Goodness that came my way this past week:

• Norma Flores, a participant on our Food and Society Conference core team this year, has a blog about her work for farmworker justice.
• Brad Ovenell-Carter and the void of voids.
• Dave Pollard shares a travelouge from Joanna Macy in the Tar Sands
• Also from Dave, The Transition Initiative.
• Dojo Rat on his practice over the next 50 years.

This story about Britain’s last WW1 soldier has a key them:   reconciliation is possible:

To the strains of the “Last Post,” and in the presence of soldiers from armies that had fought as both friend and foe, the funeral was held here Thursday for Harry Patch, the last British survivor of World War I living in this country.

Pallbearers carried the coffin of Harry Patch from Wells Cathedral on Thursday in Wells, England.

Born in June 1898, Mr. Patch died last month at the age of 111 at a nursing home in this southwestern cathedral city, where thousands of people lined the streets in densely-packed rows and applauded as his coffin passed by, draped in the red, white and blue Union flag.

Soldiers from Britain, Belgium, France and Germany marched alongside the coffin in a token of Mr. Patch’s increasing desire as he aged for reconciliation both with his own memories of the trenches and with his erstwhile enemies.

“Too many died,” he said, late in life, of the estimated 900,000 Britons killed in the conflict. “War isn’t worth one life.” He called war “the calculated and condoned slaughter of human beings,”

To have soldiers of the former enemy marching at his funeral!   Imagine Afghanis marching at the funeral of Canadian veterans in 80 years.   And vice versa.

That is the world we certainly would wish for, no?   And what if we were to work back from that premise to the near future?   What does it say about how we will end this endless debacle?

Obama has a birthday, and here are some wishes for him:

Obama’s failure would be unthinkable. And yet the best indications now are that he will fail, because he will be unable–indeed he will refuse–to seize the radical moment at hand.

Every instinct the president has honed, every voice he hears in Washington, every inclination of our political culture urges incrementalism, urges deliberation, if any significant change is to be brought about. The trouble is that we are at one of those rare moments in history when the radical becomes pragmatic, when deliberation and compromise foster disaster. The question is not what can be done but what must be done.

via Links (Harper’s Magazine).

Fresh from the feed garden:

• Ria Baeck on collaborative classroom design.
• George Por on his contemplative co-tweeting experiement, Parts 1 and 2
• Geoff Brown continues the holding questions thread.
• Euan Semple on what constitutes radical action.
• Mushin on living social fields.
• Johnnie Moore on Dave Snowdon and complexity in government
• Rob Paterson has a TED talk from Stewart Brand on environmental heresies.

Links I’ve grazed this week.

• A soldier writes from the front, and from the grave.