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)

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.



　

　

　

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.

Almost Five Years Ago

I'm feeling aged. I've been going through some of my old journal entries. I wrote this down in April of 2008. It's hard to believe that I wrote this down close to five years ago. I pulled the book of the shelf and he signed it in 2004. Must've wrote the quote down on a second reading. Time flies.

"So far as we know, you have only one life, and there's almost nothing more worth fighting for than to figure out what you want, and then pursuing that if it takes you to the ends of the earth and to the end of your life."(Derrick Jensen, Pg.48, Walking on Water)

The Clock in the Classroom

I've always found this quote out of Derrick Jensen's Walking on Water; to be mostly true:

"The most important piece of technology in any classroom is the second hand of the clock. The purpose is to teach millions of students the identical prayer: Please God, make it move faster."--Page 15

Headed to the Bookshelf

There are times when I'm reading a book and I will notice a different author has said something similar. I will then head over to the bookshelf, pull down the book, and look for the quote. This morning it happened.

As I said before, I've been reading different parts of Walking on Water for inspiration. While at it I ran across this excerpt:

I ask a student to give an opinion. She says, "We need wild salmon."

"Why?"

She's fast: "Diversity is strength."

"Why is that important?"

"Wild communities with the most diversity are the most stable. If there is some disaster, they're more able to recover."

"Why do you care about that?"

She thought, then came back with, "The strength that diversity gives is not only to the physical world, but also to the mental and emotional world. Everything has a lesson for our human communities, not in any woo-woo way of talking fish but in the way we have always learned how to live in a particular place. Observing and cooperating with everything around us has been the basis of our species evolution and our personal development. More diverse habitat means more lessons, which means more chance of our own survival within that paritclar habitat." [Derrick Jensen, Pg.106, Walking on Water]

I open up Doug Brown's "Roadmap to Sustainability: Interpreting Daniel Quinn"

This is not what Q [Daniel Quinn] means by the Community of Life. The Community of Life and community-through-diversity are not subjective states of being that make people or living things FEEL good. The diversity in the Connunity of Life is an objective criterion essential to maintaining the community. Community is structural and material component of the life process, as is the biodiversity that correlates with it. Humans have difficulty understanding this. And there is a reason for why they don't get it: once humankind stepped out of the Communtiy of Life, or more precisely believed that it did, then in its divorced state as Taker civilizations, it alienated itself from the objective dimension of communtiy and began to liken community to a feeling of "sameness"-to a subjective feeling of belonging together as humans in which diversity became suspect. Community for the Taker way became a means to retrieve what was lost and abandoned in the civilizational process of divorcing itself from the true Communtiy of Life." [Doug Brown, Pg. 17, Roadmap to Sustainability]

So, diversity is what we're after. And it's something that we rarely ever talk about. We're in trouble.

Eight Years Later

I mentioned yesterday that I was reading Derrick Jensen's "Walking on Water" for writing inspiration. This morning I turned to the title page and found that it read: "To Curt, It's time to work miracles, it's time to walk on water. Derrick Jensen, 2/19/04 Occupied Tunes"

What surprised me is that next month it will be 8 years since he signed and sent me that book. It sure doesn't feel like it's been eight years. And it's sort of funny because I can remember how much I anticipated for this book to show up in my mailbox. It was worth every penny I paid for it, that's probably why I find myself opening it up 8 years later.

Stuck With Me

Found myself reading some books about writing for inspiration this morning. These lines stuck with me throughout the day: "As is true for most people I know, I've always loved learning. As is also true for most people I know, I always hated school. Why is that? [Derrick Jensen, Pg.3, Walking on Water]

They speak to my experience of schooling.