escapingbabylon.com

Imaginary Foundation: Make a difference. via BoingBoing.

Download the PDF. Print it. Stick it up somewhere.

Why?

Because, to be honest, there are too many voices that say that we are powerless, and that the machine goes on whether we want it to or not.

Those voices are wrong.

But first we need to decide that we will.

xkcd: Desert Island.

xkcd: Desert Island.

How often do we live our lives for this. Here’s the challenge for today: Try to look for and identify the amazing things going on beneath the surface of your day today. Look for the things that aren’t obvious, for the person who does exceptional work so as to produce an experience for you that is seamless, or for the unusual confluence of events that has brought you and another person together.

And, if you want, you can share some of those stories here.

So I’m freaking out a little bit. You all know me, and my recurring cycle of over-commitment. I’m fairly deep into this cycle and right now it’s combined with my almost annual spring restlessness and the fact that I’m at school and producing a fairly massive freakout.

So I figured I should write about it. I’ve found that the major drawback to being over-committed is not that I don’t have time to do everything. The more debilitating loss is that I don’t have time to think about everything as well as to think about nothing. I don’t know if this is the case for others. In essence, it’s that I lose effective use of my subconscious.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m finding for myself that while my conscious mind is quite capable, it’s the subconscious that does the more interesting stuff. That’s the part of my mind that’s creative, that will come up with ingenious solutions, that will connect two unrelated ideas to produce something great. When my days are full, or when I don’t have time to sketch, do music for fun, or other random things like that, my subconscious suffers.

One of the buzz words I’ve been hearing recently is “margin” which, despite my distaste for buzz-words, is a useful word. It talks about the space at the side of the page that is unused (or that you doodle in) that makes the page work. So right now, I may need to work on creating some margins in my life. That’s part of what this post is, writing in the margins.

School Bullying Prevention: Teach Empathy at Young Age – TIME.

But like language, the development of this inherent tendency may be affected by early experience. As evidence, look no further than ancient Greece and the millennia-old child-rearing practices of Sparta and Athens. Spartans, who were celebrated almost exclusively as warriors, raised their ruling-class boys in an environment of uncompromising brutality — enlisting them in boot camp at age 7 and starving them to encourage enough deviousness and cunning to steal food, which skillfully bred yet more generations of ruthless killers.

In Athens, future leaders were brought up in a more nurturing and peaceful way, at home with their mothers and nurses, starting education in music and poetry at age 6. They became pioneers of democracy, art, theater and culture. “Just like we can train people to kill, the same is true with empathy. You can be taught to be a Spartan or an Athenian — and you can taught to be both,” says Teny Gross, executive director of the outreach group Institute for the Study and Practice of Nonviolence in Providence, R.I., and a former sergeant in the Israeli army.

One of the reasons that I think Youth and Children’s Ministry is important is that I suspect that this idea can be expanded beyond empathy. We can choose whether we want to teach our kids to be selfish, to treat each other as sex objects, to be racist, etc. We choose what the world, into which our children are born, looks like, and what that world looks like, affects what the next generation will grow to become.

This is also why college ministry is important, because it is during this time where people make the decisions about what they want their world, and thus the world, to look like in the next ten years. It’s why the work of organizations like the Children at Risk Foundation, Jose Abreu’s El Sistema, Bolder Options, Frontier Youth Trust and Union Gospel Mission are important, because they are helping to teach values to kids, many of whom live in environments that are significantly more “Spartan” than “Athenian”.

Anyway, I thought the article was interesting, and it intersected with some things I care about. Take a look at it, tell me what you think (particularly if you see some interesting implications of the article, I’d love to hear and discuss them).

Music video with a whole school as the instrument – Boing Boing.

Coloradas Mangus, a sophomore at Ruidoso High School on the Mescalero Apache Reservation, N.M.

Coloradas, a member of the Chiricahua Apache tribe, lives on the Mescalero Apache Reservation in New Mexico, where there have been five youth suicides since the start of the school year. All were his friends.

via Youth suicides epidemic on tribal reservations – Mental health- msnbc.com.

This article showed up on MSNBC a couple of days ago, and has been floating in the back of my mind since then. Anybody have experience working with First Nation/Native American youth or know of any good organizations and initiatives to support and partner with? I’d love to hear your thoughts.