I was unable to present the haiku that my participants had written at the Solena Fermiĝo due to lack of AV equipment in the auditorum, so I set up my laptop with them running in a loop at a table in the cafeteria where people could see them during breakfast. A half dozen or so took the time to actually watch and read them all. I had several people compliment me on how much they enjoyed my session. This afternoon I have posted a page that includes a little video of the 
Dumnoktaj Arboj Haiku.
After the Solena Fermiĝo, about 20 of us went to the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum. They say "It's a museum as big as Texas". I was fascinated to see how the museum presented nearly everything in Texas history with an inward, self-absorbed focus. I was struck to hear how the early rebellion in Texas was driven, in large measure, by the interests of the wealthy slave owners to be able to bring in slaves. The Texas rebellion was about the freedom to own slaves. The museum presentations generally made those two statements separated without bringing them into the sharp juxtoposition they made in my mind. In a movie about the defeat of Santa Anna, the narrator spoke of "the blood of martyrs" and even though the enemy had overwhelming weapons, they would still fight on. I was struck with how consistent the statements that might be made by insurgents in other parts of the world that fight today against the overwhelming force of the United States. A final observation was that the museum was backward looking: the display and presentations about oil, talked about the discovery and exploitation of oil as a transformative force in Texas, which it undoutedly was. Most striking was a display that showed the amount of oil pumped in various years in Texas from 1900 on, but only until 1950. That presentation makes it seem like oil production increased -- and is still increasing at an exponential level. The fact that the Texas oilfields are now exhausted was completely absent from the presentation. The idea that an oil-based economy is unsustainable was missing as well: a figure compared numbers of workers in agriculture and manufacturing "before and after" oil. A very misleading picture. The whole museum projected a comforting sense that the long-ago struggle of brave and valiant heroes had fought and won our well-deserved successes today and so on into the future. It looked back with little reflection and almost no consideration for how the past might be used to understand the future. My final observation on the museum regards the Texas Declaration of Independence. What a great progressive document. I particularly liked this one
When the Federal Republican Constitution of their country, which they have sworn to support, no longer has a substantial existence, and the whole nature of their government has been forcibly changed, without their consent, from a restricted federative republic, composed of sovereign states, to a consolidated central military despotism, in which every interest is disregarded but that of the army and the priesthood, both the eternal enemies of civil liberty, the everready minions of power, and the usual instruments of tyrants.
StevenBrewer