| Saturday, March 1, 2003 |  |
| Congress Overturns Organic Bill | 1 comment |
 1 Mar 2003 @ 12:10Turn your back for one second and.... Last week Congress passed an appropriations bill which overturns USDA regulations requiring all organic livestock to be fed 100% organic feed. My friend Eric Werbalowsky, permaculture guru and master MC forwarded this to me. Check out Farmer and the Cookour local hub for permaculture aaaaaaaction, seed swaps, lectures, locally grown produce and good ol' yummy home cookin'. *****Take Action - to Protect The integrity of Organic Standards***** Senator Leahy (D-VT) is introducing the Organic Restoration Act to repeal this rider along with Representative Sam Farr (D-CA) in the House. Both of these bills were introduced on February 26, 2003. Co-sponsors are needed ASAP in the House AND Senate - both Republicans and Democrats. For the repeal bill to be successful, we must generate a lot of interest and public comment on the Organic Restoration Act all across the nation. It is important that everyone - farmers, consumers, environmentalists, and the entire organic industry - talk to their members of Congress and get them on board in supporting the Organic Restoration Act. We must stand up to this blatant attempt by agribusiness to have their way with the organic standards. ****What You Can Do - Take Action!****** Contact your representatives in Washington and demand that support the Organic Restoration Act to repeal the language inserted into Section 771 of the Omnibus Appropriations Bill undermining the integrity of the organic label for meat, poultry, eggs and dairy. The message is simple: Urge your Senators and Representatives to support the Organic Restoration Act that was introduced by Senator Patrick Leahy and Representative Sam Farr to repeal Section 771 of the Omnibus Appropriations Bill. Repealing this section is in the interest of consumers, organic farmers and the environment. Repealing this section will encourage continued growth of organic agricultural production in the United States, one of the bright prospects for U.S. agriculture overall. You can find your Senator here. You can find your Representative here. Representative Farr's office has asked that we target the following Representatives, if you know of folks that live in their states please forward on this email to them. Allen Boyd, Jr. (D-FL/2) 202-225-5235 Agriculture Aide:Charla Penn Jerold Nadler (D-NY/8) 202-225-5635 Agriculture Aide: Kisette Morton Dennis Rehberg (R-MT) 202-225-3211 Chief of Staff: Erik Iverson Jim McDermott (D-WA/7) 202-225-3106 Agriculture Aide: Sean Hughes Wayne Gilchrest (R-MD/1) 202-225-5311 Agriculture Aide: Jeri Finke Please also let your local health food store know what you are doing.Tell them to carry NO products by Fieldale Farms, the company in GA that instigated this movement to gut the organic livestock feed standards. They also produce poultry under the Springer Mountain Farms and Redding labels. Tom Taylor Field Organizer Organic Consumers Association Tel: 612-331-7309 Fax: 612-331-7483 More > |
| The School Of Heartbreak | 2 comments |
 1 Mar 2003 @ 11:44My aquaintance Daniel Foster from the invisible Theater sent me this recently. It's a long read, yet well thought out. The author, Evan Hodkins has an intriguing take on the perversions of (average) community -- and the possibilities of what Hodkins calls "communitas". THE SCHOOL OF HEARTBREAK By Evan Hodkins Community, even when intently devoted to harmony, routinely degenerates into a splintered collection of untamed egos, each ardently peddling their precious agendas in the form of dogmas, goals or style. The ego specializes in divisiveness-it is angered when expectations go unmet, or sulky and self-piteous when slighted. As C. S. Lewis observed, the true slogan of hell is-- "I have my rights!" There are casualties within groups. Discord is the soup of the day. Paradise gets fractured. And, sooner or later--just wait your turn--everybody will be stabbed in the back, slandered, demeaned! Community is guaranteed heartbreak. Jung likened democracy, the very heartbeat of American society, to a chronically sublimated battle, or prolonged civil war. It was, he thought, a modest attempt to add a dash of creativity to the circus of political aggression. Politics, more than anything, is the enshrinement of the ego on a collective scale. Power, employed capriciously, can ruthlessly slice the gizzard out of any cooperative enterprise. Community intensifies frictional entanglements and fosters the proliferation of peevishness. It exponentially amplifies karmic misfortunes. It's a magic theater, replete with endless reflectivity, wherein the undigested aspects of our personal shadow is conveniently deposited, as if by dreaming, upon an unsuspecting other. Meanwhile, one projection engenders a counter-projection, as the favor is returned in kind. Prickly, jagged, reprehensible stuff--you won't get this kind of unpalatable feed-back just anywhere! Colliding egos eventually cancel each other out. The rancor of one member insures the annihilation of another. Once crushed, however, we all sneak sullenly away from the School of Heartbreak, into the Wasteland of Despair, to pout in isolation and lick our wounds. Community handily scores another fatality as we fatefully resign ourselves to terminal hermit-hood. How will we ever, in the words of W. H. Auden, learn "to love our crooked neighbor with our crooked heart?" Speaking esoterically--community is the unwitting instrument of the ego's demise, the agent of un-selfing, the slaughter-house for narcissistic agendas, providing an efficient means for the thorough pulverization of any residual conceits. Ironically, it is precisely our justifiable abhorrence of community that, in fact, awakens our considerable craving for something more. Once magnificently splayed by the banal bickerings and petty acrimony of your average community, we are then rendered perfectly heart-broken candidates for true communitas. Click "more" for rest of article. More > |