“Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia” / Steven Stoll

This one is a big deal. Not a long book, but the author hones in on the concept of enclosure and the difference between “subsistence” living–which he points out is not necessarily so dire and “poor” as is often portrayed in the media, and “capitalism,” in which things must be priced and turned into commodities, starting with labor. It’s a cogent idea and leads to a lot of thinking about alternatives to our current economic system, even if he clearly over-simplifies some aspects of the history of non-native-American settlement in Appalachia (starting with the fact, mentioned, but not belabored, that the waves of poor white settlers who first invaded the region took it from others).

It also reinforces a lot of other reading over the past year, pointing out that America has always ruthlessly supported the side of money and capital. This isn’t a “neoliberal” idea. It is American bedrock. That doesn’t make it less important to change, but may encourage those of us who would like to be change agents to look a bit more closely at history.

The author deals a lot of Commons, and at one point, takes Garrett Hardin, author of “The tragedy of the commons,” for proposing an intellectualized, theoretical set of issues. But, as anyone who has ever dealt with collectives knows, Hardin is persuasive because he touches on very real issues. People don’t magically get along, and communities don’t always find ways to work together–nor do they magically arrive at sustainable paths. Sometimes, they just self-destruct. (Easter Island comes to mind, but so does archeological work showing how various societies collapsed when ecological issues finally caught up with them.) That doesn’t invalidate the importance of looking to Commons for a model  for sustained community; it’s just a disclaimer that there is a lot to explore and this model, too, won’t always work.

This book reminds me a lot of EP Thompson’s “The Making of the English Working Class” in it’s thoughtfulness and depth–and in changing the way one looks at the world–in particular, labor, capital, and potentially better ways to organize community. The author has some proposals (see previous paragraph), but I find them more credible as places to begin exploration and experimentation. The importance of this book is in making the case that the dialectic between capital and labor may be a losing argument about the wrong stuff. And, of course, there is a lot here about Appalachia and the people who live there. It is time for them to have a voice, as well.

Somewhere in my Hassidic Anthology, is a quote attributed to one of the Rebbes, who was invited to become the Rebbe of a particular town, and who agreed to do so, so long as he was only interrupted from his studies and prayer with “new” problems.

Sure enough, soon the town comes to him for his approval of a statute prohibiting beggars from going door to door. The Rebbe refuses to comment. The townspeople are indignant. The Rebbe explains, “This is a very old issue. Surely there were similar laws in Sodom and Gomorrah. The Torah is clear that if people are in need, we must help them. Keeping the needy away from us so as to prevent our noticing that they need help is a sin.

But, such laws are so easy to rationalize. It doesn’t take much to realize that the new rules allowing States to require Medicaid recipients to work for their healthcare coverage are rationalizations. When such rules are put in place, States, and their citizens, are saying, “We don’t want to help you. We do not believe in a God of compassion. To the contrary, if you are suffering, it is your fault, and we want you to never forget that you do not deserve the help we provide, you lazy bums.”

It follows a very American tradition (not that the impulse is unique to America) of blaming the victim. We are like Job’s friends: unable to understand how someone could be suffering unless he has sinned. It is a convenient belief. 

The founders of this country thought that we had left behind the idea of Divine selection of Lords and Ladies in this new world. (Never mind that the historical record is much less sanguine.) They undertook measures, from the presumption of innocence, to heavy taxes on inheritances (skimpy list to let me to move on), to minimize the accumulation of power and maximize the right of everyone to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

But, when we go against Jewish law (and I cannot speak for other faiths) in insisting that we do not treat the homeless, the indigent, the stranger as well or better than we treat ourselves, we increase the store of sadness and evil in the world. For those who would claim the Bible as an excuse, it is time to reread, and even more important, to listen, to what is written therein.

As some people know, I have been at an impasse with regard to identifying as part of the Jewish community. In terms of who I am and how I approach the world, nothing has changed. Entirely Jewish. But, between the excesses of the Israeli government and growing racism in Israel, and my visceral rejection of Halacha–especially as manifested in racism, misogyny, and other framings of the world that I find alien–there isn’t much left. And certainly, not much that I would want to put out in public, where, should those same (to me) extremists find my comments, I will rapidly be subjected to a stream of hate that, given my druthers, I’d rather live without.

One manifestation of that impasse is reading more about Buddhism. It is clear to me that, among the forms of exercise I need to bring into my life, meditation is one that would likely have a positive, immediate impact. So, I was intrigued by Robert Wright’s “Why Buddhism is true: the science and philosophy of meditation and enlightenment.” It is an unusually clear secular explanation of the Buddhist world view, and one that reinforces my desire to begin meditating. (Will I actually begin meditating? Inertia is strong, and there are other things, like finding my next gig, that may need more attention.)

Having said that, the quantum contradiction between, “oneness” and “nothingness” is important, and part of the dialectic of being human. The ability to step away from the emotional veil through which we experience the world, to see things a bit better “as they are” feels important. I agree with the author that this is especially important at a time when we are busy poisoning the earth, and returning to a tribalism that will make it likely that we will poison ourselves into non-existence.

But.

In reading the book, I also found my mind wandering (perhaps if I meditated I would be more present!) to a moment about 30 years ago when a friend and I did what turned out to be the last modification of a Hagada that we used for our San Francisco Bay Area, New Jewish Agenda seders. We felt that the Hagada had gotten so focused on the problems of the world that the story of the Exodus–our story–was getting lost. This was the year that Stan Gurfinkel wrote an amazing summary of that story that we incorporated into the Hagada.

That year also marked a change in my thinking about the seder: Rather than use it as a time to reflect on the liberation required throughout the world, it returned to being a time to retell the story of our liberation as a people–hopefully to be better able to feel the pain of slavery and fight for ourselves and others, renewed.

In a similar vein, reading Wright’s book made me reflect that Buddhism is an inner-directed path. Jews tend to focus much less on self (more mindfulness would be good, I agree), and to instead focus on humans acting in the world. As the rabbis recorded thousands of years ago in the Talmud: “It was a mistake that God created humans. But we are here now, and we need to do the best that we can.” We need to act in the world. We may all be nothing, but there is a huge difference in “nothing” experienced as a middle-class human in the privileged, wealthy United States, and the 99% who do not have those advantages.

And we know those differences exist. We all know the story about the Rabbi on Yom Kippur wailing, “Lord, I am nothing, and my deeds are nothing, but inscribe me in the book of life.” Then the congregational president wails, “Lord, I am nothing, and my deeds are nothing, but inscribe me in the book of life.” Finally, a beggar at the back of the congregation wails, “Lord, I am nothing, and my deeds are nothing, but inscribe me in the book of life.” The President looks at the Rabbi and sneers, “Look who thinks he is nothing.”

A couple of weeks ago I felt that Judaism had become poisoned for me. That, if I were seeking spiritual sustenance I needed to explore elsewhere. As often happens, looking elsewhere has enabled me to more dispassionately regard those Jewish communities whose actions I abhor and reconsider my own Jewish practice.

In the meantime, as it happens, it would probably be a good thing if I =did= dig more deeply into meditation.

“In my estimation, Egypt’s revolution was defeated so readily because it wasn’t organized, it wasn’t political enough, and, most fatally, it didn’t have a compelling, constructive idea at its center.” (Thanassis Cambanis, Once upon a revolution)

Sadly, the quote above says more, in my mind to how little Mr. Cambanis understands organizing and community, than anything relevant about what happened at Tahrir Square. I am much more convinced by those who, looking at the wreckage of much of the “Arab Spring” point to the lack of organizing experience amongst the demonstrators and would-be revolutionaries. In countries where there are no unions, no legitimate political organizations, no secular community organizations–where the only mass organization represents one religious strand–it is much easier to figure out how things fell apart.

I am also reminded of the punch line I gave each night during a visit to Nicaragua during Hanukkah, 1984. I was part of a Jewish “Witness for Peace” group. Among our goals was to ferret out any official antisemism in a country which was home to only a handful of Jews (a couple of whom were in the government, but never mind). Because most people hadn’t heard of Jews, we took the opportunity to celebrate the holiday, and to raise some consciousness. Each night, as I explained the holiday to our hosts of the evening, I began, “Over two thousand years ago, Judah Macabbee, our Sandino…” and each night ended with something I still believe to be true: “We celebrate the dedication of the Temple, not the military victory, because military victory, though hard and fraught with difficulty, pales when compared to the monumental task of building a new, just society.” 

And so it was. the Macabbees founded a short-lived empire celebrated for its cruelty, rapaciousness, and fratricide–and empire so nasty that the Romans, under whose aegis they had achieved victory over the Greeks–finally stepped in and took over. In Nicaragua, after a determined terrorist campaign (the “contras”) funded by the US, the Sandinistas became more corrupt and were eventually (for a few years) voted out of office. (There is much more to the history of both groups, but I’m going to stick to that attempted transition from revolution to governing right now.)

As Cambanis painfully documents, the revolutions weren’t just fragmented and at cross-purposes, but had no civic or political experience. There was little organizing outside of the demonstrations that led to the resignation of Mubarak.

In her recent book, @Zeynep Tufekci talks about the inability of such groups to build on the initial attention–fragmented, no process (and a sizeable group of supporters who oppose process, on principle), no experience, no ability to react quickly to change. I’d argue that these are significant, but despite those handicaps, Mubarak was toppled. This is where I find myself turning to organizers and saying, “if you want a revolution, you have to organize.” It’s the slow stuff that not only establishes a decision-making process, but also creates norms for what the group stands for, and which (ideally, especially if you are talking about a national movement) focuses on and normalizes the country’s diversity, rather than leaves the movement as a choice between one objectionable in-group and another, which might be even worse. In Egypt, that came down to a choice between secular military dictatorship and the perceived threat of religious dictatorship by the Muslim Brotherhood. There were other choices, but they never got on the table, and as Cambannis does document, never got outside the smoky rooms in which the fractious parties debated and debated.

A few weeks ago I spent some time talking with a friend about my current attempt to find useful organizing design patterns, part of my attempt to do better organizing in real time (and at work, better scrum coaching).

Conversation is a good thing, but if I thought that my talk about how there were things common in Scrum and IAF-style organizing would strike a chord, I was wrong. For the umpteenth time, I have yet to find the language that speaks to the organizing imagination. Just as Scrum Masters and Project Managers listen to my talk about IAF-style organizing as though I were describing characteristics of Asian fruit trees (interesting, perhaps, but utterly irrelevant in Boston), my friend was mystified as to why I thought scrum might offer insight. He did like my emphasis on transparency–something we often don’t see in community organizing. But, I did not get the impression that it was something that he saw as relevant to his own practice.

He discussed how he teaches union members about social media–that they don’t build relationships. “But they get people you didn’t know before to the table!” I interrupt. He concedes the point and it disappears as we continue to talk.

But, here’s the thing. Union membership is at an all-time low compared to its peak, and still dropping. The reputation of Unions is even lower than the reputation of the bosses who grab even more of the national pie as our anti-aristocracy laws are rebranded “death taxes.” Huge swathes of the country see Unions, and community organizers, as the enemy.

Once we get people involved, yes, we need those relationships, community ties, one-on-ones, and the rest. But we have a lot to do with social media to change perceptions, get people to show up, and get them engaged–and talk with excitement to their friends. Mass media without those human connections keep us on the fad track. But, all the organizers in the world aren’t going to create change if we’re seen as the enemy, and if we’re not present where our potential members spend their attention.

I don’t know how to make this all work. I don’t even know how to get organizers to pay attention. But I remain convinced that if we can pull these tools together we can create a sustainable movement for change. In the meantime, am I talking with the wrong people? Totally wrong about these synergies? Irrelevant? No proof otherwise.

Following up on a mention in the recent Zeynep Tufekci book, “Twitter and tear gas,” I explored a new collaborative system. Loomio.org seems to be addressing the area–making collaborative decisions–that works most poorly online. Part of me goes, “well, get people together on the phone, or even better, in a room.” But, that isn’t always possible, so perhaps a tool like this has a niche.

But, if I were looking at a tool around which to organize, this would be the last on my list. Most often, I want good email tools, a calendar, a doc store –something like Google Drive or even better, groups.io. (For getting the word out, we have some relatively universal communities such as twitter and facebook–creating a special system for that would be counter-productive since nobody you’re trying to reach would be there.)

Loomio addresses an issue that Tufekci brings up in her book, and one which I assume is very important to some organizers: Especially in an anti-authoritarian collaborative, how do you make decisions? In particular, how do you make decisions with sufficient speed as to counter the actions of a government trying to destroy or discredit your movement? Loomio posits an answer.

I tend to think that this is the wrong question. I would argue that in a collaborative of strangers, making good decisions via online tools is unlikely. Good, deep, responsive organizing relies on community–people who know each other, who bowl together, form a union together (or keep one going), who play pokemon go together or ride bikes together, perhaps even celebrate religious community (which tends to be much more than mere prayer, for better and for worse) together.

People who know each other have trust, or have grounds on which to build trust that is sufficiently concrete that decisions can be discussed and decided. The decision tool, which could be Roberts Rules of Order, Sociocracy, consensus, or just “this seems to be what we’re agreed on” doesn’t matter. From my soapbox, if knowledge is a community construct (see, for instance, the recent book, “The knowledge illusion : why we never think alone” / Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach), then I would argue that the ability to make decisions based on that knowledge is even more of a community construct.

But, that’s my bad attitude. If anyone is interested in the idea, do explore and report back.

http://loomio.org

One of my earliest experiences with using online media came on my return from a Witness for Peace visit to Nicaragua in 1984, posting a write-up of the trip on a local computer bulletin board and having an effect that I did not experience at all in my reporting/organizing with the local organization (New Jewish Agenda) that had arranged for the trip. It was clear that computer-augmented human networking was going to matter.

So, it comes as no surprised that the most exciting book I’ve read this month is Zeynep Tufekci’s “Twitter and Tear Gas.” I first heard about it on the WELL (which I joined not so long after that first BBS experience so many years ago), where a member had read it and blogged about in Spanish–he’d been looking for advice that would fit what he was experiencing as the situation worsens in his native Venezuela.

Zeynep is really the first =organizer= to take a look at what works and doesn’t work when organizing using the new social media. Without them, there would have been no Arab Spring. Without them, important protests ranging from the Occupy Movement to a more recent occupation of Gazi park in Istanbul would never have had the impact that they had.

And yes, as Zeynep notes, those occupations did not have the long-term influence that they should have.

Drawing on experience ranging back to the Zapatista revolution in Mexico over 20 years ago, she puts on her Gene Sharp hat and discusses how use of social media first helped citizens organize with an impact that would not previously have been possible. At the same time, with the eclipse of the Arab Spring, she also notes that there are limits to organizing via Twitter. And, before going into some of that brittleness, she also provides very cogent analysis of the right-wing backlash on social media which uses lies and disinformation to so flood the media that people can no longer tell what is being reported truthfully and what is made up, diluting the potential effect of the media as organizing tools, and further disempowering people.

In her analysis of modern social media and their political affordances, both good and bad, this book is a milestone. I anticipate sharing my print copy far and wide.

At the same time, I can’t help but feel that Tufekci doesn’t yet know how to organize. By that, I mean the knowledge of how to effect deep and long-term political change. She talks about what happens when huge crowds are brought to regime-defeating demonstrations, but then cannot respond quickly when the local powers change tactics–whether those tactics be the coup that ended the brief return to democracy in Egypt or the isolation and lack of provocation that eventually caused the recent demonstrations/occupation in Hong Kong to eventually just peter out. In the book, she refers to the problem as something that follows from groups that have just organized, don’t have ways to make decisions quickly (especially given the canti-authoritarian bent of many modern movements) and thus to respond.

I would argue that she is on the right track, but that the problem goes deeper. In the years since the Arab Spring, one common analysis I have seen of the relative success of change in Tunisia, vs. horrible failure elsewhere, is that only in Tunisia were there social institutions (unions, etc.) and the norms of local community organizing that provided both that ability to respond that was lacking elsewhere, but also the deeper connections that enabled groups to find common ground and to work together.

In thinking about Tufekci’s analysis of the recent mass protests and their lack of effect, I am reminded of the late Saul Alinsky’s disdain for mass movements, including the Civil Rights Movement. He felt that only local organizing could effect long-lasting change. Yet, today, as we look at the evidence that knowledge, itself, is a social construct as much as a collection of facts–pretty much as Tufekci reports–much of what Alinski said still resonates. Except that that Alinsky-style organizing suffers from an opposite effect–a gradualism that can, in effect, lead to positive change that can’t keep up with the ongoing worsening of life for those not in the 1%.

My hope is that there is some way to bring the two together: to use social media better, and to counter faux news with relational organizing communities (starting with the importance of union organizing, as described and details in Jane McAlevey’s recent “No shortcuts: Organizing for Power) and the multiplicity of community connections that can counter those who not only still own the presses, but also pay for the artificial turf organizing that is becoming its own global opportunity zone.

But, don’t take my word for it. Read Tufekci’s book, "Twitter and Tear Gas”. Read more about it at http://https://www.twitterandteargas.org and let’s take up the conversation on twitter (@aridavidow, @zeynep) and elsewhere. I should note that there are two versions of the book. If you can afford it, and want to help support the author, you can join me and purchase a copy (which I ordered through my local book store, thus also helping keep an important local source of books, readings, and other community building alive), or access the Creative Commons version online.

Have fun.

I had an interesting moment of clarity today.

I have a list of about 60 tasks created by the Product Owner of one of three teams with whom I am working on a messy, complex project.

The list is great because it represents the milestones that the two primary product owners felt would be needed to understand how long, and what effort would be required to accomplish our goals.

Long-time project managers and Scrum folks of every flavor will be laughing, of course, because the list includes no team estimates–no User Stories whatsoever–no sense of dependencies, and a very managerial (granted, experienced managerial) set of time estimates. It’s a wish list, not a plan. And sure enough, as I wrestle to turn these line items into user stories and to better understand the project from my perspective, it rapidly becomes clear that as much is missing as I expected. The time estimates make no useful sense, and there is probably much more work here than we understand–and because we don’t understand, I can’t even point to what is critical and what is merely taking up time (or, could at least be deferred or handed off to other groups).

In a better world, of course, we’d have a team kickoff meeting and work this out as a team. This is a group not yet comfortable with Agile–they like the way they work now and are not ready to make time to try a phase 0 Agile planning session. (This, despite the fact, that our first project phase, which lasted about five months, managed to meet its delivery dates, in part because we spent three days planning and discussing. It takes time to change culture.)

So, I’m trying to tease these line items apart and saying mean things to myself about my abilities as a change agent and why am I trying to do what a team should be doing and learning from yada yada yada (or as my French friends would say, “blah blah blah.”) All of this is true.

But why can’t I find a tool that helps me cluster these line items and figure out the stories? How do I capture the discussion? I’m taking a walk to the other side of the work campus to fetch some fresh painkillers from the car when I find myself musing through the various tools that I have at hand. MS Project, bloated and buggy, does, nonethless make it easy for me to group stories hierarchically. Jira lets me create the User stories that we’ll ultimately put into something “sprint-like”–but gives me no tools yet for visualizing how things fit together.

So, I’m walking and visualizing and thinking and it suddenly hits me. What I’m trying to create is a map of user stories. Yup. See Jeff Patton’s book, “User Story Mapping”. I’ve been dipping into that book for at least a couple of years now without making a connection to what I do day-to-day and its finally sunk in.

Still a lot of work to be done. A lot of stickies to write, and then get recorded in something. I don’t have any easy visualization tools to help pull my product teams together. But now that I have a better sense of what User Story Mapping maps to, in my own head, I’m feeling a bit more optimistic.

Just finished reading “Janesville,” an account of lives changing when the main plant in a small midwest town closes down. Mostly depressing. I didn’t expect to hear that Paul Ryan, the congressman who represents the district, did anything, and he didn’t. But, for the most part, few did in either party. I’m not sure any politician helped–not Obama, nor Walker, and certainly not Trump. Those who did help, were mostly the underpaid or volunteer folks who make anything work, but weren’t enough to keep many former industrial towns going. Janesville has sort of survived.

Some notable things mentioned, but not analyzed: job training didn’t improve laid off folks lives. To the contrary, those who underwent retraining ended up with fewer jobs and less earnings, than those who didn’t retrain. I would so much like to see some in-depth research. What happens if you correct for age? Was there a difference in education, training, income, age, among the two groups (retrained or not retrained)? Was some of the difference simply caused by what happens when people start over in a new field? Who knows. At least here, the author asked some questions.

The town of Janesville paid millions of dollars to relocate industries. The cost/job is astronomical. Elsewhere, this has been a loser strategy–costs the towns much more in benefits than will come in from wages. How did it work out for Janesville? The author didn’t ask.

Were there any projects that achieved good outcomes, or other projects that achieved unexpected (or expectedly) bad ones? Not mentioned.

We do learn a lot about how the closing of the GM plant affected a few families, mostly for the worse. But I’d trade those local color details for more study and more analysis.

This stuff matters. We have to dig more deeply. We have to be trying different ideas in as many places as possible–and study the results so that we have some idea of how to help communities when industries die, move out, or change, leaving their former employees with bupkis. This book is well-written, but it is not the place to find any of that out.

“Don’t they realize that they are hurting themselves the most?” It seems to me that I have heard this phrase all of my life. From the Watts and Detroit riots in the 1960s that trashed the sections of LA and Detroit serving the rioters, to the “right wing wackos” who preferred billionaire populist Donald Trump over liberal Hillary Clinton in this past November’s election.

I’m getting tired of the trope. It’s a way for those who bitterly disagree with what happened to distance themselves from those who act “against their interests” without engaging. The bitterness is even more extreme as Trump proves true to the person he has been all of his life. His first act was to repeal an executive order providing mortgage relief to the middle class. His cabinet is full of fellow billionaires, and his legislative priorities, from repeal of Obamacare (otherwise known as the “welfare for the wealthy act”), to tax reform (also known as “welfare for the wealthy”), he has been true to who he has been. And yet, despite clear evidence that he will be a disaster for the middle class and the poor, his supporters remain true.

I’m not sure I understand much about the phenomenon–not the riots, not the voting against your interests. I only know that it is familiar and goes back at least as far as the golden calf. When you feel that there is a path for you to survive and to better yourself, you’ll take it. That’s human nature. But, when you feel that life sucks and it’s going to get worse, it doesn’t take much to get your to take it out on what is at hand. “Hurting yourself” in a riot or an election is a meaningless concept when you already know that you hold a losing hand. What is left is the expression of anger, the looting, and at worst, the satisfaction of knowing that those smug liberals are getting theirs.

It’s wrong. It’s stupid. And it’s what we humans do when we feel that the alternative is going to the slaughter like sheep.

If someone wants to create a party that will speak to the disenfranchised, we can either speak to their fear (Fox News, et al), or their fantasies. Or we can engage, community by community, to fight for Criminal Justice reform, higher minimum wages, access to capital and to all levels of education, access to healthcare and shelter.

What we can’t do is talk down to people and insist that they realize that they are only hurting themselves. Somehow we have to be able to listen, and to see and hear through other’s eyes and ears. Without that empathy, we got nothing. Without that empathy–and the follow-up that delivers on that empathy, we got nothing.

Jane F. McAlevey’s new book, No Shortcuts: Organizing for power in the new Gilded Age is an important dissection of the difference between “organizing” (building a committed, sustainable community) and “mobilizing” (getting people out short-term, until the next fad grabs their attention). There is also “advocacy,” which is essentially paid lobbying–it matters a lot for many causes, but is both ephemeral, and depends on money paid to the lobbyists, with virtually no effort or engagement of the community.

In brief, what McAlevey seems to be saying is that if you want change, you need to organize. And if you want to succeed, unions are still the best lever for organizing. But, and it’s a big “but,” unions succeed only when they community as a whole is involved–you can’t focus just on the workers in the workplace. You need to involve their families, and you need to build on the relationships in the communities–social organizations, for instance. One of the examples in the book, “Make the Road New York,” is, in fact, a community organization that has pushed into union organizing in the immigrant community in NYC.

It’s hard to hear. I’ve been involved with Alinsky-derived organizing for many years, and this work does point to some of the problems with that style of organizing. In fairness, too, the Alinsky organization I work with in Boston has been much closer to the organizing model than McAlevey credits. 

Bottom line: Much of our lives revolves around work, and earning a living is a primary worry. Organizing without involving labor is going to be weak. But, by the same token, New Labor organizing tends to be more “mobilization” than organizing–staff negotiating without involving or engaging workers–and that erodes worker support for the union and leads to significantly lesser gains. Look, instead, at the Chicago Teacher’s Union, or SEIU’s 1099NE (as very different from 1099 in other regions) and what it has done for healthcare workers. Likewise, the successful organizing effort in the South that nobody has heard about: Smithfield Foods being organized by the UFCW (an effort that also involved Rev. Barber, more recently of “Moral Mondays” fame.

We like to think in terms of definite enemies: the Indians as experienced by immigrants from Europe while grabbing someone else’s traditional lands; the Germans and the rest of the Axis Powers during WWII; the Soviets when we pretended that all conflict in the world reflected a Zoroastrian battle between good and evil.

Things are much more porous, and the conflicts in our globe are not well represented by individual ideologies, nations, or religions. Perhaps, better said, there =is= a global religion that focuses on the benefits to the fortunate few who have the education, wealth, security, and luck to take advantage of globalization. In response, we see local revanchist movements such as Boku Haram, horrible as they might be to non-believers, trying to claim control in specific geographies. Even more typically, we see disaffected, disconnected individuals. Some travel to troubled areas–they join ISIS in Syria and Iraq, for instance. Others read about causes on the internet, or from local pockets of disaffection: they are not just the individual terrorists who have attacked crowds in the name of Islam, but the Dylan Roofs, killing blacks at a prayer meeting in church; Robert Lewis Dear, Jr., at a Planned Parenthood in Colorado, the murder of a pro-EU British legislator in the run-up to the Brexit vote in the UK. The daily stories of murders in the US by someone who was, or looked to the shooter, like a Muslim. The enemy isn’t Islam, or Fundamentalism, per se; rather we live in a world where the disaffected find it easy to justify their confusion by idolizing whichever brand of hate fits their limited experience of the world, and to kill.

If we are to find a way forward that speaks to the best in us, and to the best in our faith, whether faith in economic progress, or in books written thousands of years ago (or whatever mix of faiths brings out that best in us) we need to find ways to make our societies more just. America is deeply corrupt–perhaps it mostly ever was. If our major corporations are not held to account for exploiting labor, polluting the air, water, and earth, or for being responsible members of their communities, then the laws we use to weave order become meaningless and oppressive. In part, this is the message I take from Arlie Hochshield’s “Strangers in our own land,” as she describes how people in Louisiana consistently vote for politicians who abet the destruction of their world: destroying vital coastal areas, polluting the earth and air and water with chemicals resulting in illness, cancer, and the destruction of the natural habitat. It is a world in which individuals can be fined for hunting out of season, or killing the wrong wildlife, but in which a chemical company will get away scot free for killing thousands. The rot starts at the top, and until we address that, we are defending a state that is actively helping that destruction, when it should be our bulwark against the predations of the powerful against the individual.

We sometimes talk about our failures in nation-building as related to the lack of civic organizations in foreign countries. It rings true. Without unions, without independent civic society, without a diversity of independent religious bodies, there is no experience in self-governance, and nothing to reign in the most powerful warlords or military men from taking control of the government, seeking rents to line their own pockets. What we have lost sight of is that here in the United States we have so eroded our own secular and civic bodies–in particular, we have weakened the union movement to the point of near-irrelevance in most spheres–that all that is left is our religious diversity, at a time when most Americans do not affiliate even there. It is no surprise, given that dynamic, that religious fundamentalists are fueling anti-government actions–but not just fundamentalists. They are joined by the dispossessed and disaffected from across the once dominant majoritarian culture who can no longer look to the future for a better life for themselves or for their children. Our government, our society, have failed them.

But, if the tea party and the inward-looking xenophobes are right to be angry, taking that anger out of those who are weaker: the poor, the foreign, on the new, on the future–using that anger to make us smaller in every way, and in particular in making our future smaller–is the wrong path.

We need a reform of government, so that the rot at the top stops, rather than concentrating power further in the hands of the wealthy. The more the income gap grows, the poorer we all become–including the wealthy. Rent-seeking can’t substitute for innovation and opportunity, and those thrive only when =all= people have access to education, to healthcare, shelter, to legal redress and to capital. Thousands of years of history teach us, too, that they thrive best when many cultures participate, when diversity of gender identity, religion, and other talents all have room to thrive. To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin 250 years ago, we can shrivel up separately, or flourish together.

I have been fascinated with the idea of test-driven development for a few years now. It is part of the salad of changing ways of making/sustaining code that includes Agile, Lean, DevOps and a few other significant buzz-words. Right now, between assignments, I am digging into a book I’ve had for at least two years called “Test Driven Development with Python,” by Harry Percival. I know it’s been at least two years (I suspect more like three) because the 2nd edition is going to be released real soon now. If I’m right, then the text I am following on the site if for the 2nd edition (whereas I have the first edition on my computers).

So far, a lot of what I am doing is meta. As part of my prep, I had to find the latest version of Firefox which works with Selenium (not, apparently, the latest versions of both). I’m rehabilitating my python, which was never very advanced and needs improvement. I’m also thinking about text editors. I’ve been using a nice editor called “Coda” for my HTML and CSS and all of the regular site maintenance I do on my 1990s websites (the ones that will eventually be replaced by Django–at least, Django is the target this month. We’ll see how this goes. I spent several years years intending to move to Drupal, which is familiar, and which I like on a lot of levels. But, really, if I am coding for myself, do I really, really want to get deeper into PHP? Hell no. Python is the language I love, the first language I have loved since Turbo Pascal, however imperfectly I know it. So, now, as I say, it’s revamp what I know of python, then on to django and new websites.)

Right. Editors. So, I want to be using a second text editor, so that my HTML and CSS and the zillion files opens for current maintenance are in one context, and all of the python stuff is open in a different context. I’m considering using Komodo, which I have used before and like–although I have had trouble figuring out how to make regexes work with it. I am also considering ponying up for Sublime or some other text editor. Suggestions welcome.

The milestones to get to the new websites go something like this at the moment:

* Use the TDD book to learn a bit about TDD. That includes subtasks like, getting comfortable with Django, git, ansible (or other automated configuration/site setup tool), figuring out where I want my code to live (i.e., do I continue to develop on my local testbed, promoting to my traditional ISP, do I move to AWS, or do I find a PaaS environment that works for me. I lean towards PaaS because I don’t want to be spending time doing what a friend calls “yak shaving”–worrying about the distracting minutia that would be handled elsewhere were I using these skills professionally, rather than as a hobbyist. But in the messy, “figure it out” phase, I’m likely to move to AWS (because I know it, because it will be easiest to set up all the subdomains I want, and because I can access it easily from all of my computing devices)

* Having decided on an environment and how to sustain it, dig into Django and begin replacing critically-broken parts of my personal websites

* Assimilate lessons learned and migrate. 

In any event, having broken my person websites and their accompanying blogs, I am likely to use this tumblr record what I’m learning as I learn it. Hope to, at any rate.

It has taken over a year for me to realize that my KlezmerShack FB page is basically a one-way communications tool. Even stuff I post as me, gets assigned to a corner “guest post.” Duh. Pages are there to broadcast. If you want a group effort, make it a “Group”. Which is what I’ll be doing with the KlezmerShack page anon. In the meantime, the good folks on the Progressive Exchange list sent me pointers on how to use FB for non-profits and causes better. As usual, these are posted so that (a) I can find them again, and (b) in the hope that they will be useful to others:

A page called “Nonprofits on Facebook”

How is the above different from Facebook for Nonprofits - there’s a different domain (fb.com), but will have to explore before I know whether this is part of Facebook, something owned by Facebook, or a third party.

And finally, Actionsprout points out that they have a plethora of helpful webinars

Best article I’ve seen so far about using Trello for personal projects. Still not sure how to best apply this to teams.