Jim Macdonald's Posts - Occupy Cafe2024-03-28T18:46:37ZJim Macdonaldhttp://www.occupycafe.org/profile/JimMacdonaldhttp://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1591245461?profile=original&width=48&height=48&crop=1%3A1http://www.occupycafe.org/profiles/blog/feed?user=1s6udsx3gssmi&xn_auth=noSome Thoughts on Patriarchytag:www.occupycafe.org,2012-05-24:6451976:BlogPost:252272012-05-24T16:00:00.000ZJim Macdonaldhttp://www.occupycafe.org/profile/JimMacdonald
<p>Patriarchy literally means the rule of fathers. In more ways than we imagine, we live in a patriarchal society despite the trappings of what we call democracy. One way this is evident, for instance, is in the desire of so many people around us to be “patriotic.” That is, people who are patriotic declare their support in the most literal sense for the fatherland.</p>
<p>There are so many directions to go with this discussion, but let me start here on one path. Patriarchy, I hope it should…</p>
<p>Patriarchy literally means the rule of fathers. In more ways than we imagine, we live in a patriarchal society despite the trappings of what we call democracy. One way this is evident, for instance, is in the desire of so many people around us to be “patriotic.” That is, people who are patriotic declare their support in the most literal sense for the fatherland.</p>
<p>There are so many directions to go with this discussion, but let me start here on one path. Patriarchy, I hope it should be obvious, is – like all forms of rule – illegitimate. Nothing inherent in being a father logically entails the conclusion, “Therefore, you are right to rule over others.” The thought of trying to prove the conclusion from the premise is laughable. I provided sperm; sperm is a creative force from which you would not exist; therefore, your existence would not be if not for me. Those who provide a service are owed a debt, and therefore you owe a debt to your fathers to serve them. </p>
<p>You’ll note the additional premise connecting service with debt, which is a premise concocted out of thin air. Yet, it is a premise on which the practical applications of patriarchy surely rest. I provided the start up money for this company, and therefore I own and have a lien on your production forever. I created this idea, and therefore my copyright or patent is inviolable. I planted this land first, and therefore it is mine forever. The seed of patriarchy that roots from nothing more than a single cell is used in tandem with an invented premise to assert a right of rule over everything that came into existence because of that seed. We normally do not call this seed sperm; no one would be dignified to think that all of patriarchy arises from the messy, smelly scent of semen. Instead, we talk of labor, capital investments, improving property, and all the rights and privileges that supposedly come from that.</p>
<p>Obviously, we miss the obvious fact in patriarchy that it takes two to tango. Women and their eggs have often been left entirely out of the equation – the egg seen as a passive receiver, the earth as that which is there for the labor of man, the worker being the mere tool of the entrepreneur. In recent years, there is an attempt to correct that and to provide women equal rights. Something is missed, though. The logic of domination is still essentially patriarchal. Rather than resist the fallacy of the concept of rule, we simply choose to make patriarchs out of women, too. Or, we cleverly try to use terms like matriarchs or democrats or some new way to hide up the fact that we are still living with what are essentially patriarchal premises. That is, there is a creative force which brings a thing into existence, a debt is owed, and rule arises from the debt that needs repaying.</p>
<p>It is not hard to see, then, how property rights are tools of patriarchy. The property owner is he who plants his seed through the sweat of his brow (the metaphorical semen) and creates wealth for which he is owed payment. The property is his. It is his to defend and even expand upon if someone leaves his land barren and childless. Wars quickly arise among the fathers and their fatherlands. Peace activists stupidly say often that “peace is patriotic.” That’s nonsense. There is nothing more patriarchal and therefore patriotic than war. The line of reasoning should be obvious.</p>
<p>We also see patriarchy clearly in the way we conceive of our relationships. Men have been conceived of as better than women, of course. However, humans have been better than non-humans. Some would say that whites have been better than non-whites, though they would eventually be smacked down for not understanding the right arbitrary lines for patriarchy’s slippery slope. Being a father is to be a ruler of families. Yet, outside of the obvious hierarchy within the family itself, we begin to see each unit of society as a fiefdom of itself. Rather than see our fellow beings in our world as a community, they are competitors for what is rightly ours. We live in fenced off little lands earning our wage and not feeling any sense of responsibility for our neighbors. We live a life of tyranny driven by jealousy – our sex lives, our intellectual lives, our emotional lives are monopolized by our insular family units. If we break out of them, we are often considered to be doing something wrong. So, there’s a whole underground world of adultery, for instance. People feel constrained by their captive lives, and many inevitably reach out for something beyond their ball and chains. Yet, such things often become simply about sex. It’s convenient that the larger constraints of patriarchy are not exposed because many acts of desperate fleeing from the cages of life strike us as cliché and otherwise morally bankrupt.</p>
<p>That may sound extreme. People surely forge all kinds of friendships outside the home and all kinds of relationships within the larger community. Of course they do! The question, though, are the boundaries of those interactions. I cannot go off to a different country and simply expect to be a welcome member of the community. I am owned in my case by the United States of America. I can visit, carry on trade, or perhaps be involved with military or business escapades in the country. I cannot very easily fall in love and leave without going through a harrowing amount of red tape. This is as true in the interpersonal level, where we’ve created in many cases all kinds of boundaries that tie us so resolutely to our various fatherlands. Tell me how many of your children would be allowed to meet another child and then live with them on their own choice for months at a time. How many of your significant others could venture off the reservation for more than an hour or two – particularly with a close friend (dare we say of the opposite sex) – without seedy things being wondered at, things that violate the private property contracts that really govern our relationships whether most of us are willing to admit it.</p>
<p>I am not arguing that we do not have responsibilities with regard to each other. That is misconstruing and debasing my argument. What I am arguing is that our current relationships are rooted in a patriarchal fallacy about rule. Since that rule is fully illegitimate, we need a revolutionary approach to re-conceiving these things. Nevertheless, it would be ridiculous to think that we should therefore just go run off, have an affair, or drop out of society, move to Alaska, and die in a magic bus. Why? The negation of a falsehood does not necessarily produce a truth. If I were to say that 2 + 3 does not equal 6, it does not mean I should go out and assert that 7 is the truth because it is not 6. We have to be careful how we go about unshackling ourselves that we do not replace someone’s illegitimate patriarchy with someone else’s illegitimate matriarchy. Ultimately, you can guess from this essay – if you have never read anything else about me – that I am urging anarchy. Yet, what is anarchy in practice? Does that not depend upon a careful study of our nature? Are we really prepared to take on that study?</p>
<p>Thus, I’d urge that to undo patriarchy at the macro and micro levels, we need to have real conversations about our nature, and about the nature of reality itself. Such an act is in some sense defiance against patriarchy, as it puts the onus on us rather than someone else to figure out answers for us. And, rather than urge more specific answers, I’d call on people to engage the question honestly and seek to root out patriarchy from our lives and own up how it infects each of us (certainly in the case of men like me, but in all humans). I know I have so very far to go, which is no doubt a large part of what motivates me to write this.</p>Fellow Fools, Come Closer!tag:www.occupycafe.org,2012-04-13:6451976:BlogPost:241592012-04-13T22:00:00.000ZJim Macdonaldhttp://www.occupycafe.org/profile/JimMacdonald
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<p>Earlier this week, I wrote and published an essay entitled “<a href="http://www.rockymt.org/407"></a><a href="http://www.rockymt.org/?q=node/407" target="_blank">Fools! A Cry of Hope!</a>” that has elicited a response I scarcely could have anticipated. First published on the Northern Rockies Independent Media…</p>
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<div class="field field-name-field-write-article field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Fellow fools, come closer!</p>
<p>Earlier this week, I wrote and published an essay entitled “<a href="http://www.rockymt.org/407"></a><a href="http://www.rockymt.org/?q=node/407" target="_blank">Fools! A Cry of Hope!</a>” that has elicited a response I scarcely could have anticipated. First published on the Northern Rockies Independent Media Network – among the obscurest outposts in cyberspace – to my pleasant surprise, it soon appeared on the much more popular <a href="http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article31051.htm">Information Clearing House website</a>. The essay has received dozens of comments from all over the world, almost all of which have been positive. Nevertheless, the majority of commenters have missed at least something of the essay’s essence. Most commonly, people have used the word “resonated” to describe how it made them feel, but then they either have described the commentary as “bleak,” “sad,” “cynical,” as “embracing absurdity,” or as a call for people to be fools.</p>
<p>Briefly, let me paraphrase what I was trying to convey. The social, political, and economic system is dominated by very few people who have made fools of us. They have perpetuated a system where a middle class is kept fat and lazy enough not to notice that there are deep problems in our society that express themselves in a number of artificial hierarchies – classism, sexism, racism, nationalism, and speciesism to name just a handful. Because the system is what it is, it is impossible to reform the system. We actually have no voice in respect to the current system. That is why we have been made fools – i.e., fools <em>in respect to</em> those few who rule as despots over everyone else. The protestor who screams and shouts and recognizes the irony of her own situation is in that sense more rational (by apparently being foolish and crazy) because there is no conversation to be had with power. We have been made irrelevant and voiceless, and thus we speak more honestly by screaming as caged animals than with the false so-called rationality of trying to craft a message to speak or petition the powers that be. The recognition that we have been reduced to fools is the beginning of wisdom, but it is not enough. We also need hope that we may no longer be fools, that the system can be broken. I urged that the beginning of hope is the hard work of making friends, that the system cannot be broken unless we develop the means to break it. Friendship, which is based in equality and freedom, is the beginning of that hope. That hope, at first, manifests itself through ineffectual and apparently deranged screaming in the streets, but it may become effective if the culture of friendship spreads. Screams, then, may be heard; the tower of Babel (babble, Babylonian <em>Empire</em>) might come crashing down.</p>
<p>Thus, the essay was fully intended to be a <em>positive</em> cry of hope. It was a message encouraging us to take to the streets, all while recognizing the futility of change seen as reform of the system. Instead, we should not only take to the streets and scream, but also we should take steps to revolutionize our approach with an aim of destroying that system, leaving in its wake the rubble of babbling friends, who are no longer fools without a voice, but wise with the love of friends. It was a primal scream of desperation, of longing, of recognizing that the human is still there embedded inside of us – that though we have been made cogs in a machine, that we are not merely cogs. As a result, I screamed a desperate cry of hope arising from the dungeon of loneliness, from one who longs for the friendships that can make systemic obliteration an actual reality.</p>
<p>It was not a praise of folly, a call to mere cynicism, existential irony, or a lament.</p>
<p>Rather, it was a primal scream urging us to recognize the essence of a problem and to forge the deep and meaningful friendships that must serve as the basis for any revolutionary cultural shift. It partially came from a deeply personal place; it partially came as a social commentary that gives rise to that personal reaction. Obviously, I found myself deeply humbled that it reached people at that profoundly personal level, but I am urging something far more than angst and absurdity.</p>
<p>Keeping all of this in mind, I want to frame the same conversation in a different way, though keeping the two threads of the personal and the social together, forging perhaps more clearly the seed of hope that I want so dearly to plant in this inorganic wasteland of us fools who are either pleasantly unaware or desperately desiring something more for ourselves.</p>
<p>So, fellow fools, draw even closer! My voice is not very strong (literally, my voice is very hoarse today), but my heart and mind have much to share.</p>
<p>Today finds me 38 years old and a half year or so of change, but my birth might as well have been when I was 17. That year found me incredibly depressed pining, as so many lonely boys do, for the fanciful notion of a “one true love.” I was convinced in some respects that I was a vile and ugly creature (some things never fully change), though perhaps with some qualities that could be loved by the right person. When I was 17, I developed another in a long string of crushes, and depression ensued because I knew that it would not work out. Even though for the first time in my life, I worked up the nerve against all my timidity to express how I felt, the result was predictably rejection. Nevertheless, the ability to pour open my heart was a birth of sorts – a freedom that I did not know was possible. The possibilities of emotional expression seemed boundless, and the world did not seem so desperately bleak if only … .</p>
<p>I found myself newly born and quite actually taking a bath when I had what I took to be an epiphany. “Dreams,” I said aloud to myself, “should not die.” Then, it came to me, “What if there were a group of people dedicated to making each other’s dreams come true, who were compelled by the nature of the group to work for each other’s hopes and aspirations without question or judgment?” I was influenced by the romanticism of the movie <em>Dead Poets’ Society</em> but was frustrated that the “sucking the marrow out of life” was reduced to the narrow confines of poetry. In these few moments, I dreamed suddenly of people aiding each other out of compassion and duty, sharing their depths in the most soulful and unlimited ways possible. What I would immediately call “The Young Romantics” was born. As one soon-to-be close friend called it, a call for “friends” was born.</p>
<p>Now, the idea captured people’s imaginations, particularly young teenage boys frustrated by life and desperately searching for an outlet of expression. It struck a chord; it resonated. </p>
<p>We didn’t realize just how foolish we were, though. For instance, one friend desired to be an Air Force pilot – a job ostensibly that would put him in the position to kill others. I was a pacifist, and yet the vision I had would bound me to help others on the idea that “all dreams were equal and that all dreams should be possible.” To give another example, my dream obviously was to have “romantic love,” but I did not just want any romantic love; I inevitably had an object for my affection. Thus, whereas love should be a free association, fellow dreamers would be committed to trying to help me win over a particular person, thus to objectify that person as the mere object of an individual dream.</p>
<p>That may go a long way toward explaining why the Young Romantics produced some penetratingly beautiful moments – where people shared things so vulnerable that I do not dare share here – but which ultimately faded away quickly. In all our earnestness and naiveté toward building a community of dreamers aiding dreamers under dreamy skies, we failed to recognize the social context of these dreams. We failed to understand that our dreams were the products of the same social structures that make us all mute and all our aspirations moot. How can we dream to possess the love of another? How can we dream to fly a craft of destruction? How can we possibly aid ourselves as though we live in a vacuum, the space which our dreams must traverse simply a vacuum full of objects for our taking? Dreaming, in absence of context, will perpetuate foolishness. I am sure that Christopher Columbus was a dreamer; are we really bound to help a man who sails the ocean blue for God, glory, and gold – who more to the point, engaged in a genocidal pursuit in the “New World”? Are we to engage in the dream of a nation, of a race, of a way of life that exists apart?</p>
<p>Now, there was something raw about the Young Romantics, something that arose from the deep-seated loneliness that strikes those who become aware that something is amiss in the world. It is raw, human, and well meaning. It sought to find a chorus to wonder melodically within the halls of the most beautiful places. Indeed, some of the greatest nights of my life were huddled with up to four others under the shooting stars of Yellowstone, lodged above the depths of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, hearing nothing but the sound of our desperate voices as the Yellowstone River roared below invisible beneath the enchanting milky skies. Yet, it was ultimately overcome by the tragic flaw that believes we can merely be in a moment, be in ourselves, act in a world apart, and define the circle of friends narrowly at the expense of the “not me.” We held to that belief that we exist as individuals in a nature known simply as the “not me,” which is a tragic flaw in romanticism, in general – in the hearts of Emerson and Thoreau and Whitman that had perhaps permeated us unwittingly. Those dead poets and essayists now lived their tragic flaw through us.</p>
<p>Now older, I do not renounce dreams or friendship per se, but I no longer believe that there is an intrinsic beauty to a dream or to the dreamer. We live squarely in a world where we have all – ruler and ruled alike – been made fools, stuck in contexts where we are at once victimizer and victimized. That is, we live in a community of angst that spreads throughout. The most beautiful place in the world to me – nearby Yellowstone – is not even quite what it was to me. I recognize that Yellowstone is a political boundary set apart and managed apart to serve particular economic and political interests forbidding it from being what it might be. There are no pure places; no sacred ground on which to plant our flags and establish our hopes and dreams.</p>
<p>What I am getting at is to criticize another notion – that the way to social change is simply to set up an alternative community that exists apart, or at best alongside the existing social system. Theoretically, such a world feeds on a mistake, namely that we can set up a society that merely treats the diseased social order as an object of our care, of our aspirations. We think we can act purely apart, and maybe the world will one day come to us, or that we can at least carve out a better space. At 17, that sort of communal living was my dream. Yet, the truth is that we do not ever live apart. Our community is not merely human – we live within a biological and ecological community; we live in a community of land that is surely not as inert as we imagine. We breathe and are infused with a common air, and even if we could get around the notion that industrialization has created far too many of us to live apart, counting who “us” is cannot be so simple. Romanticism and communalism is essentially also a kind of liberal idea, one with the pretense that we simply find our voices in terms of each other as a mere community of equals and that we can create the systems that project outside of our circle which may convince the larger society through our example (or harness the larger world to serve our needs). </p>
<p>How benevolent and paternalistic of us! It is also hopelessly naïve and logically incoherent. All we have done is exacerbated hierarchy. We set ourselves apart as an <em>avant garde</em>, living the good life, pure in our intentions, that the wretches may soon follow our example. Soon, we become like one commune that frequented the streets of Washington, DC, selling t-shirts that read “Stop bitching, and start a revolution!” Perhaps, they should more appropriately read, “Stop bitching, and sell t-shirts.” Maybe, we have found friendship, but we remain as fools. The world is still essentially an object for our action, a world where only our privilege – not to mention a fair amount of luck that the bigger plutocratic fish allow such frivolity under their noses – leaves everyone else behind. This is all while failing to understand the intrinsic notion that society cannot truly live separately and outside a shared context – i.e., our universe.</p>
<p>No, fellow fools, though we cannot reform this crazy system, we also cannot leave it. We are thoroughly infected by the environmental ills that become our nature the moment we are born. You don’t simply eradicate thousands of years of patriarchy simply by finding some friends who do not treat each other that way – you exacerbate it. I cannot pretend that I am not white or male or straight or human or middle class or American simply out of the knowledge that those categories do not make sense. We have to wear our scars; we have to own up to our place in this society. We have to own up that we are not yet in a place where we can live simply and purely in accordance with our nature – our nature as romantics, as dreamers, as caregivers, as lovers of wisdom. There is no frontier from which we can establish utopia – that place which is nowhere.</p>
<p>Rather, we begin with this mess; if there’s any hope, it must be possible within this inorganic manure. That is no doubt why many turn to various reform measures, though they are so clearly hopeless. They perhaps are guilty of the crime that we can fix things in absence of friendship, that the problem is merely mechanical. They yell, “Vote!” They yell, “Sign this petition!” They yell, “Give money to this cause!” They are fools, but we can see what gives rise to it. They know that there is no new frontier; that frontier attitudes are those of emperors and kings and Andrew Jackson. No, we must find hope in open resistance to this system, within this system, struggling to create friendships in full awareness of the pitfalls all around us. It is not okay to support your brother who wishes to drop bombs on other countries, or your other brother who wishes to possess a girl out of some Disney-esque notion of love. Rather, we must support each other to build the right sort of weapons that we might all live freely according to our natures. We absolutely must take actions against the systems of power all while working on the means to overcome the systems of abuse. Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, shelter those in need of shelter, but do so simultaneously with the aim of making friends who are at once sworn enemies of the absurdity that leaves us incoherent before their majesty.</p>
<p>We must necessarily stumble; we must necessarily start from a place where almost by definition we at first go wrong. That is why screaming is more than okay in the short term, why it is a rational response to an irrational situation. The primal scream is the cell from which we grow like cancer on the system, but grow as dreamers and poets among each other. </p>
<p>I guess that is why I am simultaneously working on a project like a bank divestment campaign (in my case, particularly against Wells Fargo) all while organizing potlucks with the scattered individuals who feel likewise in Bozeman, Montana. We do not seek to be mere dreamers; we seek to be builders and destroyers. Revolution requires both; to believe that both are actually not only possible but also necessary is what I take to be the essence of radical direct action. We must fuse our social connectivity and context – that is, our environment – with the individual who yearns to be loved, who so desperately wants to be held and touched and heard.</p>
<p>This also is the hope of the Occupy Movement – the groups that would dare set up encampments in eyesight of the plutocrats in power. Not a commune apart but rather an open community of action within, Occupy perhaps best expresses what I am suggesting. Here hope finds itself like a community eyesore where all the social problems of urban life come to the fore. Nevertheless, within that eyesore, friendships are being forged and voices are being heard, despite many inevitable missteps. No one should fret long about missteps; they are inevitable. The community does not stand on a new frontier but within a swampy “bedrock” of filth and decay and buffoonery. We have to expect that it will always be hard overcoming thousands of years of the impositions of cities over the land – i.e., civilization – and hundreds of years of capitalism over everything else.</p>
<p>The Occupy Movement is merely one form of acting on the program I propose, but for many of us, it is an available form. Nevertheless, we should constantly be engaged in a process of open critique and ready for new organic forms to emerge, like new diseases in nature. Note at 38, I am no longer speaking simply in terms of waterfalls and shooting stars but seeking to find friends among cancers, termites, and wrecking balls. All the same, we cannot simply note our antagonisms; we have to remember that not far beneath our surface is still a young girl or boy – still an infant – longing to be held and for friends to help us through the chaos of sensual experience. We seek family, and kinship, and tribes, and all the things that make us alive. Though we cannot now live only in accordance with our natures, our natures must still find expression in what we do.</p>
<p>In closing, let me say a word specifically to my new friends in Bozeman. Can we be activists who are also friends? As Sasha once said to The Girl, “We are comrades. Let us be friends, too – let us work together.” Let us work inside this world of foolishness that we may all yet be wise, that we may all yet be happy. Your concerns are my concerns, and our concerns are everyone who is not yet and may never be friends. There is much work to be done, but look! Tonight, also those Gallatin Mountains are dreamy dreamers with us! Behold them and each other!</p>
<p>And, to the rest of you, we may never be friends, but here’s to wishing it for you and for all the mutual aid and solidarity that we can muster.</p>
<p>Fools, I have said too much; forgive me, what have you to say among the elk and buffalo trapped on this government farm?</p>
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</div>Fools! A Cry of Hope!tag:www.occupycafe.org,2012-04-09:6451976:BlogPost:242512012-04-09T18:19:27.000ZJim Macdonaldhttp://www.occupycafe.org/profile/JimMacdonald
<div class="field field-name-field-write-article field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>In our society, there are a few people who control most of the money and almost all of the levers of power, and then there are the rest of us. That is surely an oversimplification, though. For in the rest of us, we can find all kinds of divisions of power. Men have it better than women, whites than people of color, American citizens than…</p>
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<div class="field field-name-field-write-article field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>In our society, there are a few people who control most of the money and almost all of the levers of power, and then there are the rest of us. That is surely an oversimplification, though. For in the rest of us, we can find all kinds of divisions of power. Men have it better than women, whites than people of color, American citizens than foreigners, middle class than poor, fully able bodied than those with disabilities, human than non-human, property owner than non-property owner, manager than worker, good-looking than ugly, stronger than weaker, and on and on. Yet, surely all of these other hierarchies might be easier to eradicate if there were not so few people controlling the economic and political capital and all that goes with it – namely government at all its levels including the laws, military, and police; business at all its levels, particularly the large corporations; the banks at all their levels, especially the mega banks (I know you’re not listening, Wells Fargo); etc. These same people control the mass media – and the useless range of talking heads we hear – and the policy choices left as scraps for those foolish enough to believe their vote matters.</p>
<p>Of course, that we are all left as fools is the point. Compared with their power, we are mere babbling idiots. I am allowed to write these things because they resonate nowhere. I am lucky if I can get my friends and family to read these essays. At most, my reach is a few hundred people for any given essay. If my message is intended to penetrate those who wield power, it simply cannot. Therefore, I am not a threat. Voices much larger than mine – from Amy Goodman to Noam Chomsky to Michael Moore – cannot make a dent in their citadel. In respect to it, we are left as babbling idiots. We, to them, are no more than the curiosities we find at the zoo – the same zoo animals that we happily abuse without a second thought. “Don’t feed the animals” might as well be a message for treating us. Ignore them, and they will go away. Give them a deal on consumer junk. Numb their minds with the safety of popular culture where what passes for radical is whether someone dares to utter a foul word or shows too much skin.</p>
<p>Many people are surely “happy” with this life. They make enough money, they have a nice enough family, and they enjoy watching television day after day after day. So long as the upper classes keep a moderately fattened middle class, the wretched underbelly of the society will continue to be tolerated. You never see domestic cows rise up whatever their conditions. Just keep them sufficiently fat, and they will find contentment in that. I doubt that cows are actually content with that, but I want to make a different point. Keeping a cow fat comes at a cost. In Greater Yellowstone, it literally and specifically means the deaths and torture of thousands of bison. In human terms, it can mean computer chips coming at the cost of millions of lives in Africa, chronic poverty, and a permanent underclass of despair. It often means wars in other countries to maintain control over oil and energy resources, it means detrimental land practices, and that interestingly can lead to deaths and torture of thousands of bison. For keeping cows fat is not irrelevant in practice to keeping humans grazing on potatoes (in a thousand different varieties) from the couch.</p>
<p>Yet, as long as we do not have to think about any of these things ourselves – so long as enough of us can remain fat and lazy – we are free to do whatever we want within the range of minutiae left for us (even to write essays like this – whatever floats your boat?)</p>
<p>We are left babbling fools. When some people wake up to their condition and decide that they want to live their lives more fully – recognizing that the happiest life is one where each of us has the chance for the fullest expression of our nature – they occasionally go out to protest. This has happened in the last year with the Occupy Movement; it has happened here in Bozeman, Montana with a Wells Fargo divestment campaign and other actions. Inevitably, some people show up, raise a fuss, other people honk horns, and everyone goes home. To the vast majority, it just looks like a show – a perverse show perhaps that could use a director and professional writers. It’s where the lunatics go, not the respectable people. Respectable people understand that change is not made that way. No one listens to lunatics on the side of the road waving signs and speaking incoherently into a sound system. It smacks of almost a religious cult to go out there with a sign proselytizing and chanting like maniacs. </p>
<p>What the respectable person does not realize is that he too has been made into a fool. Most people live in their silly little boxes connecting their asses to the couch, with a beer at their side, a remote control where their penis might be, flipping through hundreds of channels constantly. Perhaps, they pride themselves on being outdoors people, going out and hiking in the mountains with their dogs, enjoying the scenery and the physical exertion. This is all good; even animals need their exercise. They think they have found a place to keep their dogs off their leashes, but the leashes are firmly around our necks. The moment ends, and we return to our jobs and the numbing routine of life. Look at this society from the sky, and you see what looks like an ant colony marching in line, the land turned into grids, and all the people down there look like mere ants filling up those grids with their cars. The respectable person has been made a fool. Our ancestors would not likely see this as progress. They would laugh at what buffoons we have made of our lives.</p>
<p>Through peaks, we see that things are not nearly so dreamy that even the happy caged fool imagines himself. We get a glimpse behind the American Beauties at the high divorce rate, at the high suicide rates, at polls that suggest that the respectable people don’t think things are going in the right direction. Alcoholism and drug abuse are high at all socioeconomic levels; diseases related to obesity are gaining strength as well – all while health care costs are skyrocketing and many formerly middle class people have lost their homes and their jobs. There is high anxiety about whether the middle class trough isn’t soon disappearing. Indeed, I am not immune; I can write this essay today because my contract at another job recently ended, and I too am between jobs and unsure whether my trough will run dry. We do not know where to turn. Our friends are the people we get drunk with; can we count on them to be there when things really get tough, when we might find ourselves imposing on them? In some cases, we are fortunate. Many are not; they do not even know their neighbors.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, the happy fools are content enough and only take a disdainful glance at anyone who reminds them that there are many who are not and have never been so fortunate – that the 2008 economic recession was their lot long before the housing market collapsed.</p>
<p>The protestor actually has it right to yell and scream and wave all kinds of signs and to be as incoherent as possible. That is who we all are in respect to the few people who have all the economic and political power. Those who pretend they can change Wells Fargo or elect the right man who promises the right kind of hope are dangerously delusional. They are merely seen as yelling and screaming, too, but they waste their time pretending that there’s a reason to craft their message. We have seen with bison where that goes when a Greater Yellowstone Coalition, for instance, repeatedly sells wild bison out for the “next step forward.” They believe they have the ear of the governor, as if that matters. We have seen what all the electioneering has done to give us a President Obama who has plenty of blood on his hands – continuing to wage wars across the world. They have elected Democratic and Republican congresses, and they are surely not the same (one is always going to be better than the other), but they did not derive their power from you. They derive it from those who hold the purse strings. That is why they can pretend to be environmentalists, for instance, all while supporting hydraulic fracturing. That is why they take a half moment to shake your hand while spending hours wining and dining with the rich and influential.</p>
<p>There is a logical notion lost on many people – that of the false antecedent. Namely, in any compound proposition, if the antecedent is false, it really does not matter what the consequent is. The entire statement will be true because the entire statement is vacuous. Thus, in the proposition, “If the cow jumped over the moon, then the moon will be made of green cheese,” the entire proposition is true because the antecedent is always false. The cow did not and has not jumped over the moon, and therefore you can say whatever you like about it. It does not matter. You can say that the moon is made of rocks, or you can say that Elvis is still alive. I’d suggest considering the false antecedent, “<em>If your voice matters</em>, then you should ….” The protestor goes out realizing that we are all made into babbling idiots. Others choose to vote. Others have a barbecue and text their choice for the next American Idol. C’est la vie.</p>
<p>The real problem, of course, is that our voices – the extension of what it means for us to be alive as humans – do not matter in the least. Thus, I’d suggest that acting like fools via protest serves a more rational purpose in one respect. The protestor is, by screaming and yelling, trying to express to the rest of us that we are reduced to a state of relative insanity, and that we fellow fools need to do something about it. Unfortunately, the message is lost on a dumbfounded public that misses the irony. That is no doubt why I find myself writing an essay like this – so that at least those few people who hear this recognize that we have as much hope of getting our message across to the powers that be screaming like fools than doing anything else. Or, maybe, we just need to figure out how to be more entertaining. As court jesters, we might be able to be more subversive than we realize if only we were more conscious of our aim. My sense is that too many protestors believe that they are doing something that might communicate a serious message. There is a serious message for sure; however, we need to step back and realize that the message isn’t to be found in our signs, but in our desperation – in the fact that we are exposing the truth of what we all are – lab animals in some sadistic if yet silly experiment.</p>
<p>Consciousness that we have been made fools, then, is perhaps the first step of wisdom.</p>
<p>However, I have left out something very important. While we are fools in respect to them, we must learn to be meaningful friends with each other. We should never want to have the kind of power and prestige that the rich and powerful have. They too are fools in choosing a world where only the scattered few have the opportunity to live freely, constantly having to plot ways to stay on top of the pile. It is no doubt why Plato in <em>Republic</em> likened the despot to the unhappiest person of all. Anyhow, in respect to each other, we’ve also been made fools by the various power dominations that exist within our society. It can often feel beyond hopeless that we can find meaningful friendships that we can trust. Relationships between races are fraught with mistrust due to the history of racism in society. Women are often rightfully untrusting of the motives of men. A poorer friend may think his wealthier friend may use his favor over him. Many groups of people dissolve into petty soap operas rooted in the stupidity with which we feed on in this social structure. Yet, overcoming many of those obstacles is so important – to find a place where your voice matters, to find a group of people where you can scream to your heart’s content but be there with a kind word, a meal, or even a building project.</p>
<p>I meet a lot of people who admit a core of loneliness. If recognizing we are made fools is the beginning of wisdom, then the admission of our loneliness – strange as it may sound – is the beginning of hope. When people both realize their place as fools in this world and yet also find a kindred bond with some in the immediate environment, then maybe there’s a reason to care, to be rational, and reasonable, and respectable. There we find the true seeds of happiness – not the inner peace sold like a potion and not the so called outer peace of hope in someone else somewhere else – but in discovering something simultaneously in ourselves and with each other. Only if we can succeed at those first steps can we have any hope of raising our voices loud enough to be heard up in the citadel, to make ourselves strong enough to tear that tower of Babel down once and for all.</p>
<p>This is my cry in the dark. Has anyone heard? I don’t want to be left howling alone in this dungeon. Enough is enough! Let us sing a new song!</p>
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</div>The Problem of the Biodegradibility of Revolutiontag:www.occupycafe.org,2012-03-19:6451976:BlogPost:236912012-03-19T17:00:00.000ZJim Macdonaldhttp://www.occupycafe.org/profile/JimMacdonald
<div class="field field-name-field-write-article field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Four years ago, I wrote an essay called <a href="http://www.eclecticworld.org/2008/03/revolution-of-small-uselessness-of.html">Revolution of the Small: The Uselessness of Global Action and the Need to Take Local Action (Here in Bozeman, Montana)</a>. The main point of the essay was that a person's voice is only meaningful within the range where that…</p>
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<div class="field field-name-field-write-article field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Four years ago, I wrote an essay called <a href="http://www.eclecticworld.org/2008/03/revolution-of-small-uselessness-of.html">Revolution of the Small: The Uselessness of Global Action and the Need to Take Local Action (Here in Bozeman, Montana)</a>. The main point of the essay was that a person's voice is only meaningful within the range where that voice can be heard. Actions where people try to speak beyond the immediacy of our senses (as when people vote, or buy consumer goods, or join national advocacy organizations) are not meaningful actions because each of our voices becomes such a small fraction of the entire whole. However, because all of our actions do have consequences that reverberate across the universe, it is possible to take local actions which have revolutionary consequences.</p>
<p>I want to piggyback off of that essay to consider a complementary problem of revolution. Because the systems of oppression in our society are so large - global capitalism, global-scale environmental destruction, nuclear weapons, huge nation states - one cannot pretend that a small group in Montana can (or should) successfully pull off the destruction of these systems by ourselves. If we were somehow able to bring capitalism, for instance, to its knees, what would that say about us? Would it say we are damn effective? Or, rather would it say that either we had far more power than any small group of humans should possess, or that we just somehow happened on hitting a leverage point in the system that brought the whole thing tumbling down? We should think the second case more fortuitous except for this point - what next? What happens if the system just unexpectedly crashes down because of a random action somewhere? Are we suddenly to expect liberty and justice to spread throughout the land? Will the hierarchies of abuse simply be gone because the governing and economic systems were thrown into a momentary state of chaos? I would think not, if only because there would have been no cultural change in society. Where would the racists have gone? Would people stop trying to be greedy? Would people stop trying to get others to work in the new factories? Will others not try to get their hands on nuclear weapons?</p>
<p>The truth is that revolutions of this type have happened occasionally in history. The most obvious example was in Russia, where the disaster of World War I finally was the impetus for many decades of radical movement-building to bring about the collapse of the tsar and eventually the rise of Lenin and the Bolsheviks. The ultimate autocratic society crashed and along with it its capitalist institutions. What replaced it? - autocracy and graft and persecution of anyone who did not tote the party line. Defenders of Bolshevism say that this was due to the pressure and ostracizing from the rest of the world, which necessitated the hardships and ugliness of autocracy, but if you read works like Emma Goldman's <a href="http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/goldman/works/1920s/disillusionment/index.htm">Disillusionment in Russia</a> and <a href="http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/goldman/living/livingtoc.html">Living My Life</a> one will quickly realize that what happened in Soviet Russia was not at all a revolution and its horrors could not be explained simply by outside intervention. And, that was at the beginning. After many decades of Communist rule, it would be hard to say that the Soviet Union was anything akin to a transitional state to a revolutionary stateless society.</p>
<p>So, even if you doubt your intuitions that a sudden collapse brought about by a few people would not provide the revolutionary change we seek, search through the sudden revolutions of history (from France to Russia to Egypt last year) and see what little such a view of revolution has accomplished.</p>
<p>I want to note two points from this discussion. The first is that a small group of people by themselves cannot bring about a meaningful and lasting revolution. The second is that there is a problem in identifying what will bring about a meaningful and lasting revolution.</p>
<p>If revolutions must begin with small groups of people, but that it must also involve many small groups of people so as to be large enough to take on the system, obviously this raises a lot of issues - many of them I cannot discuss here and frankly I cannot answer. How do small groups coordinate in a way that they can become big while activists work only within the small local context? That is another problem we will need to turn to in another discussion and one that <a href="http://www.occupycafe.org/group/occupy-structure-and-governance/forum/topics/effectiveness-in-sociocratic-and-other-terms">people are discussing</a>. The problem I want to get at, rather, is the notion of the size, scope, and form of a revolution. That is, revolutions must arise out of small groups (if my previous essay from four years ago is correct), but revolutions must be large enough to have any hope of being meaningful and lasting. What form should they take so that they will not simply be transfers of power from one large group to another?</p>
<p>I call this the problem of biodegradability. That is, revolutions must be biodegradable in the way that the consumer products we use should be biodegradable. The power we use to take down the systems of abuse in society must not itself become the new power that lords over everyone else. The power must decompose and not quickly come back. Eventually, any manner of injustice may come back and rise again, and so let me be a little more precise. I think it is enough to be meaningful and lasting if it is not likely to come back during a generation of life, the span in which those who brought about the revolution can live freely without imposing or being imposed upon in any essential way by someone else (that is yet another question we cannot delve into in this essay in any meaningful way and is another huge question). What can bring this about? What allows for small groups of people to band together to take on global power structures that just as quickly fade away?</p>
<p>One controversial thing I'll say to start is that I think that this sort of revolution must then exclude the notion of an armed revolution. It is not necessarily to say that guns need fade away or be eradicated. The truth is; it's hard to see that happening. It is to say that the use of guns cannot be the power that produces revolutionary change. The reason for this seems simple to my mind. If guns are the power that produces revolution, does the power dissipate once the goal has been accomplished? Does not power now reside in those who used the guns to bring about the change? Why should we not expect a new Soviet Union? Why should we call this revolution? We will have killed people; will we have killed a system of hierarchy?</p>
<p>This again is not to say that guns will be gone; the point here is one about power. What power is used to bring about change such that when it is finished, it too is finished? Revolution may in that way be seen more like a cancer on the system. Once the body is killed by cancer, there isn't something left over called cancer that rules the now lifeless body. It too is gone, and the body rots into the earth.</p>
<p>What kind of power then eats at the system but is gone as soon as the system is gone? This is another reason to suggest that revolutions must be led by small groups of people. However, it is not any kind of small group of people. They must be small groups of people who do not function like the hierarchical systems that they resist against - that is, small groups of people who work on principles of consensus and mutual aid function in respect and solidarity with one another. If their actions are directed against abuses in the system, and those small groups are multiplied enough, then the cumulative effect of their actions should matter. If for instance, everyone opted out of the banking system AND worked on creating systems of material aid and support that worked within their very small community, then you would not only be hurting the system but also you would be doing so in a way that was culturally different. If things fall apart, then that small group has been developing the means to care for each other's basic needs. Revolution, then, is a simultaneous effort of large numbers of small groups taking direct action against leverage points in the system while developing and caring for the particular material needs of a group in a non-hierarchical, non-oppressive manner.</p>
<p>Now, that sounds highly unlikely even if I cannot understand how it would be impossible. It may be why I would have trouble finding actual examples of revolution in history. However, it is not impossible. I challenge anyone to show me the contradiction in the model proposed. I do not find one, but I admit that I have no idea how you are going to have a movement so large composed of so many smaller groups of people working on a culturally just model who simultaneously take actions against the overarching system. Yet, that to me seems exactly what is required. It requires taking actions at a local level, not knowing whether anyone will be doing the same in sufficient mass, and doing so on a non-hierarchical model. Wow ... but is it any wonder that history is the sad story of humanity run amok?</p>
<p>What's more, is it any reason not to work for it? The truth is, all of us are better off even if revolution remains elusive to try to go down this route. We will have greater voice the degree to which we engage each other within the range of our actual voices. We will be better off if we find ways to take care of each other. We will be better off if we force the powers that control the system to spend resources to try and quash us. It may not be enough for everyone and our world, but what other choice is there, really? Why should we expect a quick and easy solution? We want a magic bullet, but that is a large part of our problem. We want to get rid of the powers that abuse us, but we think that happens by some quick and aggressive power? This does not involve any meaningful revolution; it will only produce new devils.</p>
<p>Right now, I'm <a href="http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bright/berkman/prison/toc.html">reading about Alexander Berkman</a>, who spent 14 years in prison for attempting to kill Henry Clay Frick during the Homestead steel lockout in 1892. Berkman saw what he was doing as an attentat, a violent act of propaganda, not so much against Frick, but against the system that Frick represented. Frick would die, and the people might see the power they possess through that act. The truth is that Frick didn't die, but even if he had, all that was likely to happen was that Frick would have been replaced. Even if somehow the act of propaganda had served its purpose and the strikers managed to win a pitched battle against Pinkertons and the militia at Homestead would see themselves suddenly as proletarians (somehow fully understanding the import of Berkman's act), why should we imagine that anything is likely to have changed in Western Pennsylvania? I wonder if ultimately that is the lesson that Berkman would have to learn the hard way when he too became disillusioned in Russia so much so that he wrote a book called <a href="http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bright/berkman/bmyth/bmtoc.html">The Bolshevik Myth</a>.</p>
<p>If we shoot and hit or shoot and miss, that means nothing. What matters is that we do something that has the potential for revolution. We won't get there by traveling to the seat of abuse where no one knows us and doing something where our voice will fall flat. Action must begin for me here in Bozeman and project at the tentacles of power that reach here. From there, you have to build growing overlapping circles of smaller groups, and then you have to hope. That's all we can do; if we really want profound change, we must toil and be workers. Revolution will come if and only if a critical mass embraces that cultural change.</p>
<p>A lot has gone unsaid, and I hope that there is a path that is somewhat easier than the one I have outlined. At this point, I'll throw it out for discussion, particularly within the smaller groups in which I actively engage.</p>
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</div>Wells Fargo and the Loss of Our Voices: One Anarchist's Viewtag:www.occupycafe.org,2012-03-09:6451976:BlogPost:233762012-03-09T20:13:38.000ZJim Macdonaldhttp://www.occupycafe.org/profile/JimMacdonald
<p>In weeks past, I have – in my capacity as a member of <a href="http://occupybozeman.org" target="_blank">Occupy Bozeman</a> – written about <a href="http://www.rockymt.org/?q=node/310" target="_blank">many of the reasons</a> why you should get your money out of big banks – particularly Wells Fargo – as part of a <a href="http://www.rockymt.org/?q=node/323" target="_blank">divestment campaign</a> we are waging against the bank. That campaign continues…</p>
<p>In weeks past, I have – in my capacity as a member of <a href="http://occupybozeman.org" target="_blank">Occupy Bozeman</a> – written about <a href="http://www.rockymt.org/?q=node/310" target="_blank">many of the reasons</a> why you should get your money out of big banks – particularly Wells Fargo – as part of a <a href="http://www.rockymt.org/?q=node/323" target="_blank">divestment campaign</a> we are waging against the bank. That campaign continues <a href="http://occupybozeman.org/?p=519" target="_blank">with an action next week</a>, and I have been a good foot soldier for the campaign.</p>
<p>Today, I write entirely for myself and my analysis of what really drives me to take on this campaign. In the past, I found myself appealing to the most selfish motives you might have for making a switch. I have mentioned high fees, high interest rates, and low rates of return. I have mentioned bailouts and subprime mortgages, investments in private prison companies, in the coal industry, and in fracking. I mentioned unfair practices toward people with disabilities and African Americans. I talked about fines and court settlements for wrongful practices. While all those things are and remain true, the appeal was mostly to address reasons why I think that you the reader might find Wells Fargo objectionable. I have spoken little of my own motivation.</p>
<p>I intend to do that in this essay. However, note that I do not think you need to accept the arguments I am about to give in order to come to the conclusion that getting your money out of Wells Fargo is a good idea. Nevertheless, I think there are reasons that may be overlooked that need to be brought to light. We may not always bring them out for fear of hurting the harmony in our organizing environment, realizing that we do not come to the same conclusions for action based on the same reasons. However, I would be dishonest not to point out my reasons and point us to these aspects of the discussion.</p>
<p>It is tempting to go into a diatribe against capitalism because at root this is what this is about and in defense of what I am, which is an anarchist. That is a necessary discussion to have, but it may take us too far adrift for the purposes of this essay. I want to hone in on an aspect of what big banks represent that I think is critical to talk about while fully well understanding that the issues I raise are really part of a much bigger discussion about the nature of governance, wealth, and our reaction to that world.</p>
<p>You should get your money out of Wells Fargo and other big banks because the very act of doing so is a direct affirmation of what has been silenced by them – your voice. The most pernicious thing about banks is not that they make record profits or are deceitful or take care of their investors while hanging you out to dry. What is most pernicious is that the whole process by which this happens fortifies a system that leaves you out of it, which limits your options to register and act on your disapproval.</p>
<p>Banks like Wells Fargo have largely become what we so affectionately term “too big to fail.” While that term has become quaint, I do not think we understand the full import of it. An institution that has become so large that it cannot be allowed to collapse for fear that it will send us into a depression essentially has become an unofficial arm of our government. If we cannot do without something for fear of collapse, then it is who and what we are. That these banks continue to engage in practices that keep the entire system teetering on the edge of collapse, we have much to fear in them because collapse does indeed bring greater economic hardship to those who can least afford more hardship. It is an untenable situation. Those held hostage are the people. As one example, we can easily see how the looming Greek default is being held at bay on the backs of the Greek people.</p>
<p>Wells Fargo, then, is a non-governmental financial institution that wields enormous leverage and power on the American government. No matter who you elect into office, the situation does not change. From George W. Bush to Barack Obama, the Wall Street interests and the financial institutions have held the country hostage. No one dares to let them collapse for fear of the political implications that arise from an economic superpower suddenly with more starving and jobless people than it already maliciously tolerates.</p>
<p>Thus, the one manna that most Americans believe is their power, their voice – the vote – is for nothing when it comes to this state of affairs. Voting, whatever else it might be, is not power to make any change when it comes to a bank like Wells Fargo. Even if you somehow managed to elect someone who would go after these banks, all you would be doing is setting up the conditions that will hurt the people who least can afford to be hurt. You will at once be propping up a political and economic system that allows for renegade banks to assert so much leverage, or you will be wiping them out and starting us surely into the storm of depression. Doing the latter might have some opportunities for the radicals among us to foment our lofty ideals of revolution, but only people with privilege can dare assert that they want the hungriest to become hungrier and the jobless to suffer even more. It is playing God to the extreme to think that we should manufacture economic crisis for a chance at a systemic change that is not likely to happen from those means. Look at the Arab Spring where dramatic increases in the price of basic goods drove people into the streets, toppled their governments, and found themselves ruled in most cases by the same ruling classes. Revolution is a beautiful idea, but it is not as easily attained as some imagine.</p>
<p>One might argue that maybe you could elect – in some strange world that does not seem to exist in America except in the racist pretenses of the Tea Party in their views of Obama – some socialist who will nationalize the banks and therefore rob them of their pernicious incentive to ruin us and the country. Thus, instead of a state that tries to keep banks in line through a Central Bank, we simply have another bank of the United States as the sole chartered national bank in the country. One has to ask, though, even if such a thing were to happen, what would fundamentally change in practice. Who would still have the most influence on government? The poor? In what sense would such a bank then be accountable to the people? While some of the pernicious incentives might be erased by such a move, it might mean less than what some might imagine. Wells Fargo and other big banks already are essentially arms of government; they are already institutionalized into the fabric of the country; they already have complete influence over governing. All you would be changing is the C.E.O. It would be little less than a nominal change in practice. Wells Fargo, whether in the private or the public sector, already is welded to the state. The rich will exert their leverage either way.</p>
<p>Thus, voting is not synonymous with your voice. It is not an action that you can take that does anything to restore what is lost in this system.</p>
<p>As a result, we are left with people in our country who have little say in the governance of their own lives. We are at the mercy of economic factors out of our control and political factors that keep us muted. While I can give an anarchist diatribe like this, it’s only because I have been deemed powerless. We are far from the days when Emma Goldman could be thrown in jail simply for passing out mere information about contraception, when a speech on any subject could get you thrown in jail for years. Everything is essentially entertainment. We can choose “taste’s great” or “less filling”; we can pay exorbitant rates to go to sporting matches, buy our cable and our internet where we can be free to watch or say a million things. Yet, all of that is because we are thoroughly defeated. When push comes to shove, if the food trucks stop coming, if the jobs go away, if your home is foreclosed – those are the things that really matter to the functioning of life – you really have no say whatsoever. It is a game ruled by a very small plutocracy. We have been left helpless and foolish like babbling idiots. It is no wonder that people care nothing for politics. Why should they? People also don’t care about essays like this; what does it matter? We need our fix; we are junkies in so many ways. We know the results of American Idol, or The Voice, but very few of us really know our neighbors or each other or believe or even think about whether anything is wrong. Those who do must because something is very wrong. They are sleeping homeless in our streets, dying too young on the reservation, and wasting away in prisons (perhaps for succumbing to the socially unacceptable drugs). They are often too weakened to take action, and most of us go on ignoring the truth we must all know – that we are not really free or secure.</p>
<p>What action can we take in such a system? Anything we can do which not only takes power from the system but also puts it in or closer to our hands is an action that not only hurts the system but also empowers us if and when such a system collapses. Thus, it is not enough to let big banks fail; we have to have means in place to take care of others when those banks fail. Moving money from one of the banks that are too big to fail into something like a credit union is not some revolutionary move in itself. Credit unions in the way they function in practice are not some idyllic solution; they are not all as democratic as they seem. Nevertheless, they represent the right kind of transition. Moving your money to a place that gives you a greater degree of control over it is a step toward restoring your voice. It begins the process of transferring the power that banks hold over you back to where it should be – within your community. Right now, your money goes to fund who knows what – anything and everything. Shouldn’t it be closer to the space where you live and breathe, where people still hear what your voice sounds like? Shouldn’t your voice be sounds and melodies coming from your vocal chords, and not an abstract balance sheet in a New York or San Francisco office, or a number on a voting tabulation?</p>
<p>The decentralization of capital from institutions that are too big to fail to those closer to where we breathe has the effect of wrestling control of the system from giant banks all while avoiding depression. Developing the means to exert real popular power at the local level gives the means for the community to take care of each other when federal systems begin to fail.</p>
<p>It is an act that tends to restore voice; of course, it is not enough. The banks do not represent the be all and end all of political and economic justice. There are many other things besides. We have touched on issues like food and shelter. Exerting greater control over the wealth within the community should offer some leverage to better deal with the problems we all face when the national and global economy collapses (either in part as is often in American history or in whole as it did during the Great Depression). If we are not completely at the mercy of the whims of policy makers and corporate executives somewhere else, we can actually take steps to do something about the things that matter to us.</p>
<p>Thus, it seems the first act is simple enough. Get your money out of a big bank, and move it somewhere else – preferably somewhere like a credit union. However, the second act, which can happen concurrently with the first, is to organize in your community and take actions together which deal with the needs in your community. The more we do that now, the more we find our voice, and ironically the more dangerous we become. Essays like this will no longer simply be for your reading entertainment. They will be seen as revolutionary calls to arms, the way that disseminating information on contraception was seen in this country only a century ago. That may be when things get interesting, but let’s get that far. We need to go that far, or one day – as they are discovering in places like Greece – things will not really be in our control. The rich will stay rich, somehow, but we will be starving and struggling to survive, much like so many already are – as the system does not ultimately care who thrives so long as those on top stay on top.</p>
<p>Please take action. Please get your money out of big banks, and please take action in your community. I don’t want this essay merely to be an exercise in vanity, which right now is all that it is.</p>