Hear ye! Hear ye! Read all about it! Old fogey joins Steemit!

Greetings to the Steemit community!!! From yours truly, old fogey John Congdon.

Hello to you all, fellow Steemers, Steemians and Steemites now that I am finally affiliated. But that’s after waiting a long time for the ultimate approval, more than 10 days! I let a moderator know that it seemed too long time since I had initiated my processing and still nothing; while just 2 days before starting my application I had helped a friend sign up and it only took one day. I was champing at the bit to get started and was feeling bummed out by the delay. The moderator was very helpful but still took a couple days longer, I imagine that it was because we had reached the weekend. Anyway all has been completed properly thanks to the help of the moderator and here I am. I have since spent time reading posts trying to get familiar with the ins and outs of Steem where I realize that I am at the bottom of a learning curve. After reviewing my first draft of this introduction I realized that I need to work on my writing skills.

Decentralization is going to be very important for the world and overall development plus freeing society from the globalist controllers. So hurrah for the blockchain and trustless contracts!! The cryptocurrency side has attracted my attention only in the last year or so; though I have studied the creation of money and economics in considerable depth. I have a number of thoughts around how development in this alternative scenario might be able to take shape in terms of sustainability which I will enjoy discussing with the community and presenting ideas.

One such area will be: what actually makes a currency useful? To me this is going to be an area of significant importance as to how the plethora of models that are in the crypto marketplace will survive, or not survive as the case may be. Something that I notice and believe needs to be considered very seriously is that none of the cryptocurrencies as yet, and as far as I know, actually resemble a real currency. From what I have seen so far Steem is closer than most and I like that a good portion of it can be considered a gifted currency. I’ll appreciate being brought up to speed by the knowledgeable people in the community about the further intricacies of Steem and SBD. And shortly I will present some of the things that I believe are essential to a currency that I have garnered from more than a couple decades of informal study.

My last 7 ½ years have been spent living in South America, the majority of that in Lima, Peru and a number of months in Ecuador along with travelling. My belief is that equatorial S. America has a lot of potential that has not been developed. Over all sustainability for the world is a big interest of mine and especially how that applies to agriculture, energy and community. Agriculture is very appealing to me, in spite of the fact that I don’t have much hands-on experience except in gardening. The Andes near the equator offer the ability to grow year round and elect the temperature zone by altitude. Well, I hope to be able to have or be managing a good size farming project in the not too distant future. I have lots of ideas about the possibilities available in sustainable agriculture and am drawn to Biodynamic and Permaculture techniques with both being in the organic mode. The following photo is while travelling in Ecuador.

I was one of the very last of the war babies, born at the very end of WW II. The US military had just let go of Little Boy and Fat Man over Hiroshima and Nagasaki respectively and in that very dire time before the Japanese surrendered I popped out. Well, the good news was that I had just by the nick of my teeth escaped being a Baby Boomer! Nevertheless welcome to the Atomic Age! Electricity too cheap to meter and where’s my atomic flying car that never needs refueling? Ugh! My parents raised me in eastern Washington state in the rather quiet and traditional American cultural environment that existed at that time, and I imagine still does, in the city of Spokane.

Before finishing high school I plunged into the world of art, leaving my future math and science career behind. While my older brother was zooming ahead to a PhD in nuclear engineering I began to focus on painting and ceramics and loved it. I went on to major in art with a BFA 1967 and MFA 1971, both in painting along with much work experience in ceramics. Working in clay is wonderful and I ended up devoting a lot of time and experimentation with building kilns, raku firing, wheel thrown pots, sculpture and formulating glazes.

Below are two paintings in gauche and transparent watercolor from 1968 that were a part of my master’s thesis. They are from a time that I spent close to a year painting at a country place with a small lake situated not too far from the Canadian border.

I traveled considerably in my younger days and have lived in different parts of the world and as I look around I see that I am continuing to do so now. I have a lot of curiosity about life with a wide range of subjects that can draw my attention. Art remains high on my list of interests along with spiritual development techniques and what might be called metaphysical inquiries from both a practical scientific and philosophical point of view. Continuing to study in general health, psychology, ecology and economics as well has led me to learn far more than I did with formal education. From what I hear that’s relatively normal for many people. Revamping our education system is a very good idea to make it more pertinent to the knowledge that is most useful in life. Economics is generally not taught but has a lot of everyday importance and ramifications. Likewise the arts which bring joy and beauty to living are suffering while administrative budgets balloon.

While in art school (California College of Arts and Crafts) in Oakland, CA I participated in what were the first and second organized anti-war Vietnam protests, marches that occurred in Berkeley in 1965. So I was a peacenik at that time. The first march took place in the evening walking down Telegraph Avenue to Oakland from the UC campus. There had been a peace oriented “teach-in” at the stadium on campus with an estimated crowd of 20,000+. The march was to arrive at the Oakland Army terminal where many of the soldiers going to Vietnam were departing the US.

Oakland had denied issuing a parade permit for the peaceful demonstration. The Oakland police force had their own special reputation which incidentally was at least one of the main inspirations for the formation of the Blank Panthers the following year. So the plan became to arrive at the anticipated blockade and then hold a sit-in. The first photo below shows Oakland police lined up at the Oakland-Berkeley city limits waiting to block the march which has not yet arrived and will be approaching from the right. All of the rest of the people in the photo are news reporters and spectators. (Kind of amazing what one can dig up about one’s sordid past on the internet!)

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The second photo above shows the demonstrators leaving the UC Berkeley campus and forming ranks for the march down Telegraph. I was with a group of friends along with our English professor from the college, Michael McClure, who was an avant-garde poet and playwright of some note in San Francisco. Michael was also friends with the poets Allen Ginsburg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti who were presenters at the teach-in. Because of that we ended up by shear chance being in the front row of the march. The march was well organized and went off as planned. We arrived at the police barrier and peacefully sat down on the pavement for a period of mostly silent protest and vigil. When we arrived at the blockade word was that there were still some people leaving from the stadium to join the march.

For my friends and myself this felt like a grand event with so many people involved with the protest. It was a big and successful turnout. Afterwards we rushed back to Oakland to a friend’s tiny apartment to enjoy some banana bread that she baked in the cramped kitchen and wait for the final 10 pm edition of the evening news on her 12” black and white TV to see our victory for peace. And then it came; a clip of stragglers leaving the campus, a longer section of video showing confusion among demonstrators at a few intersections where Berkeley police were allowing cars to cross the avenue, and a glimpse of the sit-in at the police blockade. All of that while news casters reported that by official police estimate that there were 2-3,000 protesters. So, that was what reached the SF Bay Area TV audience that night of October 15, 1965 through the filters of the police and professional media. Very different from what I had seen and experienced.

A few years later I campaigned for George McGovern in 1968 in my hometown of Spokane because of his anti-war platform. We silk screened some posters, help coming from two artist friends who had also been at the Berkeley peace march, and giving a some presentations at a local venues. Spokane was pretty conservative at that time so support was small. Seeing the twisting of the Berkeley reporting along with McGovern’s defeat and Nixon’s “landslide”, those experiences have left me very doubtful over the efficacy of politics and government. Plus with the train of little and big wars since then I am even more doubtful today. We need a new structural relationship with one another than what comes through top down central governmental administration.

In addition to eschewing the political scene my viewpoint on life in 1968 was starting to change in a major way. I now take a mystic’s view and approach to life and the world more and more each day. We all come from the same infinite and timeless source. The mystics’ view, the mystery of life, is that we never left the source and the source never left us (nor expulsed us as some might have us believe). The infinite absolute became the multiplicity of the creation itself without ever being less than infinite absolute. However many times the clay changes form it is still the same wonderful clay.

Alas, alas, we arrive now at the end of Part 1 of “Old fogie joins Steemit!” I believe long articles can be a little too boring to endure, so thanks for hanging around to the bitter end! Stay tuned for Part 2 to follow soon and in the meantime I’ll appreciate all comments and responses.

I’ll leave with a quote that I have liked for a good number of years from the French mystic, paleontologist and priest Pierre Tielhard de Chardin:
“Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”