These pieces were not written by the late British poet, Ken Smith (1938-2003), nor the other Ken Smiths who make bass guitars, study marine biology, sell cars, teach card counting, paint war scenes in oils, guide bear hunters in Idaho, teach forest management, study immunology, do war reporting, sell real estate, photograph nature, teach cryptology, provide legal counsel to the gay and lesbian community, realign the spines of athletes, listen for seismic faults in the Sierra Nevadas, operate a 4-axis milling machine, work for sustainable development in Alberta, play blackjack, or criticize Junk English. Nor were the pieces written by the Ken Smith who is “the Elvis Costello of Landscape Architecture” nor the one who serves in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives nor the one who hit a home run for the Atlanta Braves in 1983. I only wish.
- Powered by
- WordPress
-
Average political speech will kill us
The average political speech, the average op-ed, the average social media post, seeks a nod of agreement and maybe a trip to the voting booth. These average speeches and bits of writing don't care about building organized activism. The foundation of their philosophy is that "we insiders, having been elected, will take care of everything.…
-
Semaphore is not broadcasting
Our messaging tools mostly don’t encourage social organization at either end of the chain of communication.
-
Tearing it all down
Tearing things down takes little time at all. Building something worthy often takes a lifetime, and sometimes saves many a life.
-
Don’t go it alone
There comes a time when every activist movement can no longer sustain itself on the energy it has accumulated so far. It can't get its voice out far enough to do the necessary work. It can't sustain its voice long enough without exhaustion. It can't maintain its morale and confidence in the isolation of its…
-
The Power of the Powerless, section 1
And most important of all, Havel begins to ask about the real power of these powerless citizens.
-
Get back to where you once belonged
You hear this idea sometimes: Don't waste a crisis. That might mean some very different things, more than just the first bullet point below: Building a coalition committed to kicking out the bums and getting America back to what it was in, say, 2014. Same coalition, aimed at ejecting the dangerous ones and getting America…
-
Power’s self-reinforcing loops
Someone was complaining about a place in the Caribbean, saying, essentially, that people there had grown accustomed to distant, powerful others providing substantially for their local needs. It wasn't a subtle moment in the conversation, and with someone I'd just met I decided not to press for more of the reasoning — if any. I…
-
What style of greatness
A nation may be tempted to put on the clothes of past adventures and to play the songs of previous generations, to salute what was saluted in the past, to gather up into a pantomime of courage that recalls the actual courage of the past. But the past's challenges are past. If a nation is…
-
Preserved in the archive, hidden there too
"I've been writing about it on my blog for many years." That's a sentence a variety of interesting people might utter or post. It's a reminder that good new thinking and writing slides effortlessly down the screen and out of sight, into the archive, where it might be preserved and maybe located again someday. Maybe.…
-
RSS options via WordLand
My wording in italics below (posted here) was misleading, too compressed to be clear, or something like that: One of the powers of composing on WordLand, I believe, is the ability to inform WordPress pretty much instantly which of your RSS feeds you'd like a post to belong to. Or to more than one RSS feed,…