We stand together or we fall apart

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Welcoming the New Industrial Revolution

I can just see friends taking these words the wrong way.
Some say go back to the old days, others
DON'T go back. That's the last
thing we need here in Hazelwood is more industry to pollute
and then leave. Go back to the good old days
when there were three grocery stores, a shoe store, and
thirteen barber shops on
Second Avenue. Don't go back to the bad old
days when the smoke was so thick you could hardly see the
other side of the river and the bosses treated you like you
was... We don't need no damn industry; we need air and
new lungs to breathe. Revolution? Oh, yeah, we ain't
been hurt enough by everything else. Just leave
us alone...

Like passengers on a ferry at turbulent sea, we can be like the children - who turn the rocking boat into rollicking fun - or their parents turning green in their seats trying to hold on to their sliding possessions.

We are at the dawn
of a new age, like it or not. We don't have the choice
to stay the same or go back - these are not in the list of
options. Moment by moment, we each on Earth at this time
are called to choose between love and fear. At a faster
and faster pace, new challenges arrive. Blindly battle for
what seems a smaller and smaller share of the pie and you
will see and participate in greater and greater conflict and
destruction. Accept each new surprise as a wonderful
chance to make things better and you'll find even better
possibilities than you had hoped for. Nature is a Great
Machine which constantly churns out incredible new designs
for life; we just need to step away from the old pollution
machine way of looking.

It's a law: Let yourself become discouraged and afraid and
you'll find yourself in an ever-tightening nightmare of
problems due to lack of money, competition over things, and
a world that is just falling apart by the hour. But
share with your neighbors your worries and you find they
have the same. Next thing you know the problems start to work
themselves out. No, you still don't have the scratch to
pay for that whatever it is you need. But somebody else
lends you theirs, or you don't really need it, or things
will work out in some unexpected way. Pittsburgh
healer Kathryn Kuhlman used to say, "Expect a
miracle!" Now I know that comes off sounding like
hokey-gokey stuff, but that IS the way the world works.
You get what you ask for, and if you don't have enough faith
in the future to work for something better than the present
you're not going to get a better world.

We can have a world without oil. We can have a world
without the incredibly destructive Marcellus shale hydro-fracking for natural gas, or tar
sands mining for gasoline. We can have a West Virginia
that is "Almost Heaven" (just like their advertisements say) and a Pittsburgh that grows
healthier and wealthier - without having to destroy lush
mountains full of beautiful people, plants,
and animals - to get the coal. The fear that
there is a shortage of energy, or of natural resources for
that matter, is a self-induced nightmare humankind is called
now to awake from. From day one we've had enough, from
cars that didn't need gasoline to electricity that doesn't
require combustion either. But no, someone with a gimme
mindset always had to get in the way of progress by stifling
solutions. It reminds you of the Garden of Eden story,
how we drew a line between ourselves and God and so got kicked
out of Heaven. Fight over it, nobody gets it, just like
my mother said.

Faced with whole Earth ecosystem emergency - such as the oil leak
in the Gulf of Mexico - it's time to let go of all of this
fear of new ideas. Humans are reproducing a mile
a minute. We're fighting over diminishing wild fish
stocks. Species after species (including
our own) are coming down with crippling diseases exacerbated
by unprecedented weather.

Winston Churchill foresaw a time when there would be no
need to grow whole animals for livestock, that we would be
much more efficient and humane growing only the cells of the
parts of the animals that we actually eat (not the bones, for instance ). Biotechnology now has
that capacity - to grow protein and other nutrients with
single-cell microorganisms just like we make yogurt and
cheese and bread and beer. Let's get to it in
Pittsburgh. We don't have much time before the
environmental and economic changes make us helpless.

The revolution towards decentralizing production - such as with locally grown food - is such an obvious trend by now it needs no defending. All I have to do is compare that
tired months old garlic grown in China and shipped all the
way here with my fresh garlic and chives grown here right
below the tracks in the Riverside section of Hazelwood.
Give me a holler at 421-6496 and I'll show you food the way
it looks before it becomes what yens city slickers RECOGNIZE
as food on the market shelves. Farmers may be broke but
they DON'T go hungry. There are parts of food plants
which are perfectly edible, but which our coddled and manipulated
consumers have been brainwashed not to recognize; these
parts the food growers harvest for themselves or return to
the soil.

There are wild foods more nutritious than the stuff
you buy. These foods don't even need planted; they come
up as "weeds". I especially want to turn people on to
lambs quarters, which is like spinach. It's 40% protein,
doesn't get bothered by bugs, and grows as tall as a small Christmas
tree during the course of the season to provide a continuing
crop. Read up on it if you don't trust me, then take a
walk on the wild side and cook some
up. It's delicious.

The problems on our plates now are bigger than any in
modern history. Tried and true methods don't make it any
more. We have to be creative. We have to be
efficient with what we have. We have to improvise when
we don't have what we need. We can't assume either a
stable environment or government. And we can't waste
time placing blame. We stand together or fall apart.
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