applznorngz/paganism

from the article "Bad Moon Waning":
You don't have to be a Pagan to win my vote--in fact, I'd advise you not to be a Pagan if you want to win an election. Hmmn, perhaps we don't make enough use of unpopular religions. Since there's a widespread internet lie that Obama is really a Muslim, perhaps we should counter with the rumor that McCain was seen dancing naked in the moonlight, wearing goats' horns. Really--it's true. I've seen it myself. Okay, it was a vision--and what a vision! I had to dose myself with ibuprofen and valerian tea afterwards to recover. But my visions are rarely false.

Starhawk doesn't just protest.
from her page: I'm speaking on the panel about transforming our food system. The main speaker, Jim Harkness of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, does a great job of tying the current food crisis to two overarching systems--the industrial agriculture that destroys soil and local subsistence farming, and global trade policies and institutions that have forced developing countries to sell their food reserves and produce for export, not for home consumption. China, with its history of famine, resisted these pressures, subsidizes its own grain production and maintains deep reserves, and it has not seen huge rises in the price of grain.[...] I speak about soil as sacred, and as a potential sink for carbon. When we compost, when we manage grasslands holistically and graze them skillfully, when we plant and nurture forests, we can actually sequester carbon and create healthy, resilient systems that can provide the basis for real prosperity. I also talked about the Transition Town movement in Britain and similar movements in the U.S. where people are getting together to organize their communities, making energy descent plans, strategizing on how to use the resources we have today to prepare for a zero-carbon future. While these accounts focus on the actions in the streets (because, frankly, it just makes much more exciting reading!) I'm actually spending most of my time these days in efforts to build they world we want and to teach the skills of sustainability, and that's the focus of my longer-term writing.
[...]
Re Katrina: I have come to believe that we need rapid, large-scale change as well as grassroots empowerment. It's something I learned from the last hurricane to hit the Gulf, when I went to New Orleans to volunteer after Katrina. I went partly to see if our directly democratic organizing style had anything to offer in a crisis. I found that it did--indeed, in the first weeks after the hurricane, all the official systems were dysfunctional, the National Guard and military either absent or oppressive, FEMA disastrously incompetent, the Red Cross bound up in red tape. But the activist group Common Ground Relief, drawing on the skills of many of these people I see in the streets around me, and many of the same medics who staff our clinic here, was up and functioning within days, seeing patients, offering medical care and counseling and doing it all in a warm and welcoming way. Common Ground Relief organized distribution of supplies, volunteers to gut houses and clean out toxic mold, a bioremediation project to help heal soil, and many other programs. I found that our activist organizing style had a lot to offer in emergencies.

But I could also see its lacks. We were a tiny effort, compared to what needed to be done. We could have used a thousand Common Ground Reliefs, or some big agency that could go into every parish, every county, assess the damage, bring in help and medical care and resources. And I found myself thinking, hmmn, we're supposed to have such an agency--it's called FEMA. We're supposed to have such an institution, it's called government, which we the people are supposed to control. And for a problem on this scale, we need an answer on a large scale. So I do believe we need government--that works, that's accountable to the people, and that helps us to collectively provide for each others' needs and mitigate the losses and wounds of life.

Speaking of Fairytales...