One of the first things he told me when we met was that he had been in the Hitler youth.  

The oddest thing about this was how casually he mentioned it.  My first week in College and all the 1st-year students were expected to meet with their advisors for an introductory lunch.

And here I was, face to face with a man who was part of an organization which would have willingly and obediently murdered me for my ethic heritage.

I didn’t understand why he did this at the time.  I did understand that he wasn’t proud of it.  He wasn’t telling me this to promote himself or to show me what it meant.

I knew that he had been a child at the time, and likely had little choice in the matter, but even so, I found it odd that he began a conversation with this, as though it weren’t something to be ashamed of, as though it weren’t something to hide from, to run from.

It was a few years before I really understood what was going on, and it took another story for it to make sense to me.

This is not a story about history, though it is tied to it.  It is a story about today, and what comes next.  It is a story about what we do when we finally acknowledge what we’ve been part of, what it says about our humanity and how we chose to respond to it.

My social psychology instructor, in a class I took some time later, told us a story.  I’m going to render it in first person for dramatic effect, and I’m telling it from memory, so I probably don’t have the details down, so this is the basic gist:

A few decades ago, I took a job on a fishing boat off of British Columbia.  It was difficult work and we were pretty isolated.  We’d spend most of our time out in sea, and most of that time was spent fishing.  

We would joke a lot and socialize, because there was nothing else to do.  There was only one man on that boat that I ever thought of as a friend, and he didn’t speak to me other than to give one- or two -word instructions for the first five months of this work.

When we finally did have a conversation, he told me about his history.  He’d been a soldier in Hitler’s army: a foot soldier; a grunt.  He didn’t understand the bigger picture.  He just knew that he was a soldier and it was his job to fight for his country.  He didn’t know about the concentration camps, the ovens, etc.

When he finally did realize what he’d been part of, it was just before the war had ended.  And he just walked away: he threw down his gun and left his army and left his country and just kept leaving it.  He took job after job, saying as little as possible to avoid having to discuss his German accent.

By the time I’d met him, he’d managed to make it across the Ocean and across Canada.  We didn’t talk about him having been a Nazi much.  It was clear that he was ashamed of it.  It was clear that he didn’t think there was redemption for it.  So he just hid: from himself, his history, the first twenty-five years of his life.  I don’t know why he told me.  He hadn’t told anyone else.  For whatever reason, I think he just knew I was someone who wouldn’t judge him.  

He never left fishing after that.  We continued to write from time to time, and eventually the letter stopped coming.  I heard later that he had died doing that work.  I don’t know whether it was suicide or an accident, but I don’t think he expected to ever do anything but die on that boat.  He never did learn to face what he’d been involved in and that fear of his own past pushed him to become a shadow of a man, someone who could never move beyond it.

It was then that I finally understood my advisor: he knew that what he had been involved in was horrendous and that it was largely viewed as mass inhumanity, the worst of his generation.  And he knew that there was no easy path to redemption from that.

But one way of dealing with it, for him, was to be unflinchingly honest about it: never let anyone know him without knowing what he was part of first.  Never let anyone even get to know him without first knowing who he was and some of what he had done.  For him, he chose not to run or to hide, but he chose to never allow him the simple pleasure of meeting someone new without being seen through a specific filter, one connected with unrelenting evil and horror.

One man chose to flee from his past, separating himself from almost all social interaction, retreating into himself, and having few human contacts.  Another chose to face his past, looking directly at it and not giving others the choice but to face it as well.  

So what are our own soldiers going to chose?  When those who engaged in atrocities come home, what are they going to do?  Hide?  Retreat?

What sort of psychological damage will it do to them, long term, to have been put through this?  If they had a clear mission with a moral clarity behind it, it would be different, but they have no clear idea as to what their mission was for most of their time in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I read GregMitch’s diary, Why did soldier kill herself,  after refusing to torture? and one passage sticks out, with one woman talking about her experience after witnessing torture on the part of her fellow soldiers:

“It also made me think,” Williams says, “what are we as humans, that we do this to each other? It made me question my humanity and the humanity of all Americans. It was difficult, and to this day I can no longer think I am a really good person and will do the right thing in the right situation.”

Imagine this: being put through something that not only challenges your sense of morality, but places you in the position of not being convinced about your own humanity.

What do you think that does to a person?

While our soldiers come home, will we have a way of helping them deal with this?  Will we help them know what is and is not right and good?  

Will we help them face their past and learn to acknowledge it and move forward, or will they just retreat out of fear, living a life of quiet desperation, retreating from their friends, their families and their lives?  Will we embrace them and give them the opportunity to heal or will we just see the emptiness in their eyes and turn away, afraid of what it reflects in us?

Will we acknowledge our own complicity in the torture that was committed in our own name, in the violence that we helped fund?  And if we do, will we be able to handle it?

I don’t have good answers to any of these questions.

Does anyone?

An extinction burst is a concept from behavioral psychology.  It involves the concept of elimination of a behavior by refusing to reinforce it.

The best example of this is a child’s tantrum.  Parents react to tantrums, which is why they often work, but the point of the tantrum is primarily attention.  So when the parent reacts, it reinforces the tantrum and increases the frequency of it.  What many parents fail to understand is that even a spank or yelling is still attention and still helps to reinforce the tantrum.

What is generally very effective about reducing tantrums is not attention, but a complete dearth of it.  As difficult as it is to do so, the tantrum will generally go away once the attention is removed.  

But first there is the extinction burst.  

The extinction burst is basically what happens when the tantrum’s not working any longer– it actually gets worse for a time before it fades away.  If you’ve ever seen kids throwing a tantrum, you’ve probably seen this — some more informed parents will let the tantrum go and they don’t actually look like good parents when doing it– they look kind of mean and uncaring, but it’s often the right thing to do despite appearances.  

So what happens is that the kid just starts ramping up that tantrum– thinking “I just need to try harder.”  And sometimes this works– the parent relents, gives the attention (which may be yelling or a slap, but it’s still attention) and the kid gets rewarded for the tantrum and gets rewarded for making the tantrum worse.

I want to reiterate that the tricky part of all this is that it’s hard to do the right thing here.  And in most cases, the right thing is to ignore it.  So the problem is twofold:

1. How can I be sure that ignoring it is the right thing?


2. Even if I’m sure, how do I find the resilience do do it?

Unfortunately, the answer to both is “not easily.”  Ignoring it is often the right thing, but in some cases, the tantrums are not there in order to get attention but masking something more serious.  You still need to listen to your kid and pay attention, even if your kid is being a major pain.  That doesn’t mean you give in to the kid’s demands or react inappropriately, but you do need to understand the little hellspwan, whether you like it or not.

The second?  Well that really just takes strength of conviction, which doesn’t always come easy.  It’s also a lot harder when there is more than one parent and one’s not so good at handling this.  The weak link can cause all sorts of problems.

Kids, as a rule, are smarter than we give them credit for.  Not all kids, of course.  I mean, yes, there are Lisa Simpsons out there, but there are also Ralph Wiggums.  But I’m talking about how most kids in general, are not stupid– they learn their world and they know how to work it to their advantage, so they’ll take any opportunity they can find to get what they want, and if that means playing parents against one another, they’ll do it in a heartbeat.

Because, really, it’s not about morality or what’s right at that point in their lives.  It’s all about them.  That’s not their fault.  They’re just not mature enough to understand morality yet.

And sometimes the hard lesson they need to learn is that just because their parents love them doesn’t mean their parents will do what they want, and just because they choose to start screaming and shouting in the middle of a Kay-Bee toy aisle in front of everyone doesn’t mean they get that new toy they’ve been craving ever since they first saw it twenty-seven seconds ago.

One of the problems with extinction is the inability to know when you’re truly extinguishing a behavior as opposed to letting it fester and grow in the background.  Why, for example, would Orly Tatz at this point be basically a joke to the few people who know her name while Sarah Pain continues to get attention and coverage?

The sad fact is that there’s no way to always tell– when the tea party first started going off the deep end before HCR was passed, I advocated for allowing them to ride out their extinction burst, letting them get it out of their system before acceptance.

Obviously, if that did work, it was on a larger arc than I realized, and there’s plenty of evidence to suggest I had that completely wrong.  

Let’s take another example: The Westboro Baptist Church thrives off of attention and interest, and we’re pretty much ready to give them that whenever they come calling.   I remember when no one knew who they were, back when no one cared about them because they were only going after gay people and not soldiers.  I think their problem was that they weren’t getting enough attention to thrive when they were just expressing a more extreme type of homophobia than the rest of the country so they had to escalate to the point of pissing off pretty much everybody.  But imagine what would happen if we simply ignored them and treated them like the powerless anachronistic fools that they are?  Would they be able to do much of anything to anybody?

Now, part of the problem (and we see this with Sarah Palin) is that some reinforcements happen without our participation and we can’t really control them.  If you are the parent who’s always refusing to reinforce the child’s tantrums but there is another caregiver for whom the tantrums work, you can’t actually extinguish the behavior.  There needs to be agreement.  So when we advocate for ignoring Sarah Palin completely, but she still has an internal reward system that we can’t control, we can’t actually stop her by ignoring her because she gets enough attention (and money; let’s not forget the money) to sustain her existence as a political hack and sloganeering performance artist (did I mention the money?).

I don’t have a solution to this or clear answers to these questions– but I do think we need to have a better understanding of the psychology that fuels or fails to fuel some of these movements and individuals.   The only reason the Westboro Baptist Church is known at all is because people choose to cover them.  Palin’s a different story, but in order to understand whether or not she, like Michele Malkin, Randall Terry or Ann Coulter, is worth attacking or addressing at all, we need to understand the power of the extinction burst, what it means, and when it can be applied.

The BBC has an excellent article with the latest on the reactor explosion in Japan:

In principle, this should not cause leakage of radioactive material because the building is just an outside shell; the job of keeping dangerous materials sealed in falls to the the metal containment vessel inside.

Chief cabinet secretary Chief Yukio Edano confirmed this was the case, saying: “The concrete building collapsed. We found out that the reactor container inside didn’t explode.”

He attributed the explosion to a build-up of hydrogen, related in turn to the cooling problem.

However, it sounds like, even though the containment vessel itself didn’t explode (good news), it could still be leaking. Because of the venting of cooling water that has turned to steam, the explosion should result in specific radioactive substances in the air:

…this should contain only short-lived radioactive isotopes such as nitrogen-16 produced through the water’s exposure to the core. Venting this would be likely to produce short-lived gamma-ray activity – which has, reportedly, been detected.

Ok, so far, so good, those are not exactly what you want to be breathing, but at least they degrade quickly.

Unfortunately, some of the radioactive particles detected are ones that SHOULD NOT be there, if the problem is limited to the containment shell:  

[More below the jump]

…One factor that has yet to be explained is the apparent detection of radioactive isotopes of caesium.

This is produced during the nuclear reaction, and should be confined within the reactor core.

…

“The amount that you measure would tell you to what degree the fuel rods have been compromised.”

It is an important question – but as yet, unanswered.

So, while the big scary explosion is itself, not as big a deal as one would think (still bad, just not catastrophic), the real area of concern is in what we can’t see: the reactor core’s inner containment vessel may be compromised, as could one or more fuel rods or control rods.

It’s sort of like the reactor is playing the cup game with 3 cups and a rubber ball. While we’re looking “over there” at the impressive smoke, dust, and rubble, the reactor is dropping the ball through a hole in the table.

It seems humanity may be about to lose the bet over whether we can safely build nuclear power plants.

And for the nuclear advocates out there: Yes, this IS a rare event and so highly unlikely that we can’t reasonably expect such disasters all the time. However, nor can we possibly, being fallible, non-omnipotent, and non-omnicient, plan for all and prevent all possibilities.

This is a case of multiple fail-safe mechanisms failing at once due to extraordinary circumstances. The building was earthquake proof (to an extraordinary extent), but the generators were not tsunami proof.

It will be quite some time before the full extent of the failure mechanisms is understood. In the mean time, our planet is studded with power plants designed to withstand everything except whatever was unanticipated when they were built.

I would also like to put in a good word for all the technicians and scientists who are scrambling in the background to prevent this bad situation from becoming a massively horrifying situation. You know that there are people out there struggling to learn exactly what’s going on and stop it before it gets worse. Let’s all keep them in our thoughts as they try to protect the people of Japan and the world.

The Fukushima nuclear power plant accident in Japan is a terrible tragedy for the people in Japan, and for the people in the path of the moving radioactive cloud.  

The Fukushima nuclear power plant was gravely impacted by the earthquake, tsunami, and additional earthquakes and aftershocks.  It has been unable to cool the reactor core, and has had an explosion that severely damaged the containment. At the very beginning and half-way through this video you will see an explosive wave that shows that the top of the containment has blown off.  A second reactor is also having great difficulty cooling its reactor core.

The Fukushima nuke plant is almost identical to Vermont Yankee (VY). It has a Mark 1 (earliest) containment.  The fuel pool is on the top floor, and after the explosion the fuel pool is open to the environment.  Many years of spent fuel (the used fuel that is the most radioactive,) is not being cooled and is in direct contact with the air so it is beginning to release significant amounts of radiation.

As a result of this devastating accident, radioactive Cesium, which lasts in the environment for 300-years and is absorbed by muscles in the human body, especially infant hearts, has been detected in the environment around the plant.  People near the plant are already receiving as much radiation in an hour as they normally receive in one year.  The delayed response to the accident has put thousands of lives in jeopardy.  Like Three Mile Island (TMI), significant amounts of radiation are already in the environment, and like TMI, the government in Japan has waited too long to evacuate people.   See the truth about TMI here.

The Fukishima Nuclear Power Plant is a General Electric (GE) Boiling Water Reactor (BWR) with a Mark 1 containment.  NRC said in 1972 that this containment should never have been built, and the design was ultimately changed, but not until at least 22 Mark 1’s were constructed in the US, and it is not clear how many throughout the world.  Joseph Hendrie, inside the NRC, said, that the Mark 1 should never have been built, but he did not have the heart to shut them down (see end of post).

In response to the many emails and phone calls we have received, this post is an effort to provide sound analysis and information.  Fairewinds Associates, Inc, the firm I founded, is a paralegal services and expert witness firm, and Arnie Gundersen is the chief engineer.  We are not political pundits nor are we nuclear activists (pro or anti).  Our work is expert testimony on nuclear engineering, reliability, and safety concerns, and we have clients throughout the US, Canada, and overseas.

What exactly happens in nuclear reaction?  The Uranium in the reactor (in the fuel rods) get split.  The splitting creates radioactivity called radioactive daughters.  The plant scrams (has an emergency shut down) and stops the nuclear reaction, but the radioactive daughters continue to churn out heat and they must be cooled or they will cause a meltdown.

What blew off?

The above BBC footage appears to show a hydrogen explosion of a Mark 1 containment (like the containment at VY).  Hydrogen is created when the zircalloy fuel clad gets too hot and chemically reacts by breaking water into hydrogen and oxygen.

Radioactive smoke after the explosion appears to be heading out to sea.

What type of protection do people need?  Some photos from Reuters show police and other emergency personnel wearing gas masks.  The gas masks will not protect against any radiation.  The particles are atomic sized and nothing the emergency personnel are wearing can protect them.  The people surrounding the plant and all emergency workers there are also enveloped in a cloud of gamma radiation.

In the US, in about a week, it is possible that a cloud of radiation might reach California, and in 10 days hit VT.  Wash your food and take potassium iodide (not now, wait a week until the cloud is near).  Potassium iodide fills your thyroid with iodine so that it will not absorb any iodine from the radioactive cloud.

What has happened is that the nuclear fuel cladding is cracking and releasing the radiation held within the nuclear fuel pellets.  Fuel pellets are the size of the joint in your pinky and there are tens of thousands of them within every nuclear reactor.  The volatile radiation in the form of xenon, krypton, iodine, cesium, and strontium is already being released as a gas through the relief valves in the reactor and out the leaky containment.  If you have ever used a pressure cooker, you have seen the relief valve on the top of the pressure cooker, and the feature is similar to the open valve on the top of the reactor, and that valve is fully open right now.

*****************************

Arnie has been conducting research on BWR containment leaks and containment venting because of his ongoing concerns regarding the risk of Net Positive Suction Head (NPSH) in Uprated BWR’s including VY.  During his research he came across this AEC (Atomic Energy Commission) internal memo.  Fairewinds is also conducting two studies on BWR’s and on industry-wide containment failures.  

On September 25, 1972 (just about the time VY became operational), the AEC’s Joseph Hendrie, Deputy Director for Technical Review, wrote to the AEC’s Steven Hanauer who was a senior member of the Commission staff.  

Hendrie said,  

“I recommend that the AEC develop a policy of discouraging further use of pressure suppression containments.”

Previously, Hanauer had expressed concerns about the Mark 1 pressure suppression containment that GE was using at VY, Pilgrim, Millstone 1, Oyster Creek and other reactors.  

The memo went on to say:

“Steve’s idea to ban pressure suppression containment schemes is an attractive one in some ways.  Dry containments have the notable advantage of brute simplicity. …However the acceptance of pressure suppression containment by all elements of the nuclear field, including Regulatory and the ACRS, is firmly embedded in the conventional wisdom.  Reversal of this hallowed policy, particularly at this time, could well be the end of nuclear power.  It would throw into question the operation of licensed plants….  and would generally create more turmoil than I can stand.”  

This quote is from Frank Von Hipple, Citizen Scientist, Simon & Schuster, p. 217, citing a Union of Concerned Scientists FOIA.

There isn't much information available now but nothing about this can be good for the people living near the plant, the workers or this 30 year old BWR facility.

Increased radioactive levels had been detected outside the plant prior to the explosion.

The BBC has a disturbing image of the plant engulfed in smoke, steam from what they are calling “a powerful explosion”

A massive explosion has struck a Japanese nuclear power plant after Friday's devastating earthquake. A huge pall of smoke was seen coming from the plant at Fukushima and several workers were injured. Japanese officials fear a meltdown at one of the plant's reactors after radioactive material was detected outside it

I’m sure many Vermonters have been turning the same question over in their minds that I have.  What relationship does that ominously percolating reactor at the Fukushima Dailichi plant in disaster-struck Japan have to our own little hot pot at Vermont Yankee?  As it turns out, the answer is,”quite a bit.”

Like VY, Fukushima’s troubled reactor is a BWR (Boiling Water Reactor) with a G.E. Mark 1 containment design. Also like VY, it appears to be approaching 40-years in operation.

I did a little digging and learned that there is reason for concern about the ability of the Mark 1 containment design to successfully hold up to pressure.

in 1986, Harold Denton, then the NRC’s top safety official, told an industry trade group that the”Mark I containment, especially being smaller with lower design pressure, in spite of thesuppression pool, if you look at the WASH 1400 safety study, you’ll find something like a 90%probability of that containment failing.”Some modifications have been made to U.S. Mark I reactors since 1986, although thefundamental design deficiencies remain.

The NRC, who has never met a reactor they couldn’t relicense, just yesterday signed-off on another twenty years of wear, tear and capricious management for VY.  Gives you pause, doesn’t it?

(There is a hearing tonight via interactive TV link on H.202, the Health Care bill. Find a site near you. Also a presentation at 6 pm tonight with Anya Rader Wallach & Deb Richter in Grand Isle, call 372-5760 for info. – promoted by NanuqFC)

Two major issues vigorously debated today are the controversies over taxes and health care.  But few seem to consider how closely they are inter-related.

We know the wealthy pay a lot of money in income taxes for the simple reason that they have such large incomes.  But when all taxes are considered, according to the Citizens for Tax Justice, the wealthy and the middle class pay nearly the same percentage of their income for taxes (top 1%  of income pay 30.8% in total tax; $66,000 in income pay 28.5% in total tax).

But then we  have to pay for our health care. (more below)  

According to the US Department of Health and Human Services, the per person cost of health care in this country is $8,000.  Instead of paying for health care with some broad based tax based on ability to pay, working people either pay out of pocket, buy insurance, or have our employer cover this cost out of money that could be in our paycheck.  This health care “tax” is the most regressive major tax there is, adding an additional 33% tax burden on a family of three earning $72,000 per year.

Added together we have a combined tax and health care cost of about 61.5% for the $72,000 wage earner and a combined cost of only 33% for the people making about a million dollars a year.  No wonder the middle class feels strapped.

The wealthy are content with this situation in spite of the runaway health care costs because they get great health care and it only costs about two percent of their million dollar income. Any just system would have the wealthy pay more – – much more.  It’s no surprise then that many of the wealthy enlist their minions in the media and the halls of congress to fight real health care reform.

We won’t have a fair tax policy or fix our health care system unless and until we address this over-arching fairness issue and have a system for paying for health care that relies primarily on ability to pay.  

Vt., nuclear plant appears headed for showdown

By Dave Gram

Associated Press / March 11, 2011

MONTPELIER, Vt.-A long-awaited showdown between the state government and Vermont’s lone nuclear plant is on, and neither side has given any indication it will back down.

Some wondered if the NRC might go to court with Entergy to block any move by the state that might be seen as threatening the agency’s authority. But NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko, in a conference call with reporters on Thursday, repeatedly said the state has a role in determining the plant’s future.

Jaczko said there are “a variety of permits and requirements for this facility to operate,” adding that, “I would defer any of those actions (aside from the NRC’s approval) to the state or other authorities.”

Elizabeth Miller, commissioner of the Vermont Department of Public Service, said she was pleased to hear that assurance from the NRC chairman.

http://www.boston.com/news/loc…

Note: I originally wrote this in 2007, so some of the commentary is dated, but much of what I wrote about then still applies today

Sometimes it’s complicated to talk about creativity in terms specifically of activism.  So today I’m going to talk a bit about creativity of other sorts: artistic inventiveness, creativity and exploration, with a nod towards the end about how it applies to activism and political work.

But first, about the picture.  There is no Photoshop effect at work here.  This is a light sculpture (see Eric Staller’s work for the original concept of light sculptures– the man’s a genius) which I created through a fairly simple process using long exposure shutter work.  For technical explanations of long exposure work, I’ve written two pieces, one for digital SLRs and another for non-digital SLRs.  The much shorter explanation is that you set the camera up in very dark settings and leave the shutter open for a long time, allowing the light that hits the camera’s film to take prime focus in the frame.

In this case, I was in a parking lot that had very little light surrounding it and pulled out a couple of those glow-sticks you see people selling at fireworks displays and similar events (believe it or not, I keep some in my trunk for just such an occasion).  I moved them into different positions, would hold them there for a moment to get the exposure, and then move them again.  First I did them around my head, curving them, and then straightened them out to do form the lattice work grids.

My intent is to do a lot more of this, using all sorts of light sources: sparklers, torches, light-up toys.  There are tons of possibilities here and lots of room for experimentation.  Winter is perfect for this: when the nights are long, the darkness is my friend for this sort of shot.

So how does this apply to politics & political movements?

There’s a concept I teach my students called “functional fixedness.”  The idea is that we often think of what we’ve got in front of us as being fixed and rigid in its purpose.  A butter knife is for a specific set of tasks, but when you find yourself without a screwdriver, it might do in a pinch.  A lot of us simply don’t think of this, because we don’t think beyond the obvious.  Realizing that I could use a camera to take pictures not only of what’s there at the time I click the shutter and what’s going to be there ten seconds later has transformed my sense of what photography is.  My camera is no longer a way to document and capture moments.  It’s a way to render the passage of time; not through animating images but instead through capturing the whole path of light, and the way that light reflects off of mist, and how that light curves and bends.

In the picture shown, I captured the same light source multiple times, in different positions.  You see very little of the movement of the light because it’s such a low-strength source that it wouldn’t capture it except when still for long enough to show up on the image.  In politics, we often can’t see the effect that what we’re doing is happening.  We don’t know how much of an impact we’ve had until we see the whole picture.  But with experience, we can get ideas as to what works and what doesn’t.  

With politics, however, our greatest enemy can be the expectation that comes with experience: not knowing how to move beyond expectations because we’re so used to them.  A variation on that functional fixedness keeps us from thinking of new and different ways to approach people about issues.  

And before I continue, I will explain that I fully admit to bias here: I’m personally oriented towards creativity and my willingness to expand my own ideas beyond the obvious is probably my primary survival skill.  For a living, I find ways to take complicated concepts and integrate them in fashions which make them clear to people who don’t need to fully understand them but need to understand the basics.  I’m one of the few people I know who can translate easily between geek and non-geek.

So for me, being creative is key to everything.  I’m drawn to works that challenge my assumptions and I’m drawn to works that inspire me to create new material.

So, to politics: as activists, we’re often stuck in a bad situation: we have numbers, but not nearly the resources of large, multi-national, corporations.  We can’t afford to launch high-profile PR campaigns and because we’re smart people who like to think, we don’t just fall into line with daily talking points, so it’s harder for us to get a coherent, specific, and simple message into the media meme the way that conservatives (who, preferring to just repeat the same talking points over and over again, because it presumably shouts out the screaming voices from deep inside the recesses of their blackened, dying souls) are able to do.

But here’s the thing: if we approach these problems with enough inventiveness and creativity, we don’t need to act like conservatives in order to get our messages out there.

Three years ago, global warming was viewed by the mainstream media as just a theory but it doesn’t take an advanced degree in climatology to realize that when “An Inconvenient Truth” came out, it really did change things for people.  It didn’t do this through just providing good, solid, information.  It did this through providing it in an creative and engaging fashion.

Think about that for a moment: people paid money to go see a lecture about climate change presented by a guy who, when he ran for President in 2000, was just not a particularly engaging presence on the campaign trail.  Don’t get me wrong: I like Gore, but prior to an Inconvenient Truth, I would never have thought I’d be able to sit through more than ten minutes of Gore speaking without falling asleep.  

It was creativity that took this presentation of his and turned it into something much bigger.  It was looking beyond the message itself and thinking about the delivery system that changed things.  Now we’ve got a transformed debate.  No one’s pretending its not real any longer.  We’ve got people pretending it’s not bad but now no one’s pretending it doesn’t happen.  

For me, what this boils down to is that we’ve got a lot of really smart, clever and sophisticated people on our side.  But we don’t use those skills well enough.  We write.  We argue.  We fume.  We seethe.  But what are we going to do that’s going to step outside of the comfort zone?  What are we going to do that draws attention to big issues in a way which engages people without scaring them off?

There aren’t easy answers to this but it does sometimes involve a lot of patience.  Daily Kos started small, and started primarily because Markos and his merry band of Orange Heathens were willing to speak truths that no one else was willing to do at the time.  They were representing a voice which was seldom heard at the time.  This separation from the norm helped garnish enough attention and power to be derisively attacked by Bill O’Reilly.  Admittedly, being attacked by O’Reilly is a low bar, but clearly he’s in some fashion threatened by ‘Kos.

And really, although I joke about it, it’s pretty amazing that this site has attracted some major attention from high-profile (even if insane) media figures.   It’s not because ‘Kos is backed by large finances or a strategic ad campaign.  It’s because ‘Kos set up something which gives people the ability and choice to contribute in whatever way they see fit and allows us the choices to promote, recommend and/or ignore whatever content we so desire.  We use it to get informed, to inform others, to share ideas and it’s free to use for those of us who don’t chose to purchase a subscription.

There’s something revolutionary about this that pushes it to a new level of creativity.  Anything we can place online we can include in Daily Kos.  Think about  the youTube video that Ms Laura posted which outlines the writers strike.  It’s simple.   It’s clear.  But it’s funny and clever.  And I know about it because of Daily Kos.

Back to art: how many of you viewed this diary because of the unusual photo on the preview?  I included partially to talk about art and creativity, but I also included it because I knew it was something most people don’t see every day and I knew it would intrigue some people.

This isn’t something surprising or original; I used a hook.  The only unusual part is that I’m not trying to sell anything.  I’m just trying share my own experience and hope that someone finds it useful.

I think, for me, it’s that I see so many people who are afraid of trying things that will make them look foolish– I see us all wanting to find ways to create change but not having the resources to do so.   We’re stressed out, tired, not sure where to turn and our representatives capitulate to the Bush administration too often. We try things and fail and we get discouraged.

All of this is valid and understandable.  But sometimes we try so hard against those brick walls without thinking that maybe we’re seeing a wall where it doesn’t exist or that it just doesn’t look like it really appears.  We push and get frustrated and discouraged and feel isolated.  We get lost in the morass of corruption and insider politics and don’t know how to break through to the people who are supposed to be representing us.

And we forget to give ourselves the room to look at problems in new light.  We forget to give ourselves the mental space to find new and creative ways to look at the world around us.  We get so caught up in the day to day struggles that we forget that so much change happens through art and exploration and that change happens in subtle ways that aren’t obvious on the surface.

Look at that picture again.  Each of those lines of light that appear in it took time.  No one watching me create that picture would have imagined what it would look like after the fact.  I wasn’t even sure myself.  I was experimenting.  And out of the two dozen experiments I tried that evening, that’s the only one I liked enough to post.  People watching would see me hold a light then move and then hold it somewhere else.  Over and over again.  People watching would probably think I’m a bit odd and have no idea what the hell I’m trying.  But that’s because you can’t see the big picture when you’re in the day to day struggle.  

So we work.  And learn.  And experiment.  And explore.  And sometimes it works.  But when you try to get a message across, and do so in a creative fashion, somewhere with someone it probably takes hold.  That makes the message more available to people the next time they hear it.  And then when it gets presented again in a different fashion from another venue, they’re a little more ready to hear it.  And again, they may not be ready to take it in yet.  It takes time.  

I will end this with a summary of a story that most of us know, to show just how presentation can change how it impacts our recollection of the story:

A work of fiction which was written, which has been presented as a musical, has shown up in many movies, has experienced many parodies on sitcoms, has appeared as multiple plays, including a one-man play in which Patrick Stewart plays every part:

When Scrooge was first visited by Marley, he was unable to take in what Marley had to say.

When he was visited by the Ghost of Christmas Past, he chose to ignore his history and did not want to hear it.  He left the better part of himself behind, unable to learn from his mistakes.

When he was visited by the Ghost of Christmas Present, he was affected, but not enough to influence change.  He still resisted.

When he was finally visited by the Ghost of Christmas Future, he was forced to come face to face with the direct consequences of his own behavior and his own choices.  It wasn’t until that path was drawn for him that the connections were made.  

What we’ve done that can not be changed.

What we’re doing now that we can change.

What will happen in the future should we refuse.

And what happens to others when they make the wrong choice.

Until we find ways to tie these messages together in ways that the rest of our country can understand, we’re still, as a nation, heading towards an abyss.  But we can influence the messages.  We can convey to our people that there is no question that waterboarding is torture.  We can communicate to our friends and colleagues that with our decisions on the environment come consequences that we’ll only escape by not surviving long enough to bear witness to them.

We can learn from our mistakes, but we have to be open to learning and we have to be open to finding new and unusual ways to communicate those mistakes to others and draw on the motivation that comes from wanting to change.

And when we harness that interest in change, we have to be ready to present real and meaningful alternatives.  In “An Inconvenient Truth” we were not just presented with information about the horrors of global warming.  We were presented with alternatives and things we can do right now to reduce the damage to the planet.  When we find creative ways to change our world, we also need to present ways that people can tap into that change and be part of the solution.  

What’s all this take?

Creativity.