Beeswax From the Bottom Up

     Our nation is in the midst of a severe and prolonged stripping away of the power of the middle class. In fact many of us will no longer be able to claim membership in the middle class. We find ourselves on or uncomfortably near the bottom.  If we find out how we got to the place then we might be able to figure out how to get out of the bottom.

     A second and related issue is what greased the wheel.  Just out of high school I worked at Ingalls shipyard in Pascagoula and suddenly found myself on the ways crew.  We were responsible for greasing the skid that the 600-foot ship would use to slide the ship into the Pascagoula River. It took a ton of beeswax to grease the skid.  What will it take to swing the welfare of the people on the bottom into a chance to break from the bottom?  What will be the beeswax that moves our country and our people back into prosperity and hope?

     Why beeswax?  A generic article in the Internet says that there are at least 100 uses for beeswax.  But the 100 did not include using beeswax to launch a ship.  So there may be even more.  I was told that beeswax is used to launch ship because it is the lubricant that has the least chance of catching fire during the process.  If you want to begin dialogue by moving from the superficiality of deep discussion,we at least,must realize that when dialogue is approached overheating of the participants is likely.  Rather than catch fire some participants simply pull back and try to cool off.  I am leading up to a method, which helps as beeswax does to keep the process cool enough to be smooth and effective.  In other words if you form circles of people to talk about crucial issues in their lives how do you keep the individual egos from overheating.

     From an unlikely physicist, David Bohm, we are encouraged to develop small groups to go beneath small group discussion into small-group dialogue.  His vision was to stop the fragmentation that we now see in our political process and reach consensus for the common good.  In this 2016 presidential contest we see sharp contrast and nothing but innuendo and assumed moral decay.  The issues are not discussed and we are not in dialogue. Our children are only vaguely noticed. We would know we were in dialogue should we begin to talk about our children and how we are destroying our own planet and ask for forgiveness for calling each other liars. We would know we are in dialogue when we stop talking in political modes and begin to talk in survival modes.     

      As the species Homo sapiens we have just recently broken out of the African continent about 60,000 years ago.  Before that there were many thousands of years in which our ancestors were chimps and apes with much smaller brains.  With the enlarging of our brain about 1 million years ago the species began to emerge from Homo erectus and gradually to Homo sapiens.  We have lost our ability to swing through the trees but we have gained the ability to run and stand upright.  But what we have not done is completely evolve into reasonable loving caring unselfish human beings.  We are now rushing into a period of history in which the acceleration is leaving many people behind without jobs and without support.  If we do not care about these people that are being left behind then war will ensue again.