Colombians and others around the world have similar needs and wants some of which they have begun to articulate much like this.
Wants
We want a better education and a better quality of life for our children. We know that we need to clarify among ourselves what we understand to be the nature of "better education." We all have ideas of what we mean by "better quality of life," but we have not shared those ideas among ourselves well. We are not sure of how clarify and and share our understandings and ideas among ourselves in ways which allows us to act effectively toward common goals. We know that we have much to learn, but do not have a plan for doing that planning together. We believe that we can define the kind of education we want for our children and for ourselves and know that we have not shared that definition well among ourselves. We believe that we can define the quality of life we want and have not shared well the nature of that life among ourselves. Nor have we shared well our ways of realizing that life.
We want good health. We want to take better care of our health and we want better health care. We realize that our health can be better cared for with some co-operation, but we have not made adequate arrangements for that cooperation. We realize that there are costs for healthcare and are will to to arrange to pay those costs, but we do not know how mosts of our neighbors are willing to act together with us to satisfy our wants. We imagine that some of our neighbors might want to talk about common wants, but when, where, and how. It seems we have and great deal to learn and more to do together. We have not been doing togetherness very well these days. We are willing to act to the best of our ability, but are finding it difficult to do so.
We know that we have a lot to learn, but often find that our days are too short to do what needs to be done now without taking on new activities,taking on new activities. Even so,we are willing to consider what is most what is most important to us and that which is most urgent for us to learn. However, we do not know how enough of us can get together to share this doing! We are beginning to realize that learning more of self governance can be a vitalbe a vital step toward gaining and maintaining good governance including an adequate income. It seems that some how, we will need to form a learning group.
It sometimes seems that our wants exceed our capacity to fulfill them and that seems to true to are needs too! We want justice and co-operation in our lives. We want to practice peace building and maintenance. We could consider together the rights we are willing to claim and and to realize that rights call for responsibilities. But where will we find the energy and the time to do so. We are not even sure of how to get together. We sur can't do everything at once. We are willing to consider how we can develop our quality of life, our personal and common economy, and the improvement of our personal and social well-being. Well, we can't that we don't have anything to do.
Needs
We are willing to consider what we need from from institutions of higher learning to help us function better as a society, as a people. We need time and space for more togetherness, a time to practice co-operation and to learn from one another. We can't do everything, but we can do something, to take care of our common needs.
We are willing to better know and to preserve the realities of our history and to focus on its beauties and lessons, but we have unfilled needs. We too often find that we lack enough safety, enough quality food, enough adequate housing, and enough political power. We may lack quality education for our children and have many other lacks. We are beginning to feel ready to practice fulfilling one of those needs together. We are potentially many with a variety of capabilities.We need to talk together about the nature of our cooperation. How will we arrange to get together?
We are not willing to be pulled away from the best in our culture and we are not willing to have it wrested from us. We can use our memories of our past to help us deal with with the real happenings, doings, and feelings of today. our feelings of joy, honor, anger, pride, shame, hate, and love are important to us. We do not always have the words to express our wants and needs, but we do want to feel connected to the fonts of our culture.
We are willing to work to be well housed, well fed, and to feel some security. With some comfort and safety we can better enjoy the benefit of realizing our common identity, who we are, and how we belong together.
We want a full portion of the benefits of togetherness. We can enjoy benefiting from our cooperation in housing ourselves and in teaching our children well. We need some time to take a breath and remember who we have been and who we are. We want as much truth and reality as is comfortable and just a bit more so as to know that we are learning. We are able to feel the feelings, but we want honesty, development, and growth in our lives. We know that there is value in accentuating the positive, and eliminating the negative asa tendency in our lives. We now that lies and and ignorance degrade the quality of our lives.
We can enjoy learning together, and from one another. We do not have to move forward alone, we can do so together. We know enough about co-operation to make a good start.
We can find ways of helping one another to do a pretty good job of of taking care of our basic needs. By taking time to talk among ourselves, we can figure out how to do that job and arrange to actually do so.
Our history and our knowledge of our ancestors can be very useful to us. We can benefit much from the most real stories about that history and the doings of those ancestors. Our memories can help us to tap the power of realistic dreams and imagination.
Together we can provide ourselves healthier food and learning. Good food for mind and body is very good for us. With well nourished minds and bodies we have the energy and knowledge to care for ourselves together well and to help our children and youth to that same nurishment.
Together we can learn and practice effective ways to avoid wars, violence, and other dangers to humanity. Avoiding dangers is not the same as eliminating them. Dangers are always with us, but we are capable of improving are ability to deal with them.
We can determine to practice valuing, honoring, and respecting one another and to enjoy benefits of doing so.
Listening So As to Better Understand
We can rediscover that ongoing dialogue is very valuable. Today men, women, and youth are finding that their dialogue leads to the initiation and maintenance of valuable alliances which lead to effective cooperation and the gaining useful aims together. Such togetherness can be lifesaving.
Well, it seems that there is truly a lot of useful learning we can do. We know that together we can learn better ways to help our children, youth, and ourselves to better learning. We suspect that this better learning is, in large part, listening to understand, especially to those whom we see as different from us.
We do not seem to be ready to begin practicing collective responsibility yet!
We need to be ready. We may need to strengthen our weness. We may benefit by listening to one another a bit more. To be a we takes more effective communication than ever. Collective responsibility is a bit like co-operation. It may may be a longer lasting lasting , farther reaching, and grander co-operation than is usual, but well within our capability. Can we be we if we cannot decide on one thing, one feature of our society for which we are all collective responsible, can we be we? Any power we can have is in our we-ness. We must have the nature of our responsibility well in mind.
We can find healthy ways to support/help one another in justice, fairness, and equality. We can do it together. A group of five can be powerful, and we are capable of forming co-operating of 30 or forty. And, one group can co-operate with another group or two. To do so well we need to practice listening to one another well.
We can come to a common understanding on a much needed want of ours and come to a better understanding of it together and then consider how we can act on it. Maybe we are not able to act on it yet, but maybe we can begin to act or to get ready to act. We can come to consider ways to act together in effective and satisfying ways. We can practice doing so together.
Together we can come to understand a more useful part of politics. For example for the love of Christ, which includes our love for one another and the right and useful love of stranger and enemy, we can think, speak, and act for a better us. We can call our politics: listening, communicating, understanding, and acting for our common good. Open political discussion can be powerfully good when it is done together, that is democratically with egalitarian space for each and all. Our truth and justice can be our powerful tools.The practice of dialogue skills is useful.
Education
We can allow effective education and social inclusion to develop among us and we can practice that education and inclusion and enjoy their benefits. We can let the value of non violence be taught as well as ways of self care and protection. We can aim to avoid violence and to consider ways of doing so. We need laws we can all understand and we need to be willing to improve our understanding of them. We need to learn and to teach alternatives to violence and aim to practice those alternatives.
Teaching, education,and learning can be so attractive, effective, and felt by learners to be so appropriate to them that they are grateful students rather than dropouts. The trick is to make sure that it truly is so important and valuable too.
Part of that appropriate learning is learning to take care of our own health and that of or children as well as to cooperate public health.
Appropriate adult education can be very useful in helping those engaged in small scale agriculture to produce a good income for themselves and a variety of excellent food for their fellow citizens. But, that help depends on the excellent, appropriate, an ongoing education of their instructors.
Those instructors are not only needed to help these small scale agriculturalists to deal with the production of their product, but also with its marketing, and more. More may well include aid in co-operating with others in in their business in distribution and sales of their produce. Their successful production and distribution activities helps us all to healthier lives.
Health
We can use methods of measuring the quality of health among us. We want to do that because our health is important to us. once we know where our health is doing well and where it is not Once we know the pertinent details of that information we can decide how to act on it. We will know who among us is most capable of helping us to make appropriate health decisions and of taking and of taking appropriate health action because we have been cooperating with them on a regular basis.
Production of healthy food
Small and medium food producers need, want and need and deserve appropriate support. They often benefit by their organizing to provide themselves that support. Their produce is very important to us so we often rightly choose to cooperate with them to help provide appropriate help. Such support can help them to provide us in a timely manner: needed and wanted fruits and vegetables, and some animal products. With our help producers may find it more economical to provide those where they are wanted, when they are wanted, in appropriate quantities at acceptable prices. With such cooperation it is often possible for producers to gain favorable recompense for their great work.
Much of the support needed by agriculturists is more of of an informative and practical education than it is any form of monetary subsidy. Our governmental cooperation in securing them access to land, water, and markets is appropriate. Such aids and services are needed in distant rural areas. The development and production in those areas are important to and necessary to each republic. Aid for getting produce to market is particularly important.
Agricultural associations are especially important for areas at a greater distance from metropolitan centers. Agriculturalists of these areas have needs particular to them. These same same areas are also able to support the needs of the republic in ways other areas are not. One way is to prepare for future needs of a growing republic. Another way is to provide people of the land with a greater variety of foodstuffs. But they also need closer contact with the help universities and governmental offices. Other needs are more dependable transportation for getting their produce to market and more timely information about the needs of the market.
Other producers of food are located very close to or actually in metropolitan areas. Their land and water cost are often high, but their transportation costs are low and they are very close to their markets and can get delicat foods to market quickly and in a fresh state. These small producers can also benefit from the help of universities and government agencies and by prompt information about market needs. They can benefit greatly from their own organizations.
Agricultural production aids, in the form of information, education, access to the means of production and marketing on all levels such as county and state levels. Sime of this aid is also deserved by larger agricultural enterprises. Monetary subsidies are seldom needed or deserved.
National Development
National development of any country still needs attention to food production. We can profit from consideration of our experience with food production. Attention to the effects of governmental action on the quality of food production ought to be included in that consideration. We can also benefit by deciding that we want our consideration to be congenial. Of course we will also decide when and where we shall do our considering.
In Colombia as well as in most countries we will come to see that some agrarian reform is an ongoing necessity. That reform may often include the nature of some distribution and redistribution of land. Climate change is a reason for this, but not the only reason. Such adaptation includes the necessity of some learning and relearning and ongoing dialogue among concerned and effected parties. The major aim most often is excellent food production and equity of distribution of food and funds. We have finally come to realize that we need to attend more carefully to quality of the food produced.
The need for such attention is important in the United States, Colombian and most nations and people on Earth. It is time for emphasis to be given given to not only the quality, but also to the variety of food produced. We benefit, for example, from the variety of vegetables, fruit, nuts berries, and herbs available. We can benefit from the varieties of types rabbets, poultry, venison, beef, fish, pork, etc available to us. We can also benefit from some public support for sensible innovation.
Land availability is an important consideration, as is reparation and redevelopment of poorly used land and new lands is important. Co[operative use of land should have some encouragement.
Dialogue of what to produce and how to produce agricultural products ought to be wide-spread and ongoing with related widespread education. Related learning opportunities ought to be made available.
Learning
There is much which needs our consideration, but I am old and life is short. Each of us often feels there are more than enough demandes on us and we feel little need to look for more. Still food is important and sometimes climate change can be brutally rapid and many of us may need to adapt rapidly. Our grandchildren will also feel the need to it. We can help prepare them to make vital life adaptations and and even leave them an Earth a bit easier to adapt to.
We can do something to help the the great majority of the population to the learning and understanding they may us to be more adaptable to Earth's realities. We can help provide them with considerations of a humane economy, rights, fair-trade, responsible consumption, self managed finances, growing understandings of nutrition, life, death, and everything.
Communicating
To survive in good form many more citizens and people in general will need to participate regularly in one or more dialogue groups. Such groups need to be self informative and educational, but also to participate in social decisions and actions. They ought also be active in the development of organizations dealing with local usages of resources, job creation, employment of youth in important and respected activity, cooperative banks, drinking water and all they see as necessary and possible.
the dialogue groups I speak of need not to be formalized, incorporated, or granted permission, but only to act within established law. That is they may operate much as did the many clubs and civic organizations which once operated in the US.
The people of the US, Colombia, and around the world have a possibility of benefiting a lot educationally by participating in citizen groups, clubs, a cooperative, a mutual association, a community organization, a community council ecological clubs, a community action board, or a dialogue group. All such groups have benefited from open participation policies. Nearly everyone and anyone may start such a group or organization.
We know how to co-operate associative forms of work and play. A cooperative economy can be an integral part of a whole economy. This facilitates the participation and benefits of a growing and developing part of our fellow citizens. Such participation can work to protect a vital part of our citizenry. It could even act to support and stabilize our food production. The development of wide spread citizen participation makes a stronger, more stable, and more congenial countries.
We need an ongoing, active, social dialogue to take care of ourselves well.
Unions and other nonprofit organizations invite us to let go of our dispersion and isolati and act together for our mutual benefits like pleasure, abundance, safety, protection, and development. They also keep us aware of our fundamental rights, of economic and social rights, food autonomy, pure water, and a lot more. So let's practice supporting ourselves together with our daily practices of co-operation, organization, and of developing meaning and understanding in our lives.
Let's acknowledge that we have much to learn and that we are willing and able to learn together. Get ready.
rcs