And the Envelope Please....

WHAT! You've got to be kidding me!

TIME announces it has selected facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg for Person of the Year - move over Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., yes, even you Stalin, Hitler and Ayatollah Khomeini.

"But then again, perhaps Time's selection is a perfect fit for a nation of passive consumers in love with themselves and bored and addicted to mind-numbing entertainment. In a rich post-military and on-the-verge-of-collapsing-empire, who can blame most Americans for wanting to seek an impersonal, isolated and virtual outlet to get away from the realities and perplexities of their leaders domestic and foreign policies? After all, self-censorship and egotism is at a all time high, as are doses of self-love and madness that are lived through technological co-dependency which keeps one sane, or so it seems. Anything that will distract consumers and make them even more inattentive is good for business and a technocratic state. Technological diversion is the adhesive for a ruinous empire." wrote Dalles Darling.

Do I use facebook? No, I talk with people.

When I heard Zuckerberg had been named Time's Person of the Year I was stunned with numbness and the dumbness. I started to write, then read Dalles Darling's piece - it said it more eloquently.

TIME says in justifying their choice, "This year, Facebook — now minus the the — added its 550 millionth member. One out of every dozen people on the planet has a Facebook account. They speak 75 languages and collectively lavish more than 700 billion minutes on Facebook every month. Last month the site accounted for 1 out of 4 American page views. Its membership is currently growing at a rate of about 700,000 people a day."

700 billion minutes - that's almost 500 million DAYS! Imagine if those wasters volunteered to do something real on this planet?

POOF! Gone is hunger

POOF! Gone is homelessness

POOF! Gone is illiteracy

POOF! Gone is... hell just fill in the blank, the point is things would get done

Even being the lead sheep doesn't make you the sheep herder. I would like to nominate instead my mother who taught me, "if every one jumps off a bridge that doesn't mean you have to."

Inalienable Obligation

Certain phrases have followed me around my life like a shadow - there beside me, stretching out from me, inseparably connected, married to me, even before they were there, as they were becoming know, as they are occasionally forgotten.

"Remember always that you not only have the right to be an individual, you have an obligation to be one"

- Eleanor Roosevelt

An "obligation" to be an individual.

Wow. Could there be more powerful a concept.

We don't generally think of the obligation embedded within our right. Taking for granted the first too often seems to obliterate not obligate responsibility.

As I work on the Gulf Coast and each trip leads me on a journey continually further in pursuit of a truth that so much money, time and energy has been spent to conceal, I think a lot about my obligation. To myself as well as others.

I keep searching for a balance. A balance? Yes, in my own life and in my global life, I think. And then I remembered the words of Eleanor Roosevelt, "Remember always that you not only have the right to be an individual, you have an obligation to be one."

Not just a right, but an inalienable obligation. As such maybe there is no balance - balance suggests two or more objects held in some level of equilibrium. If right and obligation meet at individual then all are one and the same. My own life and my global life are simply Life, as I live it.

Obligation of individual to me means putting self on hold.

Today I hear that at the global summit in Cancun, Mexico the parties have accepted that there can be no global agreement on global climate change, reduction of greenhouse emissions targets.

"The rising ocean raises questions, too: What happens if the 61,000 Marshallese must abandon their low-lying atolls? Would they still be a nation? With a U.N. seat? With control of their old fisheries and their undersea minerals? Where would they live, and how would they make a living? Who, precisely, would they and their children become?" - more on the disappearing Marshalls

At what point is that Life what I focus on first? At what risk of discomfort, inconvenience, nuisance, reduced fortune, maybe even frustration? When do the decisions I need to make I actually become the decisions I make? When do I realize I am that individual with an inalienable obligation?

More: UN chief warns climate talks are too slow