Back in June, the Yes Men performed a fairly dramatic stunt.  Pretending to be Natural Petroleum Council members, they presented a proposal to turn human beings into fuel:

After noting that current energy policies will likely lead to “huge global calamities…” Wolff told the audience “…in the worst case scenario, the oil industry could ‘keep fuel flowing’ by transforming the billions of people who die into oil… With more fossil fuels comes a greater chance of disaster, but that means more feedstock for Vivoleum. Fuel will continue to flow for those of us left.”

Dark humor aside, we might argue over when, but at some point, the oil is going to run out.

Today, I’ll explore how we use energy, how we can change our sense of what energy means and why that change will be so much easier if started earlier than later.

The picture, by the way, is not a Photoshop effect.  It’s long-exposure work, using an infra red filter to reduce the amount of light entering the shutter.  When you do very long exposures (this was 29 seconds), images that pass across the screen don’t always appear, and when they do appear, they often appear ghosted.  In this case, you get the ghost effect of the car as it paused for a moment at the intersection and then continued on.

Okay, so enough of the photo geek babble.  Now onto science geek babble.

In 2004, the BBC was asking Is the world’s oil running out fast?:

How will you pay to run your car? How will you get the children to school? How will you heat your house? How much will transported food go up in price?

How will we pay for plastics, metals, rubber, cheap flights, Simpson’s DVDs, 3G phones and everlasting economic growth?

The basic answer is, we won’t.

This is the message from the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO).

People may disagree on when it’s going to happen, but there’s no real question that it will happen in many of our lifetimes.  Per the Australian Broadcasting Corporation:

What would happen if the world were to start running out of oil? Conventional wisdom says we’ve got 30 years, but there’s a growing fear amongst petroleum experts it’s happening much sooner than we thought – that we are hitting the beginning of the end of oil now. So how soon will the oil run out, and can we stop our economy collapsing when it does? How prepared are we for the real oil crisis?

What are we going to do in order to make this transition from an oil-based economy to making better use of other fuel sources?  How are we going to make this transition as easy as possible, and how will we do it as painlessly as possible?

Here in Vermont, Post Oil Solutions is organizing around local economy.  They run workshops, educate the public, and support people trying to take control of their own energy solutions.

They have lots of great projects, such as community gardens, the Windham Energy Project and a Winter Farmer’s Market.

These are all projects that were started by people on a small scale and are growing into something big.

And this effort at getting people to think about energy, energy usage and our impact has a direct effect on personal behavior.  I’ll just take a moment to outline some personal changes we’ve made as a household in the past few years.  Many of these are more recent and directly a result of the localvore challenge:

• Composting: I attended a Master Composter course last Fall.  In doing so, I learned how to save resources by not just throwing out uneaten/spoiled food.  We now collect all our scraps, store them and reuse them in gardens once they’re converted to healthy, nutrient-rich, compost.


• Local Harvesting: We’ve started paying a lot more attention to where our food comes from.  This is big.  When you purchase food from across the county, you’re not just paying for the food.  You’re paying for the cost of transporting that food.  When we buy local food, we’re not only supporting our local economy, we’re paying attention to where our food comes from and what the conditions are.  When I visit Hope Roots Farm to buy eggs, I know they’re free range because I see the chickens wandering around.  Usually, I just take it on faith.


• Food Dehydrating: This ties in directly with the local foods.  There are only certain times of year when you can get certain foods locally: blueberries; apples; root vegetables.  Many of these can be dried when they’re in season, stored in various fashions, and used down the line for all sorts of purposes and it’s a lot cheaper to dry food and store it than to refrigerate it.


• Attention to How I Drive: I don’t always have as much choice about this as I’d like: I have places to be and places to be on time.  But, if I have time, I don’t drive as fast as I might otherwise do.  My car (a Prius Hybrid) is much more efficient at 55mpg than it is at 65. So don’t go faster than 55mpg unless I need to and I don’t ever go faster than 65.  But for different cars, there are different efficiency levels.  Whatever car you own, you can probably drive it more efficiently than you do today and you can learn a lot about that through some simple research.


• Paying More Up Front for Better Appliances
  I’m fortunate in that I have the resources to do this.  I understand that a lot of people don’t.  But for those that can, there’s a significant difference between sticker price and cost.  Buying energy-efficient appliances makes good sense from both an earth and an economic sense down the line.  So why not offer low-interest loans or tax rebates so more people can buy things that, in the long run, will be cheaper for them?

None of these are rocket science; they’re simple steps that can be done in small increments.  You don’t have to compost everything you can.  You can make it a small project, composting the easy stuff, which at least reduces waste.  You don’t have to buy everything local.  But you can commit to having one day a week where all your food comes from local resources.  You don’t have to drive slow all the time.  But you can drive at the speed which is best for your vehicle when you have the opportunity to do so.

But in the meantime, though these are good personal steps, they’re small steps and, as individuals, we can only go so far with this.  With so much of our energy being through large-scale industrial facilities, how can we compete with this?

The simple answer is that we can’t compete with it, but we can influence change and we have to do it by demanding more from our government, our corporations and our people.  We can’t stay silent about this, nor can we expect that merely changing ourselves is sufficient.

We’ve got to make changes, and a lot of those changes have to be mandated through law if they’re going to stick.  Changes like Manure Power:

Four Vermont farms will soon be producing electricity from cow manure with the help of Central Vermont Public Service Corp… Farms in Sheldon, Fairlee, West Pawlet and St. Albans will receive the grants from the CVPS Renewable Development Fund, established in 2004 to encourage farmers to develop new renewable generation and provide new manure management options through Cow Power.

It gets better.  According to CVPS President Robert Young, “these grants will help develop 8,400 megawatt-hours of clean renewable energy right here in Vermont… enough energy to supply 1,395 average homes using 500 kwh per month.”

This isn’t science fiction.  This is real.  It’s happening right now, but we need to take it a step further: don’t just award grants for this.  Make it a requirement that farms above a certain production level give back to their communities by using manure power for their operations.  If it’s true that cows contribute to global warming then it’s perfectly reasonable to expect large-scale farms to support anti-global warming efforts.

What if you don’t live in an agricultural state?  Where might you find better energy resources there?  I’ve written before about people power.  I’m not talking about people powered political movements.  I’m talking literally about energy derived from the day to day activities of individuals:

The band takes center stage, the fans surge forward and the sheer power of the crowd’s excitement amplifies the sound of their favorite songs – providing enough energy, in fact, to move a train… The Crowd Farm, a conceptual design by two graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology… seeks to milk the mechanical movement of hundreds or thousands of assembled people to produce electrical power… the students have shown how the simple act of sitting on a stool can generate enough power to turn on four LED lights.

Think about what this could mean: roads designed to harness the power of the vehicles that move across them; sidewalks designed to power the town’s lighting system.  Even without this technology we have playgrounds designed to power water systems.  Can you imagine if we combined this technology with such playgrounds?  What if basketball stadiums were designed to work with the power of the people and the players?  What if assembly lines used the movement of their workers to help power the belt?  What if the movement of people through lobbies powered the elevators?  What if those great big buildings with the huge glass atriums combined solar power and human power to provide resources for their energy?  What if we combined those with small, rooftop-based windmills, to add supplemental energy into the system?

What if all these systems generated more power than they needed?  What if they could sell the excess energy at floor-based charging systems to anyone who wanted to power their phone, their iPod, their electric car or anything else that needed a quick charge? Think about what that could do for our economy?

And what if we provided federal grants for the research and development of these systems?  Wouldn’t that fall under the sort of option that would dramatically improve national security?

What if we started to produce portable solar generators that we could use to power our own electronic devices?  Oh wait, we already do.

In the last week, filmgeek83 posted a Daily Kos Diary about a Yahoo News story —  New technique creates cheap, abundant hydrogen:

US researchers have developed… a way to cheaply and efficiently generate hydrogen gas from readily available and renewable biomass such as cellulose or glucose, and could be used for powering vehicles, making fertilizer and treating drinking water… their reactor generated hydrogen gas at nearly 99 percent of the theoretical maximum yield using aetic acid, a common dead-end product of glucose fermentation.

I’m not a scientist.  I don’t have the technical background to know all the details behind the exact process behind this.  But I can do math and I understand the basics.  I can look at our choices and see that there is no future in an oil based economy.  I can read and learn and understand that there are things that I can do better, but we need this tackled on a grand scale to make a significant difference.

I don’t know that it’s not too late to change the things we need to change, but I have to live as though we still have meaningful choices, both as individuals and as a nation.

Sure.  We can talk about when the oil runs out.  We can talk about what’s going to happen in the future.  And we can say it’s a long way off, and worry about what’s going to happen when it finally arrives.

But what if we took the lead?  What if we decided here and now that we’re not going to wait for the oil to run out?  What if we decided today that it was time that we stopped treating oil like a necessity and started treating it like the last resort?  What if we decided today that it’s better to invest in safe, renewable energy as though the oil were going to run out next month rather than next century?

We can do this.  We have the resources to do it.  We have the genius to do it.

We only need the will.

This morning, I found the following piece in the  Brattleboro Reformer:

The Douglas administration has long resisted public calls for an ISA of Vermont Yankee, most recently made by the state’s Congressional delegation. But O’Brien indicated Tuesday night that the NRC’s standard oversight process is insufficient, noting that several recent events at the plant had diminished the public’s confidence in its safety and the adequacy of its oversight.

“The governor basically has asked me to work very closely with the congressional delegation to come up with an independent safety assessment that we can all be confident in — that will answer the sort of questions that are being asked about Vermont Yankee,” he said. “I think we make decisions based on the circumstances we’re in and the facts we’re looking at. From the governor’s perspective, he’s not comfortable right now, especially after the past six months — with the cooling tower failure and the valve failure.”

For years, we’ve been fighting for this independent review, and the Governor’s been resisting it.  This is how, even when a Republican’s at the helm, a small group of people can make a serious difference.

I don’t have a lot of time today, so I’ll make this short, but change doesn’t just happen at random.  It happens through concentrated effort and serious intent.

If it hadn’t been for continued pressure to keep the issues about VT Yankee in the light, this might never have happened, but activism and change are about multi-strategy approach: you keep pressure up and spread the word while waiting for the right opportunity to make use of your message.

That opportunity has come repeatedly.  Per a post on Green Mountain Daily from August 2007:

in 2003, Entergy’s Vermont Yankee had to shutdown as a result of a blown recirculation pump seal.
In 2003, Entergy’s Vermont Yankee was fined $51,000 for withholding information from NEC and attempting to impeach an NEC witness
In 2004, Entergy’s Vermont Yankee was fined %82,000 for trying to build a new “temporary” building at VY without permits
In 2005, Entergy’s Vermont Yankee lost nuclear fuel
In 2006, Entergy’s Vermont Yankee had a transformer fire as a result of the uprate
In 2006, Entergy’s Vermont Yankee had an electrical fire in an overheated wire to a condensate pump that now was drawing extra amperage as a result of the uprate
In 2006, Entergy sent a truck containing highly contaminated nuclear equipment to Pennsylvania without noticing the contamination.
In 2007, Entergy’s Vermont Yankee had more than twenty new cracks in its steam dryer as a result of the uprate
In 2007, Entergy’s Vermont Yankee collapsed three cooling tower cells as a result of the uprate
Throughout the entire time period, there have been numerous failures involving emergency planning, but they are too numerous to count.

Thorough all this time, Gov. Douglas has stuck to his nuclear-power guns very strongly.  Just a month ago, he was speaking an entirely different tune:

The bill would also strengthen the role of neighboring states on nuclear safety issues. It would allow, for example, the governor of New Hampshire to ask federal regulators for the independent study when the nearby Vermont Yankee seeks to extend its license for another 20 years.

But Governor Jim Douglas says he’s worried about allowing other states to get involved.
[…]
Douglas says the plant has delivered inexpensive power for decades, and is a major reason Vermont electricity rates are low. He says there’s a good chance that Yankee will be re-licensed for another 20 years, after its current license expires in 2012.

Think about that for a second.  Our Governor — scratch that — our Conservative Republican Governor who’s done nothing to support safety at VT Yankee during his tenure in office, has completely turned around on them.

It’s amazing what a few dramatic events in close proximity can do to activate people on an event.

If it hadn’t been for the dedicated work of activists for years, this existing pressure on Douglas might not have come and he might have been able to casually ignore the most recent incidents.  But a series of dramatic photos, combined with Yankee’s own workers being concerned about safety along with fairly constant pressure from groups opposed to the extension of VT Yankee’s license make for great press, especially with an election a year away.

This is good news.

This is really good news.

I’ve been playing guitar for more than two decades now.  I had classical training at a conservatory and used to play some fairly complicated classical guitar pieces. I also played jazz and blues.  My style is difficult to describe: eclectic and bizarre, but it’s often joyful and intriguing:

In previous entries in this series I’ve discussed a wide variety of topics, focusing most recently on creativity.  I’d like to continue with that concept of creativity, focusing more on music and how I use music to change and challenge perspectives.
 

But first, a quick note about the video.  I used a low-end digital camera (hence the poor sound quality) to record the video clip shown.  It’s a simple project: clamp a tripod to the guitar’s head and point it down the neck and then improvise something.  Then, use the magic of youTube and there you have it.  I get lots of compliments over this from people but I want to make it clear that this was ridiculously easy to do.  Most contemporary digital cameras can pull this sort of thing off and clap tripods are cheap.  I only mention this as one of hundreds of ways you can do something different and/or unusual that catches attention.

So let me tell you a story:

Way back in the last century (ok, 1999) I was diagnosed with diabetes.  This comes with many side effects; some are benign and some are fairly unpleasant.  One of the more benign side effects is that my fingernails are not nearly as strong as they used to be.  If you know anything about classical guitar, you know that fingernails are an absolute requirement.  You can’t be a classical guitar player without having fingernails.  I’ve tried fake fingernails or other types of extenders and the net effect of those is that they damage what’s left of my fingernails even further.

In short: diabetes killed my capacity for classical guitar.  I can still do some fingerstyle work, but not to nearly the capacity I used to do and without any serious ability to project, at least not on guitar; banjo is an entirely different story.  I still play that extremely well and don’t need fingernails to project.  But traditional classical guitar?  Done.  Finis.

If you’ve been reading my diaries you’ve probably figured out that I’m not someone who gives up easily.  It took me some time to sort this out, but I did have experience with flatpicking prior to the diabetes and even though my primary guitar technique involved fingerpicking, I knew how to flatpick fairly well.

So I went whole hog into using the pick.

But I took it a step further, with a step that was inspired by an amazing performer by the name of Pamela Means.  I got to see Pamela perform in Greenfield, MA, in a fairly small room, from a table very near the show.  I realized that she was using capos, but they were partial capos.

Be warned– I’m going to get geeky for a moment.

Hmm.  Never mind.  That seems unwise.  If you want to see the geeky explanation, I have a web site devoted to capo architecture.

Suffice it to say that Pamela’s unusual technique was something I’d never seen before and never considered.  She used capos in ways that allowed for variations in tunings and phrasings that were a revelation to me.

And I had to learn more.

So I did some thinking and actually figured out how to create a partial capo of my own and started experimenting with it.

Now, let me explain something: in the ten years prior to this event, I had been playing guitar, and playing it quite well, but had not grown as a musician.  I’d been practicing, definitely and I learned new pieces during this period, but I didn’t find my style, my technique, etc. changing.  It was certainly improved upon over those ten years.  I was a little faster.  My playing was more fluid.  My hands were a little stronger.  But I was still doing the same sort of thing I’d been doing for the previous decade.

So when I say that the addition of the partial capo changed things for me, I do not mean it made things a little different.  I mean it completely and utterly transformed my approach to the instrument.  This guitar, this six-stringed wonder that had been so familiar and routine for me suddenly exploded in sounds I didn’t realize it could make.  I was composing like crazy; seriously, new ideas were coming to me faster than I could take them all in.  In that first year, I created about three hours worth of music that I could draw from in performances.  I don’t mean three hours worth of similar or redundant material.  I mean three hours of music, with each piece differing dramatically from the other.  Simple pieces, complex pieces.  Jazz; blues; folk; contemporary; classical.  It was like the instrument was all new to me again.

I was using phrasings and configurations I’d never even considered before and the music came out in great waves of inspiration.

I’m going to stop for a moment to explain something: in music, there are only so many notes and only so many ways you can combine them.  And no matter how inventive or creative you are, you eventually run out of things you can, as a musician, can create that’s truly new.

But sometimes it only takes one new thing: the Dave Brubeck quartet performing “Take Five.”  U2 Performing “Sunday Bloody Sunday.”  Django performing “Minor Swing.”  Beethoven using the bass as a melodic instrument.

And for me, this isn’t about becoming known as a musician or famous, etc., or even making money from it.  It’s just the joy of the dance.  Once I learned to separate the income and recognition from the music, my music got a lot better.  Now, for me, it’s just a lot of FUN.

But what’s truly important for me is that I can go to pretty much any open mike I’ve ever been to, walk up there and not explain a damned thing about what I’m about to do and just do it and have people hear it and say “wow.”

This is not a path Pamela Means intended to take me on.  Indeed, she probably does not know who I am.  We met briefly after one of her shows and I told her how much I loved the partial capo technique and how I’d created some of my own and thanked her for the inspiration, but that’s it.  She wouldn’t know just how much it meant to me, nor would I expect her to.  And I don’t know how many other people I inspire.  It could be one.  It could be twenty.  It could be zero.  But I put out good works and do my best with them and hope.  And sometimes the best I can hope for is to have a lot of fun doing it all.

And as much as I enjoy photography and writing, there is absolutely nothing that compares to going into a noisy bar, playing something completely unexpected and halfway through the piece realizing that all these people who were talking loudly had just stopped their conversation to listen to whatever crazy thing you’re doing up there.

I speak in public as part of my trade.  When in front of an audience, people are expected to listen and at least pretend to pay attention.  They’re generally there when they’ve paid to be so (when I teach) or when they need something from me (when I do tech training).  When I’m in a bar, no one’s got any obligation at all.  When they choose to turn attention to me as a musician, it’s their own intent to do so and done through desire and not necessity.  As Joshua Bell recently discovered, this isn’t an easy thing:

Each passerby had a quick choice to make, one familiar to commuters in any urban area where the occasional street performer is part of the cityscape: Do you stop and listen? Do you hurry past with a blend of guilt and irritation, aware of your cupidity but annoyed by the unbidden demand on your time and your wallet? Do you throw in a buck, just to be polite? Does your decision change if he’s really bad? What if he’s really good? Do you have time for beauty? Shouldn’t you? What’s the moral mathematics of the moment?

On that Friday in January, those private questions would be answered in an unusually public way. No one knew it, but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made. His performance was arranged by The Washington Post as an experiment in context, perception and priorities — as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?

(When you’re done reading this diary,  go read the whole piece.  You will not be sorry.)

I want to explain this in no uncertain terms: to be able to get up in front of a group of people to inspire them isn’t just fun.  To say it’s a “gift” is a massive understatement.  It’s one of the things that gives my life meaning.

So how do I tie that all into activism?

It’s easier than you might think.

A friend of mine does a radio show called “Sometimes Live.”  It’s a simple show.  Two hours, once a week, including a discussion with local musicians and live performances. 

And the thing is, she’s very good at this.  She’s a vocalist, so she knows enough about music to have good conversations with musicians, but she also has a knack for interviewing people and her shows are a treat to listen to.  Her skills aren’t technical.  She’s just good at this.  So she does it.  For free.  Without expecting to ever get paid for it.

It’s not easy to produce a radio show, but it’s something she’s dedicated to doing because it promotes local artists and supports their work.  And, I suspect, it’s probably a lot of fun for her to do.

Think about how many lives are enriched through such a simple thing: taking one night a week to have a conversation and have people play good music.  It benefits the musicians.  We get free publicity.  It enriches the audience: they get to hear people they don’t normally hear.  It benefits the community:  it generates attention for local radio.

And it’s very straightforward.

How many of you live someplace with a community-based radio station?  How many of you live someplace with public access television?  These are tremendous resources.  You can use their equipment to film something inventive, produce it, with no cost to you other than your time, and just DO it.

Then you can put it on youTube and share it with all of us.

Never let anyone tell you that creativity can’t transform the world.  When you engage in creative pursuits, you change the world by changing you.

Back to the diabetes.

The diabetes was personally devastating.  It didn’t just affect my music.  It affected a great many other aspects of my life.  But it also transformed me and how it transformed my music was profound.  I don’t know that I ever would have been pushed to the creative explosion I experienced without having my ability to play challenged in the first place.  I don’t know that I would have become such an advocate for universal health care without the diabetes being a continual backdrop to my experience.

So I take this experience, this tragedy, and find ways to change it into something uplifting and profound.

And when I perform, I sometimes tell this story: about change, about transition, about transformation.  I don’t tell people “and this is why you need to fight for universal health care” because that shuts them out of the discussion.  I just tell them my story and give them the opportunity to draw the right connections.

So here I am, ostensibly someone with no power whatsoever: a short, fat, queer, diabetic who is easily ignored.  So I use what talents I have: music, photography, an innate stubbornness and a belief in myself as being awesome enough to have something relevant to say.  So I just do it. 

I’m not courageous.  If I thought this would cost me my job, I wouldn’t do it.  If I thought it would endanger me to talk about health issues or same-sex marriage or anything else, I’d probably back away or, at the very least, discuss everything using a pseudonym.  But I’m incredibly lucky: I support myself through contract work and that contract work isn’t going to go away based on my politics.  Not everyone can say that.

So I just do what I know and understand and love and enjoy and hope it makes a dent in things.  And I don’t know that it will.  For all I know, it probably won’t.  But art’s important to me and understanding that art benefits a community is important for me.  And because I’m one of the lucky ones, I can arrange performances without worrying about the money or the ticket sales, etc.  I just do what seems to be right and go with it.

And maybe I’m changing the world.  And maybe I’m not.

But I know I’m changing me.

And I’m doing my best to bring the rest of the world with me, whether you all know it or not.  And I’m doing it through something really simple:

I’m having fun and I’m doing it in public.

Sometimes you get taken by surprise.



I was in Bellows Falls tonight to do a gig and saw a sign that said “special event tonight: expect delays.” Nothing was happening in town, but when I parked and got out of the car, I heard drums. I set up the camera and realized that there was a Veteran’s Day parade coming through, so I grabbed a few photographs. Night photography is tricky work, and not everything comes out as expected, but I particularly like the two shots I’ve included in this post. The first is of the parade itself. You can see the ghost flags as part of the shot.



The second picture is what followed after:
when the march ended, there was a ceremony to dispose of old flags that were no longer of use. I’d never seen one of these ceremonies before and I found it profoundly moving. All the participants were clearly veterans or family members of veterans. I couldn’t tell you the words they spoke during the ceremony; I wasn’t even paying attention to the language as much as just the raw feeling of it.



But what the feeling boiled down to, at least for me, is that there was a point in my life where my country meant a lot more than it does today, that there was something profound and meaningful about the flag.



I remember thinking I lived in the greatest country in the world. I’m not stupid. I know some of that was an illusion. But I always thought that we tried, even though we didn’t always do it the best we could, to do what was right. I always thought that we lived in a country where people could make big changes by the power of their purse and the power of their vote.



Today, I find myself regretfully embarrassed by how our flag and our love of country have been used and abused by some in our government and how easily we allowed them to appropriate a symbol that was meant for everyone; how easily we allowed them to steal our love of country and turn it into something profane and disgusting.



I don’t know about you, but I want my country back. I want to stop being repulsed by what’s being done in our name and I want to find a way to move beyond treating the military as a political football.



I know that, as a country, we’ve done some horrendous things in the past.



But we’re better than this. We’re better than torture. We’re better than illegal wiretapping. We’re better than the occupation of Iraq.



We’re better than the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. We’re better than the treatment of the Jena Six.



We’re better than a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. We’re better than drilling for oil in Alaska. We’re better than refusing to let people help clean up toxic waste in California.



We’re better than stolen elections. We’re better than the Supreme Court intervening to appoint our President. We’re better than pardoning Scooter Libby and we’re better than outing Valerie Plame.



We have to be.



Or what the hell’s the point of even pretending to be a Democracy any longer?

This is part of an ongoing series I’ve been posting over at Daily Kos that I thought might be interesting to post here as well –Julie

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Sometimes it’s complicated to talk about creativity in terms specifically of activism.  So today I’m going to talk a bit about creativity of other sorts: artistic inventiveness, creativity and exploration, with a nod towards the end about how it applies to activism and political work.

But first, about the picture.  There is no Photoshop effect at work here.  This is a light sculpture (see Eric Staller’s work for the original concept of light sculptures– the man’s a genius) which I created through a fairly simple process using long exposure shutter work.  For technical explanations of long exposure work, I’ve written two pieces, one for digital SLRs and another for non-digital SLRs.  The much shorter explanation is that you set the camera up in very dark settings and leave the shutter open for a long time, allowing the light that hits the camera’s film to take prime focus in the frame.

In this case, I was in a parking lot that had very little light surrounding it and pulled out a couple of those glow-sticks you see people selling at fireworks displays and similar events (believe it or not, I keep some in my trunk for just such an occasion).  I moved them into different positions, would hold them there for a moment to get the exposure, and then move them again.  First I did them around my head, curving them, and then straightened them out to do form the lattice work grids.

My intent is to do a lot more of this, using all sorts of light sources: sparklers, torches, light-up toys.  There are tons of possibilities here and lots of room for experimentation.  Winter is perfect for this: when the nights are long, the darkness is my friend for this sort of shot.

So how does this apply to politics & political movements? 

Read on…

There’s a concept I teach my students called “functional fixedness.”  The idea is that we often think of what we’ve got in front of us as being fixed and rigid in its purpose.  A butter knife is for a specific set of tasks, but when you find yourself without a screwdriver, it might do in a pinch.  A lot of us simply don’t think of this, because we don’t think beyond the obvious.  Realizing that I could use a camera to take pictures not only of what’s there at the time I click the shutter and what’s going to be there ten seconds later has transformed my sense of what photography is.  My camera is no longer a way to document and capture moments.  It’s a way to render the passage of time; not through animating images but instead through capturing the whole path of light, and the way that light reflects off of mist, and how that light curves and bends.

In the picture shown, I captured the same light source multiple times, in different positions.  You see very little of the movement of the light because it’s such a low-strength source that it wouldn’t capture it except when still for long enough to show up on the image.  In politics, we often can’t see the effect that what we’re doing is happening.  We don’t know how much of an impact we’ve had until we see the whole picture.  But with experience, we can get ideas as to what works and what doesn’t. 

With politics, however, our greatest enemy can be the expectation that comes with experience: not knowing how to move beyond expectations because we’re so used to them.  A variation on that functional fixedness keeps us from thinking of new and different ways to approach people about issues. 

And before I continue, I will explain that I fully admit to bias here: I’m personally oriented towards creativity and my willingness to expand my own ideas beyond the obvious is probably my primary survival skill.  For a living, I find ways to take complicated concepts and integrate them in fashions which make them clear to people who don’t need to fully understand them but need to understand the basics.  I’m one of the few people I know who can translate easily between geek and non-geek.

So for me, being creative is key to everything.  I’m drawn to works that challenge my assumptions and I’m drawn to works that inspire me to create new material.

So, to politics: as activists, we’re often stuck in a bad situation: we have numbers, but not nearly the resources of large, multi-national, corporations.  We can’t afford to launch high-profile PR campaigns and because we’re smart people who like to think, we don’t just fall into line with daily talking points, so it’s harder for us to get a coherent, specific, and simple message into the media meme the way that conservatives (who, preferring to just repeat the same talking points over and over again, because it presumably shouts out the screaming voices from deep inside the recesses of their blackened, dying souls) are able to do.

But here’s the thing: if we approach these problems with enough inventiveness and creativity, we don’t need to act like conservatives in order to get our messages out there.

Three years ago, global warming was viewed by the mainstream media as just a theory but it doesn’t take an advanced degree in climatology to realize that when “An Inconvenient Truth” came out, it really did change things for people.  It didn’t do this through just providing good, solid, information.  It did this through providing it in an creative and engaging fashion.

Think about that for a moment: people paid money to go see a lecture about climate change presented by a guy who, when he ran for President in 2000, was just not a particularly engaging presence on the campaign trail.  Don’t get me wrong: I like Gore, but prior to an Inconvenient Truth, I would never have thought I’d be able to sit through more than ten minutes of Gore speaking without falling asleep. 

It was creativity that took this presentation of his and turned it into something much bigger.  It was looking beyond the message itself and thinking about the delivery system that changed things.  Now we’ve got a transformed debate.  No one’s pretending its not real any longer.  We’ve got people pretending it’s not bad but now no one’s pretending it doesn’t happen. 

For me, what this boils down to is that we’ve got a lot of really smart, clever and sophisticated people on our side.  But we don’t use those skills well enough.  We write.  We argue.  We fume.  We seethe.  But what are we going to do that’s going to step outside of the comfort zone?  What are we going to do that draws attention to big issues in a way which engages people without scaring them off?

There aren’t easy answers to this but it does sometimes involve a lot of patience.  Daily Kos started small, and started primarily because Markos and his merry band of Orange Heathens were willing to speak truths that no one else was willing to do at the time.  They were representing a voice which was seldom heard at the time.  This separation from the norm helped garnish enough attention and power to be derisively attacked by Bill O’Reilly.  Admittedly, being attacked by O’Reilly is a low bar, but clearly he’s in some fashion threatened by ‘Kos.

And really, although I joke about it, it’s pretty amazing that this site has attracted some major attention from high-profile (even if insane) media figures.  It’s not because ‘Kos is backed by large finances or a strategic ad campaign.  It’s because ‘Kos set up something which gives people the ability and choice to contribute in whatever way they see fit and allows us the choices to promote, recommend and/or ignore whatever content we so desire.  We use it to get informed, to inform others, to share ideas and it’s free to use for those of us who don’t chose to purchase a subscription.

There’s something revolutionary about this that pushes it to a new level of creativity.  Anything we can place online we can include in Daily Kos.  Think about  the youTube video that Ms Laura posted which outlines the writers strike.  It’s simple.  It’s clear.  But it’s funny and clever.  And I know about it because of Daily Kos.

Back to art: how many of you viewed this diary because of the unusual photo on the preview?  I included partially to talk about art and creativity, but I also included it because I knew it was something most people don’t see every day and I knew it would intrigue some people.

This isn’t something surprising or original; I used a hook.  The only unusual part is that I’m not trying to sell anything.  I’m just trying share my own experience and hope that someone finds it useful.

I think, for me, it’s that I see so many people who are afraid of trying things that will make them look foolish– I see us all wanting to find ways to create change but not having the resources to do so.  We’re stressed out, tired, not sure where to turn and our representatives capitulate to the Bush administration too often. We try things and fail and we get discouraged.

All of this is valid and understandable.  But sometimes we try so hard against those brick walls without thinking that maybe we’re seeing a wall where it doesn’t exist or that it just doesn’t look like it really appears.  We push and get frustrated and discouraged and feel isolated.  We get lost in the morass of corruption and insider politics and don’t know how to break through to the people who are supposed to be representing us.

And we forget to give ourselves the room to look at problems in new light.  We forget to give ourselves the mental space to find new and creative ways to look at the world around us.  We get so caught up in the day to day struggles that we forget that so much change happens through art and exploration and that change happens in subtle ways that aren’t obvious on the surface.

Look at that picture again.  Each of those lines of light that appear in it took time.  No one watching me create that picture would have imagined what it would look like after the fact.  I wasn’t even sure myself.  I was experimenting.  And out of the two dozen experiments I tried that evening, that’s the only one I liked enough to post.  People watching would see me hold a light then move and then hold it somewhere else.  Over and over again.  People watching would probably think I’m a bit odd and have no idea what the hell I’m trying.  But that’s because you can’t see the big picture when you’re in the day to day struggle. 

So we work.  And learn.  And experiment.  And explore.  And sometimes it works.  But when you try to get a message across, and do so in a creative fashion, somewhere with someone it probably takes hold.  That makes the message more available to people the next time they hear it.  And then when it gets presented again in a different fashion from another venue, they’re a little more ready to hear it.  And again, they may not be ready to take it in yet.  It takes time. 

I will end this with a summary of a story that most of us know, to show just how presentation can change how it impacts our recollection of the story:

A work of fiction which was written, which has been presented as a musical, has shown up in many movies, has experienced many parodies on sitcoms, has appeared as multiple plays, including a one-man play in which Patrick Stewart plays every part:

When Scrooge was first visited by Marley, he was unable to take in what Marley had to say.

When he was visited by the Ghost of Christmas Past, he chose to ignore his history and did not want to hear it.  He left the better part of himself behind, unable to learn from his mistakes.

When he was visited by the Ghost of Christmas Present, he was affected, but not enough to influence change.  He still resisted.

When he was finally visited by the Ghost of Christmas Future, he was forced to come face to face with the direct consequences of his own behavior and his own choices.  It wasn’t until that path was drawn for him that the connections were made. 

What we’ve done that can not be changed.

What we’re doing now that we can change.

What will happen in the future should we refuse.

And what happens to others when they make the wrong choice.

Until we find ways to tie these messages together in ways that the rest of our country can understand, we’re still, as a nation, heading towards an abyss.  But we can influence the messages.  We can convey to our people that there is no question that waterboarding is torture.  We can communicate to our friends and colleagues that with our decisions on the environment come consequences that we’ll only escape by not surviving long enough to bear witness to them.

We can learn from our mistakes, but we have to be open to learning and we have to be open to finding new and unusual ways to communicate those mistakes to others and draw on the motivation that comes from wanting to change.

And when we harness that interest in change, we have to be ready to present real and meaningful alternatives.  In “An Inconvenient Truth” we were not just presented with information about the horrors of global warming.  We were presented with alternatives and things we can do right now to reduce the damage to the planet.  When we find creative ways to change our world, we also need to present ways that people can tap into that change and be part of the solution. 

What’s all this take?

Creativity.

In Cryptograms, every letter represents some other letter, and it’s consistent throughout the puzzle.  I.e., if you determine that the letter “A” represents the letter “X” at some point, it will represent the letter X throughout the entire puzzle.  In this case, I compiled a list of things that all have something in common.  The two word phrase at the top is the description of the list and each line has its own item for the list.

What is this a list of?

LCPSZSYMP LMKZSIG:

• MFIKSYMW WMHS
• YCFFAWSGZ
• XIFCYKMZSY
• VKIIW
• SWXILIWXIWYI
• PMECK
• PSEIKMP
• PSEIKZMKSMW
• WMZAKMP PMN
• LCZ LMKZJ
• KIBCKF
• KILAEPSYMWG
• GCYSMPSGZ

I’m going to start by explaining this picture.  When I show people photos of fireworks, I often get asked how I manage to time the shots to get the fireworks just right.  This is because they’re under the impression that I wait until I see the perfect fireworks shot coming and trigger the camera at exactly the right moment.

That, of course, isn’t how it works.  This picture is one of dozens I took that same evening.  Some of them were excellent: crystal clarity and perfect motion, with the fireworks cascading through.  Most weren’t. 

I made errors.

I got many shots out of focus.

I didn’t leave the shutter open long enough. 

I left the shutter open too long.

Sometimes it works. 

Sometimes it doesn’t. 

But I’ve never tried shooting fireworks and failed to get a shot that I wanted to use.

But there’s still a trick to all of this.  This picture isn’t a quick exposure that I timed perfectly.  The shutter was open for about thirteen seconds.  I wasn’t trying to get the fireworks timed perfectly so I’d have them at the exact right time.  I started at the beginning, opened the shutter and waited for the blast to leave the base, fly into the air and do whatever it would do. 

That’s because even though I do make mistakes, I also know what I’m doing and have experience with this sort of photography.  But that’s not particularly meaningful if I won’t take risks from time to time as well.

So let’s talk about risk taking.

And experience.

And why you can make all sorts of mistakes and still come away from it proud of what you did.

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about Rosa Parks and how carefully planned the Montgomery Bus Boycott had planned, despite popular belief that it was a spontaneous uprising.  It was potential energy, waiting and ready to be made kinetic.  It was small movements of light that might seem imperceptible at first, that wouldn’t form a full picture at the the time viewed, but when seen as a whole paints a different picture.

When we build political movements it’s easy to treat them as though they are failures if they don’t meet their goal.  When Theresites created the Vichy Democrats blog, the site was dedicated to:

…exposing… and bringing… down… traitors to the Democratic Party, the Republican-lites, the lefty-neocons, the Iraq War apologists. The Vichy Dems.

This, obviously, didn’t quite happen.  And it’s easy to be discouraged by this, just as its easy to be discouraged by Democratic fecklessness.  When both Schumer and Feinstein agree that Mukasey should just as well be confirmed, it’s clear that traitorous Democrats still hold serious power.  When Schumer tries to scuttle the candidacy of an openly gay senate candidate against Elizabeth Dole, we’ve got a big problem.

And it looks, on the surface, like we’re losing the battle against the right-wing bush-supporting sychophants.  We haven’t made any obvious ground when it comes to ending the occupation of Iraq.  Bush has still, despite his 24% approval rating, managed to bully this Congress.  House leadership supports corrupt incumbents like Al Wynn and behaves badly towards those who ask about it.  We have Barney Frank dismissing the left-wing kooks who think that ENDA needs to be all-inclusive. 

But there’s a real change going on here.  We all felt in November of 2006.  Netroots candidates made significant progress in ways most of us didn’t think possible four years earlier.  But that was quickly deflated as it became clear that we weren’t going to be leaving Iraq anytime soon.  And, once again, we feel betrayed by those Democrats who aren’t as progressive as we’d like or by those who have been corrupted and co-opted by the party machine.

So we lose.  Again.

But here’s what I figured out, and it took me about 40 years to get this: winning and losing don’t matter. 

Let me say this again: winning and losing don’t matter.

And this is what Pelosi and Schumer don’t understand: they’ve been out of power for so long that they don’t know what it’s like to have power and to use it wisely.  So they focus all their energies towards holding onto that power.  So they don’t do anything about Iraq and they refuse to consider impeachment and they only bother to fight on issues like SCHIP when the country is over 70% behind them and refuse to take Bush on over the hard stuff.  They cave on FISA.  They decide that Mukasey is just fine even though he doesn’t think Waterboarding is necessarily torture.

So they don’t fight. 

They compromise.

They capitulate.

Because they think that the way to win the game is to hold on to power.  Even if you don’t use that power.  Even if you’re afraid of using that power because you think that if you use it, you’ll lose it.

Because here’s what’s really true about winning and losing: it doesn’t matter because fighting matters so much more.

What did Reid and Pelosi do as soon as Bush vetoed them on war funding?

They turned around and gave him the bill he wanted.

Rosa Parks didn’t even get noticed the first time she got arrested on a bus but she fought a great and enormous power because she felt a duty to do so.  She fought.  Not with force.  Not with destruction. 

Her weapons were quiet grace and peaceful resistance.

How do we, as activists, find our own way to create resistance to what we see in this world?  How do we find new ways to fight the injustices we see?  How do we battle the poverty of ideas that we see coming from our representatives?  How do we fight for better people in office, ones who will challenge any president who tries to justify torture and wiretapping, by any name?

How do we fight for representatives that will not capitulate to anyone who tries to justify long-term occupation of foreign lands?

And, more importantly, how do we stay in that fight without falling into despair?

We do it by looking at the long view. 

We do it by being prepared. 

We do it by knowing that what happens now is not nearly as important as what happens three or four years from now.

We do it by knowing that every change takes longer than we’d like and that just because we win some battles doesn’t mean we’ve won the war, but we continue to strive, to try, because if we don’t, we do fail.

So we fight.

And we try to see the big picture.

And it’s not always clear what it’s going to be.

And it might be something that just doesn’t work the way we’d hoped.

So we learn.

And we try something different.

We all lose at some point.  We all, in the end, will die. Some of us will die penniless and think of ourselves as failures. Some of us will die with modest wealth and look back on our lives as though we had some success.

But really, we all win at some point, too.  Every one of us has some moment that we can look back on and say “I can’t believe I did that.  That was so awesome!”  (if you really can’t say that, then you should really look at your life and think about what you need to do to change it, because you deserve a moment like that).

But the most important thing is that when you look back at your life, you don’t look at what you’ve acquired, thinking of your successes in terms of what you’ve earned and what you’ve gained.  Think about them in terms of what you’ve tried and what you’ve been willing to try even though you might fail.

So I’m going to ask questions I’ve asked before:

As an activist, what are you going to do this week that might change the world?

What are you going to do this year that scares you a little bit to do, but will be worth it in the long run?

What are you going to do that makes your community better?

What are you going to do that challenges an established power?

What are you going to try that’s likely to fail, and how long are you going to keep it up?

So… this is a basic algebra problem.  Solve for the variables and you can come up with the answer.  Once again, this is from my puzzle archive at Julie’s Puzzle Corner:

29A + x = 29D
AB + 2 = AD
5 + 7 = y
A + 1 = B
x + y = ?

Can you tell me what goes in the “?”

A couple notes:

• this is a simple algebra problem;
• there is a unique solution;the unique solution consists of a single number;
• simple is not the same as easy.

I wrote this in November of 2007, and posted it here at the time.  I’m reposting it because there’s so much in it that’s still relevant today, and little progress along these lines.  There’s a lot I could update here: newer information about gas prices; how the budget cuts have ended my long-term gainful employment and are causing serious problems throughout state government.  But I’m going to let this stand on its own and if I feel a need to update, I’ll do so in the comments.

Okay.

So.

Poverty.

Let me start by saying that, for a lot of people, it’s going to get worse.

I don’t mean it’s going to get worse before it gets better.

I don’t mean it’s going to get worse unless we elect a Democratic president.

I mean it’s going to get worse.

I’m not making a prediction here.

I’m just going with the odds.

What does this mean?

It’s simple.

On Tuesday night, I attended one of the many forums Vermont is holding around the state on childhood poverty.  There was a panel represented by a range of people, some of whom help distribute resources and some of whom are recipients of public assistance.  Doug Racine (whom, incidentally, I think should run for governor again, but I’ll talk about that in a whole other post) led the forum, discussing its goals as to reduce childhood poverty by 50% in Vermont over the next ten years.

And you know, I think we can do this.  When we put our minds to creative solutions, we can find ways to transform our world.  We can harness the power of children playing to run water pumps.  We’re very clever this way, and we’re capable of introducing great change.  And if we have the will, we can do it.

But in the meantime, many of us are struggling.  Gas prices are going up.  Medicine is getting more expensive.  Food is becoming more expensive and use of ethanol may make it worse.  The Water situation is not good.

And, really, most people do get by and manage, through various means, to tread water, for a good chunk of their lives.  But for each and every one of those people, it only takes one significant event to kick them hard in the gut and force them into the ream of requiring public support or some other form of assistance.

And really, even that’s a misnomer.  We all receive public assistance.  Do you use public roads without paying a toll?  Congratulations.  You’re on public assistance.  Are you using the internet right now?  (hint: the answer is “yes”).  You’re receiving a public benefit.  Yes.  Even if you’re paying for internet access, you’re still receiving a subsidized benefit.  Do you buy food with the hopes that it will be safe?  That’s because there are public officials who, in theory, regulate the production, storage and distribution of food.  That way, we don’t have to have a major salmonella breakout in order to find out that a company is using poor food practices.

These are public benefits for the public good.  When someone tells you that it’s wrong to take public benefits or that they’ve never had to receive any help from anyone and have made it all on their own, you know they’re either lying or completely self-deceptive.  We all receive public benefits.

From a financial standpoint, I’m doing reasonably well.  I have a savings account with a decent buffer and I have the resources to pay my rent for four months in advance at a time.  So I know that even if I were to lose a major client, I’d be fine for the immediate future and I have the skills and creativity that I could probably find work again long before my money were to run out.

One of the things I’ve learned in the last few years is that going from near poverty to a really nice income changes your perspective and changes your ability to allocate resources.  When it came to buying a new washing machine, I chose the best one I could find: it was more energy efficient and would last longer.  While other people end up getting washers which are more expensive in the long run, I can afford to buy one that’s more expensive up front but much cheaper over the next ten years.  Similarly, I could afford to buy a hybrid vehicle, meaning that while a lot of people I know are getting 25-35 mpg, I’m getting 45-55, making my fuel costs dramatically lower.

These options aren’t available to people without as many resources.

The way my insurance works, there’s an up front deductible.  I have to pay $1500 out of pocket before the insurance starts paying for everything and, when it comes to medicine, I still have to pay up front and then I get reimbursements down the line.  One of the medicines I’m required to take in order to prevent my diabetes from causing me long-term damage costs over $200/month.  I can afford that, especially knowing that I’ll get that money back.  When I accidentally lost a supply of medicine once (left it on top of my car and drove off.  Clever), it cost me $250 to replace it, and that was out of pocket.

When my car got broken into and much of my camera equipment was stolen, it ended up costing me over $1500 to replace, and insurance only reimbursed $500 of that.  The cost of repairing the broken window was below the deductible, so that came entirely out of my pocket.

So I’m out these chunks of money and they’re not painless, but they’re not debilitating either.

But I think about this, and how these events would have affected me when I was making less than $20k/year.  And really, the only reason I’ve got the work I have now is because I lucked into it.  I got hired for a short-term contract, which led to a long term contract, which led to other contracts.  One minor change in luck and this never would have happened.  I’d still be living near the poverty level and I’d be in that situation where I made too much money to receive health benefits but too little money to afford my own health care.  I’d be going on lower doses of medications in order to make them last longer, significantly affecting my long-term health and I’d have less control over my eating habits, opting for crap instead of good wholesome food, affecting my health once again and significantly impacting my quality of life.

This is the every day scenario for people in poverty.  You need a medication or you need food so you make your choices.  You need a car, so you find the clunker which constantly needs work and gets crappy mileage but it’s what you can afford, so you just never have the time to build up savings and every little thing that happens makes things worse.

If you add a child into the equation, it gets worse, just in terms of simple allocation of resources.

Now imagine that you’re not in poverty and that you have some means at your disposal, but you’re keeping afloat.  But you have to make choices.  Get the better health insurance or live in the better neighborhood.  Get the lower deductible for your car insurance or get the better school for your kids.

And you make choices the best you can, but then something happens.  It could be anything.  You’re laid off.  Your kid has diabetes.  Your or your spouse gets into an accident and needs four months of physical therapy.  Your house gets broken into.  Some of what you lose can be recovered but not all.

So you have to make more complicated choices and things get tighter.

And then gas prices go up and you have to decide between the really good job that pays better and comes with great benefits but costs you an extra $50/month for the commute or the crappy job that’s near where you live that doesn’t pay as well and doesn’t come benefits that are really as nice.

Or you’ve got a great job with great benefits and the company just decides that those benefits are too expensive.

And things get tighter.

Worse.

Sometimes we luck out.  Sometimes, in the midsts of all these difficult things, something gets better.  We luck into a new job.  We buy a lottery ticket and win $5k.  We inherit something from a wealthy relative we’d forgotten we had.

But, mostly, it just gets tighter.

And then, when we do need care, we go to the emergency room, because our insurance won’t provide for pre-screening.

And that’s more expensive.

For everybody.

So things get tighter.

For everybody.

And then there’s a drought in Georgia.  And Florida and Georgia fight over how to handle it because now they’re competing for precious resources.

And things get tighter.

For everybody.

So we’ve got this situation, with multiple levels of poverty causing multiple problems for people across the board.  We’ve got this squeezing out the poor and the middle class and, whether they understand it or not, it will eventually squeeze out all but the richest of us.  Those that have means which are so significant as to be almost untouchable will probably be generally fine, but even then won’t have a food supply which is necessarily safe. 

In the meantime, there are steps we can take that might not necessarily solve the problem but can, at the very least, help:

• Universal health care.  Until we’re willing to see to it that everyone is fully covered (regardless of citizenship or legal status), we risk immense problems.  Early screening and careful monitoring of health trends makes us safer as a country and as individuals.


• Loans and grants for community resource projects.  Providing resources to communities to build recycling centers, health clinics, composting systems and public transportation reduces strain on individual families and communities. 


• Creative energy systems.  Imagine what we could do if we used the motion of people walking on subway platforms to help power the subways themselves.  Imagine what we could do if we made a serious effort to invest in projects that find ways to take existing resources and make better use of them.


• Invest heavily in early education.  Research shows, time and time again, that early education is of immense benefit, not just to children, but to society as a whole.


• Get Over It.  People often seek public assistance when they don’t want to.  They receive social stigma for it.  They’re treated like dirt for doing so.  We need to start respecting that people who receive public assistance don’t want to be on public assistance and would avoid it if they could and just get them the help they need instead of constantly treating them like there’s something wrong with them that could be solved if they simply worked harder.

What are your ideas for what we can do to improve upon things?  How can we change our government, our people, our planet, to encourage true change that releases us from poverty?  Where do we go from here?

The quoted sections below are all from the Burlington Free Press or the Rutland Herald, reporting on the same-sex marriage commission’s hearing last night

Let’s start with the Free Press:

“A marriage license would deliver no more rights than a civil union license,” Greg Johnson told the Vermont Commission on Family Recognition and Protection. That marriage license wouldn’t unlock the 1,096 benefits that the federal government offers only to married men and women, he said. It’s also unlikely it would open doors in states other than the eight where Vermont civil unions currently receive some recognition.

I’ve heard this argument before. This argument is the same as the argument which pretends that global warming doesn’t exist. Don’t bother trying to reduce carbon emissions! It won’t help enough anyway. Why even bother? But really, this is about more than just what’s happening today. It’s about what’s right, what’s relevant and what’s worth doing.

Here’s Johnson again, as reported in the Herald:

Meanwhile, some states have taken upon themselves to either recognize or reject civil unions or same-sex marriage, Johnson said. Right now, eight states recognize Vermont’s civil unions as a marriage equivalent, he said, but more than 40 states have passed laws defining marriage as between one man and one woman.

This is a little misleading. While 40 states have laws defining marriage as between one man and one woman, Vermont is one of those states and not all those states have received constitutional challenges. It’s not clear from this extreme simplification of a complicated issue where the truth of the matter lies.

What’s more relevant, however, is even simpler. Having a two-tiered system in Vermont is wrong. Even if it produces no specific tangible benefits anywhere else in the country (it does, but I’ll get to that in a bit), it’s still right to lead on this. Vermont was the first to move towards Civil Unions. Vermont should be the first to take the step of being the first state in the union to move towards full marriage recognition without a court requirement.

Why should we do this?

Because we’re ready for it and it’s clear and obvious that there’s a need for it.

Let’s put it in simple terms. The Hearld reports on a comment by Peter Teachout from last night’s hearing:

But there are intangible differences between civil unions and traditional marriage, such as that marriage is more widely recognized as a union in the common culture, according to Teachout. The Vermont court did not address that in its 1999 ruling that led to civil unions, but same-sex couples do speak of feeling separate or unequal from heterosexual couples due to the distinction, he explained.

In Vermont, some legislators who supported civil unions lost their seats after that historic move. Two years later, Republicans lost their short-lived majority. Today, Republicans hold a fairly small minority in the legislature, with Democrats and Progressives holding a fairly impressive dominance. The political damage of civil unions was small and short-lived. Howard Dean, who signed the bill into law, was re-elected with a clear (though close) victory, exceeding the 50% necessary to avoid the election being moved to the legislator, against some blistering attacks from both the right (anti-civil-union Republican Ruth Dwyer) and the left (Progressive Party stalwart Anthony Pollina).

In Massachussetts, when the state legislature refused to take active steps to block court-mandated same-sex marriage, none of them, no one who came out directly in favor of same-sex marriage lost their seat.

I mention these two facts for very relevant reasons. The Free Press references Vermont Law School professor Michael Mello’s statement at the hearing:

“If the Vermont Legislature adopted gay marriage, the rest of the country and world would pay attention,” Mello said. Unlike in 2000, when the Legislature was under pressure from a court decision, a change now would signal something significant.

Civil unions changed the nature of our political dialogue. While they were once vehemently opposed by the right, when same-sex marriage was debated in Massachusetts they become the more conservative alternative to marriage. They became the fall-back right-wing position.

Vermont led, in a baby steps, the pathway to full equality. Now it’s time for Vermont to grow up and take responsibility for its earlier vote and replace it with full marriage equality.

Will it work in other states? Only a few, for the moment. This will change, over time. But, in the meantime, take this scenario: a same-sex couple is traveling with their kid in Wisconsin and there’s a car accident. The one member not incapacitated by the accident is the one who’s not biologically related to the child. So when the nurse asks if you’re a family member, what answer do you think will make the most sense? That nurse may not be legally obligated to let the conscious family member make decisions, but it’s a lot more likely that the nurse will recognize the relationship if the response is “we’re married” than if it’s “we have a civil union.”

This is real. It is tangible and it goes way beyond symbolic gestures.