Your picture? Your famous!!! Sounds like a great thing to do! (media tip: remember _not_ to mention urine drinking to the press, OK?) >how has eating unfired foods helped you to work as a more >vigorous point of light in the universe? while i love all the food talk >as much (or more) as the next living foodist, i want to hear about some >of the other raw details from your life. what appropriate and necessary >actions do you feel we must take to ensure our common future? and if you >think this post "is way out of line" for a raw discussion group, let me >know that, too! Not I. Some six years ago (notably, in my early its-the-answer-to-the-worlds-ills days of raw conversion) I was very taken with the idea of living a zero-pollution lifestyle, and the "deep ecology" stance was real lofty and attractive stuff to me. The "planet" is an issue/actuality very dear to me, yet in the last few years I have been very turned off by the zealotry aspect of environmentalists, and especially their view that government is to be the controlling mechanism. (Your activism is much more commendable.) Further, the line becomes very thin regarding "issues". During the xmas shopping season some highschoolers made headlines here in San Diego by doing the "chain yourself to the mall entrance doors" bit in protest of fur. I joined probably 90+% of my fellow San Diego county folks in thinking that that was idiotic, joined maybe 20-% in thinking it was charmingly "youthful" if misguided, and probably less the 1% in _sadness_ that any particular highschool kid is falling so hard for the animal rights shpeil, while at the same time...ah, forget it... I can't get past the obnoxiousness/rightiousness/hypocrasy of some of the "deep ecology" folks (which I see in the raw arena as well, notably NFL or course) I've met personally and the whole arena suffers in my mind as a result. While I'd get a kick out of getting arrested along with you the other day, it's not really my cuppa. As Tom Robbins lays out the social activism <----> individual romanticism continuum, I fall squarely on the ind rom side. I love that there is GreenPeace et al, and consider what they are up to (esp the activism, less so the politicism) as some of the most important work happening in the world these days. But, truth told, I'm more interested in leading my own quiet life than indentifying with any movement--at least not being part of the problem. As for the solution, I'm not sure many solutions aren't just part of the problem in disguise. But mostly I'm not sure. No doubt my own emotional history plays a big part in all this blabbing. Even in high school, I'd be up in the stands at the "big games", the crowd going nuts cheering, surrounded by folks screamin and jumping up and down, whipped into a frenzy over a swish, and I just didn't get it. Or at a rock concert, even stoned, I always thought it was embarrassing when everyone would be flicking their bics, you know? I just can't stand to be part of a "mass psychology", feel like a nasty bacterium in the crowd organism. <cackle maniacally> :) Basically, I'm not a follower. Nor a leader, for that matter. Different strokes... Living in the burbs now is really bringing it home to me: Freeway life is very limiting. As usual, we are the greenest folks on the block, but eco-warrior types would consider us sell-outs of the nth order. In the end it will be our dislike of carpeting that moves us on! ;) BTW, Ombodhi, please don't think for a second that I am talking about you as an example of zealotry. Au contrare, mon yolkie, I share Doug's view of you as the Great Raw Hope! I will learn more from watching you enter middle age than you ever will from me, you young whippersnapper you...;) Cheers, Kirt