On Stopping Social Minimalism
Want to know how to stop Social Minimalism, the way we see people and things vis-à-vis their wealth or "position in life", or their value as in a granted favor or as a traded commodity, all to improve our own social position? Huh? You stand up when you see something wrong! When your conscious tells you you've just witnessed a violation of God's sacred scheme of things and it needs to be stopped.
Isn't that simple? It isn't easy though.
I learned that lesson from my father.
Admittedly we aren't all privileged enough to have poor, formally uneducated dads who are sticklers for people even pronouncing their name correctly, for gosh sakes! Bodines, the "i" pronounced hard as in to dine at a dinner table, have class, dad always said; Bodeens, as later portrayed by Jethro in the long running "Beverly Hillbillies" television show, were crude and often rude with a little empty headed arrogance thrown in to boot.
But being a stickler to such seemingly small things as name pronunciations was my dad.
And that's what it's going to take today to stop Social Minimalism dead in its tracks again, too, I'm becoming more and more convinced.
I remembered dad's lessons May 30 when CNN Heroes ran the story, "Crazy Turtle Woman transforms graveyard into maternity ward.
" She'd stopped her fellow villagers from slaughtering sea turtles just so they could make a buck or two with their shells or whatever.
From graveyards back to egg hatcheries, it is now! Her nonprofit group promoting turtle conservation in the Caribbean had been awarded a prize by the United Nations Environment Program for what she and her husband (and others they'd later enlisted) did to save an endangered turtle; too, convincing villagers to use the turtles for ecotourism has meant more sustainable income for the local residents.
What a win-win story! Dad was reared like so many others in the Depression when scraps were table blessings.
But bull-headed along the West Texas Red River region, he ran away from home early to escape what he always called a mean uncle who nearly beat him to death several times; and thus got little formal education.
Probably like these turtle people.
Then after the Army and WWII he and Mom had to raise four kids with him working as a paperhanger and housepainter; with him only having a 6th grade education.
Life was never easy in so much of what innocently then was routinely called "ways of the world.
" But he did have a name.
And as he saw it, that name--genetic or otherwise; particularly how it was pronounced and defended--defined the essence of mankind in this world and what will and won't be tolerated.
What a place to take a stand against what wrong in Life, those whose knew him scoffed! But this indifference to "what's right and what's wrong" was the same theme again this past May 29 in a New York Times op-ed column entitled "Holding on to Our Humanity" by Bob Herbert.
The same simple message: Stand up! Maybe the times, indeed, "they are a changing," as Bob Dylan and our old hippy generation use to sing.
Writing about atrocities, the killings of babies, widespread raping, wanton stealing by government forces, all the stories coming out of Darfur, Sudan, Herbert went back to such human basics as a person's civic duty to stand up against it.
Like the turtle people in the Caribbean..
About such plights, he quoted Eli Wiesel, Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor in a speech at the White House in 1999.
To avoid distasteful topics as killing turtles, Jews, killing babies--or, as even as the winter hearing by Texas Parks & Wildlife officials here in Presidio, TX, in the Big Bend region, over the plight of slaughtering burros in our own Big Bend State Park reminds us--it is always easier to lower your head and pretend not to see.
Or care.
Don't get involved, our insipid commercialism zealots have taught us.
Wiesel pointed out such non-actions can be catastrophic to the soul of a society.
Indifference to others "is what makes the human being inhuman.
" Furthermore, "...
not to respond to their plight...
is to exile them from human memory.
And in denying their humanity, we betray our own.
" I first ran across chunks of what I call this "minimalizing people" while reading such works as that of M.
P.
Baumgarter, a Rudgers sociology professor, who wrote of "moral minimalism" in The Moral Order of a Suburb (Oxford University Press, 1991); and the late Eric Siegel, America's great poet and educator and founder of Aesthetic Realism, who maintained our economy, based on using the work of many people for the financial gain of a relatively few through mostly single-focus investments, was flawed because of the contempt at its core--contempt being defined as the addition to self through the lessening of something else.
Well-intentioned governments and especially corporate America have been snagged for decades on this idea of "progress.
" But when challenged (or pinched) with world trade, for instance, to maintain and even bolster corporate profits through increased consumer spending, the government through Free Trade pacts allowed American workers to became expendable to overseas production.
What, overseas, you say? Workers in those poor countries? We have to compete with them? And the vagrancies and cruelties of the economic markets themselves were solely to determine who among us has value? That's not fair! Ah...
thus the weeds of Social Minimalism flourished and took over our lovely gardens.
Suddenly America's stability had been rocked; workers had become minimalized by someone who worked for $5 a day overseas and was happy to get it.
While here the spirits of many American workers and their families, and even their communities...
Gutted! Can we say about the apparent disinterested juggernaut of evil that is Social Minimalism what we said in the aftermath of the Civil War--gone with the wind? Hopefully not.
I cried especially about the turtles; I'm a "turtle freak.
" And think and move about as slow.
But dad would've called all these people who stood up some way to injustices "Bodines.
" Not Bodeens.
It validated his argument that innate goodness in each of us can overcome the seemingly impossible and help give new vitality to a distressed world--the spark of the divine assuring us, once again, that eventually Good trumps Evil.
Maybe, indeed, we've rounded the corner on the latest new millennium problems, folks, this news could very well mean.
Or at least we've chiseled out a stronger toehold on a new way of economic thinking.
That's worth a cheer and a comment.
In the Caribbean Suzan Lakhan Baptiste of Trinidad for almost 20 years dedicated her energy and emotions to beating back human predators, who used machetes to kill giant leatherback sea turtles as they lumbered ashore to lay their eggs on a beach near her home.
Locals called her the "crazy turtle woman"; the turtles were their income.
For 100 million years the leathernecks have roamed the world's oceans, but with man's overpopulation and a chronic buzz in the brain to feed his stomach and seemingly other insatiable money-spending, advertising-fed desires the slaughtering almost decimated the creatures.
Increasingly their meat, fins, and prized eggs disappeared into the senseless maelstrom of zealous commercialism.
Baptiste and her husband organized their group in 1990 and patrolled a six-mile stretch of beach during nesting seasons, even getting into physical fights with hunters.
Now Matura Beach is one of the largest leatherback nesting colonies in the world.
Dad, a hard-shell fundamentalist Baptist, had little respect for those who didn't respect things like this; or people who otherwise had an arrogant attitude toward God's life that seemed to give them the authority to override, neglect or abuse the sacred Ten Commandments (common-denominator rules in any religion we're to live by)--to circumvent them just because "there was something in it for them.
" This is the crux of Siegel's old contempt charge--hardset in corporate America for sure--but the softening of which by such groups as the Turtle People underlies what for many years I've considered this new, emerging Counter Social Minimalism thinking.
It's really going back to the old way of using spiritual morality in deciding to merit something.
To dad, whether or not that someone looking for "something for themself" was driving the national economy or the local job market, it made no difference; if "you were going to rob from Peter to pay Paul" it went against God's rule of decency.
"There's a right way and a wrong way of doing things," he always told us, even down to the smallest detail.
And making sure people knew how to pronounce our last name was one of them.
If we didn't politely or otherwise correct, we paid the price.
Pronouncing the Bodine with a hard "i" may sound...
Well, a bit trifling, yes.
But dad often got into scrapes over it; and he raised his kids to know the difference.
People, even friends, would kid him about it, of course.
A lowly housepainter? Faking pride? Wasn't pride to dad; it was a matter of being responsible.
He wasn't a Bodeen, he wanted you to know.
To dad, Bodines and Bodeens weren't just breeds apart but generations apart, in political, social and moral development; we recognized and feared the hand of God.
As with all of us, there are dormant traits that represent the best and worst in all people on earth, he would tell us.
But it's one's "constitution" in the face of a difficult situation that determines their true nature in society--the ethics and moral values showed ultimately in how they confront and solve financial, legal, personal or social problems.
And each person has a God-given responsibility to define that nature for others to see--whether it be with the turtles, as is in this case; Darfur, which we've yet to move on; or even with last winter's Big Bend burros, a practice of random, point-blank slaughter to protect what some considered a fragile eco-system.
That issue is still awaiting a permanent solution by the state.
But at least it was a practice those of us who got involved managed to temporary stop.
Shenanigans have got to be made public; that's how we do stop it.
Too often folks don't understand an uproar is how we show our humanity.
And, as dad always promised, taking one small step like that brings its rewards.
We all felt better, as humans, knowing we'd stopped something inhumane.
"Are you a Bodine, or are you a Bodeen?" I can still hear him demanding, standing angrily over me jabbing that index finger through the air as though it was a missile of logic burning brilliantly in some night sky.
"If you're a Bodeen, if you don't care about things, go ahead and sit on 'ya ass! Do nothing! "But if you're going to be a Bodine, if you refuse to be some crude hillbilly who doesn't care anything about hardly nothing, then 'ya gotta stand up! God is screaming at you for help, to act against something that's wrong! You've got to stand up!" Hallelujah to the Crazy Turtle Woman! And to those who helped her.
We're all better people because of it.
By A.
Daniel Bodine
Isn't that simple? It isn't easy though.
I learned that lesson from my father.
Admittedly we aren't all privileged enough to have poor, formally uneducated dads who are sticklers for people even pronouncing their name correctly, for gosh sakes! Bodines, the "i" pronounced hard as in to dine at a dinner table, have class, dad always said; Bodeens, as later portrayed by Jethro in the long running "Beverly Hillbillies" television show, were crude and often rude with a little empty headed arrogance thrown in to boot.
But being a stickler to such seemingly small things as name pronunciations was my dad.
And that's what it's going to take today to stop Social Minimalism dead in its tracks again, too, I'm becoming more and more convinced.
I remembered dad's lessons May 30 when CNN Heroes ran the story, "Crazy Turtle Woman transforms graveyard into maternity ward.
" She'd stopped her fellow villagers from slaughtering sea turtles just so they could make a buck or two with their shells or whatever.
From graveyards back to egg hatcheries, it is now! Her nonprofit group promoting turtle conservation in the Caribbean had been awarded a prize by the United Nations Environment Program for what she and her husband (and others they'd later enlisted) did to save an endangered turtle; too, convincing villagers to use the turtles for ecotourism has meant more sustainable income for the local residents.
What a win-win story! Dad was reared like so many others in the Depression when scraps were table blessings.
But bull-headed along the West Texas Red River region, he ran away from home early to escape what he always called a mean uncle who nearly beat him to death several times; and thus got little formal education.
Probably like these turtle people.
Then after the Army and WWII he and Mom had to raise four kids with him working as a paperhanger and housepainter; with him only having a 6th grade education.
Life was never easy in so much of what innocently then was routinely called "ways of the world.
" But he did have a name.
And as he saw it, that name--genetic or otherwise; particularly how it was pronounced and defended--defined the essence of mankind in this world and what will and won't be tolerated.
What a place to take a stand against what wrong in Life, those whose knew him scoffed! But this indifference to "what's right and what's wrong" was the same theme again this past May 29 in a New York Times op-ed column entitled "Holding on to Our Humanity" by Bob Herbert.
The same simple message: Stand up! Maybe the times, indeed, "they are a changing," as Bob Dylan and our old hippy generation use to sing.
Writing about atrocities, the killings of babies, widespread raping, wanton stealing by government forces, all the stories coming out of Darfur, Sudan, Herbert went back to such human basics as a person's civic duty to stand up against it.
Like the turtle people in the Caribbean..
About such plights, he quoted Eli Wiesel, Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor in a speech at the White House in 1999.
To avoid distasteful topics as killing turtles, Jews, killing babies--or, as even as the winter hearing by Texas Parks & Wildlife officials here in Presidio, TX, in the Big Bend region, over the plight of slaughtering burros in our own Big Bend State Park reminds us--it is always easier to lower your head and pretend not to see.
Or care.
Don't get involved, our insipid commercialism zealots have taught us.
Wiesel pointed out such non-actions can be catastrophic to the soul of a society.
Indifference to others "is what makes the human being inhuman.
" Furthermore, "...
not to respond to their plight...
is to exile them from human memory.
And in denying their humanity, we betray our own.
" I first ran across chunks of what I call this "minimalizing people" while reading such works as that of M.
P.
Baumgarter, a Rudgers sociology professor, who wrote of "moral minimalism" in The Moral Order of a Suburb (Oxford University Press, 1991); and the late Eric Siegel, America's great poet and educator and founder of Aesthetic Realism, who maintained our economy, based on using the work of many people for the financial gain of a relatively few through mostly single-focus investments, was flawed because of the contempt at its core--contempt being defined as the addition to self through the lessening of something else.
Well-intentioned governments and especially corporate America have been snagged for decades on this idea of "progress.
" But when challenged (or pinched) with world trade, for instance, to maintain and even bolster corporate profits through increased consumer spending, the government through Free Trade pacts allowed American workers to became expendable to overseas production.
What, overseas, you say? Workers in those poor countries? We have to compete with them? And the vagrancies and cruelties of the economic markets themselves were solely to determine who among us has value? That's not fair! Ah...
thus the weeds of Social Minimalism flourished and took over our lovely gardens.
Suddenly America's stability had been rocked; workers had become minimalized by someone who worked for $5 a day overseas and was happy to get it.
While here the spirits of many American workers and their families, and even their communities...
Gutted! Can we say about the apparent disinterested juggernaut of evil that is Social Minimalism what we said in the aftermath of the Civil War--gone with the wind? Hopefully not.
I cried especially about the turtles; I'm a "turtle freak.
" And think and move about as slow.
But dad would've called all these people who stood up some way to injustices "Bodines.
" Not Bodeens.
It validated his argument that innate goodness in each of us can overcome the seemingly impossible and help give new vitality to a distressed world--the spark of the divine assuring us, once again, that eventually Good trumps Evil.
Maybe, indeed, we've rounded the corner on the latest new millennium problems, folks, this news could very well mean.
Or at least we've chiseled out a stronger toehold on a new way of economic thinking.
That's worth a cheer and a comment.
In the Caribbean Suzan Lakhan Baptiste of Trinidad for almost 20 years dedicated her energy and emotions to beating back human predators, who used machetes to kill giant leatherback sea turtles as they lumbered ashore to lay their eggs on a beach near her home.
Locals called her the "crazy turtle woman"; the turtles were their income.
For 100 million years the leathernecks have roamed the world's oceans, but with man's overpopulation and a chronic buzz in the brain to feed his stomach and seemingly other insatiable money-spending, advertising-fed desires the slaughtering almost decimated the creatures.
Increasingly their meat, fins, and prized eggs disappeared into the senseless maelstrom of zealous commercialism.
Baptiste and her husband organized their group in 1990 and patrolled a six-mile stretch of beach during nesting seasons, even getting into physical fights with hunters.
Now Matura Beach is one of the largest leatherback nesting colonies in the world.
Dad, a hard-shell fundamentalist Baptist, had little respect for those who didn't respect things like this; or people who otherwise had an arrogant attitude toward God's life that seemed to give them the authority to override, neglect or abuse the sacred Ten Commandments (common-denominator rules in any religion we're to live by)--to circumvent them just because "there was something in it for them.
" This is the crux of Siegel's old contempt charge--hardset in corporate America for sure--but the softening of which by such groups as the Turtle People underlies what for many years I've considered this new, emerging Counter Social Minimalism thinking.
It's really going back to the old way of using spiritual morality in deciding to merit something.
To dad, whether or not that someone looking for "something for themself" was driving the national economy or the local job market, it made no difference; if "you were going to rob from Peter to pay Paul" it went against God's rule of decency.
"There's a right way and a wrong way of doing things," he always told us, even down to the smallest detail.
And making sure people knew how to pronounce our last name was one of them.
If we didn't politely or otherwise correct, we paid the price.
Pronouncing the Bodine with a hard "i" may sound...
Well, a bit trifling, yes.
But dad often got into scrapes over it; and he raised his kids to know the difference.
People, even friends, would kid him about it, of course.
A lowly housepainter? Faking pride? Wasn't pride to dad; it was a matter of being responsible.
He wasn't a Bodeen, he wanted you to know.
To dad, Bodines and Bodeens weren't just breeds apart but generations apart, in political, social and moral development; we recognized and feared the hand of God.
As with all of us, there are dormant traits that represent the best and worst in all people on earth, he would tell us.
But it's one's "constitution" in the face of a difficult situation that determines their true nature in society--the ethics and moral values showed ultimately in how they confront and solve financial, legal, personal or social problems.
And each person has a God-given responsibility to define that nature for others to see--whether it be with the turtles, as is in this case; Darfur, which we've yet to move on; or even with last winter's Big Bend burros, a practice of random, point-blank slaughter to protect what some considered a fragile eco-system.
That issue is still awaiting a permanent solution by the state.
But at least it was a practice those of us who got involved managed to temporary stop.
Shenanigans have got to be made public; that's how we do stop it.
Too often folks don't understand an uproar is how we show our humanity.
And, as dad always promised, taking one small step like that brings its rewards.
We all felt better, as humans, knowing we'd stopped something inhumane.
"Are you a Bodine, or are you a Bodeen?" I can still hear him demanding, standing angrily over me jabbing that index finger through the air as though it was a missile of logic burning brilliantly in some night sky.
"If you're a Bodeen, if you don't care about things, go ahead and sit on 'ya ass! Do nothing! "But if you're going to be a Bodine, if you refuse to be some crude hillbilly who doesn't care anything about hardly nothing, then 'ya gotta stand up! God is screaming at you for help, to act against something that's wrong! You've got to stand up!" Hallelujah to the Crazy Turtle Woman! And to those who helped her.
We're all better people because of it.
By A.
Daniel Bodine
