Wondering Wednesdays, Baby Acres, Chapter 1, part 1

This post begins the rough draft of  Chapter 1 of my non-fiction WiP, Baby Acres.     The overall goal is now to explain why we need both equ. + justice, & why in 4 phases.  This chapter will transition to a chapter (2-5) for each phase, showing what Phases I-IV could look like as part of a possible roadmap for a fully inclusive society for all of us.  This vision is laid out in the hope that All HumanKind  will eventually have each person’s basic needs  met, without taking anything from anyone, and without violence, intimidation, nor coercion of any kind. 

Chapter I

I’m still updating the detailed outline for the first chapter, as I revise several versions of the other chapter outlines.  Sorry I have no new words yet.

Last week was the sixth installment of this series…

 

Action Items:

1.) Consider some ideas you may have on how society could look in 80 years,

2.) Share them with us in the comments, here, please, and

3.) Write a story, post or tweet that uses those sources and your thoughts.

Dear Readers, ideas on learning, especially multiple #LanguageLearning, on-going education and empathy-building, to #EndPoverty, #EndHomelessness,  #EndMoneyBail & achieve freedom for All HumanKind?

Support our key #PublicDomainInfrastructure  & #StopSmoking at LEAST for CCOVID-19:
1. #PublicLibraries,
2. #ProBono legal aid and Education,
3. #UniversalHealthCare, and
4. good #publictransport
Read, Write -one can add Stayed on Freedom’s Call via this GoodReads button:

,

 

Vote, Teach and Learn (PDF Lesson Plan Book)! 

and

my Babylon 5 review posts, if you like Science Fiction,

and

a proposed Vision on Wondering Wednesdays: for a kinder world…

   

Shira Destinie A. Jones, MPhil

our year 2020 CE =  12020 HE

(Day 1 … Day 5)

Stayed on Freedom’s Call
(free copies at: https://archive.org/details/StayedOnF…)
includes two ‘imagination-rich’ walking tours, with songs, of Washington, DC. New interviews and research are woven into stories of old struggles shared by both the Jewish and African-American communities in the capital city.

Shared histories are explored from a new perspective of cultural parallels and parallel institution-building which brought the two communities together culturally and historically.

Please leave a review, if you can, on the GoodReads page.

Shira Destinie Jones by ShiraDest is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Wondering Wednesdays, Baby Acres, and The Two Whys…

This post begins the rough draft of the first Chapter of my current non-fiction WiP, Baby Acres: Making Society Suck Less in 60 Years.     The overall goal is now to explain why we need both equ. + justice, & why in 4 phases.  This chapter will transition to a chapter (2-5) for each phase, showing what Phases I-IV might look like as part of a possible roadmap for a fully inclusive society for all of us.  This vision is laid out in the hope that All HumanKind  will eventually have each person’s basic needs  met, without taking anything from anyone, and without violence, intimidation, nor coercion of any kind. 

Chapter I (part 0): why and why

This week I am very tired, and working on getting updating the chapter outlines from their initial 2019 form. 

 

Next week I will continue with the rough draft of the start of my first chapter.  Here is the semi-detailed chapter 1 outline. I tried to use this as the post featured image, but WP kept rejecting it, so I hope that the medical debt image was a decent tie-in of two of the #PublicDomainInfrastructure items.

Last week was the fifth (end of Introduction section Rough Draft…) installment of this series…

(Note to JYP: I’ve been using and expanding this high level chapter outline  until this post, as I’ve finally filled out the chapter 1 outline, realizing that I was trying to pack too much into chapter one! 

Thank you for your feedback: it has really been helping me! –

Shira)

Action Items:

1.) Search for two different sources related to FDR’s Four Freedoms speech, and compare it to Ike’s ‘Cross of Iron‘ speech (I wonder how many people were old enough to remember his touchstone reference to the 1896 Cross of Gold speech…),

2.) Share them with us in the comments, here, please.

3.) Share your thoughts on how your ideas could affect a society that might be built, in 50-100 years.

4.) Write a story, post or tweet that uses those sources and your thoughts.

Dear Readers, ideas on learning, especially multiple #LanguageLearning, on-going education and empathy-building, to #EndPoverty, #EndHomelessness,  #EndMoneyBail & achieve freedom for All HumanKind?

Support our key #PublicDomainInfrastructure  & #StopSmoking at LEAST for CCOVID-19:
1. #PublicLibraries,
2. #ProBono legal aid and Education,
3. #UniversalHealthCare, and
4. good #publictransport
Read, Write -one can add Stayed on Freedom’s Call via this GoodReads button:

,

 

Vote, Teach and Learn (PDF Lesson Plan Book)! 

and

my Babylon 5 review posts, if you like Science Fiction,

and

a proposed Vision on Wondering Wednesdays: for a kinder world…

   

Shira Destinie A. Jones, MPhil

our year 2020 CE =  12020 HE

(Day 1 … Day 5)

Stayed on Freedom’s Call
(free copies at: https://archive.org/details/StayedOnF…)
includes two ‘imagination-rich’ walking tours, with songs, of Washington, DC. New interviews and research are woven into stories of old struggles shared by both the Jewish and African-American communities in the capital city.

Shared histories are explored from a new perspective of cultural parallels and parallel institution-building which brought the two communities together culturally and historically.

Please leave a review, if you can, on the GoodReads page.

Shira Destinie Jones by ShiraDest is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Wondering Wednesdays, Baby Acres, and The Four Freedoms

This post finishes the rough draft of the Introductory Chapter of my current non-fiction WiP, Baby Acres: Making Society Suck Less in 60 Years.     The overall goal has been to introduce one possible roadmap for a fully inclusive society for all of us, in the hope that All HumanKind  will eventually have each person’s basic needs  met.  This book lays out an idea, and a potential path for getting us there.

Introduction part III: The Four Fundamental Freedoms and “perpetual peaceful
revolution”

The “four essential human freedoms” that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt listed in his
famous inaugural (?) speech of 1941 are, as the president himself pointed out, a tangible distillation of those Human Rights as a list of freedoms that each both facilitate and require the equitable implementation of the three types of justice mentioned earlier. President Roosevelt put it thusly:

“The first is freedom of speech and expression–everywhere in the world.
The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way–everywhere in the
world.
The third is freedom from want–which, translated into world terms, means economic
understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants-
everywhere in the world.
The fourth is freedom from fear–which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide
reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor–anywhere in the world.
That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in
our own time and generation.
”

The president went on to say that “we have been engaged in change — in a perpetual peaceful revolution — a revolution which goes on steadily, quietly adjusting itself to changing conditions … The world order which we seek is the cooperation of free countries, working together in a friendly, civilized society.”

 That “Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere.“

These words touched off   The ( https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2020/08/world-war-ii-the-double-v-campaign/, accessed 2 April, 2021, 15:35 PST …)  Double V Campaign of the modern civil rights era.

While these rights have yet to be fully realized for all Americans, much less all human beings
everywhere, they are, as Roosevelt stated, the start of what any just society must aspire to
guarantee to all of it’s citizens.

That peaceful revolution of which President Roosevelt spoke must make needed changes to the entire set of institutions with which we govern our society so that, as the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. pointed out, “the edifice which produces beggars” is changed into one that produces truly equitable opportunities for all human beings around the world. Clearly, the rebuilding of such a massive edifice as our interconnected web of societal infrastructures, social, economic, physical, and governance-related, requires both time and fore-thought. The task of wrapping up even the most basic of essential human rights into a system capable of guaranteeing that each and every citizen is treated equitably in the light of each of the major types of justice is “a vast project.” Yet is is a project that must be taken on if the promise of those four essential freedoms that President Roosevelt spoke of and Dr. King dreamt of seeing are to be made a reality. It is a project which our founding documents, from the United States Declaration of Independence, to the Preamble to the US Constitution enshrine in law, that “we the people” “are created equal.”

It is equally clear that this is a project which cannot hope to be successful alone, even if
undertaken by an entire generation. The goal of building a just society must be one which is
undertaken and committed to by an alliance spanning multiple generations. From the Framers of the US Constitution, to President Roosevelt, Dr. Martin Luther King, and Noam Chomsky and John Rawls, together with Naomi Klein, members of Black Lives Matter, to the students from the many schools who have experienced mass shooting traumas, generation upon generation has added its voice to the calls for justice, freedom, and human rights for all citizens.

No one community is capable of welding together a system that will be just for all members of society, and no one generation is capable of finishing such a gargantuan task. It is thus incumbent upon all members of society to play a part in contributing to the vision of a just society, whether by putting forth an alternative potential vision of how such a society could function, or by sketching out what some piece of such a society could look like. Changing our societal edifice into one which not only no longer produces suffering, but even encourages the best in all of us, is not a task that even one generation could accomplish alone. We are all indeed in this together, and must do the work, all together. It can be done, if we will it. 

“Yes, we can.”

  

That is the rough draft of the third and final part of my introductory chapter. 

Last week was the fourth installment of this series…

Action Items:

1.) Search for two different sources related to The Double V.

2.) Share them with us in the comments, here, please.

3.) Share your thoughts on how discrimination could affect a society that might be built, in 50-100 years.

4.) Write a story, post or tweet that uses those sources and your thoughts.

Dear Readers, ideas on learning, especially multiple #LanguageLearning, on-going education and empathy-building, to #EndPoverty, #EndHomelessness,  #EndMoneyBail & achieve freedom for All HumanKind?

Support our key #PublicDomainInfrastructure  & #StopSmoking for CCOVID-19:
1. #PublicLibraries,
2. #ProBono legal aid and Education,
3. #UniversalHealthCare, and
4. good #publictransport
Read, Write -one can add Stayed on Freedom’s Call via this GoodReads button:

, Vote, Teach and Learn (Lesson Plans)!

 

Nih sakh sh’lekk, sleem wa.   Yassas,   γεια σας!    Salût !  Nos vemos!  Görüşürüz!     ! שָׁלוֹם

ShiraDest

March, 2021 CE = March 12021 HE

(The previous lesson 53/67 , and the most recent lesson 54/67…)

Stayed on Freedom’s Call
(free: https://archive.org/details/StayedOnF…)
includes two ‘imagination-rich’ walking tours, with songs, of Washington, DC. New interviews and research are woven into stories of old struggles shared by both the Jewish and African-American communities in the capital city.

Shared histories are explored from a new perspective of cultural parallels and parallel institution-building which brought the two communities together culturally and historically.

Free copies are available at https://archive.org/details/StayedOnF…

Shira Destinie Jones by ShiraDest is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Wondering Wednesdays, Baby Acres, and Human Rights as Justice

This post  goes on to begin the rough draft of my current non-fiction WiP, Baby Acres: A possible Vision for Making Society Suck Less, in 60 Years.   (Thanks, once again, to JYP and Tammy for the title ideas!!)  The overall goal has been to lay out a roadmap for a fully inclusive society for all of us, so, I am turning, this week, to the introductory chapter, Chapter 0, of the book, in the hope that All HumanKind  will eventually have each person’s basic needs  met.  This book lays out one possible path for getting to that point.

Introduction part II: Peace and Justice

 

   Peaceful change revolves around various types of justice.  Social justice is perhaps the first type of justice that comes to mind, but economic justice, both of outcome and of opportunity, and also climate and other sorts of justice count heavily when considering the factors involved in building a just society.

 

  Social justice is one of the more obvious types of justice, or more visible, in terms of how we human beings treat one another.  The basic human rights to dignity, equal treatment under the law, and equal access to resources as seen in the right to due process, competent legal representation, etc, have been the focus of civil rights activism and litigation, most prominently in the 1960s, but reaching much farther back than that, in the United States (Jones, Stayed on Freedom’s Call, P. 20). Cooperation between many oppressed groups over time has led to a variety of policies aimed at addressing mistreatment of vulnerable people in public venues, often based on visible characteristics such as race, gender, etc.  The right to associate and travel, live in safe areas, access social venues, etc, has often been addressed, however, without actively acknowledging the fact that the realistic exercise of these rights is dependent upon the actual ability to pay for access to these rights, as most of our venues in the US require some form of entrance fee, or payment.  What often goes unaddressed, and ignored, is the right to economic justice that forms the bedrock of one’s ability to gain access to nearly all of these rights, in practical usage.  Yet, this lack of acknowledgment and action is not due to lack of warning.  Many have pointed out over the years that providing social justice, without providing economic justice, is paying mere lip service to the ideal of a just society.

 

   The calls for economic justice as part of social equity in the United States go back far, but a convenient start might be the most well known of those calls, from the 1960s.  In 1963,The March on Washington was a march for “jobs and freedom” as part of the long struggle to end Jim Crow, implemented both as social segregation, and also as economic segregation.  The economic part of Jim Crow, preventing most Negroes from working in most professional job positions, was the true motor of inequality, leading to both the formation and enforced permanence of a deliberately poverty-stricken underclass constantly obligated to accept any jobs offered by the dominant members of society.  The codification of this system based on skin color meant that even after the end, de Jure, of social Jim Crow, the majority of the members of that underclass remained stuck in the position of living in substandard housing and having to accept the lowest paying of jobs because the dominant culture had not changed, even when the laws did.  Thus, the legal ability to attend the same cinemas, the same schools, and the same concerts did not grant the financial ability do take advantage of these new rights.  Jim Crow was still, economically speaking, alive and well despite new social justice laws.  Many observers, from Dr. King himself, who called for a Citizen’s Income just a few years after that famous march (King, Where Do We Go From Here, 1967), to Joseph Stiglitz, to Steve Pressman, to Thomas Piketty, have continued to point out that economic inequality both hampers all forms of justice for vulnerable groups.  They also argue that economic inequality exerts increasing pressure toward injustice on all groups, from the dominant down to the most vulnerable, in that society.  Thus, social justice and economic justice must really be considered one: two sides of the same coin.

 

A society which would like to consider itself just toward all of its members, and indeed attempts to provide social and economic justice for all groups, would still be missing something crucial, if social and economic justice were the only types of justice to be considered.  While public goods such as libraries, health care, transportation, and education may be considered part of the social or economic spheres, these systems are also part of a set of pieces of social infrastructure which work in our society both as common touch stones, and as common points of concern.  Each person needs access to information, and to community level places for gatherings and  entertainment, provided by local libraries.  Each person needs health care, and the health of every resident in a society affects every other resident, from the hospital system right down to the sewage and water treatment systems.  Transportation is a concern that touches every resident as well, whether driving in a private car, or riding on a trolley, and the culture and education of every resident of a society inform how those modes of transportation will be used, or abused.  Yet, information and communication systems, sanitation, transportation, and even schools all impact the local environment, and also pull resources from the local environment.  And, as many Native American Tribal councils, like that of the Black Hills, in South Dakota, can confirm, not all lands are treated with equal care.  Thus, climate and land or commons based justice must also be considered, as part of the foundation of any just society.  Hence, social, economic, and commons based justice must all form part of any discussion or offering of a potential vision for a just society.  Those three fundamental forms of justice must also then be made tangible by codifying specific examples of what that might look like.  One offering of an example was given to us by a president who saw the need to end both segregation and to list necessary freedoms.

 

That is the rough draft of the first part of my introductory chapter. 

Last week was the third installment of this series…

Action Items:

1.) Search for two different sources related to visions for a better world.

2.) Share them with us in the comments, here, please.

3.) Share your thoughts on how Commons Justice (or bad) can affect a society that might be built, in 50-100 years.

4.) Write a story, post or tweet that uses those sources and your thoughts.

Dear Readers, ideas on learning, especially multiple #LanguageLearning, on-going education and empathy-building, to #EndPoverty, #EndHomelessness,  #EndMoneyBail & achieve freedom for All HumanKind?

Support our key #PublicDomainInfrastructure  & #StopSmoking for CCOVID-19:
1. #PublicLibraries,
2. #ProBono legal aid and Education,
3. #UniversalHealthCare, and
4. good #publictransport
Read, Write -one can add Stayed on Freedom’s Call via this GoodReads button:

, Vote, Teach and Learn (Lesson Plans)!

 

Nih sakh sh’lekk, sleem wa.   Yassas,   γεια σας!    Salût !  Nos vemos!  Görüşürüz!     ! שָׁלוֹם

ShiraDest

March, 2021 CE = March 12021 HE

(The previous lesson 51/67 , and the most recent lesson 52/67…)

Stayed on Freedom’s Call
(free: https://archive.org/details/StayedOnF…)
includes two ‘imagination-rich’ walking tours, with songs, of Washington, DC. New interviews and research are woven into stories of old struggles shared by both the Jewish and African-American communities in the capital city.

Shared histories are explored from a new perspective of cultural parallels and parallel institution-building which brought the two communities together culturally and historically.

Free copies are available at https://archive.org/details/StayedOnF…

Shira Destinie Jones by ShiraDest is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Wondering Wednesdays, Baby Acres, and Human Rights as Equity

This post  goes on to begin the rough draft of my current non-fiction WiP, Baby Acres: A possible Vision for Making Society Suck Less, in 60 Years.   (Thanks, once again, to JYP and Tammy for the title ideas!!)  The overall goal has been to lay out a roadmap for a fully inclusive society for all of us, so, I am turning, this week, to the introductory chapter, Chapter 0, of the book, in the hope that All HumanKind  will eventually have each person’s basic needs  met.  This book lays out one possible path for getting to that point.

Introduction: Empathy-building as an ongoing part of all
4 Phases

Having cited some of the reasoning which led up to the inception of this project, we now delve into the foundational concepts behind each phase. Empathy-building, through various means, is a continual part of each phase, as without empathy, no society can be just or safe or kind.

This vision of one potential just society is based on the ideas that such a society must be defined by its levels of both empathy and of full respect for the Human Rights of every living person. Such rights as the right to equity, the right to help create peaceful change, and to have each of those four freedoms that President FDR spoke about, embody the essence of a just society. But that essence still requires some tangible way to measure the level of justice, change institutions and systems that need changing, and to define specific ideals upon which those justice seeking institutions build, and to what particular ends.

Human Rights must be the starting point for any society which seeks to be a just society.  The application of named rights for each human being in an equitable manner is essential for a
society to be truly just. Some way to measure that application is also necessary. John Rawls proposed a test for determining whether a given society could be considered just, via a thought experiment. While that test will neither be debated nor explained in full here, further exploration of his writings will show that his proposal involved imagining oneself, after having designed a just society, as being given the choice to become part of that society, but without any knowledge of the position in which one, personally, would enter it. Rawls suggested that if a person would not be willing to enter a given society with no knowledge, or under a thick veil of ignorance, as to what that person’s position would be in the society, then that society might not be a just society. For example, no reasonable person, not knowing what position he or she might have, would consent to become part of US society, because if the position of that person turns out to be one of a homeless person, then the lived experience of the vast majority of people who experience homelessness would indicate that entering society in that position would very nearly doom one’s chances in life. Thus, Rawls’ test would show that the current state of American society is not that of a just society. As many have pointed out. Like Noam Chomsky.

Chomsky and others have written many books and articles detailing a variety of critiques of US and other current societies, in terms of the damage that governments of the United States and other developed nations allow to be done in the name of economic competition. A just society must be just for its own citizens, and must also promote the ideals upon which it is founded in its dealings with other societies. On that basis, Chomsky finds that US treatment of other nations is especially unjust, and that injustice is a reflection of treatment withing US society of the most vulnerable communities within US society, as well, such as Black Americans, refugees, and women of all races. So, the treatment of citizens within a just society must also be mirrored by how that society treats those outside of its boundaries with whom it has dealings, as Chomsky points out on page 83 of his book Profits over People: unfairly vilifying and then crushing a nation for the sake of economic competition is unjust not only to those outside of a society, but even to those within the ‘winning’ society, as the reality of such behavior is evident even to small children, when viewed without the coloring of propaganda. The effects within US society, for example, of the embargo against Cuba over the long term, have been to harden views in some quarters against any compromise or opening of discussion on the topic, while others in American society have come to see hard-liners insistent on the embargo as both anti-Cuban and even anti-immigration. Thus, unfair treatment of outsiders by members of even a just society affects all members within that society, causing divisions and even justifying mistreatment of dissenting opinions, rendering that formerly just society unjust in the act. This shows that even a just society would have to have ways of interacting with other societies that set boundaries and spell out ideals to which all connected societies could aspire.

Eleanor Roosevelt, in helping to redact the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, drew heavily on the concept enshrined in the US Declaration of Independence “that all
men are created equal… that they are endowed with certain inalienable rights…” which include the right to be treated with equal dignity to that of every other human being, regardless of momentary state of being, such as poverty or wealth, gender, religion or lack thereof, etc. As crucial as to whom these rights apply, the document defined an international standard of what rights should be considered as basic to all human beings. The right not to be tortured is, for example, a basic human right which applies to each and every human being at all times and under all circumstances. Likewise with “the right to life, liberty, and security of person.”
Certain rights, such as that negating slavery, which is in direct contradiction to the 13th
Amendment to the US federal Constitution, were visionary in their global scope, considering that many nations had not yet completed the rebuilding from the destruction of the second world war, and even that of the first, the Great War. The UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights is thus a fitting starting point for our definition of what, in terms of tangible rights, a just society ought to look like. The definition of those rights does not, in itself, show us all of what a just society looks like, but it is a start, beginning at where we are today, from a documentary and international legal point of view. It shows that to build a truly just society, we do not really have that far to go. With a set of basic human right in place to which everyone around the world has agreed, in principle, we can move on to look at ways in which those rights could potentially be implemented in a way that would be equitable for all human beings on the planet. Given that the current global systems of finance, trade, etc, are clearly highly inequitable, a just society must therefore have mechanisms in place to allow the peaceful changing of the systems of governance, and even of government, allowing citizens within the society to change parts of the system of governing that show themselves to be unjust. Such peaceful revolution, though, revolves around several connected but distinct types of justice, and depends upon the ability of all citizens to make their voices heard in absolutely non-violent, non-threatening, and non- aggressive manners, so that all citizens can feel both heard, and protected.

That is the rough draft of the first part of my introductory chapter. 

Last week was the second installment of this series…

Action Items:

1.) Search for two different sources related to visions for a better world.

2.) Share them with us in the comments, here, please.

3.) Share your thoughts on how good governance (or bad) can affect a society that might be built, in 50-100 years.

4.) Write a story, post or tweet that uses those sources and your thoughts.

Dear Readers, ideas on learning, especially multiple #LanguageLearning, on-going education and empathy-building, to #EndPoverty, #EndHomelessness,  #EndMoneyBail & achieve freedom for All HumanKind?

Support our key #PublicDomainInfrastructure  & #StopSmoking for CCOVID-19:
1. #PublicLibraries,
2. #ProBono legal aid and Education,
3. #UniversalHealthCare, and
4. good #publictransport
Read, Write -one can add Stayed on Freedom’s Call via this GoodReads button:

, Vote, Teach and Learn (Lesson Plans)!

 

Nih sakh sh’lekk, sleem wa.   Yassas,   γεια σας!    Salût !  Nos vemos!  Görüşürüz!     ! שָׁלוֹם

ShiraDest

March, 2021 CE = March 12021 HE

(The previous lesson 51/67 , and the most recent lesson 52/67…)

Stayed on Freedom’s Call
(free: https://archive.org/details/StayedOnF…)
includes two ‘imagination-rich’ walking tours, with songs, of Washington, DC. New interviews and research are woven into stories of old struggles shared by both the Jewish and African-American communities in the capital city.

Shared histories are explored from a new perspective of cultural parallels and parallel institution-building which brought the two communities together culturally and historically.

Free copies are available at https://archive.org/details/StayedOnF…

Shira Destinie Jones by ShiraDest is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Wondering Wednesdays, Baby Acres, and Governance Concerns

This post continues to expand on my current non-fiction WiP, Baby Acres: A possible Vision for Making Society Suck Less, in 60 Years.   (Thanks, again, to JYP and Tammy for the title ideas!!)  The overall goal still being to lay out a roadmap for a fully inclusive society for all of us, I am turning, this week, to Phase III.  Just a short overview, mind you, to explain what my thoughts are as I start to work on fleshing the whole idea out for the book.  I realized that any society that could  pass the Rawlsian Veil of Ignorance Test would still be connected to societies that might not pass that test, which would be a problem for that just, or even merely less unsafe, society.  A serious problem.

That meant that All HumanKind  would have to be included in both Phases III and IV, since otherwise, large waves of economic migration would be generated from unsafe places, toward any society where security and basic needs were met.  Kind of like now, with the waves of refugees fleeing the on-going wars in various parts of the world toward Europe and the US.

If you follow my blog regularly, you know of a hash tag #publicdomaininfrastructure.  That tag encompasses four basic parts of our social infrastructure system which I think could give the most ‘bang for the buck’ if we devoted more support to them: Public Libraries, Public Health Care, Public Education (for both kids and adults), and Public Transportation.   With those areas shored up, our society then has the foundation for more participatory and inclusive governance structures, that can also scale up to fit in other parts of the world, as those areas levels of development increase, a bit like accession to the European Union.

Phases I and II develop the key basic stepping stones for a just society, building on empathy and critical thinking skills, the four key Public Domain Infrastructure systems, and an educated public able and willing to protect and teach themselves and others how to stay safe emotionally, physically, financially, and intellectually.  That means having systems that support those needs, like health care, libraries, well-rounded educational systems for all ages, and solid mass transit.  We must start by building those foundations in our own country, but they are also sorely needed in every country around the world, as attested to by many NGOs and UN agencies.  And it is with those international bodies that we can work to ensure that those basic health, information access, education and transportation needs are met for all people of the world.

In Phase III, both here and in other parts of the world as they are interested and able, ideas like Participatory Budgeting, Citizens Juries, Ranked Choice Voting or IRV, and local complementary currencies to supplement existing national monetary supplies can be tried and adjusted or abandoned depending on the needs of the community in question.  All of these tools are part of including a wider array of people in the decision-making processes that determine how resources are allocated among people in a given locality.  These tools each depend, however, on understanding the importance of cooperation and acting in good faith toward ones fellow citizens and residents.

So, Phase III would require an expanded world view, and a population ready to reach out to others, to learn new languages, to see through the lenses of other people’s experiences.   Thus, phases I and II are intended to build the necessary empathy, foundational bases for understanding, and then the values and skills for protecting others that could then allow such growth.

“And so, it” began, last week..

Action Items:

1.) Search for two different sources related to Good Governance.

2.) Share them with us in the comments, here, please.

3.) Share your thoughts on how good governance (or bad) can affect a society that might be built, in 50-100 years.

4.) Write a story, post or tweet that uses those sources and your thoughts.

Dear Readers, ideas on learning, especially multiple #LanguageLearning, on-going education and empathy-building, to #EndPoverty, #EndHomelessness,  #EndMoneyBail & achieve freedom for All HumanKind?

Support our key #PublicDomainInfrastructure  & #StopSmoking for CCOVID-19:
1. #PublicLibraries,
2. #ProBono legal aid and Education,
3. #UniversalHealthCare, and
4. good #publictransport
Read, Write -one can add Stayed on Freedom’s Call via this GoodReads button:

, Vote, Teach and Learn (Lesson Plans)!

Nih sakh sh’lekk, sleem wa.   Yassas,   γεια σας!    Salût !  Nos vemos!  Görüşürüz!     ! שָׁלוֹם

ShiraDest

March, 2021 CE = March 12021 HE

(The previous lesson 67/67 , and the most recent lesson 1/67…)

Stayed on Freedom’s Call
(free: https://archive.org/details/StayedOnF…)
includes two ‘imagination-rich’ walking tours, with songs, of Washington, DC. New interviews and research are woven into stories of old struggles shared by both the Jewish and African-American communities in the capital city.

Shared histories are explored from a new perspective of cultural parallels and parallel institution-building which brought the two communities together culturally and historically.

Free copies are available at https://archive.org/details/StayedOnF…

Shira Destinie Jones by ShiraDest is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Wondering Wednesdays, Baby Acres, and Public Domain (Social) Infrastructure

This post begins to expand on my current non-fiction WiP, Baby Acres: A possible Vision for Making Society Suck Less, in 60 Years.   (Thanks to JYP and Tammy for the title ideas!!)  The goal is to lay out a roadmap for a fully inclusive society for all of us.  I’d love to see other such roadmaps toward a Kinder World, but thus far, I don’t see any fully drawn up plans, so I figured I’d put my ever-evolving roadmap out there for scrutiny.  Part of that map includes posts that I have written before, as I piece ideas I’ve had over the last 10 to 15 years together into one coherent framework.  I hope to offer that framework as one possible vision of what a society might look like that could eventually pass the Rawlsian Veil of Ignorance Test.

This framework started as The Four Freedoms for All HumanKind Movement idea, but then I realized that a movement needs more than one person, so I thought I’d better try to explain it and get some other folks to help me tracing this path, or possible path, forward for our society.

Back around 2011 or so, I had the idea that if we had a modern inclusive rite of passage adapted to our current society, we could build a better definition of what it means to be an adult, and how we figure out at what point that time has arrived, for any given person.  Some sort of definition, and then test of passage, made universal, could be a more satisfactory criterion, or set of criteria, than mere age, whether 18, 21, or 25, as has been in different times and places in American society.  That led me to imagine the Adulthood Challenge, with its various prerequisites and the final test.  That led me to wonder how on earth we could bring such a new ritual into general acceptance as a means-test for adulthood, and what that could mean for those who pass, or don’t.  What sort of society would we have in which some number of 40 or 50 year old persons are not considered legal adults, and what would that mean for such a society?  How do you determine who is reasonably able to conduct the responsibilities of adulthood, and what exactly are those responsibilities, since the state of being an “adult” comes with duties, but also grants rights and privileges denied to children.  And you cannot have a functioning society with absolutely no bar, or you then have to grant driving, governing, and other privileges and other decision-making functions to anyone and everyone at any time, which clearly will not work.  So, the need for some way to decide on the maturity and preparation level of each person in society led me to wonder what levels of preparation, and in what areas, an adult in our society is expected to have, and how one could fairly test that across the entire society.   This, of course, reminded me of the woeful state of our public education system in the US, not to mention other parts of our social infrastructure which are in the public domain, such as library systems, and health care.

That brought me to another problem:  when one has not had access to basic necessities, like health care, information, education, and transportation, as a child, one reaches (assuming one survives long enough) the age of juridic adulthood lacking much of what kids who grew up in less traumatizing or negligent or abusive or poverty-stricken homes generally have.  So, backing up from adulthood, I wondered how we can build, or rather, what would be needed, to build a society that ensured access to those tools for each and every child.  Starting with food, clothing, shelter and health care for kids whose parents either die young and had no other family, or kids who never had adequate parents to begin with.  Clearly, state Child Protective Service systems are not good enough, judging by “foster care-to-prison pipeline” statistics.  (I’ll come back to further ideas about this in future posts as part of Phases III and IV…)

If you follow my blog regularly, you might have noticed that those four basic necessities,  health care, information, education, and transportation, are something I rotate into my posts on a regular basic, under the name of a hash tag #publicdomaininfrastructure.  That is because a couple of years ago, I realized that those four basics had the potential to solve a lot of problems for a lot of people, if our social infrastructure systems like Public Libraries, Public Health Care, Public Education (for both kids and adults), and Public Transportation were upgraded.  A lot.  With those systems adequately funded and utilized by the middle classes as well as the poor, you could also get a situation going where people meet and greet and get to know each other more, as well as more attention to the needs of those public goods than merely as a hand-out for those who cannot or wish not to use the privatized version of all of these public goods.    Then I realized that without empathy, you cannot have any of those things.  So, then I began to wonder what a society could look like that met all of our needs, while keeping our freedoms intact, and still allowing each individual person to go as far as that person’s potential would allow, creatively, athletically, intellectually, etc.  Without having to dig out of a childhood hellhole just to get to the starting line.   What various shapes could such a society (indeed, societies) take, and how could you ensure that any and all of those various shapes remained just?

Obviously, you don’t go from where we are now, to a just and safe world for all of us, including women in Africa, in a day.  So, I divided the various parts of ideas I’ve had over the years into four sets, thinking that a movement can surely be built in 15 years or so, and then gave somewhat arbitrary names to each of those sets of ideas, to phase in one after another as part of a path to one possible offering of a vision for a better world.  And the path, or paths, will certainly not be simple, but “another world is possible,” clearly, because we have 6000 years of recorded human history to show us that nearly every possible form of governance has existed, and ceased to exist, on our planet among human beings.  So, I wondered, how we could conceive and plan a set of possible visions for a society that would be just, safe, free, and fair, for each and every human being on this planet.  I wondered why I’ve not seen someone write a book about such an idea, or set of ideas.   Then, I wondered if I should write one, myself.

“And so, it begins.”

Action Items:

1.) Search for two different sources related to social infrastructure.

2.) Share them with us in the comments, here, please.

3.) Share your thoughts on how a society might be built, in 50-100 years, that is more just.

4.) Write a story, post or tweet that uses those sources and your thoughts.

Dear Readers, ideas on learning, especially multiple #LanguageLearning, on-going education and empathy-building, to #EndPoverty, #EndHomelessness,  #EndMoneyBail & achieve freedom for All HumanKind?

Support our key #PublicDomainInfrastructure  & #StopSmoking for CCOVID-19:
1. #PublicLibraries,
2. #ProBono legal aid and Education,
3. #UniversalHealthCare, and
4. good #publictransport
Read, Write -one can add Stayed on Freedom’s Call via this GoodReads button:

, Vote, Teach and Learn (Lesson Plans)!

Nih sakh sh’lekk, sleem wa.   Yassas,   γεια σας!    Salût !  Nos vemos!  Görüşürüz!     ! שָׁלוֹם

ShiraDest

February, 2021 CE = February 12021 HE

(The previous lesson 67/67 , and the most recent lesson 1/67…)

Stayed on Freedom’s Call
(free: https://archive.org/details/StayedOnF…)
includes two ‘imagination-rich’ walking tours, with songs, of Washington, DC. New interviews and research are woven into stories of old struggles shared by both the Jewish and African-American communities in the capital city.

Shared histories are explored from a new perspective of cultural parallels and parallel institution-building which brought the two communities together culturally and historically.

Free copies are available at https://archive.org/details/StayedOnF…

Shira Destinie Jones by ShiraDest is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Wondering Wednesdays, Room for All, and One Possible Vision

The common good, or the general welfare, includes the Public Domain Social Infrastructure, and much more.    All parts of our world system, must become more fully inclusive for all of us. I have a humble idea for one possible potential vision of what a kinder world could look like, if anyone would like to see the big picture outlined?

My working title:  Baby Acres…

Action Items:

1.) Imagine some possible ideas for what you would like the world to look like in 60 years.

2.) Share them with us in the comments, here, please.

3.) Share your thoughts on whether a more inclusive calendar might help, or hinder,  that possible world,

4.) Write a story, blog post or tweet that uses your ideas, and share it here, please!

Dear Readers, ideas on learning, especially multiple #LanguageLearning, on-going education and empathy-building, to #EndPoverty, #EndHomelessness,  #EndMoneyBail & achieve freedom for All HumanKind?

Support our key #PublicDomainInfrastructure  & #StopSmoking for CCOVID-19:
1. #PublicLibraries,
2. #ProBono legal aid and Education,
3. #UniversalHealthCare, and
4. good #publictransport
Read, Write -one can add Stayed on Freedom’s Call via this GoodReads button:

, Vote, Teach and Learn (Lesson Plans)!

Yassas,   γεια σας!

ShiraDest

March, 2021 CE = March 12021 HE

(The last lesson 67/67 , and the first GED/HiSET lesson 1/67…)

Stayed on Freedom’s Call
(free: https://archive.org/details/StayedOnF…)
includes two ‘imagination-rich’ walking tours, with songs, of Washington, DC. New interviews and research are woven into stories of old struggles shared by both the Jewish and African-American communities in the capital city.

Shared histories are explored from a new perspective of cultural parallels and parallel institution-building which brought the two communities together culturally and historically.

Free copies are available at https://archive.org/details/StayedOnF…

Shira Destinie Jones by ShiraDest is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Los Domingos, Sueños, and TechoYComidaParaTodos

(This post in English)

Yo tenîa una idea, desde 2011, màs o menos, de cômo podrîamos dar techo y comida a todo el mundo.  Claro que he estado pensando en eso y cambiando las ideas, pero ahi està lo que pensé en 2013:

–

Un programa de Igualdad y Salud para Todos

Las Metas (para que todos pueden contribuir lo mejor):

1. Cada quien, de niño, debe aprender nadar
2. Que cada quien de niño aprende defenderse
3. Que cada bebe, al nacer, recibe .5 hectarios de terreno, que nunca se puede desprender. Se lo puede alquilar o prestar, pero siempre sigue esta persona como dueño o dueña del terreno. Que sea donde sea, será con un poso de agua y capaz de agricolar.
4. Agua potable para cada persona
5. Que cada familia tenga un libro en la biblioteca publica, con resumen del autobiografía de cada persona de la familia (eso quiere decir que cada quien tenga el tiempo libre y los recursos para escribir su autobiografia)

–

Queridos Lectores, esas ideas sobre el aprendizaje, sobre todo multiple #LanguageLearning, tienen por meta el apoyo de la igualdad para todos.

1. #PublicLibraries,
2. #ProBono legal aid and Education,
3. #UniversalHealthCare, and
4.  #PublicTransport

Nos vemos!

ShiraDest

Shira Destinie Jones by ShiraDest is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Spanish Sundays, dreamers, and FreeRoomAndRice for All…

@thegeneticsgal, this one is for you:

I have been dreaming up an idea since 2011, which I have been rehashing, renaming, and reorganizing into more viable alternatives.  This bit of the idea comes from around 2013 or so, but don’t forget, that even then I was trying to figure out what parts and pieces make up the common good.

The common good, or the general welfare, includes our Public Commons, like on-going legal & financial pro-bono education (aka Adulting Education).   Access to these public goods must become more fully inclusive for all of us.

–

the aim of Fully Inclusive Equality.

The Goals (allowing each person to contribute fully):

1. Each person, as a child, must learn to swim (or at least float).
2. Each child must learn emotional/psychological self-defense and physical self-defense to the greatest extent possible, in a Gandhian context.
(1 and 2 are part of the pre-Adulthood criteria…)

3. Each child, at birth, receives half a hectare of land, non-alienable. He or she may rent, lend or swap the land, but always remains the owner. Where ever the location, it should have a well and be arable.
4. Fresh water for ever person (free!)
5. Each family should have a book in the local public library, containing the autobiography of every adult in the family (which means that each person needs free time and the means to write his or her autobiography).

(the same Goals in Spanish, in the post that follows:)
—-

–

So, it turns out that my ideas on this topic are still gurgling, if that makes sense, as I mull over how to organize and defend what seem to be ludicrous suggestions to some of my acquaintances:

Action Items:

1.) Search for two different sources related to the amount of arable land in the world, and to the number of babies born each year, world wide.

2.) Share them with us in the comments, here, please.

3.) Share your thoughts on how an acre of land for each person might help, or hinder, inclusive thinking,

4.) Write a book, blog post or tweet that uses an alternate calendar, tells a good story, and makes a difference. I’m working on that through my historical fantasy #WiP, #WhoByFireIWill. If you write a book, once published, please consider donating to your local public library.

Dear Readers, ideas on learning, especially multiple #LanguageLearning, on-going education and empathy-building, to #EndPoverty, #EndHomelessness,  #EndMoneyBail & achieve freedom for All HumanKind?

Support our key #PublicDomainInfrastructure  & #StopSmoking for CCOVID-19:
1. #PublicLibraries,
2. #ProBono legal aid and Education,
3. #UniversalHealthCare, and
4. good #PublicTransport
Read, Write -one can add Stayed on Freedom’s Call via this GR button:

, Ranked Choice Voting and Housing for ALL!!, Teach and Learn (Lesson Plans)!

Nos vemos!

ShiraDest

imagined back in December, 2020 CE = December 12020 HE

(The previous lesson 32/67 published since this post, and the most recent lesson 33/67…)

Shira Destinie Jones by ShiraDest is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.