Here is an edited version of my statement at the Minneapolis City Council budget hearing. The formatting will not carry over to Facebook: To quote Hibbing, Minnesota’s Bob Dylan and Seattle’s Jimi Hendrix: Let’s not speak falsely now, the hour is getting late. My name is Louis Alemayehu. I am currently employed as community faculty at the Higher Education Consortium for Urban Affairs. I have been employed by HECUA for a total of 7 years. I found my self well into my 60’s now and living in community as an Elder across multiple cultural communities. As my bloodlines are African, Native American and European, I have consciously sought to build bridges through the way I live in this world. My family and friendships reflects a cross section of this world. I must speak with clear intention, expansiveness with a depth of understanding and compassion for all people. We are living an immensely historic time of dramatic change. We are living in a time where prophesies from the 4 directions of the world have constellated into one story. The basic story is that we are one people and that we have come to end of a time, the end of a epoch cycle and another is beginning. To live in contradiction of the truth which says that all of life is interrelated and interdependent will cause great suffering for all the men, women and children alive, not to mention our other relatives who are of the animal and vegetation nations. We are living in what is developing to be a global environmental perfect storm. Over at least the last 200 years with the Industrial Revolution we have been recklessly burning fossil fuels as if there was no tomorrow. “No tomorrows” are clearly in view from where we are now unless we make some drastic changes. How many tomorrows in the 21st Century will there be unless we act today thinking of our children, grandchildren, great grandchildren and beyond. Make no doubt about it, we have sown some seeds as a civilization whose bitter crops we will have reap. This motivates me to have great optimism AND concern about the fate the Clean Energy Partnership and One Minneapolis. These are not random line items in a budget. They are significant tools of Democracy with profound implications for our survival as a species. What we do with these 2 items will say a lot about who we are: tragic shortsighted fools or people of hard won wisdom and courage. If implemented we could: • Build a vibrant active community that can name the common ground and a shared common vision for themselves and their children, • Build our economy with new, local, green, renewable energy businesses • Employ many who desperately need work and keep more of our Minnesota dollars circulating in Minnesota longer, • Lay the foundation for a New American Culture that holds all the Adams and Eves and their countless generations in a future we would wish for those we love and respect...our family, our neighbors.
Posted on: Thu, 11 Dec 2014 05:56:44 +0000
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