Eve Ensler is best known for writing the play The Vagina Monologues and has for being a long time anti-violence activist. In November of 2009 she gave this talk about embracing our inner girl at TED India. Be sure to watch to the end to see powerful piece from her new book, I Am an Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World, as it is well worth watching.

Eve Ensler states that within each of us, men and women alike, is an inner girl. This inner girl essence is where our compassion, empathy, vulnerability, openness, and  intuition reside. She reminds us that:

Compassion informs wisdom and that
Vulnerability is our greatest strength and that
Emotions have inherent logic that lead to radical appropriate saving action.

But, our patriarchal society has systematically annihilated this inner girl, perhaps more harshly in men than in women, denying each of us the willingness to embrace our compassion and empathy. While we’ve been busy embracing our inner men, our competitive, empire building natures, we have allowed great cruelties to happen. Horrific atrocities against girls, against people, in the form of wars, genocides, rapes, beatings and female mutilations continue to happen each and day, despite the fact that there is a little voice in each of us, trying to yell at the top of her lungs, that this pain must stop. If we embrace our inner girls, and listen to their empathetic cries, would these atrocities continue?

I’ll be honest here, I have long been an anti-feminist. It is not that I don’t believe in equality for women. I most certainly do believe in equality. I believe that each person has inherent value that should never be denied, irrespective of sex, race or any other defining characteristic. I have a distaste for the way the feminist movement was executed, and the results that came out of it. Mainly the doubling of the work force, that essentially cut the value of labour in half, and made it so I will most likely not be able to afford to stay home to raise my children.

Ensler’s sort of feminism is quite different from the variety that I find myself resenting. Watching this moving talk made me realize that I have been throwing out the proverbial baby with the bath water. I have been a very lucky person, my parents supported me, and encouraged my endeavours as ferociously as they would if I had been their son. I never felt the effects of sexism growing up. For this I am grateful. Ensler reminded me that not all girls are as lucky as me. Girls across the globe still need to be stood up for, as do our inner girls! Our compassion and empathy must be valued in order to put a stop to violence against against girls, against people.

Comment Zen*

I would love to hear about your views of feminism, both of feminism of the 1960s whose consequences we live with today, and of modern feminism. How does today’s women, and men, best embrace our inner girls to allow the inner girls of tomorrow to thrive?

* The term “Comment Zen” is lovingly stolen from Havi Brooks.

I made the decision to migrate from urpisdream.com to marilynburgess.com, and completely abandon the Urpi brand. I have been grappling with my personal brand for quite some time.  I came up with the brand Urpi’s Dream in early 2009, after a trip to Peru, where I earned the nickname Urpi. I adored the name, and was eager to embrace it as a part of my online identity.

Fast forward a few months and you have me juggling 3-4 separate brands, and not being able to devote myself to any. Today my focus has next to deserted my Urpi’s Dream blog, and it’s brand. When I look at the old Urpi’s Dream blog, I don’t even get that guilty feeling that I’m neglecting something important to me. The content I intend to write on my personal blog is very dear to me. It is the personal brand, or identity that I no longer feel close to.

In the name of simplicity, I am embracing my name and my home as my personal brand. Marilyn Burgess from Vancouver, BC.

I cannot get this out of my mind! I wrote last week about the bankruptcy of GM and my hopes that the governments taking over the greater portion of the massive corporation would bring back the electric car. From the recent advertisement being played in high rotation on television, I’m guessing that’s not part of the plan. “Stronger brands” is a part of the plan. Great, marketing mumbo-jumbo for us all to enjoy:

All that aside, I can’t get over the numbers: $39.5 BILLION! $30B from the American government and $9.5B from the Canadian government is going to GM. That is a ridiculous amount of money! In a very anti-capitalist move, these governments are taking over a crippled business that is $172 Billion in debt. Why? Why is it so important that GM be saved? They made poor business decisions that led them to this mess, why should the government be bailing them out?

The employees? GM employs 243,000 people. That is a lot of people! GM employees more people than all of the people who lost their jobs in Ontario since October 2008 (234,000). If all of these people lost their jobs on the same day, tough times would certainly fall for many, concentrated in particular regions of the Canada and the US. Times are already hard, GM going under would definitely make times much harder.

But, imagine this: $39.5 Billion divided by 243,000 is $162,551 per GM employee. What if all of that money was not to go to saving a dying relic from another time, but it went to programs, grants and loans for education, re-training and small businesses. What if it went to the individual employees that stand to lose their jobs, in ways that encourage these individuals to get creative, better themselves, and find something productive to do. What potentials could these individuals realize if they were given such opportunities?

It saddens me to realize, we will likely never know.

Just a quick note to let you know that I just released an update to the Kiva WordPress Widget. Some of you may have noticed missing images. JL, helped me figure out what was going on with his contribution of the line:

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

Thank you very much JL!!

Kiva is moving their images around, and the widget wasn’t handling it. I have incorporated JL’s suggestion and released the update of the WordPress Plugin. In addition, I added a cache check to fix up all of the missing images that may be out there right now.

Get the Kiva WordPress Widget Version 2.1 here.

General Motors dropped from DOW today as it filled for bankruptcy this morning. The Obama administration is to purchase the remains of the suffering company for $30 billion, with the Canadian government chipping in an additional 9.5 billion for the Canadian branch of the company. Together the two governments and the remaining GM staffers will have an arduous task of restructuring the giant company in to a leaner organization in the hopes that it can again rise to be a profitable employer to thousands.

Almost prophetically the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? was broadcast on TV the night before GM officially filled for bankruptcy. The documentary details the story of the EV1, GM's electric car that was released in 1996. While GM did produce the EV1, they did little else to bring the innovative car to the market place. There was little or no promotion.  They didn't let people buy the EV1, leasing was the only option to procure the vehicle. They even put A-list celebrities such as Mel Gibson through lengthy questionnaires prior to letting them lease an EV1. in 1999 when GM stopped production of the EV1, they pulled all of the EV1s on the road and destroyed them, an action that was made possible by their lease only policy.

GM put an inferior battery in the first edition of the EV1, even though the owned a controlling interest in a company that had a patent for a  far superior battery invented by Stan Oshinsky . Sadly GM only released 200 second generation EV1's that included the superior battery, and later GM sold it's shares to Cheveron/Texaco who were free to suppress the innovative technology.

When GM squashed the EV1 they choose greed over innovation. This was a massive mistake. Our world is riddled with massive problems, and GM had a solution to a hand-full of them, and tossed it in the garbage, to the detriment of the company's profits,  it's some 250,000 American  employees, and most importantly the greater good. The EV1 was positioned to help with:

• The pollution problem
  

  LA Smog

• Dependence on foreign oil
  

  Desert Storm

• Rising gas prices harming industry and families
  

  Rising gas prices

Innovation should not be squandered! Google did not earn $22 billion last year because they choose to ignore innovation. Innovation brings greater wealth than clinging on to old ideas ever will. Seems to me that GM learned this the hard way... well, lets hope they have learned this!

In the documentary Wally E. Rippel, a research engineer, points out that there is still about a trillion barrels of oil in the earth. "At $100 a barrel, that's $100 trillion of business left in the ground". The fat cat oil companies have so much to gain from prohibiting new technologies from taking over our current consuption of oil and gas, and they have the power to make it happen. Their pressure on the government, and the car companies, including GM, ensured that the EV1 would not survive. Under these pressures GM chose the gas gusseling Hummer over the EV1. Ironically now, GM owes over $1 million for every Hummer on the road.

There are many lessons to be learned here. Lessons that are not new. Lessons that we all learned back in grade school from Dr. Seuss and Sesame Street. Mainly: greed does not pay in the long run.  Society and technology will continue to innovate and progress as we move into the future, because it has to.  Our population is growing, and our resources are finite. We have to come up with innovative ideas to survive in the long run. Setbacks such as the demise of the EV1 only slow progress and innovation, to the determent of our future generations. I hope the governments inheriting the remains of the once mighty American company will have the foresight and wisdom to remove this hindrance on progress and revive the Electric Vehicle project.

You can watch all of Who Killed the Electric Car? for free on youtube in 10 parts, starting with the first here: