Peter Buffett, son of billionaire investor Warren Buffett, is an Emmy Award-winning composer, NY Times best-selling author and noted philanthropist. Currently, he is releasing socially-conscious music and touring his "Concert & Conversation" series in support of his book Life Is What You Make It .
 
 

If you’ve been following along, you’d know that I was at a loss for words last week so I posted a beautifully written letter from Martin Ping.

I’m still at a loss, but my Midwestern roots are deep and they call out to me (in a sort of pestering obligatory way) to come through with my weekly commitment.

I think a lot about what to write and it’s amazing how easy it is for me to get paralyzed when I consider how little I know regarding just about any given subject. Or when I read how many ways people can look at just about any given subject.

There are a lot of brilliant thinkers out there (and maybe some not so), and a ridiculous amount of (I’m pretty sure I mean that in a good way) passionate people. Factions are many and deep.

For instance, it’s amazing to me how these little graphics get immediately created to display a political opinion or a philosophical stance. It’s like we all have a little desktop ad agency to sell our point of view or we just copy and paste something that says it better than we could have. Here’s an example.

Which brings me back to my struggle with something to say. There are so many people saying so many things; crazy numbers of online communities within communities. I can’t imagine what this will develop into, but it seems impossible to imagine people staying circled around old institutions for much longer.

It’s almost as if we can break up into smaller communities again; like-minded people finding each other and splitting off into tribes that may be partly virtual and partly “real life.”  And then tribes start intersecting with other tribes in surprising ways.

Social interactions on the internet have begun to create a massive multi-dimensional enneagram (of course, this is what the advertising industry lives for tracking your every move so you can be selectively but predictably sold to).

People are starting to gather around deeply personal and unique aspects of themselves, and because of their sheer number and the ease of personal expression, the internet is providing a much more nuanced look at behavior and true ideology.

So, I’m trying to imagine how people would govern themselves if they converged around defining characteristics other than political parties and nation-states, religious ideology, and moral certitude–the list goes on–not because these things would disappear so much as they would get so granular that other qualities would emerge and reveal whole new layers of overlap in a sort of  “camaraderie of values” between people and communities.

While in some ways the world seems to be turning into a caricature of itself (everything seems just a little bit over-sized and out of whack–like a cartoon that maybe isn’t so funny) at the same time, we’re meeting each other as individuals across artificial boundaries like never before. Our world is becoming a very granular place. How will we take care of each other and ourselves when we can see everyone’s faces–and a little of each other’s lives?

Who has more knowledge or a stronger opinion or a better way to say this than I do? There’s probably a whole school of thought around this and I just don’t know the name of it. Help me out here.

Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

What do you think? Share your story at changeourstory.com . Visit www.peterbuffett.com to learn more and Change Our Story to join the conversation on how we all can become active participants in shaping our future.   

Image courtesy of Sustainable Sanitiation,  licensed under Creative Commons.  

Peter Buffett, son of billionaire investor Warren Buffett, is an Emmy Award-winning composer, NY Times best-selling author and noted philanthropist. Currently, he is releasing socially-conscious music and touring his "Concert & Conversation" series in support of his book Life Is What You Make It . 
 

Here's another one from Mark Twain's "history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes" department. Take a look at the map below. I saw maps similar to this posted on various websites after the 2012 presidential election and I think it's fascinating:

We all know that we live in a divided country along various ideological lines. But this map illustrates just how consistently divided we are. I'm certainly not suggesting that today's Republicans are supporters of slavery! But this map clearly illustrates that some fundamental thing or things have not changed very much. What's the story?

For the answer to that, I'm asking for your help. I don't think there's a simple answer. And, I think more importantly, there's not an easy solution. When politicians talk about getting the country "back on track," what does that mean? When did we go off the rails? And is it one track or multiple tracks? Is it really possible to unite a country that's been divided since the Civil War; a country that only seems to come together when we have an obvious common enemy? (I say “obvious” because I believe there is a common “enemy” in our midst that many of us fail to recognize.)

A few observations:
• The country was and is an extraordinary experiment. When it was formed, the concept of a Nation-State was new. Nations of laws governing large landmasses and large groups of people was new. Free market capitalism on the scale it was adopted was new. And myriad outgrowths of this experiment—public education, for instance—were all new.

• For thousands and thousands of years, this is not how societies organized themselves. There were versions of parts of all these things. But nothing in scope or scale of the United States of America. My feeling is that this experiment is far from over. And this particular iteration of the experiment is one of many.

• I'm hoping—as I've said in the past—that change will come through a natural evolutionary process. I don't think we need revolt. But change will come. The future is far from a static march towards life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

• There needs to be radical thinking regarding how people organize themselves in community. And the thing to remember is that much of what we came from will serve us well in the future. For instance, many consumers are recognizing the value of eating organically grown vegetables. Our grandparents didn't have a name for that other than "food."

I have hoped that this blog would spur thoughts that will help lead us to a future where we see commonality in a shared humanity instead of arbitrary lines on a map that show us who's "with us and against us." 

Please write your thoughts or post links to ideas that might give us a roadmap to the future.

I’ll start with one I found interesting:
http://www.wildethics.org/

and another:
http://www.greattransitionstories.org/wiki/Main_Page
 

What do you think? Share your story at changeourstory.com . Visit www.peterbuffett.com to learn more and Change Our Story to join the conversation on how we all can become active participants in shaping our future.   

Image courtesy of Mod-n-Pop Studio, Dan'l Linehan.
 

Nobody wants to stare out their window at a neglected, decrepit, empty plot of land that might sit waiting for a developer's blueprints for months or even years. The mandate of Salt Lake City's Redevelopment Agency is to buy up property in blighted neighborhoods and sell the land to developers. But as one official explained to City Weekly, Sometimes, because we're trying to create large properties, we sit on property for such a long time, it causes more of the blight we are directed as an agency to turn around."

Enter the People's Portable Garden. "The partnership between the city and Wasatch Community Gardens has erected above-ground planters that can be moved to another location when it’s time to develop the property," reports City Weekly. "All available $25 plots were immediately snapped up."

It's a perfect solution for now, but long-view types have their concerns. Eventually, developers will come for the land. And despite the temporary status of the garden implied in its very name, "Other cities that have allowed community uses for vacant land have faced protests when it finally came time to develop."

Source: City Weekly 

After the Virginia Tech massacre, much of the public conversation focused on the tension between community safety and individual privacy. We heard from members of the university’s English department, who referred Seung-Hui Cho to counseling after reading his disturbing creative writing assignments. Could they—or should they—have done more to prevent the shootings?

Writing in Academe, Monica Barron addresses a more fundamental, less-discussed question: long before a creative writing teacher has to decide whether to call the counseling center or the police, how can she be attentive to the emotional realities of writing and reading—and in a way that both attends to safety concerns and honors the vocations of writing and teaching? For Barron, a professor at Truman State University and an editor of Feminist Teacher magazine, the answer lies in cultivating within the writing classroom an emotionally sensitive community that is itself capable of authorizing certain readings of its shared narratives, de-authorizing others, and discerning boundaries.

One highlight is her brief recounting of the Virginia Tech tragedy itself:

One April morning in Blacksburg, Virginia, a young man packed up his guns and went to school for the last time. He was done struggling to be part of any community of readers or writers. He was entering the community of killers. His fellow writers had noticed and remarked that he wasn’t simply retelling the stories of the tribe or trying to scare peers with over-the-top, out-of-control representations of experience; he himself was scary. His teachers were faced with a kind of reading they were unequipped to do: reading as diagnosis.

Our national community of readers is familiar with this narrative, with the riveting blow-by-blow of a shocking event. Barron retells it from a perspective few understand—that of the people charged with nurturing creativity, thought, and community in young adults.

—Steve Thorngate