364 Days

9 NOVEMBER, SAN FRANCISCO We are now less than a year from Election Day 2016. Voter turnouts in states east to west saw participation levels as low as 29%. 2014 statistics for young voters were atrocious; a California adult 24 or under was more likely to have been arrested. No nation can survive failing on buy-in at this scale without a military coup

– or becoming far more responsive to their young people’s growth needs.

If AIG is too big too fail, then America is too big to fail. We do not want to live in Hell (if the whole wide world’s “Po’Lease Man” keeled over). These are obviously serious decisions. We have to find the joys in cooking and parenthood and being a responsible representative of the kids and elders who call us family.

However, we are locking ourselves (read: American resources – people!) into truly garbage life paths by incarcerating rather than educating. It’s holding our growth and our progress – and our truly limitless potential – back. It’s job hunt lore that if you’ve done time, you have to lay it out right there in your work history. That’s a metric we need to take a hard look at. How many felons are we creating by carelessness in class size? What schools gave up on these kids? We’re not too busy for each other’s lives, you know that?

Our culture is transforming with us. Ultimately, the same daemon, Capitalism, which justified enslavement became a colorblind cashier for the black American’s dollar. Capitalism kept us at the Woolworth’s counter past Woolworth’s – once they stopped kicking us in the back of the head. This valuation of our time and lives is grinding too many of us up. Wars, untreated aggressiveness (the rise of ultraviolence), and leaving the learner mindset let us fool ourself into thinking “Sometimes, there’s not enough money for a school.”

We are discovering amazing insights about this earth, its life and our forms on a daily basis of late. We have to let true stuff, and truth, inhabit the space where we are building our lives together; what we build together won’t be propped up on anything false.