Dave Pollard got the idea a few weeks ago to run a “Great Canadian Song Contest” and I agreed to be one of the judges. The results are in and posted at his blog, and although this is just about as unscientific a poll as you could imagine, the final list would still be a wonderful introduction to non-Canadians to ourselves and our land.
Canadian Railroad Trilogy tied with A Case of You for fist place, by the way.
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Lately here in British Columbia, we have been in some major labour strife between the government and the public sector unions, most recently the hospital employees union. (HEU) A couple of weeks ago there was a strike that escalated and then ended with legislation that was perceived as illegal by some union workers who stayed out on strike, gaining support from other unions and nearly precipitating a general strike in the province.
I was talking last night with a friend of mine, an emergency room nurse who is, by all accounts, left leaning, but who doesn’t like strikes in general in the health care system because they do end up hurting patients and leading to blocked thinking on both sides, entrenched positions and general bad will all round. She does acknowledge however that our health care system is under brutal attack from our current government and radical action needs to be undertaken.
I agree with her. I am most interested by how these kinds of civil actions evolve and change. With crises like this, there is often a flash point, where one side takes on the other at the level of engagement that it perceives of the other. For example, anti-globalization protesters have over recent years engaged in violent protests which mirrors the violence they perceive to be coming from pro-globalization corporations and governments. This is always a first stage response to a crises in civil society. What comes next is always interesting to me, because after the bluster, there is always a chance to transcend the current reality, find some common ground and move on, with both sides changed. It doesn’t always happen this way, and sometimes the cycle of reaction continues for a long time before any progress is made.
But last night, talking to my friend, we wondered if there could be a better way. And we started thinking about the best way for the HEU to make their point, claim high ground AND not hurt the people in care that suffer during strikes.
We decided that what was really at stake was CARE. The HEU was protesting the government’s privatization of their jobs, complaining that it would result in a lack of care in a system that is already perceived as underresourced and unable to treat [patients humanely. In many ways, nurses are the last bastions of care in a whole area of civil society that was founded on care.
So we started wondering what nurses could do to make their point, and we came up with a radical idea that brought to mind Vaclav Havel’s politics of living in truth.
What if all the nurses went to work instead of striking? What if every patient had three nurses looking after them instead of just essential service levels of “care.” If the issue is about care, what better way to demonstrate that then to show the world what a fully functioning system would look like? Instead of marching outside for a pittance of strike pay, take a week of protest and show up for work and simply take care of the patients in the system. The nurses could even set up large tents outside the hospitals, reminiscent of a disaster scene, as if a large earthquake had hit and everyone’s hands were needed to care for the casualties. That would send that message that the health care crises is approaching disaster proportions and that it’s all about care and THIS is what care looks like.
It would get really juicy if the employer started preventing nurses from coming into the hospital to work. The government wouldn’t stand a chance against this expression of the truth. To be put in a situation where they were preventing caring professionals from caring for people would be untenable.
The government is privatizing jobs, so having nurses OUT of their workplace is exactly the image that the government wants to see. Yelling, angry protesters don’t send the message that these people are actually caring professionals, and that level of anger plays into the government’s hands as well.
But actually ignoring the government’s plans, recognizing the real need which is that people are not receiving a the care they need, and going to work without the government’s sanction…THAT would be powerful.
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Doug Manning at Proactive Living quotes a study from the Us Department of Labor that says that there are more college graduates taking unemployment than high school dropouts. Although percentage wise, high school dropouts outnumber their college graduates, the stats point out to a myth about education: that you can buy your way to prosperity:
This is a sobering new reality of the 21st century, one that is partially of our own making. We have successfully encouraged and enabled more young people than ever to obtain a four-year degree. However, we have done little to help them evaluate the commercial value of those same credentials. Therefore, it should not be surprising that the supply of some degrees exceeds their demand, particularly for those that have no direct application in the workforce.In a perfect world, this would cause adults to stop blindly advising all capable students to “go to college”. Instead, we would encourage them to: (1) identify educational pathways that have personal meaning, and (2) evaluate the supply and demand for the educational credential they are considering.
Those of us who are autodidacts, and who are proponents of unschooling have already jumped to Doug’s conclusions. The most important thing we can offer children, whether in school or not, is an ongoing reflective conversation that facilitates their own understanding of their own learning style. This meta-learning trumps all the content we can stuff into their skulls because it encourages them to engage with the act of making meaning out of the world, a critical skill for evaluating one’s own place in society, and the contexts in which one operates. If we had more people aware of their own agency then we might have fewer people – whether high school dropouts or college grads – trapping themselves in the feudal remnants of the consumption society. We might see universities then as learning experiences, rather than the contrived rites of passage that they have become. Simply graduating with no self-awareness is not going to land you in the promised land, and in fact, dropping out of school, if it is done with the right intention, may in fact be the best choice a kid can make.
For more on intentional dropping out, visit Grace Llewellyn’s website, and check out this interview with her. A lot of the lessons in her book, The Teenage Liberation Handbook, are useful for adults too.
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I’m making the gradual move to more and more open source software. Recently I have been using Mozilla Firefox (brilliant) for web browsing, Thunderbird (works just fine, and pretty good on the junk mail) for email and a Mozilla plug-in for my calendar (still pretty raw, but I only use it for keeping appointments). And just this week, I’ve committed myself to making the full on move to Open Office for most of the other functions I use my PC for, mostly word processing and the odd spreadsheet and powerpoint.
I want to do this because I believe that Open Source is really something we should all be supporting. It is more than just a model for software development. It is a model, as my friend Rob Paterson pointed out to me, for an entire economy. A model based on sharing, decentralization, passion and responsibility. With Open Source, if you need a feature, you build it, or you offer to pay someone to build it for you. Everything is transparent, so you can pick your spots and make a difference. Anyone can contribute to making the software work better, it all depends what you have to offer.
because Open Source software is free, any cash contribution you make to it’s development is still a bargain for the end user, and because the software is developed by volunteers, resources are used efficiently, not tied up in excessive marketing or, legal protection or administrative structure. Open Source supports light organizations focused on producing quality products.
In many ways, this is the leading edge of a new way of doing business, one embodied in a social way by what we are doing at GiftHub for example and trying to kick start with the Opening Space for Giving to Flourish Conference in Chicago this July.
Open Source is nothing new of course, but it’s starting to make a big move into the world of the moderately techno-savvy folks like me. As powerful free programs like Open Office become more and more available, I think it will force the proprietary companies to make some changes although we’re probably a long way off from knocking off the big boys.
I’m still wedded to Microsoft in the operating system though, using XP, despite the crazy week I had last week with the Sasser worm. I use free tools for most of my other work though, including (the newly improved) Blogger for the weblogs, Winamp for audio and video, NoteTab Light for html markup and AntiVir for virus protection.
But it won’t be long until I make the move to Linux I think. It needs a bigger time investment from me, but perhaps with the next computer I buy, Linux will find it’s way onto one of the boxes in the house.
By the way, you can find tons of open source programs at SourceForge.
What’s your experience of Open Source?
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From this month’s Harper’s Index:
Chance that an American adult believes that “politics and government are too complicated to understand”: 1 in 3
Chance that an American who was home-schooled feels this way: 1 in 25
Harper’s quotes a new research study from the National Home Education Research Institute as the source.