Command, Control, and Compulsion

I was thinking of Derrick Jensen's book "Walking on Water," which does a really good job laying bare the effects of compulsory schooling, yesterday while sorting mail. Compulsory schooling, which almost all of us reading this has experienced and champion, prepared me for working in a command and control buisness like the USPS. One parallel between the two structures is there is very little, if any opportunity to offer feedback to change the structure. You're expected to show up, listen to authority, and do what you're told. Because look around you, there are people more than willing and happy to do what you do. Both structures are far from being democratic, and they operate on this assumption so eloquently laid out at the beginning of the 20th century by the founder of scientific management, Fredrick Winslow Taylor:

"In the past man has been first; in the future the System must be first."

Thinking Critically, Community Rights, and Corporations

Daniel (15 yrs. old) and I are back at reading Derrick Jensen's "Walking on Water" to each other this morning. I can think of 3 powerful quotes that I could pull from today's reading. I'm going to go with this one.

"It is possible to perceive the world such that it makes sense to gas Jews and others at death camps. It is possible to perceive yourself and others such that it makes sense to destroy the planet in order to make money and amass power, to perpetuate and make grow an economic system. None of this is to say these are "wise" choices: It's to say they're choices. It's also to stress once again, how often unquestioned assumptions frame our choices. If we wish to make different choices we must smash the frames that constrain us. We must, if we care about our own lives, and if we care about the life on the planet, begin to remember how to think critically, how to think for ourselves." -- (Pg. 119-120)

I had a couple thoughts related to Community Rights and Corporations this morning.

The first: It occured to me that I'm not against corporations. What I support is once again making corporations subordinate to We The People. A free and sovereign people define and have power over the robots they create. In other words, under the the theory of The United States the corporation was never meant to govern We The People. In my mind, a big reason why the American Revolution was fought was to drive a stake through the heart of the corporation.

The second: What does an authentic win look like for a community fighting a corporate harm? I think an authentic win looks like citizens within the community voting "no", or making a law against the harm being done to them. If a corporation decides to leave because of economic reasons or because of the hassle-factor that is the corporation leaving. You, as a self-governing people have not defined what your values are and codified them into law. Once you have expressed your values into law it's all out there in the open for the next corporation that will be coming in to do the harm.

Do I think this will be easy? No. Do I think it's a magic bullet? No. But I think it's far more effective than fighting corporate harms one at a time. It reminds a lot of whack-a-mole. That is what it looks like for citizens and activists fighting the harms.

We Are The Relationships We Share

Daniel (15 yrs. old) and I are done reading a chapter out of Derrick Jensen's "Walking on Water" to each other this morning. I look forward to this ritual, especially with this book. I would consider Derrick Jensen one of the most important thinkers and writers of our time. Every teenager should be exposed to the words in "Walking on Water." The sad thing is that barely any will based on the simple fact that we can't stand too much reality. His analysis is so spot on that there is no place for the reader to hide. You're left with having to do something however small about our current collective suicidal path to extinction. Anyway, I was delighted to read this paragraph with him and discuss it.

"A human being is not simply an ego structure in a sack of skin. Human beings, and this is true for all beings, are the relationships they share. My health--emotional, physical, moral--is inextricably intertwined with the quality of these relationships, whether I acknowledge the relationships or not. If the relationships are impoverished, or if I systematically eradicate those beings with whom I pretend I do not have relationships, I am so much smaller, so much weaker. These statements are as true physically as they are emotionally and spiritually." ( Derrick Jensen, pg. 107, Walking on Water

Two things I'd like to mention from Community Right's front:

Another brilliant post by Paul Cienfuegos. This post is full of great ideas for local ordinances to combat climate change and assert a communities right to govern itself.

The Community Right's folks in Oregon are organizing to add a “The Right to Local, Community Self-Government” amendment to their state constitution. They asked that folks who support Community Rights like their Facebook page. The big picture plan is to drive a "The Right to Local, Community Self-Government" into our state and federal constitutions.


 

Hierarchy in School

Back to reading Derrick Jensen's "Walking on Water" with my teenage son this morning. I'm glad that I got to read the paragraph below to him. I wish all schools (I know, I know, children don't need schooling. But we're stuck in the myth of Bottom-Line Economics for now) had this in their vision statement. The world would be a different place. And it would've made getting out of bed a whole hell of a lot easier for the majority of my mornings from ages 4 to 18.

"We perceive the entire hierarchy in school exactly opposite to how it really is. You're not here for me, and I'm not here for my supervisor. My supervisor is here to help me, the administrators are here to help him, all the way down the line. 'You' are the reason we're all here. What do you want to do?" (Pg. 96)

Who are you?

The lines below are some of my favorite lines ever written. They are a big reason why I don't send my kids to public school. They are a big reason why I live the way I do. They are a big reason why I resist this culture. I read them to my son last week, and I'm eternally grateful for this. They should be read in high schools across the nation. Ever since first laying my eyes on them I have wanted to type them out so I have quick access to them. Well, this morning, I finally did it. After exactly 30 minutes of typing they are now copied to my computer. It's funny because my book is a signed copy from the author. This morning I noticed he signed his name on 2/19/04. That's almost 11 years to the day. I remember the day I got this book. I pulled up to the mailbox in my pic-up, opened the door, reached in and grabbed it out, then closed the door. I drove up to where I usually park my truck, shut it off, then proceeded to tear off the brown grocery bag paper covering it. I opened the book and didn't get out of my truck until my future wife asked if I was going to come in the house (Life was a little different for me back then). I had to be out there for well over an hour. From where I'm sitting right now I can look out the window that wasn't there at the time and see myself sitting there in the old pic-up that I'd recently bought of my dad reading these revolutionary lines. Gawd, what memories. What a place. It's good to be alive resisting.

Be careful when you read the lines below. You just might do something you never expect to do.

"There's really only one question in life, and only one lesson. This question is whispered endlessly to us from all directions. The moon asks it each night, as do the stars. It's asked by drops of rain that cling to the soft ends of cedar branches, and by teardrops that cluster at the fold of your nose or edge of your mouth. Frogs, flowers, stones, pieces of broken plastic, all ask this of each other, of themselves, and of you. The question: Who are you? The lesson: We're born or sprouted or hatched or congealed or we fall from the sky, we live, and then we die or are worn away or broken or disperse in a river, lake, or sea, ripples flowing outward to bounce back from the far shore. And in the meantime, in that middle, what are you going to do? How are you going to find, and be, who you are? Who are you, and what your going to do about it?

"If modern industrial education--and more broadly industrial civilization--requires 'the subsumption of the individual,' that is, into a pliant workforce, then the most revolutionary thing we can do is follow our hearts, to manifest who we really are. And we are in desperate need of revolution, on all scales and in all ways, from the most personal to the most global, from the most serene to the most wrenching. We're killing the planet, we're killing each other, and we're killing ourselves.

"Our current system divorces us from our hearts and bodies and neighbors, from humanity and animality and embeddedness in the world we inhabit, from decency and even the most rudimentary intelligence. (How smart is it to destroy your own habitat? Who was the genius who came up with the idea of poisoning our own food, water, and air?) I've heard defenders of this system say that following one's heart is not a good enough moral compass, that Hitler was following his heart when he tried to conquer the world, tried to rid the world of those he deemed unworthy. But Hitler was no more following his heart than any of the rest of us who blindly contribute to a culture that is accomplishing what Hitler desired but could not himself bring to completion. The truth is--as I have shown elsewhere, exhaustively and exhaustingly--that is only through the most outrageous violations of our hearts and minds and bodies that we are inculcated into a system where it can be made to make sense to some part of our twisted and torn psyches to perpetuate a way of being based on the exploitation, immiseration, and elimination of everyone and everything we can get our hands on.

"Within this context, the question the whole world asks at every moment cannot help but also be the most dangerous: Who are you? Who are you, really? Beneath the trappings and traumas that clutter and characterize our lives, who are you, and what do you want to do with the so-short live you've been given? We could not live the way we do unless we avoided that question, forced others to avoid placing that question in front of us, and in fact attempted to destroy those who do.

"As we see." (Derrick Jensen, Pg. 41-42, Walking on Water: Reading, Writing and Revolution)

Apologies

Well over a decade ago I had a friend out of the blue come up to me and apologize.

"We blew it." He started out. "It was the moment we could have changed things for the better. People were organized and energized, and we blew it. I apologize to you for that. I apologize that you have inherited this horrible economic and political system, and world that is systematically being destroyed."

"No problem." I said uncomfortably and sort of surprised.

It was a few years after George W. Bush was appointed by the Supreme Court to be President of The United States. My friend came of age in the sixties, at the height of one of this countries most revolutionary moments. He watched Martin Luther King march on our nation's capital with 50,000 people, Malcolm X shot dead on a stage, Gaylord Nelson, the father of Earth Day, elected as our State's Governor then move on to the United States Senate, Federal clean air and water standards enacted, etc.

At the time I thought he was being tough on himself. Why should he shoulder his generation's shortcomings? I thought. Then, over a decade later while reading to my teenage son this morning, I unexpectedly read this paragraph to him:

"I want to apologize, just as people in the generation before mine should have apologized to me, for the wreckage of a world we're leaving you. The people of my generation are passing on to you the social patterns and structures, the ways of being and thinking, the physical artifacts themselves that are killing the planet. We're blowing it, badly, and you'll suffer for it. I'm so very sorry." (Derrick Jensen apologizing to an auditorium full of students at an all boys boarding school, Pg. 50, Walking on Water)

Shortly afterwards it all came together for me, and I apologized to my son. In a couple years he will be entering an economic and poltical system that is far worse than it was when I entered it in 1992. And a world with far less diversity.



　

　

　

Unschooling with Derrick Jensen's Open Letter to Environmentalists

Some friends have asked what we do to educate our children at home. Here is a good example of what we did about a month ago. Since I'm a member of Derrick Jensen​'s reading club I received this open letter in my email. I thought it was so spot on that I wanted to read it to my family and see if they'd be willing to sign it also (I especially wanted to hear what my teenage son's thoughts were on it.) So I went through with my plan and read it, had a discussion focused on it for an hour or so, then we decided to sign it (numbers: 28, 29, 30). My son's first response after reading the letter was: “Dad, they’d rather see us go to Mars than restore grasslands to restore carbon.” If you notice that whoever put the list of signees together added his comment behind his name. I'm really glad they did that. I would have loved to have a letter like this read to me back in high school.

Reading, Writing, And Revolution With My Son

I'm once again grateful this morning for the opportunity to sit down at the kitchen table with my teenage son and read to each other Derrick Jensen's "Walking on Water: Reading, Writing and Revolution." Given that he's working on writing a novel and generally likes to write I couldn't think of a better book to read at the moment. I would recommend this book be required reading for all 16 year olds. It would also be a part of my adult bookstore and my class on revolution that ...I fantasize about nearly everyday. Hey, a guy could be having much worse fantasies. Anyway, it was a pleasure to read these lines to him:

"Someone asked me once at a talk why I so stress the positive with my students yet am such an unstinting critic of those who run our culture and who are killing the planet. I answered immediately, 'Power. If I've got power or authority over someone, it's my responsibility to use that only to help them. It's my job to accept and praise them into becoming who they are. But if I see someone misusing power to harm someone else, it's just as much my responsibility to stop them, using whatever means necessary.'"--Derrick Jensen, Pg. 17

A lot of people over the years have criticized Derrick Jensen for advocating violence in his writing. After all he has made the claim that we have to take down civilization if we want a planet for our children to live on. But I consider him to be an "everything on the table" type of guy. He advocates talking openly and honestly about the dire situation we are in (political, economic, ecological, spiritual, psychological) and all of the strategies we can use to improve the situation. I have no problem with that. And if the difficult subjects of sabotage and violence and such come up I have no problem with that either. You don't get anywhere, I think, burying your head in the sand. The things that you're burying your head about come back and bite you, like violence and war. We are born with violence and war in our souls. That's part of our inheritance as human beings when we come into this world. It's archetypal and given to us in the womb. It's part of the cosmos.

That's the truth as I see it right now. I'm glad my son and I can talk openly and honestly about it.

Who Ya Gonna Serve?

The final authority in this culture is its technics and not the health of the land base. We serve the former before the latter. It's pretty fucking scary.

“My thesis, to put it bluntly, is that from late Neolithic times in the Near East , right down to our own day, two technologies have recurrently existed side by side: one authoritarian, the other democratic, the first system-centered, immensely powerful, but inherently unstable, the other [hu]man-centered, relatively weak, but resourceful and durable. If I am right, we are now rapidly approaching a point at which, unless we radically alter our present course, our surviving democratic technics will be completely suppressed or supplanted, so that every residual autonomy will be wiped out, or will be permitted only as a playful device of government, like national balloting for already chosen leaders in totalitarian countries.”--Lewis Mumford

30 Hours of Podcasts

I downloaded close to 30 hours of author podcasts from The Philadelphia Free Library, and listened to all of them in the car while delivering mail last week. Out of all of them two authors and what they had to say stick in my mind. First, I'll paraphrase Alice Walker: Hope to sin only in the service to waking up. Sin is part of the discipline of who we become. There is no such thing as living without it. Secondly, Chris Hedges said that if we allow unfettered and unregulated capitalism to continue we'll be extinct as a species within a 100 years. The elites, he said, are preparing for the instability that every empire in its endgame goes through. That's part of the reason why they are collecting massive amounts of information about us and storing it in a building in Utah. He also said that theologists call the systems that our corporate state has created "systems of death." I like that term. I'm becoming more and more a fan of Chris Hedges. He's just as dark and doesn't sugar-coat a thing about the predicament we've got ourselves into, much like Derrick Jensen.

Earth Day 2014

It's Earth Day. And I've been sitting here for a half-n-hour or so trying to figure what I'm going to say about it. This best I can come up with is a quote by a guy that I didn't know existed until yesterday. His name is Henry Giroux. I guess Bill Moyers has interviewed him the past. I heard about him from Derrick Jensen. He'll be doing an interview with him on Resistance Radio in the near future. Anyway, here is the quote:

“It’s hard to imagine life beyond capitalism. It’s easier to imagine the death of the planet than it is to imagine the death of capitalism.”

I struggle with this all the time. Do you?

I want my kids and grandkids to sit down some day and not have to hear about species going extinct, overpopulation, poisoned water, rising cancer rates, mountain tops being blown to pieces, oil spills, climate change, desertification, and the list goes on.

Happy Earth Day...

Saving The Buffalo

If anyone is interested in the fight to save the last remaining wild buffalo this interview is worth listening to. This interview also inspired me to go back and look up this quote about the buffalo and extinction:

"About ten years ago, I spoke to members of the Society for Ecological Restoration. I told them that traditional Indian knowledge says that beings never become extinct. They go away, but they have the power to come back. I predicted that, in their restorations, if they were preparing the area right, plants they thought were extinct would begin coming back unaided after four or five years. Plants would come back first, and then animals and then birds.

"Of course, my audience thought I was crazy. But later, when I went to get a cup of coffee, several people followed me. They said, "You're right. We're seven years into a swamp restoration in Wisconsin, and all the original plants are coming back."

"This is not as extraordinary as it might sound. The elders tell us that the buffalo used to go back and forth between two worlds. In the summertime, people would find themselves in the middle of a big herd for weeks. But in the wintertime, there would be only a few buffalo down in the river bottoms, or up in the grasslands. Where were the huge herds? According to the Sioux, they were underground. There were about ten places where they went in or came back out.

"When I first heard that, I didn't believe it. Then I talked to some of the elders, who said, "Of Course," and showed me the buttes where the buffalo used to come out in the springtime. I thought, this is insane, so I scoured the literature, but I couldn't find any accounts of big buffalo herds in the wintertime. Then, come June, the damn plains were so covered with buffalo. In the fall, they started disappearing again.

"I'm still working on this one. But that's what life is all about. You take disparate facts, bring them together, and say, "Now, what's the real question?" And so often you're amazed to find that the matter is much deeper than you ever imagined. But the point is to ask the questions, and keep asking them."--Vine Deloria Jr. in an interview with Derrick Jensen back in July of 2000.

End Modern Capitalism With Good Books

Finishing up Thomas Moore's Original Self this morning. This quote has got me thinking:

"The way out of the dehumanizing effects of modern capitalism and industrialism is not to change the system but to read good books."(Page 143)

Some brief reflections: I didn't start reading good books on a regular basis until my mid-twenties. It all started about 15 years ago after I read "Ishmael." Given my lifestyle--unschooling 3 kids, taking care of a horse, a dog and a cat, plus 4 vehicles sitting in the driveway and a cordwood house to maintain--I barely have enough time to finish a good book these days. And I'd guess that I work at a job half as much as a man my age living in a similar situation. We've worked hard to stay out of debt. Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining. There isn't a day that goes by where I don't feel blessed. It's been that way since I started reading good books.

I'm also thinking of an interview that Derrick Jensen did with Lierre Keith on the Progressive Radio Network a few months ago. At the end of the interview she made a distinction between a liberal and a radical. What I heard her say is that liberals spend most of their time trying to change individual minds. They concentrate more on personal transformation. Radicals, on the other hand, organize and try to change the material conditions that keep them oppressed. They are not afraid of wanting to seize and obtain power...

Redskins

Growing up I used to be a Washington Redskins fan. I still remember watching Joe Theismann falling behind center wearing eye-black, a single-bar kicker's helmet, and the #7 on his jersey (My favorite number to this day). And Joe Gibbs giving the ball to John Riggins sometimes up to 40 times a game. The glory days of the franchise. Of course, now I've come to my senses and am a die hard Green Bay Packer's fan.

Why am I remembering and writing about this?

Yesterday I learned that "redskin" refers an image of a body of an Indian that has been skinned alive. I guess when you take the skin off from the human body most of the blood comes to the surface. This used to be a common practice as the settlers moved westward towards California. I always thought that redskin just referred to the reddish color of their skin.

I was wrong. And I can see why the natives want the name changed.

Derrick Jensen Interviews Chris Hedges

This interview with Chris Hedges was very sobering to listen to the other day on the mail route. Given his many years of experience being a war correspondent, and witnessing how countries domestic politics play out during periods of violent and bloody revolution, it seems that we're well on our way to a similar revolution. Of course, no one can predict it, but all of the signs and symptoms are there according the Hedges. I like the idea of how the state will determine how we resist (violently or nonviolently).

If you want your current way of looking at our political situation in this country to be shaken or rattled this interview is definitely worth the listen. If not, don't waste your time

Emotion

A life after Ishmael reflection: One of the effects that reading Ishmael back in the late-nineties had on me was that it moved my emotions out it into the world. In other words the inrage started to change into outrage. Reading Derrick Jensen's work then pushed it further.

"Emotions are mainly social. The word comes from the Latin ex movere, to move out. Emotions connect to the world. Therapy introverts the emotions, calls fear 'anxiety." You take it back, and you work on it inside yourself. You don't work psychologically on what that outrage is telling you about potholes, about trucks, about Florida strawberries in Vermont in March, about burning up oil, about energy policies, nuclear waste, that homeless woman over there with the sores on her feet--the whole thing."--James Hillman, pg. 12, We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and The World's Getting Worse

Resistance Radio and Rights-Based Organizing

Spent time with Derrick Jensen and Thomas Linzey on the mail route yesterday. I highly recommend this interview to anyone concerned about our children's future. With the planet warming faster than most expected we are going to be faced with the issue of whether or not Nature has the right to exist and flourish sooner than we think. Atleast that is my humble opinion. Or maybe I'm being too hopeful.

Building Things That Fall Apart

It never fails, ever since we've started building with cordwood and other materials on our place this philosophy and image comes to mind. It also has kept me from strangling my kids.

"In the village, people used to build their houses out of traditional materials, using no iron or lumber or nails, but the houses were magnificent. Many were sewn together out of bark and fiber. Like the house of the body, the house that a person sleeps in must be very beautiful and sturdy, but not so sturdy that it won’t fall apart after a while. If your house doesn’t fall apart, then there will be no reason to renew it. And it is this renewability that makes something valuable. The maintenance gives it meaning.

"The secret of village togetherness and happiness has always been the generosity of the people, but the key to that generosity is inefficiency and decay. Because our village huts were not built to last very long, they had to be regularly renewed. To do this, villagers came together, at least once a year, to work on somebody’s hut. When your house was falling down, you invited all the folks over. The little kids ran around messing up what everybody was doing. The young women brought the water. The young men carried the stones. The older men told everybody what to do, and the older women told the older men that they weren’t doing it right. Once the house was back together again, everyone ate together, praised the house, laughed, and cried. In a few days, they moved on to the next house. In this way, each family’s place in the village was reestablished and remembered. This is how it always was.

"Then the missionaries and the businessmen and the politicians brought in tin and lumber and sturdy houses. Now the houses last, but the relationships don’t."--Martin Prechtel in The Sun Magazine

Martyrs and Victims

No post yesterday. I got called into carry mail at the last minute.

It's Sunday morning. I've found myself going through a few of the conversations in Lament of the Dead. I was hoping I would run across their conversation about Jesus banishing the demons to hell. I'm not familiar with the Bible at all. Someday I would like to find out where it's talked about in the Good Book. Anyway, I ran across a different quote that has stuck with me since I finished LoD last week.

"We're all Christians. We're all suffering the two-thousand-year curse that has been laid on us by what you all like so much, the early Church. As Jung explains to the 'Red One,' his devil, in the Red Book, 'Do you believe that Christianity left no mark on the souls of men?' Don't forget what the early Church did, a lot of murder, a lot of victimization too. But you don't have murderers unless you have martyrs. So the enjoyment of martyrdom is all part of the same sadism."--James Hillman, pg. 218, Lament of the Dead

I think this is why Derrick Jensen refers to Christianity as a victim religion in Endgame. To some degree most of us are martyrs in this death seeking culture of ours. Why else would we allow 200 nonhuman species to go extinct everyday. You'd think we'd take a stand. We're talking about the murder of life on the planet here. It's sadistic. And I think there is a level of enjoyment in it. I also think Ishmael and most of his other work is Daniel Quinn's way of working through the wounding of Christianity.

Death and The Other World

"I think it's more a matter of realizing that there is a porous permeability between the living and the dead. Between life and death. And the way we have set it up is that death and life are opposed and you must hold off death and it's the ultimate other, and you die alone, this sort of existential whatever. And it seems to me that this offers a completely different way of realizing that the day world is permeated with the other world--in all kinds of small ways, that they're always inner voices, that the dead are cautionary figures. That you are living with the dead. And what you think of as the way of life may be the way of more death. And the way of death may be the way of more livingness. That these are not necessarily alternatives or that first you do one and then you do the other."--James Hillman, pg.25, Lament of the Dead

Derrick Jensen made it clear to me with his work that our "way of life may be the way of more death."