Where EarthNationLive came from, hollerin’ at the Popes, my hunk of burning love for Pam Omidyar, & her instant karma: Chapter the Seventh of “Eat the Rich & Share the Wealth”

February 5th, 2010

I don’t know

what it’s like in Enid, Oklahoma,

or Decatur, Georgia, but when you raise a child

in Boulder, Colorado, as I did my dearly departed daughter,

two things are going to happen: they’re going to wear some tie-dye,

and they’re going to ask some questions. When my daughter was in elementary

school, the questions weren’t on the order of, “What’s up with Minnie’s

shoes? They’re so big!” They were more like, “Hey, what’s this

ruckus I hear about Nike and restroom

breaks for workers in

Indonesia?!”

Those kinds of

questions led to some long

conversations between the two of us

as we ambled about in the mountains west of Boulder.

The theme, as it developed over years, came to be something like,

“How come humanity keeps tripping so hard, and what do we keep tripping

on?” The answers we arrived at were: “We keep tripping because we don’t

hold focus on our problems long enough to solve them,” and “We

seem to be tripping on four things, mainly — population,

environment, economic justice, and

ethnic/gender/religious

divides.”

We reckoned

humanity and the Earth

could take a quantum leap in the direction

of real well-being if those things could be meaningfully

addressed — with an emphasis on the meaningfully part. Yeah, every

weekend there’s a conference in Vienna on living wages or another in Sydney

on plastic in the oceans. Next week it’s nuclear weapons in Tokyo, and

the week after that population gets chewed on for a few

days in Stockholm or Durban or Sao Paolo.

But the dogs bark, and the

caravan moves on.

What if all

us monkeys concentrated

on a few things at once, though?

Not just 100 of us, but 100,000,000, or a billion?

That’s the idea behind EarthNationLive:

sustained global concentration on

what ails us and how

to heal it.

You can’t fix

what’s broke without looking at it.

If enough people look at a problem long enough

and hard enough, a fix will emerge. I don’t have to explicate those

sentences because we all know they’re true. Nor do I have to show you more

than these two pictures to make it plain that the Earth developed

the internet like a brain develops nodes

and synapses, i.e. to become

conscious:

That’s obvious

to anyone, right?  Not a word

is necessary in the face of those two images.

So let’s talk about why I’m hollering at

the Popes of the internet.

This is a

pretty aggressive conversation

I’m having with the tech billionaires at the

moment — naming people, putting their pictures here,

talking about their children. How come? Two reasons: the polite

conversation wasn’t working, and I don’t have time for it anymore. I’ve been

carrying this idea around for over a decade, explaining it again and again to people

who could afford to build it. Everyone who hears it goes, “Awesome! True dat!” —

and then they get the whirlies from how big it is. Even the sturdiest characters,

like that marvelous old bandicoot Ted Turner, get overwhelmed by it and

go off somewhere quiet to sip a sasparilla. So I’ve had a lot of

interesting conversations, and held a lot of peoples’

hands while they fainted, but I ain’t got the

lil’ $20M or so cash injection

I need.

I don’t have

time for that anymore.

I have a little spot of cancer now,

thoroughly uninsured poet that I am in the

world’s richest country, and I’m the only guy in the world

walking around with this idea. If I croak, probably it doesn’t get built —

for some reason God has decided in Her infinite wisdom that I’m

the Fanatic-in-Charge, for the moment. So we need some fookin’

action here from the people who have both the dough and

the know-how to put this together. So wake

up, Pope Pierre! Wake up, Pope

Jeff! Wake up, Pope

Melinda!

And now, let’s talk

about that part of  the headline

which piqued everyone’s curiosity:

the forbidden love between me

and Sweetums.

Sigh.

I’m not actually

in love with Pam Omidyar.

Oh, it would be easy enough, I imagine!

That red hair, those raspberry lips, the kindness in her eyes,

he said as he swooned. But it’s hard to get into full swoon over someone

you can’t get to know. And I can’t get to know Sweetums because

in this world, there are some people who have so much

of what everyone else wants that they

get afraid to interact with

regular folks.

Watch a beautiful

woman for a day and all that she has

to endure in the way of leg-humping from men.

The crazy rich suffer from another version of this affliction,

and it makes them wary and isolated. So, frankly, I just haven’t been

able to get to the bottom of my delicious scandalous

thing with Pam. Haven’t even been

able to scrape the

surface.

Now I’m not

‘zackly sure why this is.

I know about the money thing, of course,

I’ve had friends with some money and seen how it puts

them at arm’s length, and worse, with the world. But the curious

thing is, she and I are interested in a lot of the same things —

the musical stylings of Mister Barry Manilow, candlelit

dinners, long walks on the beach at sunset.

No, wait! — read her tweets

from yesterday:

In one she

speaks of learning and applying

our learning to “nurturing our common humanity”;

in another she promotes the notion “we must ALL work” together on

important issues — not just the men, the scientists, the

politicians, or the generals. What is

EarthNationLive about if not

precisely that?

And she reads

what I write here every day —

like Pierre does, like Bezos the Miser does, on and on.

I won’t bore you with the tracking data for now,

but everyone’s in the house now,

including Mr. Gates the Great

Accumulator.

So talk to me, girl!

We both want a better planet!

We’re both tired of all this –

– and we want,

more or less, the same betterness:

health, wealth, well-being, clean water,

good food, peace, opportunity. Not just for

your children, nor just for mine, but for everyone’s.

What anyone with any sense, anyone with any family, wants for

the human family.  What we can achieve if we share

our thoughts and energies and resources

with one another like the

interwebs will help

us to do.

It’s fine for

the rich to be rich, but dang,

they need to be able to go out and shake

their tail feathers and dance and talk and share with other

folks. Maybe if they were just rich instead of crazy rich, they’d be more able to

do that. Maybe you can keep the Gulfstreams and all the houses the rest of the

five star life and still be human enough to circulate, talk, share, enable,

empower others. Maybe it wouldn’t kill y’all to give attention and

money like poets give attention and poetry — freely.  Maybe you

could take it to the point of reentering the ordinary flow

of humanity. Why should Pam Omidyar be afraid

of a skinny little taoist poet? Why should

Bezos or Brin or Schmidt

or Gates?

They shouldn’t.

Karma, though — that’s one to

keep a weather eye on, kids. We need to all

shine on now, you included, like the moon and the stars

and the sun — not just my dearly departed daughter,

not just me, but all of us. Like this,

remember, you just read it

here:

 

 

The sun,

each second, transforms

four million tons of itself into light,

giving itself over to become energy that we,

with every meal, partake of. For four million years,

humans have been feasting on the sun’s energy stored in the

form of wheat or reindeer, as each day the sun dies as sun and is

reborn as the vitality of the Earth. Every child of ours needs

to learn the simple truth: she is the energy of the sun.

And we adults should organize things

so her face shines with the

same radiant

joy.

 

Human

generosity is possible

only because at the center of the solar

system a magnificent stellar generosity pours forth free

energy day and night without stop and without complaint and

without the slightest hesitation. This is the way of the universe. This is

the way of life. And this is the way in which each of us joins this

cosmological lineage when we accept the sun’s gift of

energy and transforms it into creative action

that will enable the community

to flourish.

We need to

organize things for our children,

yes? And you have the keys in your hands, billionaires.

I don’t need much of your money, and I don’t need it for long, and

we can set it up where you get the Nobel Peace Prize, okay?

But you have to get up out of your Pope-ish

slumbers. And now would be

a wonderful time to

do that.

“Better recognize

your brothers: everyone

you meet.”