In a post at Creek Running North, commenter jmartin offered a great response to the question of how do we give kids the straight story about the condition of the world without destroying their hopes for the future. I'm quoting what jmartin said, because I think it works well for adults too.
Okay, so I was over at Shakespeare's Sister the other day, reading this post about the Supreme Court, and how important it is to not let it slide further to the right. I'm nodding my head in agreement, reading the comments thread, and then I hit this comment:
ANYONE who thinks there is no difference between the parties,
ANYONE who is tempted to waste your vote an a green candidate as a matter of principal [sic],
ANYONE who thinks Ron Paul makes sense and might be a better choice than an "establishment" candidate of wither [sic] party,. . . . .
. . . remember those three words. [The Supreme Court]
And I just lost it. (Obscenity-laden response below the fold.)
Recently I read an article in Orion by Janisse Ray, called "Altar Call for True Believers." In it she addresses the question of "preaching to the choir" among environmentalists, and argues that the choir is more in need of preaching than one might think. She calls for environmentalists to make more of an effort to walk their talk, to fully live their lives according the principles they espouse.
Now, I don't have much of a complaint with this argument in its general form. I agree that it's silly to suggest that people ought to use reusable bags at the grocery and switch to fluorescent bulbs when one is unwilling to do the same. These are small changes, and they add up.
But I found, by the end of the article, that my hackles were raised, and I'm trying to put a finger on why. What I've come to believe - and it's an uncomfortable belief - is that, if Janisse is correct, I am not a good environmentalist, if I am an environmentalist at all. On the heels of this belief is an even more disturbing one - faced with the possibility that my efforts are not only practically but symbolically empty, why should I bother? Why should I struggle, if nothing I do will ever be "enough"?
This is purely and simply terrifying.
I grow increasingly sceptical about the transformative powers of a 2008 election - if we even get to have one. These are not the actions of people who plan to leave office or give up power.
If you have a blog, please get out the word. People need to know about this.
I am really enjoying the discussion we've been having about this new ecological, nonhierarchical mode! I hope that you will continue to leave your comments on the preceeding post - I am going to be away from the 'net for a few days, so my participation will be sporadic, but I don't want this conversation to die while I'm away.
To this end...
Something is growing in the soil, the water, the air of our collective world. A number of times I've been moving about the world, in virtual space and physical space, and grew aware of a growing network of linked ideas, attitudes, topics. These moments when I suddenly can step back and see a whole where there were just parts before can take my breath away. In the time it takes to indraw a single breath, the vast potentials can suddenly be seen.
So what is it that I have been seeing? In Orion I read a piece by Paul Hawken about a new kind of non-movement movement. Beth wrote about the publishing industry and the tensions between the demands of the market and large-scale publishing, and the rewards of reading smaller, quirkier authors. I read the articles she cites as well, about publishing, and about musicians selling directly to their fans without middlemen. Digby wrote about pseudonymity and the complaints of mainstream journalists and pundits about "uncivil" bloggers. Lance brought up engineers and the kind of cheap big-box concrete crap they design in a discussion of feminism. I got into a prolonged argument about value judgements, objective truth and writerly arrogance at LibraryThing. Melissa quotes Al Gore talking about "networked democracy."
The threads started pulling together. What I am seeing is the rising tide of a new mode of mass interaction, one that could be called ecological and reciprocal instead of hierarchical. People are challenging the top-down pronouncements of the powerful and the privileged, and finding that collaboration between equals is mutually beneficial.
Some of this is do in part to the actions of the elites themselves. Part of the point of having an elite is that it can serve as a source for the higher and better, a source for things to inspire and to which to aspire. This is collapsing. Paris Hilton is among the elite, because of her celebrity and her wealth. Over-written and so-obvious-as-to-be-trite articles are churned out weekly by a wide range of very well paid pundits. Hosts on the radio and television vomit out violence, misogyny and bigotry and are rewarded with money from advertisers who sell bland plastic junk. We are offered impersonal cheaply made houses and apartments to live in, ugly cookie-cutter stores to shop in, chain restaurants specializing in the tame, fatty, sugary, and salty to eat in, meals filled with wheat gluten from China and corn syrup from American farms to take home and heat in the microwave.
The power is in the hands of those behind the production of these offerings, in those who limit our choices to force our selection of these inferior options - they are our de facto elite, and what they are holding out to us is a far cry from the inspirational. Moreover, they are defensive and aggressive about it, insisting that what they offer is what we want, when what they really want is to remain relevant and respected without having to work for it.
So individuals are learning to create their own alternatives. They've been doing so for years, in small groups of like-minded compadres, building straw-bale houses, planting trees in Africa, digging wells, monitoring the ebb and flow of ice, forming co-ops, self-publishing, making cassette tapes in basement studios, operating ham radio and low-power stations, sewing and knitting their own clothes, canning their own vegetables... Up to this point, these collaborations and innovations have been localized and highly personal. In order for them to spread, they had to be co-opted by powerful voices and agents, agents with their own agendas. Now, though... we are seeing the rise of a truly global-local ecology, as all of these smaller groups find themselves able to link up across borders and genders and ages and classes, to communicate directly without the distortion of elite filters and control.
We see the rise of things like the Encyclopedia of Life project, of networks of organizations working together on common goals, of ordinary people like you and me developing communities we never could have dreamed of a mere two decades ago, and which we only began to realize during the last ten, with the rise of the web and the blogs.
The sap is rising in the tree, the roots forcing their way through the soil... a new ecology is evolving. What will be your niche, your web?
Over at Cassandra Pages, Beth has written in response to the recent violence at VTech, and I feel compelled to re-post here what I wrote in her comments thread. Her piece, and the ones she was reacting to, provoked me to respond, because I think that perhaps my non-reaction, or unwillingness to react, to what happened, is part of the cultural context that encourages such extreme reactions. I distance myself to avoid feeling complicit, but, as a person living in this society, I have absorbed - and come to take for granted - the kinds of sick behaviors and attitudes that lead to these sorts of things. That, I find, is more disturbing to me than the violence itself.
Is there something wrong with me that I don't "get" why people are so upset about what happened at Virginia Tech?
I mean, I understand that it was a horrible, violent event in which people died. But, personally, it doesn't strike my heart the way it clearly is for other people. I didn't know any of these people, and while I feel sad about them in the abstract, I can't see what's so special and moving about their deaths. People die every day, some in great numbers by violence, some in great numbers individually by accident, some because of neglect or need or treatable illness. Nor do I feel compelled to learn all the little details, the numbers of dead and injured, the names of the dormitory, the identity of the killer, the emails sent or not sent. (And yet I unwillingly know about them anyway, just by osmosis.)
Is my outrage meter broken? Or am I just tired of the way the media likes to seize on these dramatic stories and beat them into the ground until all the humanity is gone - while simultaneously ignoring the everyday tragedies of less "newsworthy" individuals? The way this has become a kind of sick spectator sport for many* of the uninvolved? I don't know.
I should feel badly about this event. But I don't. I don't feel anything about it, except an irritation that I can't escape other people talking about it, and this feeling that something's wrong with me because of that.
I don't know which puzzles me more - that this is so important and moving for so many people for whom the victims are complete strangers, or that it isn't, for me.
* I say many, but not all, because I do recognize that for some people, the emotional reaction they have is deep and wordless, rather than shallow and contrived. There's a difference between weeping helplessly for the victims and flipping channels for the latest juicy tidbit, between mourning and collecting tragedies like stamps.
In any case, I find myself having neither reaction, and puzzled by both, though sympathetically in the case of the former.
Over the last few days I've been noting a groundswell of blog posts about American apathy, banality and greed.* I don't know if I understand what triggered it (reaction to Katrina? 9/11?) but it is striking to me that the same notes are being sounded again and again.
Once again, there's a dust-up in the political blogosphere in which the specter of the sexist / racist / homophobic / ist-ist "progressive" blogger raises an ugly head. I'm not going to talk about this incident, because it's one of many and it's been well-handled by people who were on the scene over the weekend, unlike myself.
What I am going to talk about is something that I see underlying this recurrent dynamic: the tension between Politics and politics, and the people who rally to those respective flags.
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