When looking for gainful employment workers often overlook how much power they have. Workers forget that employers need workers to make businesses work. That is why they pay millions to find workers. Companies have choices of whom they hire, but workers just as often have choices of whom they will help succeed. The illusion that the employer holds all of the cards blinds workers to how much power they have. That means workers rarely use that power.

Too often workers only look at who will pay the most or has the most attractive benefits package. If those are the only considerations, workers will get hoodwinked.

Workers need to think about what the company does. They need to think about what kind of world that company is trying to make. They need to look at how they treat other workers and customers. If the best workers would help the best companies succeed, it can go a long way towards creating a world where all workers get paid and treated better as well as a world where customers get treated better. Even if you have to take a job for a bad employer, you don’t have to help them more than is required to stay employed. Workers should be looking for ways to help the good employers push the bad employers out of the market.

Good companies are likely to pay better but if good workers help bad companies, then they can make it difficult for good companies to make enough to pay better. If the good company is pushed out, the bad company will like reduce the pay or even fire the good worker. If the good employer gives the bad employer an idea to improve efficiency, the bad employer will usually fire other employees, probably the friends of the good employee. Clearly this is not good for the good employee.

If the 99% would focus more on helping the 99% do better than helping the 1% become even more rich, 100% of us will do better. Let’s make a point to help those who help others.

Many languages are losing their way
and their value to humanity everyday
This thing we know
Living languages must grow

https://youtu.be/tSx4ogqlR8I

These are the first known poems of record written in the Lakota language by Lakota people. The intent is to bring a tradition of poetry to Lakota culture as an additional tool of expression for Lakota speakers. It is a small contribution to the big effort of keeping the Lakota language, and the knowledge it contains, alive for all of humanity.

When we lose a language, we lose a little part of our collective humanity. Languages hold the history, experiences and knowledge of a people. Many things said in one language cannot be expressed in another so, when that language is lost, the ability to express that thing is lost.

Keeping a language alive can only be done if there are people speaking it. Learning a language requires learning to think in the language, rather than translate, because translations often fail to deliver accurate meaning. Poetry is even more difficult to translate so writing poetry in a language is a great way to practice expressing ones self in a language being learned.

I would love to try this with some other languages. As an artist in residence, I have been facilitating learning poetry in english and I facilitate a regular poetry group in the South Dakota prison system. But it is rare that one gets a chance to start a tradition of poetry in a language that has no such tradition.

Let me know what you think of the film. Please share it with friends and family. I hope it encourages more people to speak Lakota.