Charlie Keil and I have a new book out (title above). It’s the third book in our series, Local Paths to Peace Today. The first two are: We Need a Department of Peace: Everybody's Business, Nobody's Job and Thomas Naylor’s Paths to Peace: Small is Necessary. Steve Feld thinks it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread:
Who says a peace manifesto can’t be deep fun? The wisdom of collaborative practice rings bells on each page here, inviting us to dance in the streets of a world still within reach. Get with the beat of this drum!
You can buy it here:
Amazon: https://tinyurl.com/4p67bahh
Barnes & Noble: https://tinyurl.com/5vjf3kjt
Google Play: https://tinyurl.com/39rz43vp
Kobo eReader: https://tinyurl.com/5bmkjsme
Contents
Thriving and Jiving Among Friends and Family: The Place of this Volume in the Peace Series
Common Glad Impulse
What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?
Paideia Con Salsa
Dance to the Music: The Kids Owned the Day
Jamming for Peace
The Hungry March Band helps Hoboken Celebrate Public Control of Its Waterfront
Peace & Joy Unlimited: The Festive in Everyday Life
Global Green Basics
Reclaiming our species being: Humo Ludens collaborans
Appendix A: Greening the Population Issue
Appendix B: Organizations Charlie’s supported
Appendix C: A trifecta from Charlie Keil on the need for a Global Organization of Democracies
Brief synopsis of each chapter
Common Glad Impulse – William Henry Hudson is perhaps best known for his 1904 novel, Green Mansions, which was made into the 1959 film starring Audrey Hepburn and Anthony Perkins. The novel was drenched in love for the natural world, which Hudson cultivated in his career as a naturalist. This section contains a passage from The Naturalist in La Plata, in which he asserts that “birds are more subject to this universal joyous instinct than mammals,” an instinct he termed “the common glad impulse.” That common glad impulse is at the heart of this book.
What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun? – The late David Graeber argues that fun IS at the heart of animal life, human as well. He asks: “Why does the existence of action carried out for the sheer pleasure of acting, the exertion of powers for the sheer pleasure of exerting them, strike us as mysterious?” He argues that we’ve got it all wrong, from the ground up. Economics – survival of the fit and all that – though important, fails to explain life. Why not reground the whole story on pleasure and play, in freedom. Graeber outlines how we can get started. ”We can understand the happiness of fishes—or ants, or inchworms— because what drives us to think and argue about such matters is, ultimately, exactly the same thing.”
Paideia Con Salsa – Charlie Keil proposes the people need (at least) three layers of cultural awareness, practice, and loyalty: 1) local, the most intense and richly developed, 2) regional, and 3) a thin layer of planetary culture “so that regions or the peoples within regions do not drift back into aggressing, aggrandizing, state-building, and empire expanding.” The local level could be organized around an Afro-Latin music-dance curriculum, a “paideia con salsa,” that could be seeded at the start and then allowed to grow and flourish as it will. To that end he proposes a pilot project oriented toward the “three Ms” – music, motion, morality – that were the foundation of Ancient Greece’s golden age. A curriculum would be developed and deployed in several local schools and the results studied, refined, and further disseminated.
Dance to the Music: the Kids Owned the Day – Bill Benzon: You know about competitive dance, right? Dance studios compete locally and regionally for prizes, trophies and glory. It’s late afternoon at one such competition in suburban New Jersey. The competition is over, the kids are just hanging out, and then suddenly and spontaneously they begin to dance to hip-hop booming on the sound system, kids, tweens, and teens, all of them, in the aisle, between rows of seats, 100, 200 of them. That’s the world of competitive dance at its best.
Jamming for Peace – Bill Benzon: There was a big peace demonstration in New York City on March 22, 2013. I was there with Charlie Keil; he had a cornet, I had my trumpet. Thousands and thousands of people marching down Broadway. Lots of musicians, mostly drumers, but other horn players as well. We moved from place to place hooking up with various musicians. Sometimes spontaneous magic broke out and a thirty yard swath of people became one in the beat. We ended on “All You Need Is Love.”
Peace & Joy Unlimited: The Festive in Everyday Life – Charlie Keil argues for guiding and coaching children in singing and dancing as early in life as possible, as often as possible. They need to develop their “festive skills” – mocking the dark side, identifying with spirits, birds, animals and plants, drumming, singing, dancing the seasons and Nature's cycles, horn tooting, honk festing, joke telling, miming, rhyming, funny walking, looking ashamed, goofy talking. “They don't have to be taught. They just have to be done, for fun, to enhance primary communication in daily life.” Suggestions for things you can do at home, now.
Global Green Basics – Angeliki V. Keil lays out the core of a “green”, that is sustainable, communally responsible, and joyus approach to living with one another, with other species, plant, animal, microbial, and with the Earth. Establish living areas for all, encourage local self-sufficiency, foster democracy at all levels of organization, renounce governmental debt, renounce war, foster the survival of all cultures, East and West, North and South, halt pollution, renounce nuclear technology, encourage scientific inquiry, revamp science education, and facilitate the free flow of individuals and information. Start now. “We only need to commit our hopes, faiths and love, especially in the form of the actual sharing of resources, to help us over the ensuing dislocations.”
Reclaiming our true species being: Humo Ludens collaborans –- Food for Thought – Charlie Keil has created an exploratory listing of thoughts, directions, provocations, wishes, what have you, pointing toward a re-creation of our local social being in terms of our most basic species being: Humo Ludens collaborans.
Appendix A: Greening the Population Issue – Linda Cree lays out the basic rationale for reducing the population as a necessary step to long-term sustainability.
Appendix B: Organizations Charlie’s supported – With links to where you can find them on the web.
Appendix C: Toward the GOOD, a Declaration of Interdependance and An Appeal