2011-03-27 13:00:00 I am giving another talk on Community Empowerment via Time Banks  
Join us at 1pm on Sunday, March 27 following coffee fellowship to learn about 
Green Money.
 Destinie Jones will be leading the talk, sharing her research on Time Dollars and how this alternative currency revalues time equally for all members of the community and empowers our local economy.
at Wesley UMC on Connecticut Ave nw, at Juniper and Connecticut 
(talk went well except for being told by everyone that we need the profit-motive …) Read, Write, Dream, Teach ! 
 ShiraDest 
22 February, 12016 HE

2011-02-22 21:10:00 wondering about languages and ways of thinking… Idiomas y pensamientos I wonder sometimes if languages like Turkish, where people are distinguished from the languages they speak (ispanylci vs. ispanyol, and ingiliz vs. ingilizci) encourage more differentiated modes of thinking (i.e. more open-minded) than languages such as English, where the word for a language and a speaker of the language are one in the same (French as both the lang. and the person, for instance).  Could this be a result of the wider exposure of the various cultures, for instance the Silk Road going trhough the Turkish homelands, vs the isolation of England, and whether languages which are gendered, like French, facilitate different types of thinking from say Turkish, which has no gender at all. I am sure others have asked these questions before -any thoughts? Me pregunto si idiomas como Turco, que distingen entre la gente y los idiomas que hablan (como ispanylci vs. ispanyol, y ingiliz vs. ingilizci) disfrutan de modos mas distinguidos de pensar (es decir, mas abierto de mente) que idiomas como ingl que usan la misma palabra por el idioma y la persona quien lo habla (como por ejemplo Frances para decir el idioma y la persona de Francia).  Acaso que se debe al ambiente mas amplia de la cultura, como por ejemplo que la Via de Seda anda por las tierras Turcas, a cambio de la aislación de la Inglaterra, y sí los idiomas con genero, como Frances, facilitan otros modos de pensar de por ejemplo Turco, que no tiene genero ninguno.

Segura que otros han preguntado lo mismo antes -ideas?
ShiraRead, Write, Dream, Teach ! ShiraDest 22 February, 12016 HE

2011-01-23 06:42:00 Pre-Adulthood, Adults, and Rites of Passage… Dear Friends, here is another idea for your perusal.

A New Rite of Passage

 

 

We need a new rite of passage in which every teenager must voluntarily teach someone, from start to finish, a usable and important skill. It must be a skill which the person has to use in the real world, such as moving from the alphabet to reading chapter books, or from counting numbers up to multiplication tables, or from writing a sentence to writing an essay, or from no English to conversational or passable workplace English, in the United States.

 

This needs to be a project which requires a serious investment of time (meeting for two or three hours each weekday) for about one year. That way the young person can look back with pride on a serious accomplishment and justifiably claim his or her status as an adult. Along the way, several problems in our moder society can be solved at the same time.

 

• The increasing lack of self-discipline, civility and respect for learning among the young.

• The shortage of teachers combined with the budgetary shortfalls in most states would be greatly enhanced by adding the numbers of teenage students needing to finish their “Adulthood Project” to the number of classroom aides and volunteers.

• The need for challenges and self-testing during the adolescent stage of life which is left unfulfilled by modern society´s unsatisfyingly arbirary definition of adulthood.

 

I would propose that implementing such an idea would begin with involving the local community by having the adolescent (or if still in his/her 20´s, the “pre-adult”) bring a person to meet with the community to show the starting point of the teaching process. After the learning objective has been attained, the pre-adult and the learner would return to meet again with the community to assess the effectiveness of teaching and to award the pre-adult his or her status as an Adult, with the full rights and responsibilities expected of an adult, including such cultural norms as civility, courtesy, and even graciousness.

 

In this way we may move from a society where rudeness is the norm to one in which graciousness is valued. For example, a friend tells of an incident where a lady´s dog snarled at her, and the lady apologized, which was the civil thing to do, and then even offered to call her a cab for her, which was the gracious thing to do. A society in which graciousness is valued will be both a more compassionate society and a more creative one. I leave these thoughts for contemplation, debate, and action. (I still think this would be useful: ) Read, Write, Dream, Teach ! ShiraDest 22 February, 12016 HE

2011-01-21 11:07:00 Favorite Speeches Just thinking on some of my favorite speeches , such as Dr. King in 1963 MacArthur a href=”http://www.keytlaw.com/Greatwords/macarthur.htm”>Duty, Honor, Country one of my all time favorite speeches, which is not well known in the US but ought to be, is the passionate and incredibly well-versed plea for the well-being of the poorest of the poor in a country which was 97% dominated by foreign corporations, Castro a href=”http://www.emersonkent.com/speeches/la_historia_me_absolvera.htm”>La Historia Me Absolvera´ (´History Will Absolve Me´) speech,

and one of the most poignant and prophetic speeches I have seen, very briefly but effectively traversing history from ancient times to the present before making a devastating point, and then presenting possibilities for much needed solutions, Dr. King a href=”http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkivebeentothemountaintop.htm”>I’ve Been to the Mountaintop now just as they did when I first read each of them years ago. Shira Destinie even now: Read, Write, Dream, Teach ! ShiraDest 22 February, 12016 HE

2010-12-02 19:20:00 Dollars for Democracy I was just explaining to a friend that I am not a Communist, but rather, I am a true Democrat: a democrat who believes in Democracy, and takes the ideals of freedom and equality to their logical economic conclusion. We always have a balance between communal rights and individual responisibility, and between individual rights vs. the community’s responsibility to help even the fools among us who chose to smoke or use drugs. My proposal is this: a birthright non-transferable arable tract of 0.5 of a hectare for each person born on earth. on that .5 hectare of arable land (anywhere on earth), when the kid turns 9 yrs old, kid goes with parents and or other members of the community to see the land, learn about it, and start building a one-room self-contained eco-friendly house with solar heat and cooker and basic indoor plumbing. By the time the kid is about 16 he/she should know how to maintain the house, and decide whether to live in it or rent it out or swap his/her land for someone else’s .5 hectare in a different part of the world. Equal Rights for all Human Beings is based on economic and food self-sufficiency for all, therefore some form of basic housing for every person on earth on earth, to be build by the community and funded by the interconnected global community, to indlude a minimal amount of water and access to free education and health care as a human right. Read, Write, Dream, Teach ! ShiraDest 22 February, 12016 HE

un proyecto…

2 and 3 pages