nature, any way we can. We can learn to reprogram ourselves under the tutelage of Nature herself. Nature influences us at both obvious and deep unconscious levels. Longer sojourns in nature are recommended so that its subtle yet powerful effects can reach and heal us beneath the mental, physiological, emotional, and lifestyle conditionings that can take time to loosen their hold on us.
We may choose at some point to live rurally. Even if we don’t know how to, cannot imagine, or feel repelled, embarrassed, or guilty doing so, by moving into such a life, we place ourselves in position to discover deeper inner fulfilment. Here we also can remember how to perceive and live life poetically. Natural metaphors (including poems themselves) unite seemingly disparate aspects of life, thereby unveiling wholeness and catalyzing healing. For instance, the satisfaction and wisdom gained from growing food—from planting a seed to eating its fruit—is also an exciting and ineffable experience. The nature-saturated among us, who have also, for example, witnessed and helped along the miracle of food grown from seed, are and will increasingly become crucial medicine for planetary healing. The 11-year old Birke Baehr is a glowing example.
Re-Greening Our Hearts (Part 3)
Oct 20th
A Practical Path for a Successful Planet
If you have not read Part 1, please read it first here
If you have not read Part 2, please read it first here
20th October 2011
By Jack Adam Weber - Guest Writer for Wake Up World
To a great extent, each of us can choose what we consume, depending on the resources available to us. Certain “necessities” for coping and positively contributing to life are primarily provided by corporate monoliths (cars, gasoline, and computers, for example). Nonetheless, making self-empowering and nature-sustaining choices when we can is the obligation of every reasonable person who values life. In these critical times we need healers not product-pushers in politics and policy, business and its media.
The talking heads of Big Business justify their mania and lack of soul by appealing to the very fear they create. Advertising driven by larger-than-life transnationals such as Coca-Cola, Monsanto, McDonalds, Toshiba and Mitsubishi does the evil work of stimulating people’s addictions, weaker selves, and unhealthy cravings. Then they feed this bottomless pit (bottomless because the filler is insubstantial and unable to truly satiate) of craving for their own profit.
Rather than promote healing, sustainability, and self-empowerment in a mutually interdependent package, Big Business promotes unchecked capitalism by promoting and glorifying this external system of insatiable desire through the cycle of acquiring more and more, the buying and too prompt burying of their cheap toys and gadgets, affording them windfall profits while ordinary folks become more inwardly and outwardly impoverished. The more they hook us on the allure of their stuff, the more we are driven to buy and the more (truly and illusorily) powerful they become. This cycle results in loss of happiness, wholeness, wisdom, connection to grace in our bodies, as well as an ongoing financial struggle to make ends meet under the burden of constant debt and compounded interest. Allowing ourselves to be bought out as consumerism prostitutes leads to depression, helplessness, soul loss, ill health, and every other symptom of self-avoidance and lack of self-care. So, next time you drive by McDonalds, reach for the non-organic milk or corn, sign the loan papers for the fancy new SUV, shut down your true feelings, courage and intuition….just don’t go there. Pull back, take a breath, give yourself and the tree next to you a hug.
Imagine if the media and advertising sectors of Fortune 1000 transnationals were annually reviewed for their moral and ecological integrity and were required to dedicate a portion of their multi-million dollar advertising budgets to encouraging empowerment and sanity rather than continually manipulating people and promoting the deification of people’s base desires.
Our Real Healthcare Crisis: The Devastating Domino Effect of GMO “Foods” (And What You Can Do About It)
Oct 18th
Contributing Writer for Wake Up World
Dear WUW Readers,
GMO stands for “Genetically Modified Organism.” A GMO is a plant or animal genetically modified through the addition of a small amount of genetic material from other organisms by inserting DNA (in genes) from one organism to another. “GM foods,” or “GMO foods,” are foods with GMO ingredients. GMO food crops have been given genetic traits to provide protection from pests and tolerance to herbicides.
For simplicity, GMO food crops fall into two main categories. One is the Roundup Ready GMO group, which consists of plants resistant to the herbicide Roundup. Current Roundup Ready crops include, soy, corn, sorghum, canola, alfalfa, and cotton, with wheat now under development. The second group is the Bt-toxin group, which consists of plants genetically modified to produce a pesticide, called Bt-toxin. Bt-toxin is a concentrated from of naturally occurring pesticide produced by Bacillus thuringiensis, a soil bacterium. Bt-toxin is also used in organic farming and gardening, but the Bt-toxin engineered by Monsanto is thousands times more powerful and a genetically modified variation of the naturally occurring one produced by Bacillus thuringiensis. Current Bt-toxin GM crops include cotton, corn, sweet corn, and potatoes.
Here is a sampling of information I gleaned from the articles and video linked below:
1) Growing research has linked GMO foods to cancer, degenerative disease and birth defects, among other degenerative disorders such as arthritis and autoimmune disorders.
2) 175 million acres of farmland in the US are now planted with GMO crops. Yikes!
3) One human study found its subjects to have Round Up Ready bacterial flora. The Round Up Ready-resistant gene spliced into GMO plants had transferred into the DNA of bacteria living inside their intestines—from eating even just one meal of GMO foods, such as GMO soybeans, at some time in their life. This means that we could have dangerous GM proteins being produced inside us for years to come, even after we stop consuming GMO foods. Read more here: http://www.responsibletechnology.org/blog/1412
4) It is possible that the Bt-toxin gene could also transfer to our bacterial flora, thereby converting our otherwise beneficial flora into “living pesticide factories.”
5) Monsanto and other biotech companies have bought out US Congress and Federal regulatory agencies with campaign contributions and lobby donations, essentially forcing their lethal GMO products onto America, despite the fact that polls show that 85-95% of American consumers want mandatory labels on genetically engineered foods.
6) If a food label lists sugar as an ingredient and it doesn’t say it’s solely from cane, then it’s possible that some of the sugar comes from GMO sugar beets.
7) From a trip to India, Jeffrey Smith reports, “I visited one village where for seven to eight years they allowed their buffalo to graze on natural cotton plants without incident. But on January 3rd, 2008, they allowed their 13 buffalo to graze on Bt (GMO cotton, my insert) cotton plants for the first time. After just one day’s exposure, all died. The village also lost 26 goats and sheep.”
Re-Greening Our Hearts (Part 2)
Oct 17th
A Practical Path for a Successful Planet
If you have not read Part 1, please read it first here
17th October 2011
By Jack Adam Weber - Guest Writer for Wake Up World
Promising parts for a new vision of ecological sustainability are already afoot. India, Bolivia, Ecuador and districts in the state of Pennsylvania and throughout New England have enacted Earth-centered constitution declaring, for example, the inalienable rights of “natural communities and ecosystems,” to possess the same rights to survival and “living well” as humans. You can read more about this here and in the newly released book, The Rights of Nature: The Case for a Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth, produced by the Council of Canadians, Global Exchange and Fundacion Pachamama.
Unfortunately, it is still legal to “make money” (especially gobs of it) without being truly accountable for the negative side-effects of production. When windfall monetary gain and supernatural power for their own sake are the primary motivation for work, care is both diminished and devalued. Sacrificing profits is avoided at all costs to the point that doing business becomes fanatical, unrelinquishable, and manically pursued with religious zeal. This is driven by the dictatorship of the linear, left brained, conquer and dominate mentality. Extending this plummeting and primarily profits-based mentality to considering our planet’s current and future energy choices underlies our current ecological, economic and health crises.
In contrast, an Eco-centric paradigm favors economic choices based on what might allow humanity to survive with a standard of living worth being alive for: clean air, water, food, good health, happy and healthy children in birthright possession of their full mental capacities and with their limbs all in tact. Please add to this birthright a still wild, fertile, and a highly diversified ecosystem which nurtures us on every level. Making extraordinary amounts of money through heartless work is innocuous enough if it did not negatively impact the rest of the world. But this is not reality, and by definition, likely impossible.
The Re-Greening of Our Hearts (Part 1)
Oct 14th
A Practical Philosophy for a Successful Planet
“A sacred choice is one that does not seek to compensate for a wound, but to heal it.” `~Rick Vassalla~
14th October 2011
By Jack Adam Weber - Guest Writer for Wake Up World
Here we are in the thick of Occupy Wall Street, with the movement and its message spreading worldwide, loud and clear: No more collusion by government and Big Business. No more tax cuts for the already rich and dirty. No more destruction of our planet for the bad habit of bullying-billionaire-ism, an epidemic disease attacking the weak of heart and low morale.
In the first weeks of the ongoing Fukushima disaster I read too many editorials describing the choice between a nuclear or more sustainable future as hinging on the monetary cost to multinational companies, government, and taxpayers. Does it also make you squirm in your skin to hear our world fixated on economic gain at any cost, with the real possibility of environmental collapse as well as species and human extinction from toxic waste streams given secondary concern? Do you care more about remaining “competitive” in the international marketplace above the survival and health of your children and family?
I have reached my limit of political puppet talk to distract attention from and justify the destruction of life on Earth. I couldn’t give a crap about the International Marketplace, whatever it is. Come to think of it, I think we should downsize the mythic International Marketplace by 90% (I’d still like to have curry powder to cook with) and replace it with hundreds of regional festivals where we all camp out and envision a new, locally-based future. Camp Headquarters will be biking distance from your home!
We need a new paradigm for living and doing business on Earth, not just an adjustment of the current system. We need a modus operandi that is eco-centric not solely human-centric. This orientation forms the crux of Deep Ecology, which perceives nature as sacred, not primarily a commodity for human progress and development. By granting Nature a right to live and thrive, we grant the same to humanity. We can no longer pretend as though nature is forever indispensable and able to re-grow itself no matter the pace at which we use it up. Or that some fantastic messianic miracle of technology is going to save us and regenerate what we have denigrated. Even if there were such a technology, what kind of world would remain in the aftermath?
