3-21 HW

1. The dismantling of Car Culture is a huge step forward, and one that will be hard to take. Our culture is built around the assumption that transportation is little to no problem for most people. However, I did see a glimmer of hope. On S. Union St in our own Burlington is a sign reminding drivers that there is a bike lane next to theirs, go bikes!
2. Once I read about the ISEW, the GDP in comparison seems so laughably flawed that it's hard to imagine why we use it. Then I think for two seconds and realized that the skewing of economic information towards the benefit of corporate entities is just as obvious as the GDP's failure.
3. The situationist movement seems so relevant considering today's problems that it is a real shock and chill to the bones that I've never even heard of it til now.
4. Lasn's rejection of the leftist label is one that I see as personally important. A book that references Buddhism so much is so obviously influenced by it. Buddhism being the middle way deplores either political extreme, conservative and liberal, the only sensible stance I think.
5. I really like that this book isn't just a call to arms, it's a how-to manual as well. A pretty refreshing change from what often seem to amount to mere empty gestures.

The Corporation-
After studying the way the world works for the short number of years I've been on it, I've only come to a few conclusions. One of the strongest is that nothing is the result of only one factor. I think the reason myself, and the rest of the country it feels like, were unaware of a corporation's power is a combination of the attempts of those entities to mask their powers from us, and our own willful forgetting that allows the corporations to do what they please. As Culture Jam describes, both a top-down and bottom-up approach is needed.

March 21, 2010 6:08 PM