Originally posted by
starry night
Me too. (Orlov scared the bejeezus out of me, but I am grateful for the wake up call!)
I am also very grateful for Kunstlers wake up call, and his advocacy for New Urbanism. I live in one of the most car-centric locals in the US, I believe--I gave up on my political advocacy career when I discovered that the biggest lobby in the state was the road builders! And, not coincidentally, we also have very high pedestrian and bicycle mortality rates. :(
Continuing my backstory: Even before I became aware of the collapse, I was drawn to community living. Palooka and I met in a mutual search for an intentional community, and we first lived together in a tiny tiny tiny community that we founded. I had an MA in Communication, focusing on Organizational, Group, Interpersonal and Intercultural Communication, and had crashed and burned at the end of my coursework so did not pursue a PhD at that time.
When I was able to study again, I wanted to learn more about intentional communities, and how to facilitate meetings in them. There was no academic route for this, so I built my own program, training with the experts in the intentional communities movement who, after 20-30 years in the field, were ready to pass on what they had learned to the next generation of facilitators. It was an amazing opportunity, and I am very grateful for it.
I also got the chance to visit a lot of intentional communities in the US, mostly based on the co-housing model, mostly dealing with (white) middle-class problems. (back when there was one, LOL.) Still, people are people, and my trainers had a much broader background, so it gave me first hand experience with the kinds of things that seem to be common to at least this subgroup of humanity, and also *solutions* on the process level. Or rather, what are the best processes, the best practices, when it comes to finding solutions to the problems that inevitably come up when living intentionally, in community?
Cause if anything is going to get done, it is going to get done by people, who are coming together from their own histories, positions, etc. have their own interests, points of view, triggers, deeply held beliefs, y'all know the drill!
I learned a lot.
Then came the realization of the end of the world as we know it: TEOTWAWKI (remember that acronym?)
I became drawn to the question of okay, so how DO we rebuild, incorporating the social-emotional axis? And at the time I started the next phase of my journey, I was still pretty freaked out, so the question was, what if we have to do it on the fly? In a state of emergency, while we are on the move from one climate zone to another?
That's when I got interested in "self-organizing" communities--as it was presented in the doomer/prepper discourse.
So started to get training in Open Space facilitation, and also, in drawing on the deeper traditional/tribal models (we've been around for a long time!) which started to line up with my Spiritual process/development... and this is what I am working on, still. But that is for another thread.
Back to Kunstler. So I am trying to sort out the point he is making. And I think it is important to tease out the role of the media, in all of this. And the messages. Which is, obviously, a whole lot of the work we are doing here at TOT. Sorting it all out!
I want to understand what he is saying, and I also want to understand where he is coming from, as a person with his own "stuff," so to speak, to help me make sense of it. Methinks he is triggered. :o I know I was certainly triggered by some of what he said, and I had to go emote until I could come back and write something that wasn't just coming from my upsettedness, so to speak.
Because I don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater, in terms of rejecting other points of view just because something somebody said pissed me off. I mean, I do that all the time momentarily, but my goal is to work through my stuff so I can "hear" again.
Anywho, palooka is home, so I need to get off his laptop (the keyboard to my iPad is kaput) and come back to this later.