What significance does Labor Day have for you? There is a spiritual teaching about rituals that requires one to: Make what is old new and make what what is new holy. Labor Day was an attempt to appease working people after a series of violent labor strikes. Unions improved the quality of life in this country and Labor Day became a Union celebration. As Unions lost their influence the holiday lost it's significance. The NY Times reported this week in a story about a reported rise in family income. Experts said the rise in income was mainly a reflection of an increase in the number of family members entering the workplace or working longer hours. Average wages for men and women actually declined for the third consecutive year. Take a minute, while you are enjoying your end of summer barbeque or concert, to reflect on what this holiday should mean today. How could you take what is old and make it more significant? Send us your thoughts.
Upcoming Event: ForTheGrandChildren will be sponsoring or participating in a special series of Awakening the Dreamer Symposiums. These symposiums are professionally produced by the Pachamama Alliance. They include videos from world leaders, deepening exercises and great conversations. The symposiums are designed to help awaken and inspire us to do what we have to do to change the dream of the modern world. A dream that is turning into a nightmare. The upcoming dates in Washington include September 29 at Edmonds Unitarian Church, October 27th in Bellingham, Wa., November25 at Temple Bnet Torah in Bellevue and December 1 at Trinity Methodist in Ballard. Please see our website Events Calendar for more information. Registration is now available for the Edmonds event at http://www.forthegrandchildren.org/calendar/2007/9. These symposiums are offered at many other locations around the country. See www.awakeningthedream.org.
We are often asked what 4TGC is all about. We have a simple but deep answer. We are about three things: (1) Remembering what matters most. (2) Taking actions to preserve what matters most. (3)Being willing to share with others what we are doing. Try and reflect for a moment what matters most to you and you will see how deep these steps can take you. This is where our name ForTheGrandChildren came from.
ON THE ENVIRONMENT: Steve Gersman wrote the following response to last weeks discussion about air travel. See http://www.forthegrandchildren.org/node/20. I always look forward to reading your emails. This one hit on a sensitive subject for me, one I have been struggling with for a time. Given that I have done as much as I can to green my home, my purchasing, etc., I am now about to buy a hybrid car. Still, the issue of air travel still dogs me. While there is no question that planes pollute the environment, that business can abuse business travel when alternatives are available, and that some vacations can be taken by car or train, cutting back air travel is a dilemma. I have a daughter in London, England. She is married and will likely one day have my first grandchild. How will I get to know that child and, for that matter, how will I see my daughter and son-in-law if we do not fly to see each other? What about not just the future of the grandchildren, but the future of families living so far apart, not just oversees but in the United States? Many people are working harder and longer thanks to Corporate America's family unfriendly drive for profits at all costs. Many employees may get no more than a week's vacation. Should they spend half of that driving across the country?
I am also very cognizant of several other facts. Many countries in the developing world depend almost entirely or else largely on tourism dollars to support their pitiful incomes. So do diplomats, missionaries, the Red Cross and other NGOs depend on air travel to do their good works. And, travel in general, opens minds, creates respect for "the other" and can lead to greater world understanding. There are many other reasons for air travel that are not frivolous.
I do believe that something must be done to make air travel less polluting, especially since it is growing so fast (currently less than 1% of all pollutants, but equivalent to 3% because of it's high altitude impact). And some progress is being made, from lower emission jets like the Boeing 787 to Virgin Atlantic's plans to test biofuels (That is is separate issue we can argue for hours). It's not good enough but like everything else in the global warming movement, it's a start. Replacing old planes with more efficient ones is much like people buying hybrids while their old cars are traded on the used car market, and we haven't solved that one yet.
Our Response: Thanks Steve for all that you are doing. The transportation questions and answers are complicated. Ed Brock sent us part of the answer from Bloomberg.Com news about an Austrian town that has reduced their carbon usage by 90%. http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109=aE4Zugflz_FA=home. Another reader challenged our statement last week that cars take more energy to produce than they will use in their lifetime. It seems that our statement was more controversial than we thought. The question has to do with the efficiency of the car. It is really important not to blame each other for our predicament. We all bought into the modern dream that technology was going to make everything wonderful and plentiful. We were not told how big the price was going to be. We made decisions about where to live based on the fact that we could always jump on a plane and visit our loved ones. We are all going to have to examine everything in our lives before this issue gets resolved. We hope to include on our website some good tools for helping that examination soon.
ON SOCIAL JUSTICE: There is a Talmudic Teaching that says if someone robs you then two crimes our committed and two corrective sentences must be administered. The thief is sentenced to work for you for a reasonable period of time in order to repay what he stole. But you are also guilty of the crime of permitting a society to exist that requires people to steal to survive. The punishment for you is that you must educate and rehabilitate the thief while he is living in your home. Compare that to our existing criminal justice system. What does it mean to live in a society that is so quick to punish and so slow to rehabilitate?
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The Joyful Future is the name we have chosen for our weekly newsletter and more in-depth periodic journal. This is Volume/issue 1.5. It will include news, teachings, event notifications of a national and local interest and much more. There will often be links to our website and there will be opportunities for members to respond in the form of blogs and forums. It is our way of communicating with our friends and supporters. Please visit our website at http://www.forthegrandchildren.org and consider joining us under JOIN and SUPPORT. We have archived prior issues of this newsletter under Resources/A Joyful Future. Let us know what you think and consider joining. And you can always unsubscribe to these emails by replying to them with unsubscribe in the subject line- but we hope you don't as we have big hopes for this work.
ForTheGrandchildren
Victor Bremson