Doug's pilgrimage

Fort Lyons Should Not Be a Pinon Canyon Bargaining Chip

2011-12-01T10:01:00.000-08:00

Dear Editor,

It would be great if Fort Lyons could become a place of healing for traumatized returning vets, as Governor Hickenlooper's Chief of Staff, Roxane White has suggested. But that historic facility should not be used as a bargaining chip to buy support for the expansion of Pinon Canyon as the Governor seems to be implying.

Fort Lyons is important to our region, both economically and because of its historical significance. It started out as an operations center to facilitate the removal of the native population from their land. It would be a bitter irony if it were used as a means to remove the current population.

Another historic irony; Kit Carson breathed his last at Fort Lyons. Carson was a "good soldier" who obeyed orders without question. That included an order to forcibly remove 8,000 Navajo people from there homes in Canyon De Chelly. According to Army documents, the expansion of Pinon Canyon would involve the forced removal of 17,000 people from their homes by the good soldiers of the fort that's named in honor of Kit Carson.

The removal of the Navajos from their traditional homeland was accomplished by enlisting the support of another Native American group, the Utes who helped Carson get the job done. It's the old, "divide and conquer" strategy. But I don't believe that the people of Southeastern Colorado can be set against one another. I believe that we will hang together in our desire to see Fort Lyons utilized for some good purpose, and in our resolve to stand against the expansion of Pinon Canyon.

I would urge that leaders in Bent County make it crystal clear to the Governor and to the Army that any use of Fort Lyons by the military would not alter their opposition to Pinon Canyon Expansion. It's possible that Governor Hickenlooper did not mean to suggest that the Army's use of Fort Lyons would buy his support for an expansion of Pinon Canyon. If that's the case, I urge him to clarify the matter and state clearly that the two issues are unrelated.

Sincerely,
Doug Holdread
Trinidad, Colorado

Occupy Wall Street is Reclaiming the Commons

2011-11-14T05:17:00.000-08:00

The traditional understanding of "the commons" refers to forests, rivers, grazing lands and such that are shared, used and enjoyed by all. The commons is another word for the "public square," a place that is open and accessible to all. The Occupy Wall Street movement is literally and figuratively reclaiming this old understanding of "the commons."

There are a number of related words in our language like "community," "commune," and even "communism." During the Middle Ages 1% of the population were nobles, while 99% were "commoners." In the formation of the British system of government a "House of Commons" was established as a counter- balance to the "House of Lords." Other old words and concepts that come from the same "common" root include "communication," the "common good," "commonwealth," which derived from "common weal" or "well-being."

The Occupy Wall Street movement is bringing all of these old words and concepts back into our awareness and our vocabulary. By establishing common ground upon which we can all come together and enter into dialogue with one another, we are making important connections, we are weaving together a populist tapestry, a matrix of alternative consciousness which will develop into the social fabric of a new order. We are creating an alternative to the elitist, trickle-down, societal infrastructure in which wealth is supposedly materialized out of thin air by "job creators," magician-marketers who seduce us into measuring our happiness in term of our ability to feed artificial appetites; an alternative to "voodoo economics" in which speculative bubbles blown up and popped leaving our nest eggs and pensions in shreds; and alternative to the old infrastructure that irrationally requires ever-expanding growth in a world of increasing scarcity; an alternative to an economy which is overseen by those who look down upon the masses from on high, while the commoners place their hopes in the over-flowing excess of the 1%; a hope that some of that excess will descend to the 99% in sufficient dribs and drabs. We will create a new counter-cultural infrastructure in which we generate wealth among ourselves, spreading it out in an ever-widening pool of plenty, a new order in which the common weal will be sustained and shared within our common humanity for the common good.

This is happening because we have reached the tipping point. We are in crisis and it has become clear that our survival depends upon creating a new system. Necessity is the mother of invention, and change has become a necessity. The occupy wall street is not happening because of a lofty philosophical awakening. It has come about because our survival instincts are kicking in. We are faced with a choice between continuing to trust the 1% , or to take matters into our own hands and begin crafting a new social order which will give us a chance to survive the impending collapse of the false economy.

This transformation will happen because it must happen, and because it can happen. The people who are coming together in the commons have skill sets from the counter-culture of the 60s, merging with the tech-savvy, network-conscious new generation which lives within a new egalitarian paradigm. We have come to a point in our evolution where elections, majority-rule and representative governments are becoming secondary to inclusive dialogue, direct democracy and consensus decision-making are technologically and psychologically possible.

As we come together in the commons we will be making critical connections among the thousands of isolated groups which have been keeping the flames of democracy alive over these decades of decline. As we occupy the commons all of the small, under-funded, struggling groups that have, for half a century been doing all sorts of good things, will discover one-another in common cause and become forged into a united front.

Instead of accepting the false dilemma of our two-party system, choosing between the Democratic and Republican political parties, we will come together around common values, things like equal opportunity for all; things like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; things like the common welfare of all in health care, food, shelter and education. Instead of being driven into opposing camps by ideology we will rediscover one another in the urgency of our common concerns. We have all been driven into the same common situation by ever-widening economic disparity as the United States finds itself with the highest poverty rate in 52 years.

As we listen to each other, carefully communicating of our common concerns, we will formulate our common goals. We will emerge speaking with a common voice that will to be heard above the sponsored talking heads of the main stream media. We will become a human megaphone, amplifying our shared concerns until our voices penetrate the halls of power and are heard by our elected representative who are barraged by the reality that "money talks." By speaking in unison the volume of our small voices will rise to counter the influence of the big money that has, for too long drowned out the "voice of the people."

We will increasing reclaim ownership as the common stewards of our resources, the care-takers of the blessings which have been bestowed upon us by our creator, to be shared and enjoyed in common. We will reinvent the commons by crafting together a transformative process which is decentralized, horizontal; not vertical; not trickling down, but a rising tide which becomes increasingly strong and wide and inclusive.

As we take time to have an authentic dialogue together we will develop a common process; not an agenda that is set by a self-appointed elite or a purchased inner-circle, but an inclusive process from which a common agenda emerges; an agenda that is not hurried, but is cultured and aged until ripe.

We will move forward as a new society of common purpose; not the polarized old order of opposing extremes. The 99% are somewhere between the extreme poles. We will develop a way of being together in common cause that honors the formative process of dynamic tensions and synergy.

The Pinon Canyon / Wall Street Connection

2011-10-07T10:46:00.000-07:00

As we watch the "Occupation of Wall Street" on TV it would seen that the open ranges and isolated canyons of Southeastern Colorado are literally and figuratively thousands of miles away from the financial district in New York City. But the reality is that the tentacles of corporate power reach into every nook and cranny of America, including Colorado’s economy, and there is a strong connection between the Piñon Canyon Maneuver Site and Wall Street’s plundering of America."

It is a mistake to assume that the motive driving efforts to expand the 238,000 acre Piñon Canyon Maneuver Site to as much as 6.9 million acres is military necessity. America’s military-industrial complex does not function in such a way that defense contractors simply meet the needs of the military. It is often the other way around, with the military serving the needs of defense industry.

The acquisition of more land by the Department of Defense is completely unnecessary in military terms. The DoD is already a huge bureaucracy. It’s vast holdings include 6,000 bases in the U.S. and its territories, and 30 million acres of real estate in the continental United States and even more around the world; 702 bases in 130 in foreign countries. Every one of these bases is a conduit, moving half of our national budget from our households, through our tax system, to Wall Street and the military-industrial complex. In the name of "national security" we dutifully fill and refill the troughs at which defense-contractors feed. Some are excited young wieners squealing at the prospect of federal contracts. Others are huge old swine with a dozen little wannabe sub-contractor piglets hanging from their tits. But all of them grow fat at the same federal trough.

One of the reasons why China is overtaking the U.S. economically is that the Chinese are not expending as much of their national treasure trying to match our military power. Instead, they are investing in their infrastructure, thus creating jobs. China, with a population of 1.3 billion people spends a little over 100 billion annually on defense. The U.S. with 1/4 of China's population spends seven times as much on defense. Where does all of that money go? It goes to corporations which manufacture weapons and since 9/11 to a huge and growing, mostly secret, for-private security industry, and to their Wall Street investors.

The defense and security sectors have become such a huge part of our economy that unending wars have become necessary in order to justify their growth. The invisible fat cats behind the defense industry need the military because it is the justification by with wealth is transferred from our pockets to theirs.

The State of Colorado has become dangerously dependent upon the military-industrial complex. As the state's second largest employer Fort Carson in Colorado Springs wields a lot of power with elected officials, and elected officials, doing the bidding of the corporate contributors whose campaign contributions got them elected, wield a lot of power over the military. They work hard to get more money for bases in Colorado and more money for defense contracts in our state. As a result, while many areas of the state endure economic stagnation, there are islands of prosperity like Fort Carson, a beneficiary of a bloated federal military budget. At the same time that the private sector is shrinking, Fort Caron is expanding. With recently addition of a Combat Aviation Brigade the base will grow by 2700 troops who'll be flying 100 helicopters.

Efforts to expand Piñon Canyon have less to do with the Army’s need for more training lands than with defense contractors need to build more helicopters and make more profits. While ordinary people struggle, the corporations which make these helicopters are getting rich.

Tony Magliano of the Catholic News Service observes that "Weapon-producing corporations such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics are reaping huge wartime profits at the expense of the poor and war-torn. And with their expensive campaign contributions, these corporations are lobbying politicians in Washington to keep America’s war machine rolling on and on!"

Too much of our national treasure goes to paying for wars. Not wars to defend U.S. citizens but wars to sustain U.S. defense industry. Three of the top beneficiaries of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Boeing, corporations with have operations in Aurora, Colorado.

Many of us scratched our heads when Representative Mike Coffman jumped into the Piñon Canyon controversy, arguing for expansion, and even accusing former Governor Bill Ritter of being a "terrorist sympathizer" because he signed a law which protects property owners around Piñon Canyon. Coffman was simply working for the people who got him elected. His 6th Congressional District is the home of Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Boeing. These corporations are involved with the development of drones, the expensive new robotic weapons of the new "chAir Force" and they foresee the future need for a big, easy to access testing range; an expanded Piñon Canyon. They view Southeastern Colorado as a convenient sandbox.

But the takeover of Southeastern Colorado by Wall Street corporations, through their military partners comes at the expense of the people who live there. While military contractors in Colorado Springs and Aurora benefit from the federalization of the region, it is at the expense of the poorer and politically less connected people who live there. Piñon Canyon has been an economic black hole for three decades now, and its expansion would suck what's left of the regional economy into the abyss.

When Piñon Canyon was first established in the early 80s approximately 3000 cattle were removed from the economic equation of the region. Over the course of decades that adds up to millions of dollars of lost revenue. The ranchers who used to live on the land paid property taxes and spent money at businesses in towns like Trinidad and La Junta. The Army does neither.

Southeastern Colorado also lost a lot in terms of potential tourism. Before the Army took the land the Department of the Interior was poised to designate the canyon lands of the region as a National Natural Landmark. The land is an archaeological treasure trove which according to the Army holds 4,100 prehistoric and historic archaeological sites, 524 of which have been determined to be eligible for inclusion in the National Register of Historic Places. An additional 239 sites are still being evaluated. But all of this is off limits to the public and excluded from regional heritage tourism efforts.

There are also potentially valuable mineral resources at Piñon Canyon. Within the maneuver site is the Model Dome, a very rare geologic formation which has trapped a large reserve of helium. The national helium reserve at the Bush Dome near Amarillo, Texas is almost gone and prices for the gas have been rising dramatically. Ironically, the Army is having a hard procuring enough helium for their fleet of spy balloons.

Wind energy projects have considered but rejected sites near Piñon Canyon for wind farms. Once they learn that the area is threatened by expansion they are unwilling to invest. An added deterrent is the fact that the military doesn’t like wind farms in general. They have pressured the Federal Aviation Administration to disapprove wind farms in other parts of the country because they interfere with military radar.

Piñon Canyon is enriching military contractors at the expense of people, who for four and five generations have worked hard to sustain themselves on the land that they love. It is a sobering example of how the unholy alliance between Wall Street corporations, compromised legislators and an over-grown military is impoverishing American.

Reboot The Troops

2011-08-13T07:15:00.000-07:00

This is my letter to Senator Udall, as well as the other members of the Colorado Congressional Deligation:

Dear Senator Udall:

I urge you to support President Obama's proposal to create a reverse boot camp for service members mustering out of the military, for the purpose of helping them find employment in the civilian economy, by offering employers who hire them tax breaks. Right now he's talking about a paltry $120 million over two years. It should be a lot more! And it shouldn't just apply to disabled vets. This reverse boot camp should be part of the process for all military personel transitioning back into civilian life. Too many of them return to our communities with undiagnosed Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. This is just plain wrong.

We should significantly reduce the size and expense of our military, and create a major "reboot" program to train veterans for jobs in a demilitarized economy; jobs in alternative energy and in rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure.

A big part of our economic problems is caused by all of the money we've borrowed to finance the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This has all been done in the name of "national security." But really, our national security depends, not on contolling oil resources in foreign lands, but upon developing alternative energy here in America. Our returning veterans are just the ones to help create this new economy. The most patriotic thing that they, and we all can do together is to break our dependence upon oil.

Sincerely,

Doug Holdread

Pinon Canyon: an Obsolete Extravogance

2011-08-07T14:12:00.000-07:00

The Army's Pinon Canyon Maneuver Site in Southeastern Colorado glaringly demonstrates everything that's wrong with our U. S. economy. It is an example of the obsolete, unnecessary, wasteful extravagance which typifies our bloated military-spending practices.

Military planners often make the mistake of training to fight the last war. In the case of the Pinon Canyon Maneuver Site it's not even the last war, nor the one before that. You have to go all the way back to World War II to find a war in which tanks were actually a significant factor. The Pinon Canyon Maneuver Site is predicated on an out-dated military doctrine; huge numbers of tanks and other armored vehicles arrayed against each other on a vast battlefield. It's true that billions of dollars were spent on bigger and better tanks during the Cold War, a boon to defense contractors, but of little actual military value. In this high-tech age of unmanned aerial vehicles, and robots, and lasers, tank warfare is an obsolete military doctrine.

The military refers to these old systems as their, "legacy " weapons. the term "legacy" brings to mind the big estates that have been left as a legacy to the decedents of European nobility. These high-maintenance estates are expensive, but the heirs feel obliged to hang on to them in memory of past glories. It's the same with tank warfare. It represents the romantic but expensive legacy of World War II battles in North Africa. An important difference between the heirs of European nobility and the Pentagon's legacy weapons is that the former is financed by private money, while the later is paid for with our tax dollars.

The advocates of continued funding for tank warfare have found creative ways to use tanks in the current wars in order to try and justify continuing the stream of funding to the corporations that they represent. In Afghanistan tanks have been used to shell the crops of villagers as a way to force them into the arms of the central Afghan government. Farmers can get reparations for their destroyed crops only by applying to the Karzai government. This dubious method of breaking the grip of the Taliban upon villagers is a pretty lame misuse of tanks, obsolete both in terms of military doctrine and economics.

The 238,000 acre Pinon Canyon Maneuver Site is unnecessary. The Department of Defense controls 32 million acres of land in the U.S. and even more around the world. Yet they say they need expand Pinon Canyon to as much as 6.9 million acres. This is all based upon a flawed method of calculating the land requirements for military bases. Instead of calculating the overall real estate holdings of all of the DoD's ranges and then coordinating the use of these ranges among the different service branches and bases, each individual base calculates its ideal amount of training land. All of these wish-lists are then added together to arrive at the total of the DoD's "land shortfall." It's like each and every household calculating its individually need for recreational land and then insisting that each household needs its own park, as if such facilities cannot be shared. Each and every Army base having its own huge training range is simply an unnecessary extravagance.

Meanwhile, valuable assets like the helium, uranium and natural gas underneath Pinon Canyon are being withheld from the regional Southeastern Colorado economy.

We can no longer afford to preserve our legacy weapon-systems like armored tanks. It's time to return Pinon Canyon to the public so that the Department of Defense can save some money, and the people of our region can make some.

Proactive Pinon Canyon Vision

2010-10-12T06:56:00.000-07:00

Some people live their lives reactively. They are essentially passive, waiting for circumstances to over-take them and then doing what they have to do to get by.

Other people live their live proactively. Deciding what kind of a life they want to have and then making conscious decisions which increase the odds that their chosen life will be realized.

Communities also tend to be either reactive or proactive. Colorado Springs is an example of a pro-active community. That city has decided that it wants its identity and economy to be defined primarily by the military-industrial complex and conservative religious organizations. As a result that city attracts many residents who find work in these sectors of the economy. Colorado Springs doesn’t just sit and wait for their military bases and their religious organizations to grow. They proactively work to make it happen. Just last month 70 representatives from their community traveled to Washington D.C. to meet with the Colorado Congressional Delegation and Department of Defense officials to lobby for the interests of their city. And they are currently in the process of hiring a DC firm at the cost of $100,000 a year to lobby in their behalf on a year-round basis.

Trinidad needs to decide if it wants to be a reactive, or a pro-active community. We have several unique economic opportunities before us if we decide to pro-actively pursue them. Las Animas County was recently identified by the State as the largest Renewable Resource Generation Development Area for both wind and solar energy in Colorado. This represents great promise for the economic future of our city and region. The promise of a growing alternative energy industry in Southeastern Colorado may well be one of the major reasons why Fort Carson has been trying to hard to take advantage of what they've called, "a window of opportunity" to acquire land in the region before wind farms and solar arrays are established.

Many of us who live here take the abundance of natural beauty that surrounds us for granted. But “there’s gold in them there hills!” Not only do we have beautiful mountain country in our area, but also spectacular red rock canyons and prairies. Las Animas County is an incredibly diverse outdoorsman’s paradise unlike any other locale in Colorado. Some of these natural assets are public lands. Others are on private property. But with the right kind of pro-active economic development all of these amazing resources could be developed.

Another promising area is the development of heritage tourism. The region of the Purgatoire River watershed is the cradle of Colorado history, with pre-historic people such as the Folsom Culture and historic tribes like the Jicarilla Apaches, the Ute and the Cheyenne, and the 19th century international trade and cultural exchange that occurred along the Santa Fe Trail and the birth of the cattle industry by such luminaries as Goodnight and Thatcher and Bloom. There are literally thousands of archaeological and historical sites all over our region. And there are also many thousands of curious people who’d pay good money to see them. While many of the attractions are outside of town, Trinidad also has a surprising number of museums and cultural venues for a community of its size. All of this is could become more of an attraction, supporting our food and lodging businesses. But we’d need to pro-actively help that to happen.

I have personal witnessed both the interest of outsiders in our region and willingness of private land owners to welcome them onto their property. Over the past three years I have coordinated painting outings into the historic ranch lands and canyon county in our region with over 60 artists from all over the state. Trinidad has also developed an identity as an “arts community.” Attracted by the affordable housing and studio space, the rich history and culture, and the scenic beauty, nationally recognized artists have found their way to Trinidad. We are now the home of many visual, dramatic, musical and literary artists and arts-organizations. We could pro-actively build upon this by offering incentives to artists who can no longer afford to live and create in places like Santa Fe, by subsidizing studio spaces within our stock of under-occupied downtown buildings.

But there is one big obstacle in the way of the future development of any and all of these promising options for our future. We are in competition with the pro-active vision of Colorado Springs for the future use of the land in Las Animas County. Colorado Springs’ vision of the future involves the growth of military training and in their minds, that requires the acquisition of more land. The real estate around Colorado Springs’ military instillations has become very populated and expensive. But they view us down here in Las Animas County as basically passive regarding our current and future economic development as it relates to our land.

Some might say, “why not have it all? Agriculture, alternative energy, heritage tourism, outdoor recreation, the arts AND militarization? But there are intrinsic conflicts between live-fire, military training and any of the other options. It is pretty obvious that you can’t raise cattle or put up solar arrays and wind-mills, or go out bird-watching, or painting or hiking on land that is exploding with weapons and being buzzed by military aircraft. The military is currently engaged in fighting against wind farms in areas where training is conducted because wind generators represent obstructions to low-altitude flight training and produce false, ghost-radar images. According to the New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/27/business/energy-environment/27radar.html

So we have two cities whose visions of the future depend upon the lands of Las Animas County. Colorado Springs is proactively working with legislators and Pentagon bureaucrats to try and make their vision happen. The people of Trinidad should also become proactive in working to make our vision a reality. As the old saying goes, “Use it or lose it.” We need to start thinking and behaving pro-actively.

Pinon Canyon; Not About Economics

2010-09-21T07:14:00.000-07:00

If the Pentagon’s plan to turn Southeastern Colorado into a vast live-fire range were about economics, it would be a bad idea. But for those of us who live in the targeted region it’s not about economics; it’s about patriotism.

Patriotism is the love we feel for our homeland. It’s the willingness to stand together with our neighbors in defense of the heritage and values of our forefathers and mothers. It’s our appreciation of the unique beauty and history of the landscapes that we call our own. In opposing the expansion of Pinon Canyon we are doing our patriotic duty.

If Pinon Canyon expansion were about economics it would be the most unenlightened self-destructive and unsustainable approach to economic development imaginable. The destruction of agriculture, our most consistent economic sector, the depopulation of our land, the spoiling of our environment and the federalization and removal of private property from our tax-base would all work against the long-term health of our economy. Any short-term financial gains by a few would be more than offset by devastating long-term loses by all.

But it’s not about economics for us. We don’t believe that the military should ever be used as a tool of economic development. Nor should the lands and livelihoods of hard working Las Animas and Otero County residents ever be sacrificed for the sake of a few government contracts.

From the perspective of the Pentagon bureaucrats who hatched the plan to turn our region into a big playground to try out new weapon systems, land is just land. They don’t care, and may not even know that the land is the home of multi-generational ranching families. They may not be aware that the Santa Fe Trail passed through this land and that it’s the cradle of Colorado history. They would probably prefer it if the place was not covered with thousands of historic and prehistoric archaeological sites. It doesn’t matter to them that the red rocks canyons are beautiful; ugly would do just fine as far as they’re concerned. All they want is a big hunk of real estate to create a Department of Defense training and testing range so that defense contractors can try out their wares.

But for the patriots of Southeastern Colorado, all of this does matter. We will never allow our homeland to be invaded and destroyed for the sake of providing a testing ground for the likes of Lockheed-Martin, Raytheon and Boeing.

A Pinon Canyon Compromise?

2010-07-01T08:02:00.000-07:00

We’ve been asked why we are so unwilling to compromise. Over the past four years the people of Southeastern Colorado have been resolutely united in our opposition to the expansion of the Army's Pinon Canyon Maneuver Site. We are uncompromisingly against the federalization of 6.9 million acres of productive agricultural land in order to turn it into the world's largest life-fire range. We are unyieldingly standing together to prevent the projected dispossession of 17,000 of our neighbors, (the Army's estimate of how many people would be "relocated.") Our mantra has been, "not one more acre!" And during these years, one politician after another has suggested to us that we should sit down at the table with the military and hammer out a compromise, a win-win solution which would allow the Army expand its Pinon Canyon Maneuver Site without destroying our economy, environment and culture. But we have some pretty good reasons for being unwilling to compromise.Politicians hate taking sides. They want everyone to like them, and more importantly to vote for them. Whenever they come down decisively on one side of an issue they risk losing votes on the other side of the debate. Politicians prefer the middle ground, imagining that they can keep everybody happy and voting for them. In the case of Pinon Canyon there is an obvious electoral and economic imbalance between the two sides. On one side is a motley crew of dusty, dry-land ranchers, crusty conservationists and historians, and musty, left-over 60s peace advocates. Plus, we live in a sparsely populated part of Colorado and are far from being a powerful voting block. On the other side is the most highly funded agency of the federal government; the Department of Defense, and one of the richest and most influential sectors of the Colorado economy; the defense industry. Together they comprise what former President, Dwight Eisenhower called, "the military-industrial complex." Even for politicians who sympathize with us there's not much to be gained in standing with us against the military. Politically, compromise looks like the clever way to go. I generally agree with the idea of people sitting down together to work out their differences, but this situation is different. The problem with us sitting down with the Army is that the Army is not a person. It is a huge Washington D.C. bureaucracy. The people who serve in the military have subjected their individual sentiments and opinions to a higher authority and are obliged to obey directives which come down to them from the over-arching command and control structure of the Department of Defense. Soldiers are certainly human beings with individual feelings and opinions. But they have made the ultimate human compromise; to set aside their own thoughts and emotions in obedience to policies and agendas set for them by military planners in the Pentagon. In order to negotiate any real compromise we'd have to be able to "sit down at the table" with a policy-maker who has the ability to exercise judgment and discretion. That is not the role of a soldier. Ideally the people of the Southeastern Colorado community would sit down together to participate in the formulation of our vision for the future of our region. And this would involve compromise. But "The Army" is not a person, or even a group of people. It is a federal agency without a permanent physical presence in the community or any consistent human expression here. Of course the Army is made up of human beings, but those individual humans represent policies and programs that they have no discretionary power to alter. "Theirs is not to reason why." In the last four years, there have been three different commanding officers at Fort Carson, two different Secretaries of Defense and two different Secretaries of the Army. "The Army" comes into Las Animas County from far away to use the Pinon Canyon Maneuver Site, maybe twice a year, and then leaves. They have no stake in the community beyond this limited use of a resource which happens to be located here. They have no attachment to, or investment in our community. From their perspective the land here is simply an available commodity. And the expansion is not their plan to defend or forsake; it was formulated, perhaps decades ago within the secretive, inaccessible and unassailable inner sanctums of the Pentagon. The military strategists who first dreamed it up are very likely working as civilian contractors and consultants by now. And the people who are currently under orders to advance the plan have no particular axes to grind. They are simply trying to be good soldiers. They didn't create the plan and they have no authority to alter it. Since they are not personally responsible for the creation of the plan and have no authority regarding the implementation of the plan they have no "standing" when it comes to determining the future of our Southeastern Colorado community. In a sense their role is just like a bomber pilot who releases a bomb at prescribed coordinates. It's nothing personal. Just following orders.There's a big difference between our self-determination with the compromises that we'd have to make to work out our conflicting interests, and a powerful outside interest moving in to try to determine the future of our community. The military personnel who are involved with this issue at Fort Carson have nothing to gain or lose, personally and they have no authority to alter the plan. They are simply following orders. Besides, we've already experienced the results of "compromise." In the early 80s we resisted the establishment of the current Pinon Canyon Maneuver Site, but ended up compromising. We made a deal with the Army. In exchange for them taking 240,000 acres of Las Animas County, dispossessing multi-generations ranching families, plundering our historical and natural treasures and losing the tax revenue from the land, the Army promised that they never use live fire and that they'd never seek any future expansion. They've broken both of those promises. So much for compromise.So we are not interested in any more compromises. And we are not very excited by politicians who suggest that we should compromise with the Army. We're looking for politicians who'll do what military men are taught not do; exercise judgment and decide. We're looking for politicians who'll consider, not just the vote-count, but the injustice of a powerful military moving in upon powerless citizens to take their land and their lives. We are looking for politicians who will be uncompromising, willing to stand, shoulder to shoulder with the people that they represent against the power brokers of the military-industrial complex.

Party Elite Are Sabotaging Democracy: Romanoff Shows Independence with Pinon Canyon Stand

2010-02-11T12:15:00.000-08:00

The two major political parties are subverting the democratic process in our state. They are, perhaps unwittingly pushing people like me toward the "Independent" column. First it was the Republican elite who got together behind closed doors to anoint Scott McInnis as their candidate for governor, long before the primary process had a chance to work. They even drafted a platform, a document which has traditionally been part of the party caucus process.

Now it's the Democrats who are subverting the primary process. President Obama is on his way to Denver to give his blessing to, and raise mega-bucks for Senate candidate, Michael Bennet. Such an endorsement would be fine if the primary process had been allowed to play itself out and Bennet had emerged as the party's choice. But that's not the case. There's another strong, viable Democratic candidate in the race; former Speaker of the Colorado House of Representatives, Andrew Romanoff.

It has become evident that Romanoff is just too courageous in his thoughts and actions for the party elite to embrace him. First, Governor Ritter ignored him and appointed Denver School Superintendent, Michael Bennet to fill the Senate seat vacated by Ken Salazar. Now the Colorado Democratic Party, and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committees are conspiring with Bennet's campaign to sabotage democracy, short-circuiting the primary process, by bringing the President into our state to campaign for Bennet, Perhaps Romanoff is just not corporate-friendly enough for the taste of the party elite. After all, he has turned down all campaign contributions for PACs, while Bennet raked in $600,000 from PACs in 2009. Or perhaps he's not urban-centric enough. In taking a strong position against the Army's plan to expand their Pinon Canyon Maneuver Site he has signaled that he will represent the state-wide interests of Colorado, and not automatically do the bidding of the military and defense contractors in Colorado Springs and Denver.

Whatever their reasons, it's just not right for the Republican or Democratic party-elites to impose heavy-handed influence upon the primary process. It causes people like me to consider a third, independent way forward.

I'm Beginning to Look at Haiti

2010-01-23T11:44:00.000-08:00

When the first pictures came on TV, I was caught in that excited curiosity that grabs the attention of the public when they see the words, written big and red across the screen, "breaking news." But a day later I didn't want to see it at all. As the scale of it and the rawness of came into focus it became too much for my mind to grasp; too much for my heart to bare. I quickly sent $50 to the Red Cross, and found ways to look away.

But there is a guilt that I've carried now for days. How can I not look hard at this? It is not just Haiti's experience. It is such a naked human tragedy that it is also our experience; my experience; the experience of all of humanity squeezed onto a Caribbean island; all of our secret frailties, prejudices and fears pushed into view.

The nagging that I feel is not just the guilt of looking away. I also feel guilty about looking. What right do I have to look now, after all of these years of knowing. What right to have to look at the indignity of bony grandmothers and plump children and muscular men; bodies arranged in rows along the curb, all mixed in with the rubble and the trash. What right do I have to look at the dirty, broken bodies of people forced out of the privacy of their agony and grief; forced to live out their hell in the streets; in front of the cameras?

It's complicated. I'm having a hard time identifying all of the feelings that are sturing in my emotional stew. I tell myself that it's okay to look without seeing too much and to turn the channel so as not to see too much; not to think too much about it. What's the use? My brain and my heart are too small. I can't imagine that much death. I can't imagine the pain that is being experienced by even one single individual who's beloved has been crushed, who can't put them properly to rest in a proper grave, let alone feel the enormity of that, multiplied by a million.

But that's really no excuse; that it's too big and I'm too small. I don't have a choice. There it is, the worse that can happen to human being, right in front of my human eyes. I can pretend that is doesn't have to do with me. That it's far away in a foreign land. That the Haitians are so different from me; they are experiencing it in a whole different way than I would. But none of that is true. Haiti is not a world away and the people are not so different from me when it comes to the lose of love and life.

I find myself denying the reality of it all. It's kind of like when I saw the Grand Canyon for the first time. My mind couldn't take it in. I fought against it. It didn't fit into the categories of my prior learning and the capacity of my understanding. Little by little it is sinking in, but I will probably never comprehend the full horror of it. I can only create an abstracted version that I can live with.

In my culture we are insulated from the reality of death. I didn't see a dead human outside of a funeral home until I was forty years old. Americans in 2010 go to great lengths to avoidance death and dying. We pay people that we don't know to take of the bodies of our loved ones. We say, "goodbye" to embalmed, powdered and waxed ecto-forms and we say, "That's not her. She's gone." We transition quickly from death and decay and loss and grief, to vision from our memory. We imagine the departed floating near by, ready to whisper consolations, or living on in heaven, poised to receive us into the kingdom.

When reality is too much for us to mentally comprehend, or to bare emotionally, we are faced with a dilemma. We have to either accept a reality that is too brutal, to harsh, to huge and risk being destroyed by its enormity, or place that reality within a larger mythic context, outside of experience and reason. We place this earth that sustains us, but can also shake us to our core within a larger realm; the earth atop a tortoise or held aloft by Hercules, or cradled in arms of Jesus. When understanding fails us, we look beyond it to faith. I'm not very fussy these days about the exact specifications of the here-after and beyond. But I do need it. I envision it in different ways as the moment requires. I am not willing to accept that redemption and justice exist, or fail to properly exist, only within the limits of human logic. My soul entertains the possibility that the unjust, disproportional tragedies of this world might make some kind of sense in a transcendent cosmology. I recognize that this is partly a way that I avoid the starkness of the reality of Haiti, but I have to, and I honestly believe that their are beyond the mind of man.

Some are tempted to believe that the Haitian people somehow brought this upon themselves. Pat Robertson says they had it coming. Their ancestors made a pact with the devil long ago and Satan is claiming what is rightfully his. I guess he figures that if it's the wrath of God then humans are off the hook. At least the big questions of "why" are taken care of. He applied the same logic to AIDS epidemic, and 911 and New Orleans. I can't imagine how scary it is to believe in the God of Reverend Robertson.

I think there are a lot of people who want to do something now. They have the same confused, guilty feelings as me. We want to believe that we can make it, if not all right, at least better. We send money, we volunteer to go and help clean up or care for the orphans. Maybe we can make Haiti a better place. Maybe I can help.

I think I need to do some art work about Haiti. That's the way for me to process the experience. I can't understand it. I mustn't ignore it. Maybe I can take it and give my experience of it a visible form. It's something that I can do.

2010-01-20T06:47:00.000-08:00

The Army is trying to spin the fact that their efforts to expand Pinon Canyon have been thwarted, yet again. Fort Carson officials announced on Jan. 19th that they are backing off "for now" and concentrating on using land they already have. So far, so good. But Col. Robert McLaughlin, the garrison commander at Fort Carson, said the Army may still try to expand Pinon Canyon that expansion is not, "off the table."
http://www.armytimes.com/news/2010/01/ap_army_pinon_expansion_011910/

We've heard this line before; that the Army is not pursuing expansion, "at this time." Or that there is, "currently no plan." They're trying to make it sound like it's their idea to back off, but the reality is that it would be illegal for the Army to try to expand because congress has enacted, for the third year in a row, a ban on spending any funds for that purpose. Thanks to the united efforts of Senators Udall and Bennet, and Representatives Salazar and Markey the Army has no choice but to back off, "for now."

But a careful reading of Col. McLaughlin's words makes it clear that they'll be back if and when they can get out from under the year-to-year bans which prevent them from moving forward on expansion. Meanwhile Southeastern Colorado remains under a dark cloud. What is needed is a permanent legislative ban on expansion. The Army says that it wants to "improve relationships" with landowners around Pinon Canyon. The first step that they need to take in that direction is to reaffirm promises made over the past 30 years that there would be no further expansion of Pinon Canyon and pledge their support for putting that promise into binding legislation. Then, and only then can the Department of the Army hope to win any goodwill in the region.

The classroom as a metaphor

2009-11-05T05:36:00.000-08:00

I've spent most of my life in the classroom. First as a public school student for 13 years. Then in various training classes in the Coast Guard, followed by seven years of higher education, and finally, 30 years of teaching. The classroom has become my metaphor for life. In many ways it is a little microcosm of our larger political landscape.

The school is my metaphorical nation. The principal is like the president presiding over a collection of classrooms which are like states. Each classroom has a governor, a teacher who tries to secure funding and manage it for the benefit of the citizens of her state; her classroom.

Just as different states have different concerns, so do different classes. The needs of art class are different from biology or math.

And individual classrooms and administrators operate as conservatives and liberals. Conservatives emphasize the tried and true basics, the three Rs. They understand the need for authority, discipline and structure. No monkey business. Liberals believe that the desire to learn is innate and what should be learned will be learned in an open, student-centered experimental environment. No need to stifle natural curiosity.

Coffman's Pinon Canyon Apology

2009-11-04T04:33:00.000-08:00

Congressman Mike Coffman has done a smart and proper thing. Less than two weeks after questioning gubernatorial candidate, Josh Penry's motives in supporting the property rights of ranchers in Southeastern Colorado in their four-year-long battle with the Army, he has issued an apology. The offending accusations were delivered in a column in the Colorado Statesman on October 23rd. In that piece Coffman accused Penry of voting for HB1317, "on the basis of a political calculation." He went on to impugn Penry's patriotism, suggesting that his vote was cast, "without any regard for the men and women in uniform." What Coffman failed to consider was that he was, by implication questioning the motives of the majority of Colorado legislators. The bill, which blocks the sale of State school sections to the military for expanding the live-fire range at the Pinon Canyon Maneuver site was supported by a large bi-partisan majority in both houses of the statehouse.

Coffman's original editorial was intended as an endorsement of Scott McInnis' position in favor of Pinon Canyon expansion, but it had much broader implications. It brought to light an ideological schism within the Republican party. On one side of the rift are Coffman and McInnis, supporters of the economic interests of the military-industrial complex. On the other side are those like Penry who come down on the side of the property rights of landowners.

Coffman's election-day apology which was also sent to the Colorado Statesman demonstrates good political survival instincts, coming in the context of an angry avalanche of reaction from his fellow Republicans, including military veterans. While Coffman's criticism was aimed at Penry, it was also an implicit indictment of other property-rights Republicans who voted to protect private and state lands from being seized and federalized.

Perhaps Scott McInnis will now follow Coffman's example by apologizing for similar damaging accusations, which have alienated him from many within his own party. And perhaps he will reconsider his position in support of a military take-over of the southeastern corner of our state.

Pinon Canyon: McInnis Can't Count

2009-10-13T09:17:00.000-07:00

It probably looked like a mathematical no-brainer to Scott McInnis, Republican candidate for governor, when he decided to feed Southeastern Colorado to the Pentagon wolves. He figured he was trading a few thousand lost votes in that sparsely populated corner of the state in exchange for millions of votes in El Paso County and along the 1-70 corridor. He calculated that he could subtract a few ranchers from the vast numbers of job seekers up north and he'd come out ahead. But alas, Scott can't count.

He should have done his math a little more carefully. It's not just ranchers in the boondocks who are outraged at the idea of the transferring up to 6.9 million acres of private and state land, the whole southeastern corner of the state, to the federal government. And it's not just Democrats who are appalled at the idea of hardworking, patriotic Americans being forced to defend their homes and lifestyles against an invasion by their own military. And it's not just archaeologists who are against turning the cradle of Colorado History, a region loaded with Native American sites, vestiges of the Santa Fe Trail and the ruins of Hispanic settlers and Pioneer cattlemen, into a vast live-fire range. And it's not just property rights advocates who are up in arms at the prospect of eminent domain ultimately being used to take private property in order to increase the 34% of Colorado currently owned by the federal government by about an additional 10%. And it's not just environmentalists who are opposed to destroying one of the most biologically diverse regions of our state. http://www.denverpost.com/ci_6160060?source=rss.

Nope, he didn't do his math.

Even in military-friendly, Republican El Paso County he may have figured wrong. Buddy Gipson, Chairman of the Governmental Affairs and Public Policy Advisory Board of the Colorado Springs Chamber of Commerce has sided with McInnis's anti-expansion opponent, Josh Penry on the issue, http://www.gazette.com/articles/wednesday-62932-penry-assert.html.

What McInnis failed to calculate is the fact that many Republican primary voters are ideological conservatives who are staunch defenders of private property rights. People who don't see the federalization of Colorado's lands and economy as our salvation. True-blue conservatives who know that wealth is produced, not by an over-dependence upon the federal government by building a diverse economy in the private sector.

Scott needs to go back to grammar school and work on his arithmetic.

Without Public Option It's Just a Corporate Giveaway

2009-10-02T02:49:00.000-07:00

Healthcare reform could turn out to be yet another huge corporate rip-off of the public. If we end up being forced to buy insurance from the same companies that have been getting filthy rich by continually raising rates and increasingly denying coverage, we’ll be the big losers. The only way to ensure that mandatory insurance coverage will work to the advantage of the public is to include a public option that will induce private insurance companies to make their offerings fair and affordable.

Without a public option we’d be left with a requirement that we must fork over hundreds of dollars a month to corporate fat cats in hopes that larger numbers of policy holders and more competition will lower the cost. But competition isn’t what it used to be. The Corporate Titans have learned to “coordinate” their profiteering among themselves. It’ll be just like gas prices. The petroleum companies know that we have to gas up, no matter what the price. If we are all forced to buy health insurance from the for-profit corporations, it will be a similar situation.

But a public option would pool a huge number of policy holders, forcing the private insurers to bring their profits down to earth. A public, non-profit insurance option would not be paying multi-million-dollar bonuses to executives. A public, non-profit option would not have to spend billions on advertising. A public option would not have to hire lobbiests or make campaign contributions. It would otherwise operate just like a private insurance company, but under stricter regulations. There would be laws against excluding people because of pre-existing conditions or charging impossible premiums.

Making insurance coverage mandatory is a good idea if, and only if we have the option of buying our insurance from a public, non-profit provider. If we end up without a choice, being forced to pay for the same old coverage from the same old, greedy corporations; that would be a huge scam.

Everyone should contact Senators Bennet and Udall, and Representative Salazar to let them know that we want to have a choice between for-profit, corporate insurance, and non-profit public insurance.

Pinon Canyon Conspiracy Theories

2009-09-13T04:44:00.000-07:00

I've never been one to ignore a good conspiracy theory. Faced with a choice between covert agendas and official government explanations, the conspiracy theories tend, on average to be more credible. In the case of Pinon Canyon, Army documents have surfaced, through leaks, court orders and freedom of information act requests, revealing plans to acquire 6.9 million acres to turn Southeastern Colorado into the largest military training range in the world. The plan would turn the entire corner of the state, all the way to the Kansas and Oklahoma borders into a vast, depopulated, live-fire zone. For those of us with suspicious minds, the question of what the real, secret purpose of Pinon Canyon might be, have provided plenty of fodder since the early 80s.

Back then it was broadly suspected that the creation of Pinon Canyon had something to do with a helium dome which is (coincidentally?) located smack dab in the middle of the maneuver site. Helium domes are rare geological formations. There's only one other helium dome in the U.S., the Bush Dome which is the National Helium Reserve near Amarillo, Texas.

Helium domes have been discussed in scientific documents as promising sites for the storage of radioactive waste. It is logical that if the formations are capable of holding a lighter-than-air gas they could also be used to seal nuclear waste off from the outside world.

Just before the Army started condemning land and evicting ranchers to create the original Pinon Canyon Maneuver Site, two different companies came to Las Animas County with proposals to tap into the helium dome in order to create an underground chamber for the storage of nuclear waste. Public outrage resulted in the recall of a county commissioner who had met with representatives of the nuclear waste companies and put those proposals to rest.

And after the Army acquired the land there were suspicious cattle mutilations and black helicopter sitings. The theory at the time was that tissue samples were being surgically removed from the cattle in the dark of night, in order to measure radiation levels. And when then-governor, Roy Romer was pressured by the federal government to remove nuclear waste from Rocky Flats, a decommissioned nuclear weapons production plant outside of Denver, he proposed moving it to Pinon Canyon.

As recently as last year soil samples were covertly gathered and removed from the site. The samples were tested and found to contain unusually high concentrations of uranium.

There have been other conspiracy theories over the years. I've heard about plans for secret underground facilities, missile defense installations, and experimentation with high frequency radio waves designed to control everything from the weather to human behavior.

Officially, the Army says that it need more land to conduct tank training. Few seasoned conspiracy theorists are buying that simple explanation. After all, Pinon Canyon is already larger than many other bases where similar training takes place.

But there's one remaining theory which is my current favorite; that the Pentagon wants a huge mock battlefield for testing and training with a new generation of high-tech, robotic weapons. Air Force officials speak openly and proudly of a future arsenal of weapons like the Predator and Reaper, unmanned aircraft that can be controlled from thousands of miles away by a new generation of "pilots" who vaporize the enemy by zapping icons on computer screen. According to a recent Colorado Springs Gazette article the Air Force Academy is already using Fort Carson's training lands to teach Academy cadets how to "pilot" these unmanned aircraft. http://www.gazette.com/articles/world-61900-half-controlled.html

There is also a whole new generation of unmanned ground vehicles; robots that will become the Army's future soldiers. In fact, The 2001 Senate defense authorization bill mandates that one third of the operational ground combat vehicles of the armed forces will be unmanned by 2015. The Army recently sponsored a "Robotics Rodeo," an event at which military contractors showcased their unmanned ground vehicles. http://news.cnet.com/8301-13639_3-10339238-42.html

The official Army documents which have come to light argue that training ranges must be expanded to accommodate the ever-increasing range and lethality of modern weapons-systems. It really doesn't take a paranoid, conspiracy nut to see that the Army doesn't want to gobble up all of Southeastern Colorado for old-fashioned tank training. It's something more than that.

Okay, so future weapons will be unmanned aircraft and robotic land vehicles, coordinated over great distances through networked satellite communications. But why does the Pentagon want to take almost 7 million acres in Southeastern Colorado? Why can't they test these new weapons on existing federal lands? After all, the feds already own 70% of the Western U.S. The Pentagon alone owns 25 million acres of it.

They Army will tell you that it's to save money; that it costs too much to move troops to existing huge ranges at Fort Bliss in Texas, or to Dugway in Utah. The Chamber of Commerce in Colorado Springs will tell you that it's about the survival of Fort Carson and the economic viability of their city. I don't buy either argument. Troops are moved all over the place all the time for all sorts of reasons, including training. And Fort Carson is one of the Army's premiere bases. It's not going anywhere. It's not about the troops or forts or the even the Army. It's about defense contractors.

That's why politicians like Representatives Lamborn and Coffman are fighting so hard for the expansion. They represent districts in which corporations like Raytheon and Boeing and Lockheed are involved with satellites and communications and robotics. These weapons-makers want a convenient place to develop and train troops with their products. That's the conspiracy. Military contractors are the ones who are really pulling the political and military strings behind the scheme to expand Pinon Canyon.

Follow the Pinon Canyon Money

2009-09-03T06:24:00.000-07:00

"Follow the money", they say. That's not hard to do when it comes to the motives behind the backers of Pinon Canyon expansion. I have to give them credit for their recent honesty. Early on in the battle between landowners trying to defend their land and the Pentagon with it plan to turn their homes into mock Afghan villages, there was a lot of high-minded rhetoric about, "supporting the troops" and "military necessity." But recently expansion cheer leaders like Doug Lamborn, Scott McInnis and Mike Coffman have come down to earth; down to the bottom line. In the words of Scott McInnis, "Hell, this is about jobs!" The position of Doug Lamborn is a no-brainer. He represents Colorado Springs with Fort Carson as its primary economic engine and with 40% of the citiy's economy dependent upon the military and defense contractors, it's pretty obvious. But at first I didn't quite understand why Mike Coffman, from way up north in Aurora was weighing in so heavily on the issue. So I followed the money. I googled "defense contracts" and "Colorado." As I expected Colorado Springs is in the top position, but guess who's second. You guessed it. Aurora is not only the location of Buckley Air Force Base, but also of such military-contracting big names as Lockheed, Raytheon and Boeing. Once you've stripped away all of the phoney patriotism, the issue of expanding Pinon Canyon boils down to feeding hard-working, multi-generational ranching families to the money-hungry wolves of the military-industrial complex.

The Army's New "Good Will" Initiative on Pinon Canyon

2009-09-01T09:01:00.000-07:00

I helped to man a booth for the Pinon Canyon Expansion Opposition Coalition last weekend at the Trinididdio Blues Festival. Many of the people who stopped by to grab a “No Expansion” bumper sticker or to sign our petition made the same comment, “I thought this was all over.”

To the casual observer it may appear that David has defeated Goliath; that an unlikely coalition of conservative ranchers and left-leaning peace activists have accomplished the impossible; beating back the Pentagon.

We have won some significant battles. The Colorado legislature has passed a measure, HB1317 which prohibits the sale of state lands to the Army for the purpose of expanding Pinon Canyon. And once again, Representative John Salazar has been successful in attaching a ban on spending for Pinon Canyon expansion to the 2010 military construction budget. So it’s understandable if looks like we’ve won.

But for those of us who’ve been fighting for the homes and livelihoods of ranchers in Southeastern Colorado for the past four years, dispelling the false sense that the battle is over has become our biggest challenge. As much as we’d like it to be true that we’ve succeeded in defending our land against an invasion by our own military, the unfortunate truth is that the Army recently reaffirmed that the expansion of Pinon Canyon remains a top priority.

The only reason that the Army is not actively pursuing expansion at the moment is that they can’t. They are under a spending ban imposed upon them by Congress. Instead of accepting the fact that they’ve been hamstrung for at least a year, they’re pretending that they’ve decided to hold off for a while in order to work on developing a new “good neighbor” policy.

At a recent meeting of Action-22, an organization representing the interests of Southeastern Colorado, Col. James Rice, (retired), Fort Carson’s operations officer, announced the Army’s new focus; wooing backers by investing in our local hospital and by coaching our local businesses in the art of securing contracts with the Department of the Army. He spoke of spending millions to upgrade medical services at the Trinidad hospital and of hosting seminars in Trinidad on securing government contracts. He said that the Army has decided not to move forward with expansion at this time; that all of this is being done in the interest of building up “good will” and has nothing to do with future expansion plans.

But in the meantime current Secretary of Army, Pete Geren says he’d like to, "hit the reset button." on Pinon Canyon. Geren made the point that, “the development of Pinon Canyon properly done could bring some economic development to a part of the state that is economically depressed. We see an opportunity to make a contribution in that regard.” (Senate Armed Services Committee Hearing, June 19, 2009) And at a Senate confirmation hearing, Representative John McHugh, who was recently nominated to replace Geren as Secretary was unwilling to promise Senator Mark Udall that the Army would permanently take eminent domain off the table as a means of expanding Pinon Canyon. Instead he promised that working with willing sellers would be his “first path” towards expansion. (Senate Armed Services Committee Hearing, July 30, 2009)

So, while we may have won a couple of significant skirmishes, the war between ranchers trying to defend their land and the U.S. Army and economic interests in Colorado Spring rages on.

2008-12-14T04:25:00.000-08:00

Intelligence; what is it?

What is actually being measured in IQ tests? Can intelligence really be measured all? Is there a correlation between IQ scores and valued behavioral outcomes? Is our definition of intelligence prejudiced by our cultural values; independent thinking, creativity, individualism? Are there other values in other cultures that might equal "intelligence" in those cultures? Things like traditional beliefs and practices and participation in established life-ways? We assume that higer IQ results in better performance. But is that true across the board? Are the best hunters in primitive cultures the individuals with the highest IQs? Are shamans with high IQs more effective in the application of their skills, or more socially influential? Are the individuals with higher IQs more effective parents?

Is there a high correlation among rural Mexican farmers between high IQ and yield per acre? Or is there a higher correlation with family size or social-networking skills?

In your studies, is there a high correlation between resilience and IQ? I guess what I'm asking is, is IQ good for anything other than an ability for abstract thinking? Is it an important attribute in terms of social success, circumstantial adaptation and survival?

Maybe the concept of IQ itself is too abstract. Maybe it is measuring the wrong thing. It would seem that it is a measure of input rather than outcome. A fundamental issue in the definition of intelligence is the question of whether we are talking about innate cognitive capacity and potentiality, (input) or about actual ability and competency, (output.) Howard Gardner defines intelligence as "the ability to solve problems that have value in at least one culture." That makes some practical sense. The definition sounds more like applied intelligence. Innate intelligence is recognized as being of value to the degree that it is applied to culturally identified problems. But Gardner's ideas about multiple intelligences are not really the mainstream understanding of IQ. The more orthodox understanding of IQ is that it is supposed to measure cognitive or mental capacity, without regard for whether or not intelligence is applied to culturally valued problem solving, or applied to anything at all.

Gardner's multiple intelligences; Bodily-Kinesthetic, Interpersonal, Verbal-Linguistic, Logical-Mathematical, Naturalistic, Intrapersonal, Visual-Spatial, Musical, are more like competencies than some native mental capacity. It seems fairer and less biased, but is it really a measure of intelligence?

I suppose one way of thinking about IQ is that it is a potentiality, like muscle mass, or lung capacity. We can measure muscles and lungs and perhaps conclude that an individual has the capability to be a good distance runner, or that a group should do well at high altitude agricultural work. But is there a correlation between physical attributes and performance? Likewise, is there a correlation between intellectual capacity and meaningful outcome? In our culture, there is, because we value a particular kind of abstracting thinking and we recognize the act of thinking (and writing and planning and the development of programs to think and plan things), and we reward it. So in our culture there is a correlation between IQ and performance.

Outside of academia, I wonder what the optimal IQ is, in terms of performance. Maybe, if you are looking for a good worker on an assembly line, the optimal IQ is 100, or 75. I can imagine that the higher the average IQ on an assembly line, the lower the production. Unless, of course the assembly line is organized in a way that mobilizes the intelligence of the workers in some atypical way. What I'm getting at is that you can't necessarily say that all of the problems of Africa can be attributed to lower IQ scores. There may actually be some things that benefit from lower IQs. And there may be other kinds of intelligence that are of equal or greater importance.

I guess that in addition to the questions of what IQ is, is the question of what good it is. Does it give us useful information? Does it help to understand that Africans have lower IQs than White Americans? Are there other measures that are equally or more useful? I know of a couple of times in my life when I was benefited because of having a high IQ score. It wasn't because I actually performed better.

When I was in the Coast Guard I was a flunky. The way that the system worked was that a person advanced from an E1 on up by taking a series of tests. They were pretty easy tests, but for some reason I passive-aggressively refused to even look at them. So I didn't advance. After three years I was still an E1 while my peers were E3s and E4s. It was pretty dumb of me; I was scraping paint and swabbing decks. But then my boss, a lieutenant, saw my IQ score and gave me a job as a radarman. Everyone that I worked with was at least an E3. I was advanced ONLY because of my score.

It doesn't seem fair if we make positive assumptions about individuals or groups of people based upon their IQs and open or close the doors of opportunity on that basis, especially if there are other factors that are of equal or greater importance. (Of course there are lots of other factors that give people an unfair advantage as well; good looks, gender, inherited social status.)

So what about "Group Intelligence?" Is there such a thing? It's a little embarrasing to talk about it. It reminds me of force-fields and juju. But I think there is such a thing. It exists at all levels of reality. From the molecular level through cell-life and insects, to the planet, there are systems that somehow "know" how to behave together. It's not just individual molecules or cells or bees or celestial bodies, acting autonomously. There is systemic intelligence. And in human societies, I'm wondering if there might be an inverse relationship between individual intelligence and group intelligence; the higher the individual IQ, the lower the GIQ. It seems to me that there is a correlation between high IQ and individualism. Does IQ work against socialization? Does high IQ contribute to isolation? Does the emphasis on functioning within a social body, subjecting personal ambition to ones family, clan, or village work against the advancement of IQs? What about the autistic savants? Certainly there is high intelligence, but low social intelligence. How many functional, but mildly autistic-savant, anti-social people are out there in our culture? I've heard that the Silicon Valley has a high incidence of Asbergers. Okay, I'm in over my head now. I don't know anough about these conditions to be discussing them.

It seems like most all measures of intelligence aim at quantifying individual intelligence. I'm wondering if there might be another kind of intelligence that operates beyond individuals, in social groups. In other words, individuals live and operate within a shared intelligence as well as intelligence residing and operating within the individual. Perhaps this would explain the lower IQ scores among individuals living in tribal and traditional cultures. Maybe there's a trade-off. The more immersed a person is in the shared, group mind, the less exercised and developed is their individual intelligence.

We know that insects like ants, bees and many other animals operate within group intelligence. It is the intelligence of the swarm, the flock, the herd. This sort of intelligence is systemic, interactive and dynamic among individuals, rather than residing within an individual. Perhaps a similar kind of intelligence functions as coherent functional global patterns which have emerged and become established norms in traditional societies. It's a different kind of decentralized intelligence. It may be a very important part of our own reality as well, of which we are largely unconscious.

I'm not so sure that measuring individual IQs really gets us a very useful measure. Individuals rarely operate in isolation. Perhaps we should develop tools to measure group intelligence. Problems are solved when people work together collectively.

It seems to me that the human body is an example of systemic intelligence. The cells function collectively, not individually. We may try to impose a hierarchic model upon the body, with the brain behaving like the king, overseeing his body/kingdom. But that's not really how it works. Our bodies are really swarms of cells, working things out together. And it's not that all of the cells of our bodies love each other. We have all sorts of oppositional stuff going on. Dynamic tensions exist between extensors and contractors, excitatory and inhibitory functions. It seems to me that measuring individual IQ is like measuring the functional capacity of an individual cell, rather than the health of an organ or of the entire body.

If we accept that some sort of transcendent, shared group intelligence exists among insects, then the questions becomes; is this a more primitive kind of intelligence? Are we evolving from a lower-order, group intelligence toward a higher-order, individual intelligence? It's probably not either-or. I'd say both individual and group intelligences are real and important, but are we largely unconscious of our hive-mind? Do we value it? Do we understand it and cultivate it? And is there a way to measure it?

Has evolution been happening by virtue of the survival of the fittest individuals or the fittest groups? I think the latter. Individual Paleolithic humans would not have survived, regardless of their individual intelligence. Survival depended upon the viability of the clan; what might be called "group intelligence." Paleolithic hunters stalked and killed their prey in coordinated groups, not as individuals. And it is doubtful that these hunting tactics were devised by an individual of superior intelligence, but rather by a group intelligence.

We have, in Western Culture, and perhaps as a species, become less identified with the group or clan that we belong to, and are becoming more and more individuated. Throughout most of history the group, not the individual was emphasized. Throughout the middle ages individual expression was discouraged. It was viewed as an expression of the sin of pride. Individuals were supposed to sublimate themselves to the good of society.

I saw this in Mexico. The suppression of individual initiative was evident in the little village of Los Ricos where I lived and worked for a year. Being exceptional was not valued. Instead it was valued for a person to fulfill traditional roles within the community, like worker bees. In fact, there were traditions which ensured that no male, (women didn't even consider such things) would differentiated himself through his excellence or personal initiative. Each year the pueblo selected a Mayor Domo. It was a recognition of superiority but also a mechanism for bringing the superior individual back down to the norm. It was an honorary position accompanied by an obligation to finance all of the fiestas throughout the year. So the richest, (most exceptional) individual in the village was brought back down to the economic level of everyone else. Nobody could ever break out and become "an outstanding individual."

I'm realizing as I write a flaw in my thinking. People don't decide to be smart. An intelligent individual in Los Ricos is not going to say to himself, "It's not worth it to be smart and get rich. They'll just make me Mayor Domo and I'll lose my advantage. I think I'll be dumber and more social instread." No, that isn't it. But maybe there is something bigger than that, in the group mind, that distributes intelligence within the group.

We talked about the theory that there may have been a self-selection process in the establishment of Americans. The individuals who migrated to America in the 15th through the 19th centuries were unique. They were willing to leave their homes, their land, their loved ones, forever. They were strong individuals who were not so invested in the group mind or social identity that they were prevented from leaving. This self-selection continued in the westward migration on the American Continent with the emphasis on rugged individualism. I would be interesting to know if they also had higher IQ scores than other Europeans.

You raised the issue of new immigrants. I think you are right that the contemporary situation is different. Mexicans move back and forth between their jobs in the U.S. and their homes in Mexico. It does take a certain degree of initiative, but not at all like it was when there was very little possibility of ever returning.

Humanity turned a corner during the Renaissance when it started to evolve in the direction of the individual. Since that time art (which is really all I know about) has been become increasingly about the individual artist, their unique vision and creativity; their self-expression. Prior to the Renaissance, art was about self-effacing service to social values, mostly religious. We know the names of very few artists from the middle ages because individual artists didn't matter. It wasn't about them.

But we have seen this emphasis on the individuals ever since the Renaissance. Individual achievement is very important to us today. We try to teach our children to "play nicely." We want them to function well within their social identity. But we don't grade them on it. We don't emphasize it. We teach them to excel as individuals, in competition with their peers. I'm not saying that social or group intelligence is superior to individual intelligence. Only that it exists and has been neglected. Both should be understood and cultivated.

Everything in our modern world perpetuates the illusion of the preeminence of the individual. In popular culture, the media and in sports we have the illusion of the "star." We all know that it takes a lot of people to make a movie or put together a winning sports team. But there is something in us that wants it to be about the outstanding individual performer or athlete. I think it's a hang-over from the idea of the king as a god, an ideal human who can show us the way. This ancient idea that the Pharaoh or the King was a super-human being was the beginning of the concept of the exceptional individual. It has grown over time so that we now each aspire to become such an exceptional individual.

As I think about it, the idea of the unique, superior individual has always been there. It's just that the idea of the superior individual has been democratized. The Greeks had the idea of a group mind comprised of an intelligent body of superior individuals, an oligachy.

They also had the concept of ideal proportion, a Greek Polis of 5,000 households. I think they were trying to get at the balance between the individual and the group; the proper scale where the individual could effectively operate in society. Aristotle felt that in a polis each citizen should know the others by sight. Pericles described it this way: "Here each individual is interested not only in his own affairs but in the affairs of the state as well: even those who are mostly occupied with their own business are extremely well-informed on general politics... we do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at all." Of course, this is where our concept of democracy comes from; the idea that there is some sort of superior wisdom in the group mind.

So it's not the individual versus the group. It is a question of finding the appropriate human scale in which individual identity is meaningfully derived from engagement with the group, and the group positively benefits from the individual's contribution and participation in the group-mind.

What I'm suggesting is that social intelligence isn't just the sum of the contributions of all of the individual intelligences involved. It is another kind of consciousness, similar to our body awareness, a decentralized competence, a systemic intelligence.

We need to reclaim and value this group intelligence. We lost the remnants of it during the industrial revolution when individuals served as operators of machines rather than participants in a social intelligence. Today we function as consumers more than citizens participating in society. I think that Obama may be trying to change the paradigm. The way that he built his campaign from the ground up with house parties, inviting people to identify with his campaign by becoming engaged with a small group, may be the beginning of a whole new awareness of this group-mind.

There are some lofty versions of this idea of group intelligence. Some people look forward to our evolution toward a planetary intelligence; the whole of humanity on planet earth thinking together, as one. It may be that our ultimate destiny is our participation in a universal, global intelligence, but we are long way from that. I suppose that would be a sort of Second Coming of Christ. But we are not there yet and I'm afraid that we getting ahead of ourselves. The state of the global economy is evidence enough that such thinking is premature. It is beyond our current capacity. The global economy transcends the appropriate human scale. We are completely lost in it, overwhelmed by it.

I guess that the most important and neglected intelligence is social-relational intelligence. Personhood is related to the efficacy of relationships. We feel effective, powerful and free to the degree that we are able to engage meaningfully with others. We feel prosperous and empowered or poor and powerless in "relationship" to others. Our definitions of power and freedom have a lot to do with our social intelligence. To the degree that we emphasize individual intelligence, we define our freedom in terms of being left alone to think and act as we choose. As we come to understand group intelligence we come to define freedom as our ability to engage meaningfully within a social context?

This doesn't mean that "we all just get along." I'm a big believer in dynamic tensions. It is the complimentarity of opposites that stimulates creativity, and life itself. Our bodies are comprised of opposing muscles, excitatory and inhibitory neural transmitters. So this group intelligence is works itself out just like the complimentary opposites within the systems of our bodies. We fight it our among ourselves, for the good of us all.

All of this relates for me to the Christian idea of the Body of Christ, "the building up of the body of Christ; until we all attain to the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ… we are to grow up in all aspects into Him who is the head, even Christ, from whom the whole body, being fitted and held together by what every joint supplies, according to the proper working of each individual part, causes the growth of the body for the building up of itself in love. Ephesians 4

Okay, these are VERY undeveloped ideas and I feel a little embarrassed, a little nerdy that I have gone on at such length. I don't expect you to respond to all of this disjointed thinking Lindsay. I'm on Fall Break and have time to explore these ideas, but I know you have other things to do. I just got intrigued by this and had to work on it a bit. Thanks for getting me thinking about it.

2008-12-14T03:40:00.001-08:00

Vincent’s Last Painting
He seems frozen, like he’s be trapped within a single frame, standing still before his easel, in the middle of this field. His eyes seem fixed on something far beyond his field of vision, cutting through the space in front of him, through the material world, piercing deeply into another realm. He is so motionless. Does he breath? I’m going to take a chance.
“Excuse me. I’ve been watching you for a while, just sitting here, looking so intent. I really hate to bother you, but since you haven’t touched the canvas for this hour since I noticed you, I thought I’d speak. I would leave you alone, but I’m learning that everyone I meet here, along the river is important. Either I have something for them, or they have something for me.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter. I’m finished. There’s nothing more that I can do. It’s the end of the road. I have marched along, in this procession far enough. I’ve walked in this parade along this river; trying to eke out an existence on this tough ground. Just trying to survive until some soldier or lawyer or other dark-suited bird comes diving down to pick the flesh from our bones.
Now days, in the asylum it doesn’t feel much like a procession. It isn’t holy and we’re not going anywhere. They walk us in circles in the yard; we get our exercise in the afternoon, just like we get our gruel in the morning and our digitalis at night.
Everything is dry, brittle, desiccated. Nothing much remains of the summer crop; just what the crows have left; the husks, the shocks, gravel and graves, bones and ruins.” Vanity of vanities. The windows are darkened and the daughters of music are brought low, man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets, the golden bowl be broken, the dust returns to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it. Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher; all is vanity.
“Have you been painting long? Is painting your livelihood or just a hobby?”
“Ah, so you are my tormentor! I’ve been expecting you. I come here day after day, waiting for you to arrive. And now, here you are at last. Very well, I submit to your interrogation. I will stand before your inquisition. Truly, I have no defense against your accusations, but I will try.
I have been not been painting long, but all my life. For everything before I took up the brush was my charade; a pretense for the benefit of others. My father hoped that I would be a minister of the gospel. I tried but found the demands of Christ to brutal to bare. I found that the morsels of the church to scant and weak to feed the profound hunger of humanity. I tried my hand in the market, but found I nothing to sell. I discovered myself an infidel, lacking the necessary faith to move my wears. But these nine years I have lived, painting each day, clawing at these canvases, digging at it with my brush like miner for gold, and feeling the pain of being alive. Is it my livelihood? Hardly. It is my death; my undoing. This hapless, hopeless art of mine is cutting asunder my body from my soul. It has brought me to this place where I must endure you’re recriminations. It is not my livelihood, but it is no hobby. It is more serious than any disease and more real than any of the delusions of my mates in the asylum.”
“I’m sorry. I really didn’t mean it that way. I only meant to make conversation. I’m not your accuser or your tormentor and anything at all like that. I’m a pilgrim, walking along the banks of this River of Lost Souls in Purgatory. This is my penitential sojourn through this realm, between hell and heaven. We are brothers, I am sure. Will you stay here much longer? May I walk with you a ways?”

2008-12-14T03:36:00.001-08:00

Walking Upstream
I’ve thought and I’ve thought about everything, and just don’t want to think anymore. I just want to drive; follow this county road out onto the prairie; way out here were I don’t know where I am; where I don’t care who I am, or who I was, or who I’m supposed to be. This landscape is nice and empty. It feels really lonely. This is the right place for me just now. I want to get lost out on these long, straight roads.
It’s like plummeting through the void of space; vast and vacuous. The road disappears into a single vanishing point on the horizon. The fence posts emerged out of a visual vortex, an unattainable point, the womb from which reality is born, first emerging, infinitesimally small. The fence posts advanced toward me and then disappeared, flashing in my periphery. Steady like the beating of a drum. Pulses measure me out like a mantra, a repeated visual phrase, droning on, imposing a welcome numbness.
The prairie is shrouded in gray. Everything is dull, monochrome. Well, it is November. What a weird way to celebrate Thanksgiving. But it would be even weirder to be with people. I got a couple of invitations but I think they were just taking pity on me. It’s really strange, being alone today, but it feels right. Tiny snowflakes are falling on the windshield, milting and spreading into water droplets as soon as the hit. There’s a sign beside the road. It’s hard to read, weathered. (“Original Grave Site, William Bent.”)
I know about William Bent, the guy who built Bents Fort, the trading post on the Arkansas. So this is where he was buried. What an awkward place for a grave, in the middle of this plowed field. I can hear sound of flowing water. It seems pretty close. It looks like the farmer has to be pretty careful when he plows to avoid the gray granite headstone. God, I guess he died here. The sound of water that I hear must be the Purgatory River; El Rio de las Animas Perdidas en Purgatorio. The River of Lost Souls in Purgatory.
I’ll bet his stockade home was right over there where that farm house is now. The river is probably just beyond those cottonwoods. The crows circling over head, all mingles with the snow are giving me the willies. They makes me think of that Van Gogh painting. The snow is really coming down now.
What is that? It almost looks like a fort or castle of something. It’s hard to make out through the snow. I’ve got to get closer.
Barbed wire fences; guard towers; it’s a prison. The Bent County Correctional Facility. This is surreal. It’s named after the old pioneer. I hear a voice. It seems to be coming out of the clouds; like the voice of God. It’s just the PA system at the prison. It’s hard to make out the words, they’re all garbled. Probably directives dictating the daily routines of the inmates’ lives. It’s all muffled, because of the snow, because of the heavy low-hanging gray clouds.
I’ll bet all of these stones were placed here by Bent’s family when they buried him. This one is so flat and smooth. It fits the palm of my hand; like one of those perfect skipping-stones I used to send skittering across the pond. This stone rolled down the Purgatory River for a thousand years, down from the headwaters in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. It tumbling down past the coal mining camps, down through the cottonwood groves that were there before Trinidad became a town. This stone tumble down past the spot where the Drop City hippie commune would be built. It rolled through Pinon Canyon where the Army's has their Maneuvers Site, past all of those ruins of failed 1930s homesteads and alongside the petroglyphs of Cheyenne Indian camps. I’ll bet it’s been rolling and rolling for thousand years, maybe a million, gradually getting smooth and rounded as the river pushed it along, across the dinosaur tracks at Picketwire Canyon, through Red Rocks Canyon and cattle ranches and Hispanic villages. I can see it, tumbling down through the centuries, all the way to this place where the Purgatory flows into the Arkansas River; to this very spot where William Bent built his home, where he died. This stone was finally planted right here by a spring flood. At this exact place where they would dig Bent’s grave. I guess his relatives probably scooped it up in a shovel full of river rock, to shield his corpse from the coyotes.
Stumbling upon that grave site seems like the reason for my aimless driving around on the plains this Thanksgiving day. I’m in need of some sort of sacramental rite. It feels like I need to do something for my soul, some penance. I’ll carry this stone back up to the place where it came from, back to the crags where the waters of the Purgatory seep out of the mountain. I’ll walk upstream to the source; to the place where the river begins. I’ll make a pilgrimage.
It feels right to walk upstream. It will be kind of like walking backwards through my life, revisiting the course that has brought me to the desolate solitude of this chilly afternoon. I’ve been alone most of the time since I moved out. I’ve wanted to be alone. I’ve wanted to hide from everyone these past few months, since I packed up and left my home. Elaine and I had been together for twenty years. How long has it been now, since I moved out? Two months? I actually kind of like being holed up in the barn. It’s lonely, but being in the barn seems appropriate somehow. That’s where my time in Colorado began. In fact, I helped build that barn. And Boncarbo is also where Elaine and I met. I suppose it’s pretty lame the way I spend my evenings, listening to NPR for cryptic clues to the meaning my situation. It’s probably a little sick that I keep expecting some message from God to come to me through the radio. Too much sitting around I suppose. Too much thinking.
Yup, I need to do something physical; something for my soul. I’ve been spending way too much time feeding logs to the flames of the wood stove and thinking.
I’ll put this stone into my pocket and in the Spring I’ll come back here to start walking. The snow is coming down hard now; big heavy clumps. It’s like they’re laying a veil upon the landscape; a bridal veil. But it’s so dark; I feel like I’m dying; the heavy snow feels more like a funeral shroud. Okay, my pilgrimage has begun.

Speaking a Different Language

2008-12-07T00:26:00.000-08:00

I dreamed that I went to a meeting of anti-war/anti-expansion people. I told them that we need to do something other than just aquiese to being part of their system, providing more bodies at their meetings, writing more words that can be bound into their EIS publication as evidence of public participation. We need to do something that is spiritually non-cooperative with their agenda and something that is visually potent and noticable. The cowboy hats are a start.

For most of us it goes against our nature to be disruptive or to draw attention to ourselves. It seems errogant or impolite. We have been brought up to behave ourselves in public and to be polite. But when we participate in the ways that we are supposed to, we lend validity to a culture and to a process that is wrong. We need to be present in protest, in ways that are evident, even if we don't speak.

At first everyone was resistant to me; resentful and arguementative. I told them that I didn't feel like I am part of a peace and justice community with them; that the only time I see them is at meetings like this one, once or twice a year.

Upon waking it came to me that we need to launch a campaign with the them, "Speaking a Different Language." Part of the problem with our contributions to the EIS process is that our words get swallowed up in the sheer volume of vergiage. Our words are like little, tender sappling in a rainforest of tree-words. The simply make the forest look a little bigger. We need to be the orchids which bloom in the midst of the forest.

Instead of commenting on the next EIS in their language we should make our comments in other languages. We should submit works of art with thoughts written in, mixed with images and old family photos with comments written on them. We need children's drawings of their homes and life-ways. We need old codgers reciting cowboy poetry, we need FFA kids singing songs, old ladies showing quilts which symbolize their land and their lives or dramatists speaking as the voices of the lost souls of the Purgatory in a dramatic interpretation. Such unorthodox comments, in other languages will not get lost in the forest of words because they are a different language, representing a set of values from the governmental/military bureaucracy double-speak.

We should all wear cowboy hats. The real cowboys can wear their real cowboy hats, but we should give everyone who is willing to wear one, an orange cowboy hat to wear. Orange to symbolize the rising sun, the prairie dawns that have been rising upon Pinon Canyon for a hundred years and that we pray will continue to rise for centuries to come. We need a visual that shows a see of cowboy hats; real ones and those of supporters.

The best thing that could happen is that they would disallow this different language to be spoken in EIS hearings. That would really grab the attention of the media and the public. If such languages as art and music and drama are deemed to be taboo forms of expression by the military, that is a statement in itself. We could publish our alternative EIS report titled, Pinon Canyon Expansion EIS Responses in A Different Language. It would contain all very-person and creative EIS comments and would become a best-seller!

The second best thing that could happen is that they would allow us to make our comments in our "different language" and that the media would pick up on that.

Our theme needs to be; "We speak a different language because we have different values and a different way of life from the military."

As a Christian

2007-10-24T20:23:00.000-07:00

My church has a pulpit. above the pulpet is a cross. Behind the pulpet are two flags; an American flag and a Christian flag.

Donald Lives On

2007-10-04T08:56:00.000-07:00

The only thing that we know for sure about the proposal by the Department of Defense to expand the Pinon Canyon Maneuver Site by hundreds of thousands, if not millions or acres is that we don't really know for sure what the DoD are up to. We don't know for sure how much land they really want. We don't know why they think they need more land on top of the 25 million acres they already have. And we don't really know what they intend to do with it. In spite of repeated requests, and now demands from congress, the DoD just won't tell us.

But by putting together fragments from blackened-out military documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, FOIA process, we can piece together a rough outline. And by peering hard through the fog of military buzz-words and acronyms, we can see the silhouetted form of the true agenda.

A year ago we were hearing one of those buzz-words a lot because it was the brain-child of the, then Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfleld. The buzz-word was, "transformation." The term has pretty much disappeared from the media, replaced with another term which is unencumbered by Rumsfeld branding, "Revolution in Military Affairs. RMA."

"Transformation" went out of fashion with the political demise of its promoter, but Rumsfeld's vision lives on in the countless DoD appointees that survived him. While the term has pretty much disappeared from popular media, it still resides on countless military web sites and in their planning documents. Rumsfeld's grand scheme is rolling along like slow but invulnerable Abrams Tank, armour plated by BRAC, (Base Realignment and Closure) and NEPA, (National Environmental Policy Act), proceedures and exemptions.

For the intrepid few who have the volitional, high-top boots adequate to slog through hundreds of pages of Environmental Impact Statements, EIS, (written by, guess who, military contractors,) the clues are there. Just as a scatologist can, by the careful examination of partially digested fecal content, determine a creature's food source, so too can we discern in the well-masticated bone fragments of military documents, the DoDs original corpus.

One of the realities of the government is that, while political expediency can end the career of a cabinet member like Donald Rumsfled over night, the machinations of the federal bureaucracies grind on over the course of years and even decades. Rumsfeld is gone, but his vision for the transformation of the military lives on.

Another buzz-word to be found in the excrement is "future" as in "Future Force" and "Future Combat System."

The way to really understand Donald Rumsfeld's legacy, as it is embodied in the Defense Department's plan to expand the Pinon Canyon Maneuver Site, is to look into the meanings of these terms.

Rumsfled's plan is to transform from Legacy Force to Future Force. We think of tank maneuvers being run on the Pinon Canyon site. But the reality will be Future Force Units of Action. The Army's manual for Training Ranges, TC-25 indicates a maneuver box of 150 kilometers for a Unit of Action, This is the amount of land indicated on a leaked Army map which expands Pinon Canyon all the way to the Kansas and Oklahoma borders.

The Transformation plan would transform the military from foot soldiers to robots.

It would transform the "war is hell" idea into "was is a game."

And it would transform the execution of war from something that is done by a voluteer army into something that is done by professional, mercenary, for-profit, military contractors like Blackwater.

Dehumanization of Warfare

2007-09-18T07:04:00.000-07:00

War has always been a dehumanizing reality. In order to kill other human beings it is necessary to redefine them as some other than, or less than human.

War dehumanizes the warrior as well. In order to act as an effective killing machine a warrior has to be stripped of his humanity, distanced, ethically and geographically from the brutality of his actions, exempted from moral responsibility. Our "support the troops" attitude reduces the young men and women to amoral automatons who have no responsibility, and therefor no capacity for making moral judgements.

Remote controlled weapons and Robots will further distance and in some cases completely eliminate the human element from warfare. UAVs and UGVs will be programmed to kill without any direct human participation. Only the far distant policy-maker and programmer will have anything to do with the actual killing.

This may seem like a good thing. Removing our soldiers from the danger zone.

While it an awful truth that human being commit atrocities in warfare, it is also true that only the presence of moral humans in the midst of warfare have prevented it from sinking into complete depravity.

The current generation of gamers have the skill set to wage war remotely. There is little difference between the virtual warfare engaged in by gamers on a daily basis and the digital representation of targets on a real military computer screen. In fact the real targets are less graphically precise, less "real" looking, more abstract and more dehumanized than the high definition pretend victims that gamers are so comfortable blowing away.

There is nothing new about indiscriminate, automated killing machines that are programmed to kill without any human presence. This has been the reality with land mines for a long time.

Why we should all opose Pinon Canyon expansion

2006-04-23T08:38:00.000-07:00

I oppose the expansion of Pinon Canyon Army Base, and it's not just because of my pacifist leanings.

Yes, I do disagree with the idea that America, as the lone superpower in the the world is obliged to impose a global Pax Americana. And it is true that I don't think we need to increase spending on our military that is already seven times that of China, the second largest military spender. I don't buy the arguement that building a bigger, more leathal army is the key to eradicating global terrorism, or whipping out radical Islamists and I don't accept in the concepts that America should become the global police force, or that America can create democracies at the barrel of a gun. I have to admit my doubt that premptive, unilateral military agression will result in a safer world.

But if I believed that all of these things were good ideas, there would still powerful reasons, as a Las Animas County resident for me to oppose the expansion of the Pinon Canyon Maneuvers Site.

I understand that "nothing has been decided" about the future expansion of the facility, but it is pretty clear that something is being considered. And the "something" is big. The official, unofficial plan presented by the Army is a quadrupling of the current acreage. The unofficial, but official-looking map that was leaked and circulated at the the Cattlemen's Association meeting, indicates the possibility that the facility may ultimately expanded ten-fold, all the way to the Kansas and New Mexico borders.

Such an exansion would cost Las Animas county a lot. We would loose an endangered species, cattle ranchers. We would lose natural, archeaological and historical resouces as well. We would lose tax base. We would lose tourism dollars.

Would all of these lossed be off-set by gains? Would soldiers living or training at the facility start to spend money in Trinidad? Would they be given over-night passes to come and recreate in town? Would their families relocate to Trinidad? No.

They would convoy to the maneuvers site from Colorado Springs and return there just as soon as they were able. Even if there were a few soldiers permamently assigned to Pinon Canyon, they'd still do most of their shopping at the PX, if they have any sense.

The only benefit would be the short-term opportunities of construction activity as the expanded faciltiy is established, but even that would go mostly to outside contractors who would move into the area temporarily. That's what happened when the place was initially established.

IRAQI ICONS

2006-04-23T08:08:00.000-07:00

IRAQI
ICONS

I'm thinking of creating a series of paintings titled IRAQI ICONS. Images of the humans invoved in the war painted as modern icons. These are some of the ideas that I would like to embody in these paintings.

-The images will be types; not specific individuals. Some of the types that I would create include soldiers of different races, ages and genders, including those who have been disfigured and dismembered. Mullahs and Clarics, Iraqi women, children, including those who have been disfigured and dismembered, politicians and business people, terrorists and suicide bombers, child-fighters, journalists.
-Traditional icons are paintings of saints. Since I believe that we are saints, not because of our meritorium deeds or our individual perfection, but because of the grace of God, I consider all who have placed their trust in this grace to be santified by it. Jesus is the embodiment of divine grace. Every graced human is the embodiment of Christ; the sacrificial body, the suffering body, the glorified body. I do not believe that Christ's sacrifice was for those who would adopt a set of Christian doctrines, but rather for all humans.
-All human life is sacred; lives that we understand as well as lives that are mysteries to us. The lives of our loved ones, the lives of our neighbors, the lives of those in far distant cultures, lands and traditions, the lives of our enemies.
-Icons are objects of meditation that bring the one who venerates into intimate contact with the spirit represented by the icon. My icons will be created for the purpose, first of all of my own meditiation. As I create them I will pray to know and understand, to love and bless, to extend forgiveness, healing, appreciation and respect to those represented by the icon. I will also create them to be objects of meditation for others so that viewer may be brought into a deeper awareness of the santitiy of all human life.

Thoughts in the Tub

2006-03-25T10:29:00.000-08:00

Long baths stimulate all sorts of ideas. This morning I had a couple.

First, I thought about Terre's concern with raising the consciousness of students. We could create a Learning Community with the idea of processesing consciousness-raising themes. I don't believe that education should be a cover for indoctrination, but it should not be a sterile environment either. We should present information and ideas and offer opportunities to process that information, and to respond to those ideas.

We could agree about a ciruculum that covers certain themes; God, Family, Love, Violence, Suffering etc.

We could gather writings and images related to the themes.

We could have writing students respond to students' visual works, and visual artists could respond to students' writings. This could be edited and published as a web site and perhaps as a printed document.

We could have an online discussion board for all participating classes to talk together.

We could have a monthly plenary session when all of the classes would meet together for food and discussion, or film, or presentation, or debate.

Another Tub thought- An editorial for ThousandReasons.org- A Christian fifth column. The majority of Christian are in a holding patern. They are not actively engaged with Christian Right. They are passively waiting in churches for an authenticly Christian social movement with which they can identify. They allow Right-wingers to speak as if, for them, but the reality is that there are many who disagree with the politicization of religion, and others who disagree with the distorted conservative interpretation of Christian values.

Why I'm not a pacifist

2006-02-25T07:50:00.000-08:00

As a follower of Jesus Christ, I reject the way of violence. I don't believe that fighting and killing ones percieved enemies, (not to mention innocent non-combatants), is the Christian way to resolve international disputes any more that violence is the solution to family conflicts. Just as murder is not the way to settle personal differences, war is the not the way of the resolve international tension or eliminate global threats.

I especially disagree with pre-emptive war; attacking the enemy before the can attack you. This is the exact opposite of, "turn the other cheek."

But having said all that, I am not a pacifist. A pacifist ABSOLUTELY rejects violence. Any absolute rule governing behavior, regardless of the circumstances amounts to fundamentalism. I am not a fundamentalist. I am a thinking, felling, praying person who looks to my head, heart and spirit to discern the way to go in life. I have guiding principles, but I am not governed by absolute laws. I want to be governed instead by a living relationship with the Spirit of God.

Absolutizing any moral precept, including "Thou Shalt Not Kill" creates a power above and appart from the God that governs conduct.

Life as Art

2006-02-06T08:01:00.000-08:00

It came to me in the night that I should attempt to live my life as a work of art. Art is from the earliest stages of a persons development, and from the earliest stages of the development of our species. It is self-evident that art is embedded into the core of our being as humans. One of the statements that I often hear from my students is, "Everything is art", or "Art is in the eye of the beholder." Faced with the difficult challenge of trying to define art they often take refuge in statements like these that allow them an avenue of escape."

There is a passage of scripture that refers to humanity as "God's work of art." I want to experiment with living my life as a work of art, approaching each day as a new canvas waiting to painted upon.

I'll start with a title for each day's creation, formulating a theme for each day as an artistic expression. A theme that will creatively express through my thoughts, words and deeds during the day.

Today I want to create a work of art titled, "Art is Magic." From the earliest expressions of artistic expression, art was understood to embody mysterious aspects of reality. It was understood to grasp and effect the world. In our modern world words and numbers have pretty much displaced art as our primary means of grasping and effecting the world around us. There are two problems with words; their specificity and their rationality. Words are well suited to the congnitive management of our left-brain functions. Art is a better means of grasping and effecting transcendent, intuitive and emotional, right-brain functions.

When I speak of Art as magic, I mean to use the word "magic" in a way that encompasses manipulation of external entities, adjustment of internal dynamics and the sacramental apprehension of transcendental reality.

Manipulation of exernal entities would include sympathetic magic such as Paleolithic hunting rituals, Voodoo or art used as propaganda to inspire patriotism.

Adjustment of internal dynamics would include art used as a psychological self-awareness tool such as art therapy.

Art as sacramental tool would include such things at liturgical art include votive statues and icons.

2006-02-01T09:58:00.000-08:00

Introduction
Bent’s grave, Prison, Van Gogh, Joe T., Barn, up stream, no stranger, Dante

1
Las Animas, Motel, Loosing your Soul, Barn, Rivers Names, Gold, tierra incognita, winter in Boncarbo, Dinosaurs, petroglyphs, studying facts Purgatory, Transgression and Transcendence

2
Las Animas, Motel, Telling the Truth, Distortions of History

3
Las Animas, Motel,Walking Alone, Times of being alone

4
Las Animas, Motel, Pilgrimages, Shoes, first journey

5
Bents Fort, Blessing the Journey, Bent Brothers, Owl Woman, Ambiguous Native Americans

6
Bents Fort, Segregation, Art Shows, Mexico

7
Tour, On the road , 1840 Peace Conference, Borderline, Conference between the Cheyenne and the Comanche,Gambling, Indian Casinos

9
Tour Boggsville Amache

10
Confluence Being Strange Bent’s Kids, Magpie, Guerrier, Jack Smith, Fort Lyons, Caron’s Grave

11
Confluence Living by Rivers Lilly Creek, St. Joe, Christiana Creek, The Elkhart, Lara,

12
Bent’s Grave Committing Terrorist Acts Chivington, Black Kettle, Soule

13
Bent Correctional Imprisoning the Enemy Amache, Fort Marian, Trinidad, POWs, Ledger drawings

14
Boggsville Making Women Invisible Amache, Josephina Carson, Rumalda Boggs,

15
Highland Canal Hiking Alone Storm, water, Phone

16
Alkali Canyon Doing a Pilgrimage Walking

17
Salt Canyon Making a Mark Celtic, Early Negev, Cowboy

18
Vogel Canyon Making Progress Stage coaches, Wild Bill, Sr. Blandina

19
Nine Mile Valley Being Fruitful The importance of water, fertility, childlessness

20
Higbee Cemetery Being a Hero Kit Carson

21
Penitente Canyon Paying Penance Penance, The Mission

22
Withers Canyon Observing Ebert

23
Picketwire Canyon Three Million Years of Time Dinosaur Tracks, Strata, Patination, Process Theology

24
Delores Mission Settling Down Owning land

25
Rourke Ranch Riding the Range A.R. Mitchell, Real, Romantic

26
Painted Canyon Hiding Away Martin Bowden, Making My Mark

27
Lost Canyon Being Lost Hell, Purgatory, Ultimate Reconciliation, Virgil, Beatrice

28
Pinon Canyon Uncovering Secrets Black Helicopters, Nuclear Waste, 911

29
Pipeline, Gauging Station

30
Trinchera Cave Differing Chase, Dicks

31
Below Perea Canyon Taming wild animals Fox, The wild man within

32
Bent’s Purgatory Ranch Fighting the Devil Garrard, Failure to integrate, integrity

33
Model Creating Community Amity, Cokedale, Drop City

34
Drop City Missing the Hippies Being Counter Cultural

35
POW Camp Loving the enemy Abu Grab, Dad’s

36
Studio Being Married Third reality, Beatrice, Lori joins me, walking together

37
River Walk Keeping a Distance Segregation of Ulliberri’s party, Gay Rights

38
Simpson’s Rest Living and Dying Large Simpson, Carson, Bent Graves, living wills

39
Kit Carson Statue Mythic Heros Reality vs. Myth

40
Downtown, Holy Trinity Making Women Visible Biber, Blandina, Mother Jones, Kerrie Nations, Black Woman

41
TSJC Teaching and Learning WPA, long-term investment in people, active learning

42
Trinidad Dam Owning the River? Marker, SFT, Controlling Nature, Floods, Water rights

43
Cokedale Owning the Labor? Cheap resources, Cheap labor, Unions, Riley Canyon, my land

44
Longs Canyon Who owns the water? Pentitente graves, suffering, Wildlife, Methane, surface rights.

45
Mitchell’s Ranch, YWAM Opening and Closing Artists and Missionaries

46
Terceo, South Fork Owning the Land? Mines, CFI, King Coal, Stonewall war, Ted Turner; Vermejo

47
BarNI Ranch, Middle Fork Marian Russell

48
Potato Patch, North Fork Finding the Source Head Waters, Drawing from the source

49
Spanish Peaks Venerating the Earth Grandote, Pilgrimage, Worshipping the Earth. Mothering, not having children

50
Bristlecones Surviving Twisted lives, endurance

51
Sangre de Cristos Bearing Witness Salvation, Co-creative, Magic, Universalism

2006-01-30T15:32:00.000-08:00

I want to spend a half hour per day writing here. I also want to:

Get up at 5:30 and do stretching exercises (L)
Pray from 6:00 to 6:30 (S)
Write from 6:30 to 7:00 themes for book or class (T)
Walk for a half hour per day (L)
Do artwork 20 hours per week (A)