DO WHAT YOU LOVE, LOVE WHAT YOU DO
by the Editor
EAP has been on the road the last couple of months, and welcome, welcome, welcome, to everyone who’s joined us after that trip. It was great meeting you all, and we’re kind of hoping some of you want to join in the conversation here. What that conversation is about is how important our everyday life is, how precious. And about practical ways to improve our world. Creative and practical. Here at EAP, creative and practical sometimes seem like synonyms. And we certainly believe, from the bottom of our collective heart, that social equity and a culture based on partnership rather than domination and hierarchy are a more PRACTICAL way to run a society. Better for everyone in the long run. Yes, even economically. Not in the sense that an equitable society will make some people really, really rich. But in the sense that it will enable more people to nurture their own creativity and contribute that much more to the polity. The way things are set up now, forcing people who aren’t born rich to struggle so hard just to keep up, well, as far as we’re concerned here at EAP, that’s just the same as our pouring our oil reserves into the ocean. An incredibly short sighted waste of natural resource.
With that in mind, I do want to mildly call your attention to a link to a small You Tube movie by my own dear husband, the Beloved Vegetarian as he’s known around here, or, as he’s known in other circles, Alex Cox, filmmaker. Alex, some of you know, has just spent a year of his life making a green screen film of rather incredible production value with the help of a group of creative pals (some who became pals over the course of the production, of course). It’s a hilarious piece of work, but the main thing about it, from an EAP point of view, of course, is that it was made for love, by love, with the energy that comes from sheer enjoyment of doing good work. That’s the kind of energy that gets forgotten over and over in a system that blindly quantifies all the things that cannot be quantified (that, for example, values the work of men over that of the women who make it possible for them to work—so that the number of elderly women existing below the poverty line far out numbers the men, because their unpaid but wholly necessary labor didn’t pay into social security—that kind of system). That’s the kind of energy that we need to tap into as an unused resource if we want our idealism to be truly practical, and to truly make life as good for everyone, not just a privileged few, as it’s possible to be.
Have a look at Al’s piece about how the special effects of REPO CHICK were made, and consider that the people working here are doing this all at night and on the weekend, after their very intense day jobs…and loving it, too.
And we hope you’re loving what you’re doing, too. If you’re not, we’re going to be the first to ask: WHY not?
Welcome back.
(A special thanks this issue to newly promoted ace Editorial Assistant Jessica Johnson, who input this issue, and at the rate she's going will soon be promoted over everyone else's heads including my addled own. Thanks, Jess. And it's okay if you use the word 'cool' in any EAP business context, too.)