The individual does not actually suffer less, but somehow, human beings —across cultures, ages groups and regions— appear to have an almost inborn tendency to convince themselves that the one who suffers with others is somehow safer. This is, of course, rarely true. While yes, a young boy might survive because his older sister goes without food, two young children in a population beset with pervasive, persistent scarcity or political disorder, may be at significantly heightened risk of violence, or even enslavement.

Others suggest the phenomenon of psychic numbing is more to do with some sort of instinctual calculation of the worth of one’s efforts. If one seeks to help one lone child, one’s actions seem able; if one seeks to send a small amount to help millions, one’s actions may seem less able, less capable of ‘making a difference’.

There is a theory that this might be related to a long “prehistoric” period —far longer than the period which we refer to as “recorded history”— in which smaller tribal bands were the organizing principle of human society. We can understand safety in numbers, but we can’t conceive of how sending a few dollars, or writing a letter, will in any way contribute to easing the suffering of millions of people. Biologically, this just doesn’t compute in a cerebral infrastructure organized around tribal society.

Yet there are alternatives: there is the theory of an informational tipping point. The lone photo, with no information and no statistics, will spark great compassion. Adding statistics or removing the photo, or naming numbers that run into the millions, will lessen the likelihood of compassion across a large population. But when enough information is given so that the reader/viewer can comprehend in intellectually resilient terms the scale of a tragic crisis, the real energy of compassion is again motivated, perhaps more effectively than by any other means.

Social networking has allowed people to share information and to make donations with an ease of effort and on a scale of cooperative endeavor never before possible. This may be helping to ease the transition away from generalized psychic numbing and toward generalized charitable predisposition, as social networking sites help to shrink the size of the planet to the biologically comprehensible “village” scale, familiarizing people with their counterparts across the world.

How much of a role is there for social networking in solving this problem? How much of the problem is about resistance to new information about crises of massive scale? How much is a crisis of imagination? And are there examples of how we can do or are doing better in any given case?

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The “Lobby Day” experience was part of the first annual CCL National Conference, in the nation’s capital. The landmark event brought together climate scientists, oceanographers, environmental engineers, economists, activists, community leaders, small business owners and concerned citizens, to deliver the message to members of both parties that citizens from the community, their own constituents, will support them if they take meaningful, comprehensive action to combat climate destabilization.

Citizens Climate Lobby is a national non-partisan, non-profit organization, working to organize citizen volunteers, by state, county or Congressional district, to lobby elected officials for a strong emissions reduction plan that will prevent catastrophic climate change and speed the transition to clean energy. The group aims to motivate political support, across the political spectrum, for a pragmatic approach to emissions reduction and to speeding the transition to clean energy.

The CCL strategy entails reaching out to all members of Congress, in both parties, regardless of their specific views or past staunch opposition to carbon-reduction legislation. The aim is to listen, to understand what specific elected officials and their constituencies most value and how they prioritize issues of energy and climate, and to work with them to help them achieve their goals in a way that is consistent with establishing a sustainable, responsible climate policy.

As part of the Citizens Climate Lobby myself, I can say it is integral to the organization’s mission to work to transition the United States from a legislative climate of full-time professional lobbyists to a new paradigm wherein ordinary citizens speaking for their communities and for the well-being and rights of future generations, are the preferred interlocutors for shaping the nation’s laws.

The conference was a three-day event, in conjunction with the RESULTS National Conference, from June 20 through 22, where citizen volunteer lobbyists gather to push Congress to act to combat poverty at home and around the world. Sunday and Monday were training and informational days, in which the CCL volunteers heard directly from established scientists presenting the latest science regarding climate destabilization and carbon emissions, and participated in workshops designed to prepare the teams for meetings with members of Congress and their staff.

The specific focus of Citizens Climate Lobby’s efforts on Capitol Hill is to promote proposed language for a fee/dividend approach to limiting and reducing carbon emissions and promoting the transition to a world-leading clean energy economy. The proposed legislation would:

1. fee: place a direct and steadily increasing (year on year) cost on CO2 at the point of entry into the economy (well, mine or port);
2. dividend: return 100% of revenues collected to the American people directly, an equal amount per capita to every household;
3. clean energy: set a price that will make renewables cheaper than fossil fuels within 10 years;
4. level playing field: apply a border adjustment to balance carbon pricing for products from nations that do nothing to increase cost of carbon emissions;
5. pollution: stop construction of all new coal-fired power plants and phase out all existing plants, starting with the dirtiest…

The plan is supported by Dr. James Hansen (NASA’s leading climate scientist), by numerous retired military leaders and by leading members of the faith community. It is designed to relocate the hidden costs of carbon-based fuels (‘negative externalities’, in economics-speak) from the citizen, the community and the small business, back to the interests that seek to profit from the resources that generate those negative externalities for which the rest of us pay.

The CCL approach is intended not to be punitive, but to be clear and transparent. It does not discriminate, and it does not in any way limit the freedom of carbon-based enterprises to join the clean energy revolution. Over time, as the cost of producing energy from carbon-based fuels goes up, investment will move toward clean energy resources, technology and infrastructure, which will allow private enterprise to profit more readily and more consistently than the more costly carbon-based alternative, with its tendency to extreme volatility in pricing.

This method allows citizens, communities and small businesses to pay for any increase in costs that might come from utilities or other industrial enterprises passing along carbon fee costs to the consumer, and to drive demand for a clean energy alternative. The plan allows the American people to build the clean energy future they would prefer, and to drive a new wave of investment in innovation and ingenuity to secure the nation’s energy independence and protect the natural environment against progressive global climate destabilization.

Having met with and listened to so many members of Congress and/or their climate and energy policy advisers, CCL has begun the process of working to find areas of mutual interest and shared principle that can build a fabric of common understanding and common interest between rival political parties, rival community interests, rival ideological camps and even rival industries, to forge the political will to achieve the clean energy revolution this nation needs for its future economic, environmental and military security.

• Originally published at TheHotSpring.net

Neither is there anything ideological about the allegiance of some to carbon-based fuels. The considerations are entirely practical on all sides, and we need to remember this as we try to find consensus on how to move forward, responsibly, as a civilization, in terms of our relationship to energy and the environment.

For some people in the political arena, it would appear to make more sense to continue to support carbon-based fuels as the primary resource for energy production, for a number of practical reasons, each of which can be refuted on practical grounds: 1) because those entities that profit from carbon-based fuels donate to one’s campaign; 2) because those entities that profit from carbon-based fuels “create jobs”; 3) because burning things to release energy is easier to understand than more advanced technologies.

There are real ideologically-rooted reasons why the passions can run so deep on either side: for environmentalists, it is morally unconscionable that we continue burning dirty fuels and eroding the natural systems on which all life depends, no matter the reasons; for the pro-petroleum segment of the political spectrum, there are patriotic roots, hearkening back to two world wars and the Cold War, with oil seen as a guarantor of security.

Oil is no longer that, and passions aside, thinking people have to acknowledge that the root of those passions is really practical and not ideological anyway. It makes practical sense to be good stewards of the environment on which we depend for everything that we have, and it was a practical consideration that linked industrial production and national security to the availability of carbon-based fuels.

But now, national security has become so closely linked to energy supply issues that we can no longer rely —again, in strictly practical terms— on a commodity as volatile, finite and problematic as petroleum. The costs to society are too great, whether we are talking about war-fighting —and war-funding, for that matter—, the loss of freedom in terms of shaping our foreign policy, costs in terms of human health or the destabilization of major climate systems.

And coal, while abundant in North America, is so dirty a resource that the environmental fallout alone makes it less than reasonable as a foundational resource for long-term future planning. There may come a time when carbon itself is a resource, required for its chemical properties, but not necessarily as useful as we now pretend, as a combustible fuel. Places where the coal industry has its roots may have to change focus or find technologically cutting-edge ways to justify the exploration for coal.

The reasons for this are hard to understand, if one starts from the assumption that there is something traditional or sacredly local or productive about coal. But if we step back and consider the real adaptability of human populations, we find that no community really needs the coal industry, having no chance of survival or prosperity in its absence, in the way the coal industry lobby pretends.

Communities are made up of human beings and are as adaptable as those human beings’ minds, hearts and relationships. The relationship to powerful coal interests is not always a happy one, and this alone can open doors for the development of resources that are more sustainable, more local-friendly, and respectful of future human need in ways that older technologies simply cannot be.

Even the coal industry itself could innovate, diversify, and find ways to turn its operations into major sources of clean renewable energy. At least three renewable resources come to mind: geothermal energy production, wind and solar. Mining companies in many cases own or lease land for which they have not yet devised a marketable use or long ago abandoned, and these can be converted to solar farms, wind farms or geothermal fields.

While international mining companies are outsourcing administrative jobs and moving to more “cost effective” mining sites overseas, some are beginning to use disused mining sites in the US to build part of the new clean-energy infrastructure. Across the southwest, such projects are already in development or being implemented. According to the Arizona Republic:

Both the Bureau of Land Management and Environmental Protection Agency are studying the potential to put renewable-energy projects on mines, landfills and other disturbed lands.

Mines can help avoid many of the expenses solar plants face on pristine desert, experts said, such as environmental rules that require relocating saguaros and other protected plants.

There is no reason why environmentalists seeking to promote clean energy and communities steeped in a long tradition of coal mining or oil drilling cannot come together, free of ideological constraints, to craft the solutions that will make the US a global leader in efficient, profitable, mass-produced clean energy. The ideology that claims this issue is one of ideology is simply a rhetorical framework that serves the interests of the most stagnant and unimaginative coal and oil interests.

Major oil producers could easily invest billions in renewable R&D and become global pioneers in the rush to achieve a fully self-sustaining clean-energy economy. Their resistance is perhaps more linked to a short-sighted ideological prejudice than to a lack of will to be part of the future, but they do not have any real ideological framework to back up their position, and the logic that favors a transition to renewables does not require one.

From a strictly economic standpoint, it does not make sense to continue being near totally reliant upon a way of doing business that carries the wildly exorbitant potential costs of an Ixtoc, an Exxon Valdez, Texaco in Ecuador, or a Deepwater Horizon disaster. If we want to be intelligent about how we achieve “energy independence”, we have to first assess and confront the real costs of doing business the way big oil does business.

It’s not a matter of “a tax on energy” or “a tax on carbon”, it’s a matter of making sure the responsible parties pay their share. Subsidies on an unprecedented scale, have made the oil business look and feel profitable in ways that it actually is not, when the health of the wider economy is considered. Were those wider costs built into the business itself, big oil would not be nearly as attractive an investment as it seemed to be until the Deepwater Horizon well blew out in April.

While an “ideology” that values the natural environment over the right of the oil industry to make profits may rejoice at the opportunity to use such a failure as BP has experienced in the Gulf of Mexico to make the case against oil, that does not make it any less true that BP had no responsible or credible action plan for dealing with an environmental catastrophe of this magnitude, despite deliberately doing everything necessary to bring about the catastrophe.

That such risks can be avoided with a transition to clean, renewable energy resources that do not require combustion and do not require oil or coal to achieve the efficiency gains they aim to achieve, is just as honestly not a matter of ideology. It’s the way it is. And science is now demonstrating that we can produce more than enough electricity, nationally, to power our entire domestic energy consumption through wind and solar alone, if we build the infrastructure.

At the point where the renewable energy infrastructure is pervasive and functional enough to outpace carbon-based fuels in total power generation capacity, there will be no question, practically speaking, whether or not renewables are a more effective method of promoting long-term economic health and prosperity. Where is the ideology inherent in planning for such a virtuous moment of future achievement?

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The law ignores the Constitutional ban on “unreasonable search” and protecting personal documents. It also seeks to establish state-level control over an area of law that is the domain of the federal government. There is, for instance, no Arizona customs service or national border service. The border is a federal category, and immigration is controlled, by law, by various federal agencies and the jurisprudence of federal law. There is language in the law that is reportedly designed to prevent the federal government from interfering with state enforcement.

In unmistakably relevant and meaningful language, the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution reads:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The president announced before the law was even signed by Arizona’s governor that he has directed the Justice Department’s civil rights division to investigate whether or not specific provisions of the Arizona law would violate federal or Constitutional civil rights protections. Numerous rights groups have said they plan to mount one or more legal challenges to the law. Constitutional scholars have begun to weigh in and some Arizona law enforcement officials have said they think it will place an unfair burden on police, and possibly take them outside their real scope of legal authority.

According to the New York Times:

Hispanics, in particular, who were not long ago courted by the Republican Party as a swing voting bloc, railed against the law as a recipe for racial and ethnic profiling. “Governor Brewer caved to the radical fringe,” a statement by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund said, predicting that the law would create “a spiral of pervasive fear, community distrust, increased crime and costly litigation, with nationwide repercussions.”

While police demands of documents are common on subways, highways and in public places in some countries, including France, Arizona is the first state to demand that immigrants meet federal requirements to carry identity documents legitimizing their presence on American soil.

For Americans who grew up during the Cold War era, the specter of totalitarian dictatorship was often represented, even in children’s cartoons, by the scene in which policemen stop people going about their daily routines, demanding “Your papers please!” There are organizing efforts going on to stage massive protests against the law, and to pressure other states to pledge not to take such action. The Miami Herald reports that a loose association of truckers traveling into or out of Arizona are planning to stage a trade boycott of the entire state.

There is also a spreading effort, across Arizona and other states, to mount a political challenge to the Republican domination of state politics, with nearly 30% of the population of Arizona being of Hispanic descent. NPR correspondent Ted Robbins reports that:

The things that are circumstantial are the fact that a larger than general portion of the Hispanic population in Arizona is under 18. So, of course, they can’t vote. And then there’s also a lot of folks who are in the country either legally or not legally, but they can’t vote because they’re not citizens yet. So, if you pair them away, what you have is 17 percent of eligible voters are Hispanic. That’s of the whole population. So they don’t, you can see that that halves the number of total Hispanics in the state. So the numbers belie their electoral power.

There is some question as to whether this law is taking place specifically because Republican party leaders in the state do not believe there is any substantial electoral risk from alienating the Hispanic voting population, which tends to lean Democratic to begin with. Gov. Jan Brewer (R-AZ) has sought to frame the legislation as an effort to fight back against “the murderous greed of drug cartels”, even as some fear the militant bandwagoning of prominent figures like Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), who has called for the deployment of thousands of US military personnel to the Mexican border.

The law is in some ways an expression of deep cultural paradoxes running through the rightward shift of the Republican party nationally. The anti-tax “tea party” movement has spent the better part of a year trying to oppose Pres. Obama and his agenda as a “socialist” takeover in which the government will take an egregiously authoritarian role in the private lives and economic choices of individuals, with little hint of any such possibility. But the same militant conservatism appears to be the impetus for this law, which establishes an unprecedented right for law enforcement to involve itself in people’s daily routines, with almost no adherence to Constitutional principles of due process.

That psychological conflict, inherent in the apparent radicalization of the Republican party and its public policy agenda, may ultimately be a serious problem for the party in terms of the arithmetic of general elections and of elections of national scope. It may also allow the Democratic party to rouse an under-involved political constituency whose personal, family and community interests, not to mention a committed belief in the value of American Constitutional ideals, and motivate a wave vote against such measures.

The legal challenge will likely come from three fronts. There will likely be a federal response, at least insofar as the Justice Department will seek to instruct Arizona state and municipal law enforcement that the jurisdictional scope of this legislation is, due to Constitutional provisions, far narrower than the governor and the law’s backers would like. There will also be a civil rights response, coming from one or more prominent and community-based organizations. And there may be a citizen-based response, in which individuals targeted by the law, or who fear they may be targeted for unequal treatment, will sue the state or law enforcement.

The LA Times reports:

Obama signaled that a legal showdown might be possible and that his administration would “examine the civil rights and other implications” of the law. Department of Justice officials said they “were reviewing the bill” but declined to discuss the legislation further. Immigrant rights groups have vowed a court fight, arguing that regulating immigration is a federal matter.

[...] Hundreds of high school students left classes this week in protest, pouring into the plaza outside the state Capitol and urging a veto. Religious leaders and police chiefs — and thousands of callers to the governor’s office — pressed for Brewer to reject the bill. Some Arizona officials argued it would stigmatize the state much as its past refusal to honor the birthday of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. U.S. Rep. Raul M. Grijalva, a Democrat who represents southern Arizona, called for a convention boycott of his own state.

The measure not only sets up a serious showdown over the nature of long-standing civil rights protections, and a genuine national crisis of identity over the degree to which police action and the daily activities of citizens might be in conflict, but it also challenges the historic openness of American society. The ideological movement behind this legislation favors sealing the southern border of the United States militarily, and the official establishment of what has been called in the past the “Fortress America” model of immigration enforcement.

This confrontational model is tempting to those who believe it will bring added security, especially in communities where a rise in levels of chronic poverty or violent crime appears to be associated with the black market in human smuggling. But there is little evidence that such measures would address that problem. The most likely practical outcome is the widespread, institutionalized harassment of individuals, even US citizens, most of whom are in no way violating any law, even up to and including immigration law.

The immigrant identification law has been compared to the beginnings of apartheid, in which the status of individuals had to be officially determined and classified, ostensibly in the interests of “security”. And while the specific provisions of the law would erode individual liberties in serious ways — allowing law enforcement to demand proof of residency at any moment, for virtually any reason, and possibly subjecting citizens and policemen to legal penalty for not collaborating — it contains no specific provisions that would directly impact the activities of violent smuggling cartels.

The book, bound pages imprinted with text in one form or another, is one of the oldest continuously used and still highly relevant technologies, and for good reason. Paper is both a simple and a complicated tool, requiring large amounts of industry and energy to produce, yet is produced in massive quantities and seems endlessly available. Staining it in a way that allows a visual rendering of a given code (a language and its preferred alphabet) allows us to create a record of ideas and thought patterns that holds up remarkably well against time and can be accessed with no technology aside from our own senses and knowledge of the code in question.

Fortunately, the human brain seems to be organically structured to deal fluidly with language as a framework for thought and communication, and acquiring knowledge of an as-yet unlearned language is not too daunting a task. And we have translators for when it is. Language interacts with the human mind in a highly permissive and constructive way, and even seems to provide the brain with structural clues that permit us to acquire knowledge more rapidly than deliberate intention would allow, at least at the earliest stages.

The book is designed to help language do its job, of affording us a more expansive communicative landscape than we could otherwise access, and expand the scope of our intellect and our ability to imagine and to achieve. In the age of digital media, when electronic text is all the rage, and really does offer some major improvements on the static page, it’s worth taking note of the staying power of paper and ink. Having a way to not only access and to share knowledge, but to believe in its consistency, is central to being able to build a society with persistent opportunities to live and enact its ideals.

While the absolute long-term preservation of certain fragile documents, like the original Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States, requires advanced scientific measures to achieve a hermetically sealed environment, such safe conditions have been achieved by less complex methods, as in the case of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The book is a lightweight, portable, personable and everywhere accessible (“always on”) rendition of the graven-in-stone paradigm we find with Hammurabi’s Code or ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. It gives us the constant reference and the confidence of a verifiable authoritative version.

The nature of the digital medium is such that one has a very difficult time checking the authenticity of “original” texts, without a paper original on hand. (This is the logic of the movement for a voter-verifiable paper trail in electronic voting processes in the United States, where accurately registering the “intent of the voter” is mandated by law.) We have to recognize the power of digital technologies, and their ability to liberate us and expand our communicative and productive reach, but we also need to understand the complete story and the genius of the hard copy bound volumes on which all digital publishing is ultimately based.

Can electronic paper replace the paper copy? In many ways, it can… it can give us mobility and freedom of selection, allow us to carry thousands of volumes with us, in an object that weighs less and is far less cumbersome than even one volume of a thousand pages. It can allow us to access huge reserves of text from almost anywhere (Amazon’s ‘Whispernet’ service, for instance, via the Kindle devices). It might even allow us to create distinct, parallel reading environments. And it can certainly keep a book looking “new” and undiminished by overuse.

But then, for those who love reading, isn’t the physical experience of the page part of the enjoyment? Isn’t the physical page’s mortality, its vulnerability, its susceptibility to wear and tear, part of what endears us to a given book, makes us believe we have participated in its ongoing life and that it has infiltrated into ours? Electronic paper does not allow for that kind of organic experience with the written word. And it is not as stable as the printed page.

Ultimately, the book is a powerful technology for delivering information that works without a device or service provider. It can be owned and kept in an intimate setting, without requiring a charge of electricity from a wide-ranging grid. It allows for intimate moments in which writers have succeeded in realizing something uniquely human to interact directly with intimate moments in which readers are realizing something uniquely human. And that, after all, is what we celebrate when we celebrate the book, the literary arts, the dream and daring of what writing is for the human species.

Countering the rise of a global black market in stolen identities will require not just bold, innovative thinking, but a comprehensive awareness of the nature of media hyper-convergence, and the ways in which that process will affect our ability to interact with, judge, manipulate and keep safe from, the world around us. Standardization and atomization both present opportunities for would-be identity thieves, and so the major pro-consumer model must be centered on getting ahead and staying ahead, technologically, of those who seek to steal and misuse personal identity, whether digital, biometric or analog (like one’s signature).

Share the best practices and legal remedies for preventing identity theft, whether by digital means or wireless harvesting, or in the physical realm of paper, plastic and voice. What laws give consumers leverage in reversing fraudulent charges? What pending legislation will do the most to help protect the sanctity of individual identity? How can we leverage consumer technologies to protect against the most aggressive, innovative attackers? What can the credit scoring universe do to assist and protect consumers?

• Join or follow the discussion on the Hot Spring Network

En Villanova, cada noche de lunes, la palabra sencilla y poderosa emprende su vuelo sin encender motores y no para de revolotear, de elevarse y planear como gaviota luminosa sobre la noche siempre cálida de la hermandad poética reunida en la mesa del Taller Literario Pinzon 9. La idea de un día dedicado a la poesía se transformó en dos días de poesía, y en un par de semanas había comenzado a tomar forma un festival que ocuparía todo un fin de semana. Así nació este festival y la presente antología de colaboradores.

La antología incluye obras de los siguientes poetas: María Elena Arias Zelidón, David G. Barreto, Andrea Cote, Silvino Edward Díaz Burns, Rodolfo Figueroa, Andrés González, Cristiane Grando, Gladys Ilarregui, Carlos Jiménez, Víctor Martín Iglesias, Floridor Pérez, Magnolia Pérez Garrido, Salvatore Poeta, Joseph Robertson, Enrique Sacerio-Garí, Cristina Sánchez-Conejero, Róger Santiváñez y Carlos Trujillo. [Más información...]

¿Dónde cae la hoja que cae de la hoja?
¿Dónde, la hoja que se suelta de sí misma
como mirando lejos y hacia adentro,
como mirándose desde lejos
igual que si fuera otra hoja la que cae
mientras ella la mira?

Where does the leaf fall that falls from the leaf?
Where, the leaf that lets go of itself
as if looking into the distance and also inward,
as if looking upon itself from afar,
as if it were some other leaf falling
while it is looking on?

The work of the poet is not easy to define. It involves imagination, observation, a musical ear and a kind of daring that allows words to forge new spaces for meaning. But none of these alone makes the poet, or the poem. In this bilingual edition of Carlos Trujillo’s Palabras, his first collection to be published in English, the award-winning Chilean poet offers the reader a hands-on experience of the creative work of the poet, and by his elegant, melodic approach, suggests a more intimate understanding of what poetry is and how it comes to draw breath. [Read more...]

Este libro, la tercera colección de poesías en castellano por Joseph Robertson, junta poemas tanto filosóficos como de amor con ensayos cortos y un cuento lírico. Es a la vez la obra más ambiciosa y más íntima del poeta, y marca un momento de cambio de enfoque en su obra y en su visión poética. Aquí siguen unos extractos del texto:

La poesía es la frontera donde el lenguaje de uso común contacta con significados futuros, y en el proceso, cuando mejor logrado, invita a entrar en el presente  una riqueza de verdades trascendentes. La poesía se involucra en todos los usos del lenguaje, aunque pueda haber tendencias populares sugerentes de que sólo las nuevas modas valen, de que la poesía es más clásica que actual : muchos artistas musicales ahora hacen el papel, incluso conscientemente, del historiador mítico o trobador vagabundo, pero la poesía no se limita a estos propósitos.

El arte de rimar, el frenético vaivén de la métrica tradicional, a veces parecen, en el ambiente lingüístico-literario de nuestros tiempos, más una distracción que un vehículo para hacer llegar el significado a su destino. La poesía ahora habita en lugares más sutiles, en formas más complejas y entretejidas. Penetra en el discurso político, en el rap, en el diálogo entre dos personajes en una película, a veces sólo por un instante, apartada entonces por una masa de prosa, hecho y circunstancia. Pero esto no es nada nuevo ni tampoco ningún peligro para la supervivencia de la poesía como arte de la concentración productiva, cuya función es crear moldes nuevos y abrir horizontes.

(del prólogo, ‘la poesía de todos los días’)

PLENITUD

somos más que consciencia
somos invención

somos más que perspicacia
somos ver y no ver

somos más que muchedumbre
somos uno y uno más

somos más que esencia
somos detalles sueltos

que piensan en otros detalles

VIERNES, CIUDAD DE NUEVA YORK, MARZO 2010 (extr.)

por la mañana, nieva al lado del east river, junto a la o.n.u., el aire queda lleno de una luminosidad algo nebulosa : es uno de los lugares de más con-secuencia de todo el mundo, y por eso mismo, todo el mundo perdona las medidas de seguridad : también por eso los jóvenes asistentes llevan cara de que algo se puede, algo se logrará : y así se logra, creyendo y dedicando el esfuerzo y el tiempo : lo imaginado es posible : eso da miedo y nos anima, y por eso suele ser de las verdades más controvertidas y tendenciosas : ¿cómo ser quiénes somos y también quiénes deseamos ser? : en lograrlo radica cualquier felicidad, y de ahí comienzan los proyectos más nobles…

no sé si el contenido de este día ha sido prefacio del nacimiento de un planeta nuevo, pero verlo así parece confirmar que sólo se puede ver así : y en una mirada se concentra la pregunta básica, apoyada en el arte divino de una respuesta íntegra : la hermosura, la superación de la espera : la resistencia y el regalo sin aparatajes : el ser : el compartir y abrirse : porque sólo así se abre a la vida : sólo siendo rangos de color, entre lágrimas : sólo juntos : la nieve dio lugar a la frescura almada de los últimos días del invierno : entre el bullicio y la vastedad, la semilla : el primer paso, el futuro…

LO QUE SE BUSCA

¿Qué hacemos
si todo es lo que no parece ser
si lo que es se convierte
sin remordimiento alguno
en lo que no era
si para ser lo que se busca
hay que abandonar lo que se busca?

¿Qué hacemos
si un hecho es también una biografía
si la biografía se esconde siempre
en otra biografía
si complicarse es llegar a ser más completo
y ser completo es más sencillo
si las sombras nunca amenazan
sólo comprenden nuestros temores?

¿Qué hacemos
si la guerra es inevitable
pero sabemos que no es inevitable
si volar es pesar más
y acelerarse es tardar en llegar
si ver un espejo es abrazar un oso hambriento
y el miedo es todavía más peligroso?

¿Qué hacemos
si un día contiene los demás días
si intentar es también encubrir el intento
si regalarse es descubrirse
y el contenido metafísico está en la superficie
si querer es esquivar y decidir es abrir
de repente todo lo no decidido?

PENSABA HABLARTE DE LA LLUVIA

pensaba hablarte de la lluvia
y cómo resbalaba en la voz de una soprano
exquisita insólita tan selvática como astral
pero ahora veo que ha dejado de llover
y ese sonido que trae calma y bienestar
que fertiliza y hace futuro
se transfirió al entorno de tus parpadeos
tu silencio
un momento más
que todo silencio bien educado
rompiendo fórmulas viendo
la misma lluvia que se fue
y esa voz de soprano exquisita
en palparte ha traído un zumbido estrellado
y una noche de intáctiles misericordias…

LYDIA, O DESTELLOS EN LA NIEBLA (extr.)

Hay oportunidades. El país entero vibra de oportunidad. Todos los países son oportunidades. La primera vez que escuchó esa idea, la convenció de que la mentira existe. Pero con el tiempo, había aprendido a ver que incluso los trámites más pasivos se formaban de una cadena incesante de decisiones. Incluso la frustración era señal de que uno vive respirando oportunidad, o siéndola, un campo de voces definidas por su desunión. La frustración, hasta la tragedia, radica en no haber elegido bien.

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El libro impreso estará disponible durante los tres días del Festival de Poesía de Villanova, el 25, 26, y 27 de marzo del 2010.

Calendario completo del festival (PDF), con títulos de obras presentadas, temas y presentadores…

The discussion opened with comments on statistical analysis of proress toward the goal of achieving 50/50 parity. With a 7% improvement since Beijing, the discussion moved quickly toward the question of how to accelerate the rise of women in decision-making and leadership roles.

With not enough parliamentary-level attention focused on women’s issues or the specific virtues of achieving parity in representation, local government emerged as a potential area of strategic focus, in relation to promoting women’s access to positions of leadership and decision-making. Quotas were raised as a potential policy lever by which to promote parity. Revai Mekanje suggested working to adopt a “more catalystic” approach to fostering support networks and the cultural underpinnings for women to take leadership positions and influence policy.

Leadership, as such, was the next topic: women need access to leadership positions, and women too often do not see themselves as right for leadership positions. These cultural and psychological barriers to accumulating political capital need to be addressed. Francisco Cos-Montiel noted that in studies of Indian political participation, it was clear that women who were able to achieve leadership or decision-making roles, in politics or in the private sector, were almost uniformly from a societal and cultural elite. Similar trends were seen across South America, highlighting the need to build the political capital of women from marginalized communities.

Norah Matovu-Winyi viewed this as the challenge of “decolonization of the mind”, which was then framed by the group as a project of “depatriarchalization”. Matovu-Winyi explained that this problem relates to a psychological colonization, because it involves the ceding of authority to a traditionally or systemically more powerful other who, it is supposed, “knows more than we do”. Personal or community agency is excluded by the prejudice that leadership entails a special inborn quality or elevated worth. In order to counter this surrender of selfhood to disinterested traditional elites, Matovu-Winyi proposed a deliberate effort to “demystify leadership”.

Marren Akatsa-Bukachi suggested this project must also apply to positions of influence in the private sector. Enterprise and community leadership roles, outside of elective political office, can wield significant influence that determines numerous factors of the quality of life for women, girls and whole communities. Without access to leadership roles in the private sector, women are less able to influence policy locally or decide how resources and opportunity are distributed in relation to their communities.

Akatsa-Bukachi also noted the pervasive custom of how even food is distributed among men and women, and linked this to the problem of the colonization of the mind by a systemic prejudice that favors patriarchy. Women are often left only the toes of the chicken, for example, while men enjoy the thigh and breast-meat. This inequity is not only a household custom or a commentary on private relationship dynamics, but is in many ways politically relevant. It illustrates the distance at which women are kept from positions of leadership and decision-making, even in such intimate details of daily life.

Jennifer Lewis, the event’s discussion facilitator, noted this male-female relationship dynamic shows the need to “make the political personal”. Matovu-Winyi noted it’s vital to promote “democracy as a way of life” — without genuine equality in everyday relationship dynamics, the political landscape cannot be authentically democratic.

Lewis also moved the discussion toward the specific question of how to get beyond the numbers. There was consensus among all participants that outreach and support-building efforts need to be “more deliberate”. Cos-Montiel said there needs to be more focus on “strategic” thinking about how to both relay the message that will best build toward parity, but also about how to help women build the cultural capital that will allow them to access the political arena or move into decision-making roles.

Akatsa-Bukachi suggested women need to move away from “staccato involvements”, occasional interactions with the systems, networks and privileges that allow women to take on leadership roles. Women cannot just come to the table “at the last minute”, when a viable female candidate for office gains traction, or a specific issue of controversy comes to prominence, because that temporary support-base will dissolve as soon as the trend shifts.

There is a measurable need for women to build sustained, comprehensive networks of involvement in matters of policy, writing opinion articles, talking about and promoting real change for women, including the rise of strong candidates who will be able to capitalize on this more sustained support.

The “loneliness of leadership” experienced by women was raised as a significant factor contributing to the difficulty of building an sustained base of positions in political and private leadership. Actual efforts to measure such deficits and to explore ways to foster such sustained support communities could help to advance the cause of parity in leadership and to provide young women with a culturally more favorable environment in which their abilities and ambitions will be more directly sought and expected.

Social media may be integral to building the necessary sustained support networks. Examples of how social media and community media can come together to empower women and combat injustice have peppered the discussions of these first days of the CSW. Gender Links is using the UN gathering to cultivate a global debate about what role media play in fostering understanding and progress with respect to the treatment of women.

Lewis asked the discussion participants to propose their main priorities in relation to expanding the role of women in governance. Quotas and the need to transform political parties from within were the first two priorities suggested. Akatsa-Bukachi said the 50/50 goal is a “solemn declaration” that needs to be repeated until it saturates the conversation. She also noted the need to reach out to men, to involve them and make them aware of the real need to improve society by achieving parity. An extension of this priority, she said, is the need to overcome the problem of “feminist faces with patriarchal minds”, while keeping in mind the goal of building a broader long-term alliance for equality that includes both men and women.

Matovu-Winyi said existing systems need to be employed and improved, to make as much headway as possible in the elections —local and national, across Africa and beyond— of the first three years of this decade. She also noted that “no politician just appears on the scene” and called for the creation of substantive institutional supports for women to get involved in public life. She called for “more research” across the spectrum of issues related to why women are or are not empowered to access decision-making roles.

Cos-Montiel called for the inclusion of “women from the margins”, a strategic approach to building cultural and political capital for women, and close scrutiny of what role religious institutions play in sustaining the dominance of a patriarchal narrative or mindset. He noted the combination of hierarchy and patriarchy in the structure of the Catholic church, observing that such institutional structures effect extreme symbolic and socio-psychological influence, which can limit women’s readiness or willingness to push for greater access to decision-making roles in the community, at work or in the political sphere.

The dialogue closed after 44 minutes of lively and engaged discussion, with Norah Matovu-Winyi remarking that political supports for women will be “more authentic” when the narrative driving those social mechanisms is not focused only on the concept of rights for women as inherently virtuous, but deliberately integrates that foundational idea into a more dynamic discourse that gets closer to the daily needs and interests of non-activist women and the communities in which they live.

• Originally published by GenderLinks
• Republished at CafeSentido.com