Building Energy

*
Last night, I had dinner with several of the participants in this Conference.

Some of them had arrived earlier in the day,

having helped put together one of the full day workshops.

This one was called

Utterly Productive Meetings and Team work:
Get the Tools, Hone your Skills.

The session blurb says,

"If you have green projects with tricky client relationships competing goals and/or difficult project managment issues, this workshop is for you. Bring a development, building, or renewable energy project and you'll leave with skills, ideas, and tools to make it more successful.

Cutting edge practice and small group brake-outs will focus on your challenges."

There were other workshops on photovoltaics, green schools, radiant floor heating, zero energy homes and even a workshop on Solar Bloopers where the three most common mistakes in solar design and implementation are covered.

Our dinner conversation rambled along, but it was occassionally enlightened and genuinely high minded and soulful.

Of course, we spoke of this remarkably incompetent government we must all endure. We were, after all, in a very blue state.

I told the story of how one blogger had published that headline that said

Shooting Victim Apologizes,

with the comment that we should archive this headline,

just "so our children could see what it was like".

But the sentiment at this dinner was not one of division.

Rather, there was the clear sense of the need for union,

and our present pressing need to transcend our differences.

It is true, you can not "build energy" while you destroy.

And you cannot bring people together by dividing them.

I brought up how the Republicans of our day have become so successful in using wedge issues to get people to vote against their best interest. Such wedge issues as the" right to life", "gun control", "gay marriage", "government infringment", and "private property rights", have peeled many a blue state mind into a red state frenzy.

Here in the land of Chomsky, we discussed the power of shaping and the need to shape our issues away from their current configerations.

Whoever came up with the word "Entitlements" was clearly against them.

"Tax Relief" needs to say no more.

It goes without saying, that the "Death Tax" should be abolished. Losing your loved one is bad enough without getting taxed on it.

We talked about the Gestalt of human consciousness and how it sees

only what it can.

No one wants a Vice President who gets drunk and shoots his pal.

So, the gestalt agrees it didn't really happen that way.

No one wants to talk about the 3rd building that was pulled on 9/11.

So the gestalt agrees to not bring it to consciousness.

No one really wants to think that a War that was sold on a noble purpose,

has a real purpose at its foundation that is based on resources.

So the gestalt believes the story that allows for the least amount of

cognitive dissonance.

No one wants to believe that this town will be under water in 100 years,

because of climate change and the resulting sea level rise that will occur.

No body wants to believe that Cheney and his war lords will set their eyes

on Iran.

The Gestalt just will not accept that possibility.

Gestalt is German you know.

Yes, you cannot "build energy" through division,

but you can build "power and distrust" through fear.

And you can scare the beejeesus out of all of us in the process.

Someday, perhaps soon, (even with a Delay)

The Gestalt will be able to see the need "to build".

Not divide.


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art courtesy of shem booth