This post continues the rough draft of Chapter 1 of my non-fiction WiP, Baby Acres. And it now has words! 🙂 I’m posting the first outline section, chapter 1, section IA, warts and all, so please be forgiving here, dear readers. At the moment it is the best I can do. This was only meant to be about 250-300 words, but I got a little, well, verbose, at 580 words, I guess.
I’ve also realized, or remembered, rather, from my thesis writing, that putting the outline up front and then the verbage, or writing the words, later, is a mess. It is easier than having a separate spreadsheet for the outline and wordcount (though that process does work better for me when I am writing a novel, perhaps because there are so many more threads to keep track of, and also because I often struggle to hit my initial wordcounts while drafting fiction, so that wordcount tracking in my novel WiP spreadsheet keeps me moving it along, while adherring to potential publisher genre wordcount requirements).
Too bad my current free word processing software is too “light” to expand an outline and recollapse it again by chapter. So I am doing this all manually.
As previously stated, 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 One, section IA:
Phase I with respect to the entire project, and phases II-IV:
The first stage of this project forms the foundation for all three remaining stages. Phase I
consists of showing the connections between four key parts of our infrastructure, and building enough support for those systems as part of our larger sphere/culture/system/xyzWorld. A lack of health care, public transportation, up-to-date information, and safe community gathering spaces places limits on the freedom of us all. Accessible and safe community information-finding spaces are equally important, and public libraries frequently act as both gathering spaces for community events, and a point of first contact for many members of the most vulnerable communities to find up to date information on health events, voting, and other critical issues.
Both a single payer health care system and good public transit are key to free speech and
association. Lack of guaranteed transportation puts a practical limit on what a person can say due to lack of ability to protect one’s health, since having no car makes trips to doctor’s offices more difficult, or even impossible. Lack of health care and independent transportation can also put the job of a vulnerable worker at risk, leading to fear of job loss or black-listing, based on guilt by association. Those fears can quite effectively limit both freedom of association and freedom of worship, for instance when attending mosque is equated with associating with
terrorists. This underscores the importance of having access to good information, since
“a little knowledge is dangerous.”
currently page 11…
Both public transportation and public health care are also interconnected to consumer debt education and public libraries. Lack of current and accurate information on debt laws at the state level, for example, leads to many default judgments on debts which were already time-barred. These default SoL judgments are often strongly skewed toward poorer zip codes
(find blog posts with MD and other state studies…) .
This lack of continuing legal financial education tilts the scales toward further unjust and also unsustainable economic distribution. Public libraries are one key place where up to date information on such critical financial and pub health and safety issues is accessible to even the most vulnerable members of society. These four systems are thus inseparably linked and needed before progress on any other part of society could advance. Together they are called PublicDomainInfrastructure, and their connection to the larger whole will be shown in chapter two.
The higher levels of both empathy and critical thinking skills needed to build support for
PublicDomainInfrastructure can be supported in various ways.
Reaching the 4 Freedoms will require climbing a fairly steep learning curve for many people, and the process of learning both sets of skills could be significantly aided by encouraging people from all walks of life both to learn two or three (hinted at in ch.2, developed in chptr 3) languages, and to travel, when possible.
Travel is also especially helpful to this learning process, but is far less accessible to the majority of people than language learning, which can be done for free online, when one is persistent enough. Language learning is an inexpensive tool for building empathy, as travel could also be, if we were imaginative enough.
Public libraries can help in that task, as well as in learning how to build a habit of continual
individual learning and even group research. Many libraries have multi-lingual staffs, and
reference librarians trained in finding information from around the world. So, they are well-
placed to encourage more on-going individual and community learning in a variety of ways.
— (Next section: Chapter 1, IB…)
I’m continuing to update the outline for the first chapter, and also, I revise old versions of the all of the chapter outlines as I go. I like to save my work each day as a PDF (doc has been updated with “, and to travel, when possible”…), in addition to backing up the rtf document. That way I have a snapshot for each stage of the work, and I can also use any editor I want to edit the file, in case of crashes.
(Btw, I must remember to ask JYP about acks, since anon. blog…)
Last week was the seventh installment of this series…
Action Items:
1.) Consider some ideas you may have on how having safe and far-reaching public transit, universal health care, free local legal and financial classes, and great libraries could society change in 15 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)!
Shira Destinie A. Jones, MPhil
our year 2020 CE = 12020 HE
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.
Inspiring Critical Thinking and Community via Books, Lessons, and Story 