You are Cordially Incited to Activism:  Give it the boot, a kick to the curb…

Read this opinion if you want to bone up on a piece of highly questionable legislation that should get the boot.  MoveOn.org is all over it; they sent the following email asking for action, including a link to the Sierra Club in case an opinion is needed on this legislation.  I figured you might want to see another opinion besides that of a known environmentally-leaning organization, hence the link to the Twin Cities’ Pioneer Press opinion.

What is with this Administration?  Do they simply not understand the risks related to nuclear waste (there was a reason we outlawed reprocessing spent nuclear fuel, after all)?  Are they completely and totally about the oil?  Have they forgotten that corporations don’t vote, that people do?  Remind them by telling your Senators to oppose the Energy Policy Act.

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From MoveOn.org:

Dear MoveOn member,

Congress is now debating the Bush administration's energy bill -- a
bill that would increase our dependence on oil, not reduce it. 

The energy bill would also increase the risk of nuclear weapons
proliferation.

Last year, MoveOn members played a key role in stopping a terrible
energy bill.  This week, the Senate is considering a similar bill. 
Your Senators need to hear from you today.

The Senate energy bill would:
- Give more than $10 billion in tax breaks to the oil, coal, gas
   and nuclear industries;
- Raise new risks of nuclear weapons proliferation*;
- Fast-track oil and gas drilling on our wild lands and coasts;
- Fail to put America on the path toward clean, renewable energy;
- Repeal a major law protecting electricity consumers from
   California-style price gouging**;
- Worsen global warming.

The House has already passed an energy bill that's even worse -- for
example, the House bill would allow oil drilling in the Arctic National
Wildlife Refuge.  The Senate bill, if it passes, would be combined with
the House bill, so it would bring certain environmental disaster, while
exacerbating our national security challenges.

Please call your Senator(s) now.  Be sure the staff members know you're a constituent. 

Then urge your Senator(s) to:

  "Please OPPOSE the energy bill."
 
If you have time and inclination, you may also want to ask your Senator
to support these four amendments, which could help reduce the energy
bill's harmful impact:

  1. Please support the Bingaman-Jeffords amendment to require that
      America get 10% of its energy from renewable sources by 2020;
  2. Please support the Edwards amendment allowing states to maintain
      stricter clean-air requirements than the federal government.
  3. Please support the McCain-Lieberman amendment to cut global
      warming pollution.    
  4. Please support the Cantwell amendment to protect consumers from
      price gouging by big energy companies.

Please let us know you're calling, at:

http://www.moveon.org/callmade4.html?id=1550-3069701-ux57XUc8QhKdrtyJCXBQ7A

Senate Republican leader Bill Frist is pushing for a vote on the energy
bill by the end of this week.  Please make your call today.

Congress is about to go on recess, so this may be the last call we ask
you to make until September.  Thanks for all you do. 

Sincerely,

- Peter Schurman
  Executive Director
  MoveOn.org
  Tuesday, July 29th, 2003
 
P.S.: For more information on the energy bill, see:

  http://www.sierraclub.org/energy/bush_bill.asp

*: The bill raises new nuclear proliferation risks by reversing a ban
on reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel. The US banned this practice
during the Ford administration because of concerns that the separated
materials could be used to make nuclear weapons.  Now North Korea is
doing just that.  The Senate energy bill would to jump-start this
practice, training new scientists how to do it and creating the
technology to spread the capability. 

**: the Public Utilities Holding Company Act.

 

4:01:14 PM    comment []

DharmaSurfing:  A reunion

Over this past week I’ve had the chance to visit with one of my high school girlfriends.  We’ve stayed up too late and drunk too deeply, tackling the myriad problems of the world, bemoaning the fates that have fallen us, kvetched about politics, consoled ourselves that our mothers are still pains-in-the-neck and worse, that we’re becoming our mothers.  God help our poor children. <sigh>

Of course, we attempted to make ourselves feel better by swapping notes about our classmates.  Poor Mark, who used to cheat off my papers in literature class, now doomed to complete baldness and working in municipal servitude.  Or the swan-like beauty queen, held up to us as a paragon while we were yet lowly, scruffy ducklings, now struggling to hold together her third marriage.  For our classmates and us, very little turned out the way we might all have once expected; our roads were crooked, far from straight.

After catching up earlier in the week, we spent one whole evening on a massive download of everything I’ve been learning over the last several years – that there is more than meets the eye, that we are called, we are meant to do something unique in this life.  Each of us has a special package of gifts, which when used for greater good, will bring us bliss.  Yeah, hokey, isn’t it?  Particularly coming from me, known to be an enormous skeptic.  But I parallel some great philosophers in this belief.  Joseph Campbell said, "If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track, which has been there all the while waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living."

The problem, as I see it, is that we somehow get on the wrong path.  Other people’s missions cloud our own –for example, our family members beg us to join their business or perhaps their profession.  We miss the signposts or sometimes deliberate choose not to see them.  It’s part of the heroic journey each of us take to find that unique path, to return to it if lost, and make something of ourselves.

Many of us sleepwalk through life, unaware that there is anything save waking, dressing, commuting, working, eating, sleeping.  They dot their I’s and cross their T’s; they pay their taxes and water their lawns.  They make no waves, no ripples and quietly dissipate into nothingness from whence they came.  Or perhaps their lives are filled with unending strife, challenge after challenge – yet none of it wakes them to a greater realization that they are being pulled away toward outer pain and not towards inner peace.

At the end of our visit together, I wondered whether I’m finding my way, whether surfing the wild waves for my dharma is working out.  I think about it often, but I’m pretty certain I haven’t yet found my bliss; this week was a chance to revisit the signs, take another listen to the call in the distance, check the equipment for road wear.  I find myself wondering as I’ve talked this out with her whether my girlfriend will waken.  No, I think she was awake, so to speak, as she was eager for more information about this path of self-discovery.  But will she find her own path?  Did I unwittingly obliterate the sound of the faintly tinkling bell of her own dharma calling her?  Will we be able to talk about our personal bliss when we see each other next year?  Am I kidding myself that at this late date, yet another multiple of years from the end of our childhoods, that we can still find our dharma, our calling, our bliss?

My girlfriend was saddened that we didn’t have a class reunion this year; it’s one of THOSE years, when a reunion might well be expected.  Apparently there was no critical mass of interest among our classmates to have a reunion.  But I wonder whether we – she and I – were meant to have the reunion that we did have instead.

10:23:51 AM    comment []