National Public Radiators

All this long week of early spring head colds our National Public Radio informants and performers, speakers and listeners, have been about the business of raising capital investments preferably in their corporate direction, to support further public broadcasting for the benefit of our children and their children, and so on. While this has often felt like a guilt-inducing headache, I was drawn into a list of statistics about NPR listeners. Contrasts between those who do listen and those who do not, or, more likely, those who send in cash, and those who do not. At first the list seemed random. More likely to recycle, to attend live theater, go to the symphony, grow gardens, bake their own cookies, read bedtime stories to their kids, read anything at all. And then I realized we are looking at social capital; growing and re-investing in social capital. What a permacultural designer would relabel and spread across endangered soils and waters and souls as eco-capital re-investment; re-investment in ourselves in each other's talents and ideas and skills in Earth's re-creative abundance. The economic thing sometimes not noticed by ecopolitically cooperative re-investors: high consumers tend to also be high producers. So, while they didn't say so, I have heard it said elsewhere, NPR listeners also list heavily toward higher education, and rabid too-the-roots, White Protestant Victory Or Die Republicans know what that means. Why isn't eco-capital investment as robust in traditional Republican neighborhoods, as in more multicultural Democratic necks of woods and urban forests? Or is it? While there may be as many answers as there are people who do not invest cash in NPR, I suspect those Republicans who prefer to NPR listen, rather than RightWing AM Rant, also find this soft correlation between deeper learning and eco-capital active re-investment troubling to their centrist nurturing instincts and orientations. It seems difficult to listen to an International Public Cooperative Economy while simultaneously expecting positive outcomes from ecopolitically competitive egocentric and supremacist nationalistic success is divinely inspired by God's Invisible Hand of Independent Might Makes Right EgoNomics. While it seems harsh and judgmental to speak cooperative prophecy to competitive strength, we might do well to remember with Paulo Freire that teaching is best practiced as mentoring, and mentoring is always ecopolitical cooperative, more than competitive, relationship. Political mentoring relationships that work, whether you are part of an academic research community, or part of an architectural design and implementation team, or part of a cooperatively-owned and self-governing corporation, require Yangstrength of balance to fall on the side of harmony, resonance, both-and nutritionally inclusive and diverse health, rather than egocentric eco-capital disinvestment through autonomous competitions, in a monocultural assumption of EitherOr fundamentalism where Earth's historically regenerative evidence more resonantly broadcasts BothAnd eco-capital re-investment. If love powers define ecopolitical power of WinWin cooperativity, so fear power refines mistrusted egopolitical WinLose competing disempowerments, then we could not have healthy and reliable growth of empirically-supported and replicated information, much less wealthy faith re-investment economies, unless the power of positive eco-capital investment overwhelms and absolves powers of negative ego-decapitation capitalistic small-self-investment. But then, I am one of those International Public Broadcasters, so sometimes my multicultural balance can become merely eisegetically polypathic, which is a multisyllabic way of saying nuts and empty zero-sum notnot double-bound. It all started with the head cold and overheated brain.