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<div><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">This completes my "forwards" from the Saipan Tribune for a while.</font></div>
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<div><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Jaime</font></div>
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Consciousness and
image</b><br>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"><b> </b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;">Kenneth Boulding in 1956 published <i>The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society, </i>which began a
conversation that I later joined after drinking deeply on the “earthrise”
picture of ’68, deciding to be a citizen of the blue orb in the sky. My consciousness and an image merged into a
story that determined behavior. Boulding’s
insight follows the following basic premise: </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="font-size: 18px; text-align: center;"><i>We operate out of images.</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="font-size: 18px; text-align: center;"><i>These images govern our behavior.</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="font-size: 18px; text-align: center;"><i>Images are created by messages.</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="font-size: 18px; text-align: center;"><i>Images can change.</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="font-size: 18px; text-align: center;"><i>Changed images create change behavior.</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><font size="4">I mention these five points again to remind me of their
relevance, still. It illuminates the
behavior change that earthrise brought, just like a friend’s pat speech. She says, “I only have three things to say: </font><i style="font-size: 18px;">reuse, reduce, recycle.</i><font size="4">” From consciousness and image spin a lively story. Sometimes though, the effect is not too lively.</font></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;">When I was in grade 11, I took a psychological test. A counselor briefed me on the result. Her message: <i>you are over-achieving</i>. I
did not exactly know what that meant but at the time, I was alarmed that if I
continued the academic path I was in, I would turn cuckoo. Cuckoo was the image. I focused on sports, athletics, and social
life instead after letting academic excellence fall by the hallway.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;">A friend received scholarship from a sponsor to attend a
vocational High School. He consented but
received a jesting message that his family did not consider him smart enough to
attend liberal arts High School. It
lingered so he nursed a deep slight past his adult life, blaming his family for
subverting his academic direction.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;">An older friend did not resemble any of her four siblings, a
bit darker and shorter. Her father joked
that the day she was born at a Manila hospital during WWII, the electricity
blacked out and she might have been inadvertently exchanged as a baby, thus,
the dissimilarities. When she turned 40,
the unintended cruelty of the joke came out in an emotional outburst that
claimed her family never wanted her all along.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;">A good friend from the Philippines signified to her adviser after
High School that she wanted to be a nurse.
She felt she did not get a supportive response. So she shifted to pursue secretarial
science. The adviser commented that she
was not pretty enough to be a secretary and not smart enough to learn
stenography. The adviser was not
received to be jesting so my friend took her negative response to heart. Others rue today with the lament that she seems
still trying to prove she was prettier and smarter than anyone else, or just as
pretty and smart as the best of them.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;">The above examples are personal at the individual level of
how messages create images that determine behavior. In a larger scale, the image that has defined
us in the last three hundred years as a specie is the way we are organized. We created nation-states, beginning with the
breakdown of the imperial entity after the Vatican blessed Spain and Portugal’s
split of the known world, to the feudal states in Europe, and the colonies of
competing empires. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;">After WWII the nation-states exploded in Asia and Africa but
the former colonizers agreed that the new nation-states would follow the
sovereign lines of their former masters. Spanish occupiers (and their successors) never
subdued the Moro in Mindanao, yet they were included in the new political
entity named after Spain’s Principe Felipe.
The same arrangement did not sit well with the Tutsi and the Hutu in
Rwanda. The “nation-state” reels from
that misjudgment!</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;">There are now global issues that require global solutions and
as Simon Anholt in his TED talk on the Good Country Index said, we elect
leaders who we ask to lead by looking through “microscopes when they should be
looking through telescopes.” We know of
global challenges but we are reluctant to jump into proposed practical global
responses because we are reluctant to change as a specie. The reality of climate change, for instance,
is not a Canada, China, or Chile issue; it is a worldwide issue that 7 billion
people need to look at and decide how to deal with.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;">Politicians in the Commonwealth respond to issues as if
political entities can operate as islands
separate from the realities of one planet.
The issue of a besieged planet does not recognize nation-state. Only the image of one blue orb without
boundaries impact the story of our lives. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;">How to act in this instance, in our violent instincts,
echoes Jean Anouilh’s <i>Antigone</i>: </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="font-size: 18px; text-align: center;">“You grab the wheel, </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="font-size: 18px; text-align: center;">you right the ship ... </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="font-size: 18px; text-align: center;">You shout an order, </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="font-size: 18px; text-align: center;">and if one man refuses to obey, </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="font-size: 18px; text-align: center;">you shoot straight into the mob. …</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="font-size: 18px; text-align: center;">The thing that drops when you shoot </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="font-size: 18px; text-align: center;">may be someone who poured you a drink </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="font-size: 18px; text-align: center;">the night before; but it has no name. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="font-size: 18px; text-align: center;">And you, braced at the wheel, </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="font-size: 18px; text-align: center;">you have no name, either. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="font-size: 18px; text-align: center;">Nothing has a name —</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="font-size: 18px; text-align: center;">except the ship, and the storm.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 18px;"><i> </i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 18px;">The ship and the storm.
On one planet earth, the option to shoot is no</span><font size="4"> longer required but we cannot afford
to be less radical. Time to peek on the
telescope.</font></div>
<br>
<div style="font-size: 18px; clear: both;"><i>j'aime la vie</i><br>
<a href="mailto:pinoypanda2031@aol.com">pinoypanda2031@aol.com</a><br>
<div><i>yesterday, appreciate; tomorrow, anticipate; today. participate. In all, celebrate!</i></div>
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