This is a fitting addition to the :

I took some liberties and added in a circle and a few other bumpf-word, bureaucratic bafflegab, don’t-know-what-I’m-trying-to-say catchphrases — straight out of Canada’s Wild Salmon Policy or the Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement, or any other “agreement”, “accord”, governmental policy, or other empty marketing pitches.

And in the spirit of Ms. Hagy’s here’s another:

(Maybe I should remember that: “less is more”… some of these blog posts carry on for quite some time)

This next piece also seems to fit in well here from Hugh Macleod’s morning emails.

Some of the text from Macleod that goes with this:

…my peers and I have a different kind of slavery to contend with, the slavery we impose upon ourselves.

Enslaving ourselves to the jobs, careers and lifestyles we hate, just in order to pay the bills. Just in order to buy fancy stuff that makes us look good on paper.

It never occurred to me when I was younger, that this kind of slavery has an element of complicity to it.

We got ourselves in this situation, partly because we willed it. We WANTED that outcome. We wanted the fancy stuff. We didn’t want to do the hard work work that would keep us away from it. We just wanted an easy life….

Mediocrity seduced us. Mediocrity won.

It’s never too late to break out of this cycle, luckily.

It all depends what you’re willing to give up. Only you can answer that.

_ _ _ _ _

And, yes, there is this element of slavery in the decisions we make with our lives — there is also a level of “complicity” and “slavery” when using empty, meaningless, bumpf-filled language. Verbal junk-food as some folks refer to it.

Sure it sounds all gooey and sweet when you’re surrounded by your peers in a boardroom or committee meeting; you fill yourself up on “best practices potato chips” and “ecological benchmark cake” all covered in “sustainability icing” and “conservation cookies” with “socially significant chips”…

You know the routine.

We don’t have to do it. We don’t have to become a slave to meaningless language – because as Macleod’s cartoon suggests, it breeds mediocrity. And it breeds obesity… obesity in language, which clogs arteries; the same arteries that deliver oxygen to the brain. If we aren’t getting oxygen to the brain, we aren’t thinking clearly.

Let’s think a little more clearly. Let’s eat a few more fresh vegetables and stop filling ourselves on verbal junk food.

To finish this today on a pretty funny note, to a devastating event; if you’ve followed some of the ‘tactics’ that BP has utilized to try and clean up the Gulf of Mexico oil spill (for example, human hair over the well along with garbage such as tires, balls, etc., celebrity input, blown estimates on how much oil is leaking, and so on) you’ll most likely get a good laugh out of this, it’s pretty clever: