fire of love now

The Triangle Shirt Waist Fire
http://mikestoutmusic.com

There they were, screaming from the windows;
Trapped like a herd, nowhere to go.
On the 8th and 9th floors, facing an inferno
Of heat and flames, in a living horror show.
Young women immigrants, trying to earn a living,
Brutally exploited in a place so unforgiving.
One door wass locked, the other was blocked;
The elevator crashed, the fire escape collapsed.
Choking from the smoke, unable to breathe;
The fire engines came, but the ladders didn't reach.

They started jumping, you could hear the thuds;
Sixty-two pools of mangled limbs and blood.
A hundred twenty-nine women, seventeen men,
Never see their friends or their families again.
When you don't have a union, you don't have a chance,
Death and injury will come to dance.
The ownerss, Blank and Harris, were arrested and tried,
With their money and slick lawyers, justice was denied.
But when the dead were laid to rest, a hundred-thousand came;
The New Deal was born, it was time for a change.

[Chorus]
The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire was a call,
To wake up a movement, they died for us all.
For a safer workplace, an escape from poverty,
A decent living wage, a life with dignity;
'Fight for the living, mourn for the dead,'
It's time to do what Mother Jones said.
It's either race to the bottom, or take the struggle higher,
Don't let the lesson be forgotten or the shirtwaist fire,
Triangle Shirtwaist fire.

On the frontiers of the global wilderness,
At the Ha-Meem factory inside Bangladesh,
A mirror image from a century before;
No fire escape, blocked and locked doors,
Jumping from the windows of wage slavery,
Down into the sidewalks of eternity.
The causes well known, they can't be ignored,
Another callous owner like all the ones before.
Twenty-eight more who didn't have to die,
At the altars of greed just another sacrifice.

Working for the Gap, Wal-Mart and the rest,
In places like Honduras, China, Bangladesh,
For twenty cents an hour, seven days a week,
In a prison tower of a sweatshop factory;
Behind the fancy clothes and toys they want to sell ya,
There's been a hundred fires, they just don't ever tell ya.
After decades of struggle made things better than before,
They shut 'em down and move the jobs offshore.
Out of sight, out of mind they hope we never stop it,
While they wage their class war and rake in the profits.

[Chorus]
The Triangle Shirtwaist fire was a call,
For a safer workplace, an escape from poverty,
A decent living wage, a life with dignity;
Fight for the living, mourn for the dead;
It's time to do what Mother Jones said.
It's either race to the bottom, or take this battle higher;
Don't let the lesson be forgotten, of the Shirtwaist fire,
Triangle Shirtwaist fire.

A simple home-made composter

Be a pro-sumer (consumer AND producer) - make yer own dang composter.

Every situation is unique...One design that interested me lately is...can't remember the name but it's something you can improvise - It's a container of whatever size and material you want with an open bottom which is set into the ground deep enough so that the larger critters like rats and woodchucks won't likely get attracted. The soil under and around the bottom of the composter serves to absorb the waste and the little critters like worms and molds and bacteria in the soil serve to distribute the nutrients to the garden area nearby. The top of this composter has a lid, so - unlike most composters which have openings on the sides to allow air to get in and smell to get out - this type is only open to the air when you open the lid. You could make one (or more for other parts of the garden) by just e.g. taking a wide piece of pipe (say at least half a foot diameter or whatever you have available) and just sticking it into the ground i'd say at least six inches.

If you want to fool with teas, the thing I'm interested in is exposing water with some nutrients (e.g. a little dirt or manure or compost) to sun and so encourage algae...Problem is mosquitoes lay eggs on the surface and within 5 days can go from larvae in the water to hatching out into the air. So either the water needs to be used before the mosquitoes hatch out or you need any kind of fish in the water that eats the eggs and larvae. An extremely simple ecosystem can be set up by having fish, snails, and anacharis (a fast growing submerged type plant). The water and muck from the bottom and any dead or live matter in the water ecosystem can both fertilize and water the garden - fertigation...And the variety of life helps to biodegrade any chemical pollutants that are in the water.

Stop by if ever you've time and are near Hazelwood for a little tour of our gardening efforts.

change for life

Years ago Adelle Davis' Let's Eat Right to Keep Fit and other books had a big effect on my life. Having shaken my own good health with poor decisions - such as eating junk food (and whatever else tasted good), smoking, getting strung out on "speed" and later caffeine pills - I was ready to learn something new. Her advocacy of large doses of vitamins to promote healing, and getting away from junk food (more recently called "industrial food") to help healing was controversial (and to this day battled by the processed food manufacturers and some in the medical industry). But - in combination with my brother Tim's getting me a job on a farm in West Virginia to get me away from this bad lifestyle - this change in my diet saved my life.

Now, years later, I've found saving my own life is inextricably intertwined with saving the Earth. With this morning's weather forecast calling for strong storm w/possibly a tornado in Western Pennsylvania, rapid climate change has become here-and-now gut level rather than just a dramatic scientific concept to be argued over. What can be done? My philosophy has come to focus on the concrete rewards from a loving attitude toward all life. As wonderfully complex as the biochemistry of nutrition is, for example, a definite pattern emerges in which the health of a person is tied to the extent to which that person eats foods which are grown via a harmonious relationship with Nature and the plants and animals which we eat.

If we farm and prepare our food in competition with other life forms - such as by using pesticides, slave labor, inhumane livestock husbandry, and other viciously dishonest agribusiness practices, the money made is in the end way more than negatively offset by food which shortens life and returns the suffering back to us. Growing healthy food - and not destroying the life in it in the process of getting it to our bellies - requires that EVERYONE, not just those who feed us, must awaken to the wider web of life. I can't have healthy soil in my garden, for instance, if I have neighbors who are so afraid of insects, bats, deer, woodchucks (aka "groundhogs" or I just found out - "whistle pigs") and other rodents, spiders, bats, snakes, owls and pigeons and other birds, bacteria and fungi that they spray deadly chemicals at the mere sight of a wee grasshopper. I pretty much lost a whole growing season once because there was weedkiller that was sprayed nearby that drifted onto my garden.

So, like it or not, I and you and all life on Earth are stuck with each other. It becomes more starkly clear each day that fighting (if it works at all) only works for an individual in a limited way and not forever. It will boomerang back on you. We are in a time of great miracles and terrible destruction. Our technology can be used to establish a heaven on Earth, and probably will be because I think eventually the loving essence of our nature will get full rein of the planet's decisionmaking. But make no mistake. We are in no sense at this time at a peaceful moment of history. We have laid down much too much of our money on fear and war, and the environmental and consequent economic consequences are going to shake each and every one of us to the very soul.

We must transform our agriculture so that growing and processing food is more like lovemaking than warmaking. The sensuous smell and feel of healthy soil is because there is life in it. A third or more of it may be alive with molds, bacteria, worms, algae, diatoms, and tiny insects. The mega-industrial model for growing food tortures animals and plants with pinheaded, stubborn, stuck-on-stupid obsession with the almighty dollar. And the end-product, of course, is accidentally self-tortured people, reaping what we sow. This is good science.

With the same incredible technological advances with which we humans CAN transition to a non-combustion technology which stabilizes the daily more disturbed environment, we are at present in large part choosing to engage in ever more high-tech warfare in more and more places, with less and less reward for our habitual competition and addiction to combustion processes and centralized mega-sized super-complex corporate-owned nuclear power plants, and ever more tremendously destructive bitebacks.

I'll end this article with a challenging piece of logic for you. It is a scientific and ecological principle that everything is connected by cause and effect. So no matter what two things you're talking about there is some at least indirect connection. Well, because the Earth is affected by the changes in both place and temperature of the planet's water (much formerly frozen now in the liquid rather than solid form, and moved away from the poles and into the oceans) - ice in the Arctic and Antarctic now becoming water in warmer parts of the ecosphere), there are some of the opinion that we are seeing an increasing rate of geological change. In other words, as with Hurricane Katrina and other weather events - at least in part happening with increasing intensity in reaction to human activity) - so also the Earth itself (that we arrogantly keep trying to master) is becoming increasingly violent. So the tragedy progressing in Japan and it's worldwide consequences is in part our doing, and we can and must work together to make it better - for our own good if for no other reason.

I believe in miracles. We see them all around us, mostly without appreciating them. Let's let our gratitude and appreciation of this life - and our actions in service to all life - bring forth the new world we in our hearts long for and know is possible.