How to End a Song: Branding Sacrifice - Willi Paul & PlanetShifter.com Magazine

Sacrifice (from a Middle English verb meaning "to make sacred", from Old French, from Latin sacrificium: sacr, "sacred" + facere, "to make") is commonly known as the practice of offering food, objects (typically valuables), or the lives of animals or people to the gods as an act of propitiation or worship. The term is also used metaphorically to describe selfless good deeds for others or a short term loss in return for a greater gain,- Recently it has also come into use as meaning doing without something or giving something up.

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There will only a few true change agents in the green revolution. Most folks will likely wander off the cliff still-fueled by petty blind greed and capital excuses. To restate: we are all headed for a long, toxic fall. We are not sacrificers.

Which is not to say the Keys to the Sustainability Age are tucked away with an ancient security. The nature-based values and community practices found in the solar panel, permaculture and grey water workshops in my hood are the new public tools for the open sourcers, peak-oil survivalists.

There are many broken vision bridges and black oil charlatans to delete along the Aquarius Highway, my friend.

The Devil wears green.

Traditional meditation is not a big deal in the west: my DNA completely rejects the yogic pace. So I propose that we train our clans in the art of sacrifice, a day - to - day heartfelt refusal to consume blindly, without consciousness, and re-byte the Earth killing.

Questions:

• What are we giving up, in the classic sense of sacrifice?
  
• What are we not buying, in the more modern sense?
  
• We sacrifice for our own spiritual good? When?
  
• We sacrifice for family, for community and Nature? How?
  
• How do we replace the need to purchase unneeded goods and services?

I see that sacrifice is more of a spiritual practice than something residing in the material realm. This is why we are not sacrificers. A soul-less capitalism that only promotes more consumption, with lip service to sustainable values, may be the cliff that I slip on each day.

What happens to Macy's, Shell Oil and Kraft frozen foods if we make a choice to only wear second hand clothes and take only mass transit and stop eating fatty and highly processed iced foods? See your garden. Instead of falling over the cliff we just might rise to a healthier, saner and environmentally just society.

You have to love the banter between "purge" and "sacrifice." How to do it? Sell it on Craigslist.org, the global Sacrifice Machine: Buy my old TV!?

The logo for the Sacrifice Brand is attached here. Please stick it everywhere.

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Don't let it Break you Down Graham Parker, The Mona Lisa's Sister

Some people are in charge of pens that shouldn't be in charge of brooms
They have the nerve to rip up a man's life in a paragraph or two
And the aeroplanes get hijacked and all the Americans get killed
And the children are addicted to a sugar-coated pill

Well you get sent out on the racetrack, you get spurs dug in your cheeks
You'll see a winning post in the distance that you'll never reach
And there's a hole in the atmosphere gets bigger every time you spray your hair
And someone's drilling down through the earth just to see what's there