The Right Way to Flourish

Tom Lehrer, the bard of my young adult days, wrote this in 1959. He was prescient about so many things. > Christmas time is here, by golly, > Disapproval would be folly. > Deck the halls with hunks of holly, > Fill the cup and don’t say when. > > Kill the turkeys, ducks and chickens, > Mix the punch, drag out the Dickens. > Even though the prospect sickens, > Brother, here we go again. > > On Christmas Day you can’t get sore, > Your fellow man you must adore. > There’s time to rob him all the… Read More

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The Newtown massacre was a private tragedy and a public shock. Always a tragedy, but perhaps not such a shock. Armed violence and death from the end of a firearm are so much a part of our American persona. I should be shocked at the shameless “solution” to the danger for schools offered today by the Executive Director of the NRA, but I am merely sickened by the deaf, insensitive, unfeeling, shameful, and absurd [suggestion](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/22/us/nra-calls-for-armed-guards-at-schools.html?hp). > The National Rifle Association on Friday called for schools to be protected by armed guards as the best way to protect children from gun… Read More

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I have waited a few days to process my feelings (yes) and thoughts about the slaughter in Newtown. I have had to work hard to separate what seemed to show up in my consciousness into what came mostly from taking in what I read and listened to and what came from somewhere in my body. My first reaction to the manipulative reporting I found in both news and electronic media was that this horrifying murder was neither unspeakable or unimaginable or unnecessary or un-many other things. It is perfectly speakable and imaginable, neither of which reduce its horror and sadness.… Read More

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I have been in contact with a Dutch graduate student in a sustainable design program. Recently he directed me to the work of a Stanford University researcher, B. J. Fogg. Fogg is the director of their Persuasive Technology Lab. I went visiting the web site and downloaded a few articles by Fogg to learn what was meant by “persuasive technology.” To my dismay, I found that it meant just what the name conveys. Fogg begins a short [paper](http://captology.stanford.edu/resources/thoughts-on-persuasive-technology.html) on his thoughts about the subject with: > The world of technology has changed dramatically in twenty years. In 1993, I went… Read More

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The prepositions used in conjunction with words like sustainability, care, or love tell us a lot about the speaker or writer’s understanding of and commitments to the word being referred to. We can take a lead from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address that juxtaposes three prepositions in “government ***of*** the people, ***by*** the people, ***for*** the people.” Let’s start with sustainability and think about the differences between business ***of*** sustainability, business ***about*** sustainability, or business ***for*** sustainability. Business ***by*** sustainability doesn’t make much sense. The first is the possessive use of ***of*** and is used to tell us that sustainability has some… Read More

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James Carroll almost never writes a [column](http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2012/11/26/hands-off-mother-earth/iZQKJkGcDg8CY3x3wVBfHN/story.html) that I disagree with. but today he did. He strayed a bit from his usual subjects into the murky world of geoengineering. > Even if carbon emissions were dramatically reduced all over the planet (including in China, India, and Africa, where fossil fuel engines are just firing up), the biosphere is already facing catastrophe. The greenhouse effect is self-compounding, and scientists tell us that atmospheric temperatures will continue to rise even without more pollution. However difficult it has been to launch a real discussion of the causes of global warming, an even-larger controversy… Read More

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Off for the Thanksgiving Holiday. I’ll be back next week.

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Thanksgiving is one of those stopping points in a year–or at least it should be. But I don’t see signs around that it really is. The mad pace of life carries us from store to store, from precipice to cliff, from megabits/sec to gigabits/sec, from war to war… Tom Friedman wrote a [column](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/21/opinion/friedman-obamas-moment.html?hp) today extolling the new high speed Internet access network built, in part, with our stimulus money in Chattanooga, Tennessee. > How fast is that Chattanooga choo-choo? The majority of Chattanooga homes and businesses get 50 megabits per second, some 100 megabits, a few 250 and those with… Read More

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I just returned from the movies, watching “Lincoln.” It measures up to all the buzz about it. After writing about gifts and moral responsibility only a few hours earlier, I was deeply moved by the film. The moral impossibility of condoning slavery drove Lincoln against the possibility of prolonging the murderous civil War. I would not begin to compare the degree and consequences of today’s inequality to that borne by slaves, but the moral issue seem to be much the same.

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Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free ‘Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be, And when we find ourselves in the place just right, ‘Twill be in the valley of love and delight. When true simplicity is gain’d, To bow and to bend we shan’t be asham’d, To turn, turn will be our delight, Till by turning, turning we come ’round right. Written by Shaker Elder Joseph Brackett (pictured) in 1848, this lyric places “gift” exactly where it says is “just right.” I thought that with the election now in place,… Read More

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