JIM HICKS wrote:
> I don’t know about ‘all’ of us being good about giving but I do know 
> that some of ‘us’ are excellent at taking (the prosperity of this 
> country is based on getting no matter what).
Jim,

Yeah... I gotta watch that word 'all'. Though even the most rapacious of 
takers eventually end up giving even if it means they are dead. Though 
you and I may not want to have to wait them out.

What I did intend though is to point at a system of giving that happens 
regardless of the overriding political stage at the time and that in 
many respects is not easily seen for how large and to what impact it has 
on our lives. It is easy to see our taxes and equate them with the 
government, it is less easy to see the cumulative activity of many 
people simply doing something nice for another person here and there. 
When Pyrate told someone where they could go with their desire to give 
he did a good thing and the 'invisible' system worked.

To me power is in the knowledge of how the systems that are invisible 
around us function. But, as I have also said elsewhere, it would be nice 
to make a living. It is 8 am.... I had better get on to that for the day.

I do agree with you that the spirit of taking... shooting any animal 
that moves, cutting down ALL the trees, killing off the natives, digging 
up ALL the coal and dumping the slurry on others is in the spirit of the 
American way. But we have a spirit that moves in many directions at 
once, not all of them in harmony. The author of the Buffalo Creek book 
describes these as axis along a progressive line of time... I'd like to 
find more information on that model.

][<en

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