LIVING HERO

Interview with Scott Parsons

At an old-fashioned soda-pop style lunch counter in Bowman, North Dakota, I met Scott Parsons. He was eating pie in black, white and pink spandex with a smattering of corporate logos across his chest. After he had learned that his friend’s daughter Mikyla had been diagnosed with Rett syndrome, Scott quit his job as Western VP of Sales with Georgia Pacific to ride his bicycle from San Francisco to Boston to help raise money to fund medical research for Rett Syndrome.

Our conversation covers:

• Scott’s motivations to ride • Information on Rett syndrome and the hope of a cure • Highlights of the great American landscape • Impressions of the American people • The goals for the ride and beyond

Learn more about Scott, his trip, and the cause for which he’s riding at Mikyla-Cure.org

Enjoy the show and please add your comments! These interviews are presented in audio format only–sorry no transcripts at this time! You may download the mp3 file, which will play in iTunes, RealPlayer, Windows Media Player and other media players or listen to it right here by double clicking on the purple media player below. (The interview is about 25 minutes.)

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Hear No, See No, Speak No—What?

The question, where is your money invested? is experienced by many as a violation, a pointed finger jabbing at them. Well, this gets our backs up precisely because this is where we have compromised our hearts, where we really don’t want to look and listen, where the worm of hypocrisy squirms. It’s what we really don’t want to feel, talk about, and possibly be moved to address. Why?

Because it is still, generally speaking, more financially profitable (higher returns, less risk) in the short term to put money into the coffers of established companies and profiteers, engaged as they may be in disregard of land, people, health and wisdom, and every creature of the Earth.

And so we think we have our money working for us?! We give over our money, which, along with our work, is our most powerful instrument, voice and vote, to this portfolio of doom and Armageddon. And, the game is set up so that the players rationalize and justify detrimental business practices on the basis of having to satisfy their stockholders with high returns. This is a game where profit is the highest value in consideration. So, there you have it.

I was at the Whitney Biennial contemporary art show on preview day and it was a spiritual wasteland, very disappointing. The show mirrors a society that is imbalanced, disgusting, disordered, epically ugly, mad, stupid, broken, mean-spirited and sick. On the audio tour, Ellen Harvey, one of the artists whose work stood out to me, said: “You can’t win, so let’s just start off by failing as extravagantly as possible,” in speaking of her art process. A fitting line for our times. There was hardly a hint of transcendence or visionary attitude in that entire show; instead, despair and hurt and self-indulgence. Is this the best we can do? One wonders about the selection of this uninspired psychic display and what the mindset is there, the agenda.

The proverb “money is the root of all evil” in these materialistically driven times might just as well be “money is the root of all good”. Our money is what we get for the life energy we have expended and both our energy and our money can be put to good, evil or neutral work in the world.

Our money actually does invest us in that which we have invested, even though we are not always willing to look at it that way or to do the real math from a holistic perspective. So then, are we living behind our own backs? Are we content to be strangers to ourselves and each other? Are we actually saying: yes, here, do more of this with our world, kill it, destroy and decimate it, kill it all, just give me another cushion, don’t take away my addictions, and throw in the health insurance.

We have the power, if we have the will, to reform our civilization very quickly, and we can do it with our energy and our money, much more effectively than with our political votes.

If you haven’t seen the movie Zeitgeist yet, you can get to it through these links. It’s screening at non-mainstream theaters across the country this Saturday. The second link displays those theaters. Part three of this movie gives a historical view of the financial world that you might want to have a look at. I invite your comments on this.

Streaming Zeitgeist movie

Big Screenings on March 15th

Article by Javier Sierra, Sierra Club, “How to Tell Greenwashing from Real Corporate Responsibility”

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CULTIVATE SYNTHESIS!

E.O. Wilson, one of our most brilliant living heroes, preciently wrote in his 1999 bestseller, Consilience, “Thanks to science and technology, access to factual knowledge of all kinds is rising exponentially while dropping in unit cost. It is destined to become global and democratic. Soon it will be available everywhere on television and computer screens. What then? The answer is clear: synthesis. We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.”

Many other luminaries have echoed this call for synthesis. One of Howard Gardner’s Five Minds for the Future is “Synthesizing Mind,” and Daniel Pink devotes a chapter of his recently released A Whole New Mind to “Symphony,” the ability to draw together details from many different disciplines while holding in mind the big picture and what it takes to achieve harmony, balance, and beauty.

This whole-brain capacity has been the gifted and treasured realm of artists, writers, philosophers, and spiritual leaders all along, but these are realms of activity that our culture has not rewarded financially. Is this going to change now? How will we see this change?

This blog is devoted to providing a forum for the exploration and discussion of these and related topics. I invite your thoughts and wish to know specifically whom you would most like to hear from in an interview or panel discussion and what your most burning questions on these topics are.

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