Three Responses to #BlackLivesMatter, Individual Evolution, and Institutionalized Racism (A Tribute to Sandra Bland) and My Replies (Below are three responses to my previous essay. My responses are in italics.) N.’s Response: Michael, I just read your paper with great interest. You make a number of important points. However, you say repeatedly that not every group needs to follow all of the 10 steps [required according to IndividualEvolution.org] to be successful. However,… Read More
#BlackLivesMatter, Individual Evolution, and Institutionalized Racism (A Tribute to Sandra Bland) “Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.” -Assata Shakur. While I am certainly not qualified to compose a proper tribute to Sandra Bland, I am qualified as a social psychologist to analyze some elements of #BlackLivesMatter in… Read More
The Final Retrospective of Full Life Farm This may be my final retrospective of Full Life Farm for 2014, but life and adventures, the academic and homesteading ones, will continue as I work towards an MSc in social psychology, a PhD in community psychology, and the co-creation of an intentional community eco-village while I also learn of life and the uses of… Read More
Full Life Farm: A Retrospective of an Ongoing Learning Experiment It is challenging to summarize the end of the beginning of what has become a lifetime of learning food sustainability. For me, it did not begin in Carrollton, GA at Full Life Farm (http://www.full-life-farm.com); it began in the backyard of my father’s house in the California suburbs where I reluctantly mowed lawns and performed other… Read More
Full Life Farm Ethnographic Diary Week 13 Ending 11 April 2014 While the semester and my official learning experience through a farming internship are almost technically over, I am far from finished, and I don’t plan to stop learning for quite some time. That’s counterproductive to my nature. As life breathes through my veins, learning will continue wherever I am in the world, whether at another… Read More
Full Life Farm Ethnographic Diary Week 10 Ending 14 March 2014 This week was filled of what I am primarily interested in from many levels: seeds, planting, and composting. My interest is, of course, sans animal wastes, but for now, this is the process I am learning and there are applications for every element of knowledge. I have found an Intentional Community (http://www.ic.org) that is entirely… Read More
Full Life Farm Ethnographic Diary Week 9 Ending 7 March 2014 Given my openly admission to a vegan lifestyle and my tempered discussion of it under the circumstances, everyone that I have encountered at Full Life has been remarkably understanding towards my position. This doesn’t change my attitude of animals being raised, suffering needlessly just to be killed later. All of this seems extremely Dadaist and… Read More
Full Life Farm Ethnographic Diary Week 6 Ending 14 February 2014 This was a challenging week on the farm, given the extreme cold and especially my views on animals, animal rights, and my vegan diet. Monday arrived and Paul, one of the farm’s owners, knowing my vegan lifestyle (I obviously had to make him aware of this before I signed on to the internship that we… Read More
Reflections On Daniel Boorstein’s “Ten-Nine-Eight-Childline!” and “What Kind of Mother Are You?” History in the Western Hemisphere, especially the United States is filled with example after example of the upper classes, the rich and wealthy, engaging in social reform of the poor and the lower classes. But those rich and wealthy, who thought they knew better, passed judgment on those so-called poor and lower classes, and judged… Read More
Body Suspension As Individual (R)evolution While on one level the entire continuum of experiencing body suspension immediately incorporates IndividualEvolution.org’s (IE) heart, head, and hand, the wholeness of it also profoundly and radically transcends individual evolution and becomes an individual revolution, as I like to call it. It incorporates IE’s scientific method of inquiry, reaches beyond its body, mind, and spirit,… Read More