13 New Ideas

NEW IDEAS
In Joan Huguenard’s January 13 column, we were invited to come up with some new ideas. This is the type of invitation I like. Here goes:

1) In city elections, when a PAC (Political Action Committee) donates money to support one or more candidates, they be required to match that amount in contributions to local non-profits.

2) In city elections, if a candidate spends more than $3000 on their campaign, they be required to match dollar for dollar the amount above that $3000 with equal contributions to local non-profits.

3) Notice which leg you put into pants first. See what it’s like to start the other way around.

4) Imagine what it would be like to have this non-habitual response: someone is rude to us, and we reaction with curiosity, amusement or delight.

5) Declare partial independence from the entrapments of the industrial/technological world. Spend one day a week car free and television free and computer free. While we're at it, go sugar free and cell-phone free. What's left, just a hell of an opportunity to be present, to love and to live.

6) Think of something you want to write down and then print it out upside down.

7) Think of something else you want to write and write it out with the non-habitual hand.

8) Pay all the teachers in the district twice their existing salaries and fire all the teachers who aren’t fluent in Spanish within two years ( since kids are expected to become fluent in English in about that time).

9) Subscribe to ( and/or bug Reader’s Books to carry again) Ode Magazine. In the recent issue are idea such as balancing the present 3rd world economic debt with a 1st world ecological debt for the resources we extract and the pollution we create; an article on the rekindling of faith in someone who abandoned organized religion; an article on the connection between soccer fervor and women’s liberation in Iran.

10) And this idea, which could save the world: end the legal status of corporations as bodies of limited liability. Put them in the same boat as anyone else who ruins something: they have to pay to fix it.

11) Learn to stand from sitting by shifting weight from pelvis to feet without any use of the arms and without using the back until the weight is fully shifted.

12) Ponder this possibility: both a “problem” with another person and a sore back have the same source: the organization of thoughts and understandings between the two ears.

13) Think of thirteen as a lucky number, the number native European shamanesses (a.k.a. “witches”) considered sacred because it was the number of moons in a year.

Chris Elms
996-1437