Discuss: Finding Time

Excellent ideas on personal resistance, Dan. Resisting the push towards over-consumption is important. If only more people would join in. Unfortunately that doesn’t seem to be happening. The town next to mine, just over the NH border, Conway, already too developed with discount shopping outlets and corporate chains in malls (NH has no sales tax) has approved seven more buildings in a new mall complex, this in addition to probably 50 already in town on what locals call “the strip”. I just read about it yesterday and it is so depressing.

I have to say in my heart of hearts I support all efforts of civil disobedience re: climate change and I hope there will be more and more such actions in the not too distant future because our situation is so very dire and we must do something about it. I know some people will be turned off by it, they always are, but as the number of participants increases and the climate worsens to the point where we’re all feeling it (as many already are), I think it will be difficult to keep so-called ordinary people off the streets. Meanwhile we must resist as much as we can and encourage others and our communities to resist as well.

Thanks for your comment, Susan Meeker-Lowry.

I think civil disobedience can be an appropriate tactic, used sparingly and strategically. It is a tangible form of resistance, certainly, but a public one. The resistance I was thinking of is internal and ruminative; personal, not public.

In my life, this resistance includes an attempt to be conscious—to claim my mind, my time and my life for my purposes, not surrender them to someone else’s corporate, ideological or personal agenda; to remember lessons learned; to be skeptical, especially about commercial or political speech; and to be clear about what really matters to me.

I can see civil disobedience playing a role in the struggles that almost certainly are coming, however much this tactic may turn people off. But I think we have a lot more organizing and consciousness-raising to do first. Otherwise, in my opinion, we’ll just be talking to ourselves.

Dear Dan and Susan,

Thanks to both of you for clarifying the terms, “personal resistance” and “civil disobedience.”

It seems to me that the human world (like the natural order of living things) is organized in hierarchies.  While the biophysical world has perfectly designed, natural, sustainable hierarchies, the hierarchies in the human world are imperfect, artificially designed, soon to become patently unsustainable, logical contrivances that serve the purpose of perpetuating the domination of elite groups whose primary intention is to maintain their power, influence, status and privileges.  Whereas natural hierarchies are not prejudicial, human hierarchies are deeply so.  They favor a relatively small minority of people in the highest levels of the hierarchical structures.

If this a reasonable and sensible analysis, then it is possible for us see that the sources of political influence, military power, social status and privileges could reside primarily in the hands of people who have individually accumulated and then consolidate together their great wealth.

Now to my point.

If several million people with most of the world’s wealth actually control the military power of modern nation-states and the global political economy, then how do billions of people comprising most of humanity meaningfully and favorably assert themselves in the name of protecting life as we know it and preserving the integrity of our planetary home?

Within the global context of a grossly overgrown human world marked by millions of obese consumers and unbridled producers functioning in self-serving, flawed, human designed, unsustainable hierarchical structures, in which billions of human beings are impoverished, biodiversity is massively extirpated, the environment irreversibly degraded, natural resources reckless dissipated and humanity endangered, what can the words, PEOPLE POWER or POWER TO THE PEOPLE mean?

Always with thanks,

Steve

Power to the People was a rallying cry and is now a cliché, used most often these days to evoke a time period, not an idea.

I marched on my first picket line when I was about 10, protesting what my family considered the railroading of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as spies for the then Soviet Union.

In about 1963, my new wife and I marched in protest of President Kennedy’s introduction into Vietnam of so-called military advisors, before Vietnam was the name of a war. We marched, on and off, in opposition to that war for the next ten-or-so years.

Advance the clock about 30 years and where do you find me? On a picket line, protesting the first Gulf War. That sad, sparsely attended picket line, and George Herbert Walker Bush’s ability to institute an information freeze on war news, taught me that all the tactics we learned in various movements—civil rights, environmental degradation, feminism, civil liberties, gay liberation, worker safety, right to know, equal access for the disabled, among many others—had become impotent.

I saw that such tactics had become mere symbolic gestures as predictable as the National Association of Manufacturers decrying a raise in the minimum wage as a threat to the American way of life.

I still march on protest lines, donate to organizations working in social and economic justice, make calls, write letters and send e-mails, but the one effort most likely to succeed, even if only in part, is the effort—imperfect and inconsistent—to try and live what I say I believe.

Dear Dan,

Yours is a remarkable testimonial. Thank you for it.

As I sit here thinking about the report you have given us, a keen sense of foreboding has overtaken me because it appears the nation I have regarded as the greatest on Earth is leading the world into very turbulent times…..into a potentially ghastly future. There are moments like this one when I find myself imagining that all of us (the human species and other species) are on a huge stage upon which a classical Greek tragedy, more threatening to and colossally destructive of the sacred than any heretofore written, is being played out.  In this “play” the human species is literally in charge of the whole world and the USA is its leader, as a consequence of the overwhelming economic and military power it currently harnesses. 

So life marches forward, in a seemingly inexorable way, down what looks like a “primrose path,” toward the unwelcome future with which our children are likely to confronted.
I hope circumstances in the unfolding “play” will prove me wrong, but I believe our children will look back at us in anger and utter disbelief at all that their elders have done and failed to do with our responsibilities to lead because what are doing with our stupendous wealth and and “over the top” military power amounts to literally “selling out” our own young people and to robbing them of a future.  We are now-here.  The many actions of those in my not-so-great generation appear to be leading our children toward no-where. 
When asked about the future, a current leading elder of the world’s preeminent military as well as the global political economy may have unwittingly told the truth about what he envisions for our children in four words, “We’ll all be dead.”
Not one of us who has reviewed at least some of recorded history or lived in the world as we know it has witnessed what appears already darkly visible on the far horizon…except, perhaps, for Ozymandias, king of kings.

Sincerely,

Steve

For me, there is something supremely ironic in the awarding of a Nobel Prize to a banker named Muhammad. There are plenty of successful bankers in New York City alone. Has one of them ever been nominated for such a prize? Why is Mr. Muhammad Yunus from Bangladesh, a banker described by many people worldwide as a “banker to the poor,” selected for the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize?

I suppose it is because nowhere else on the surface of the Earth can anyone find another banker who is not servicing the rich and powerful and, therefore, willing to say something like, “Everybody is busy buying, everybody is busy consuming, but they don’t realize how much of the exhaustible resources that we are using up by this wasteful way of living, the lifestyle. So we need to look for a new kind of lifestyle, which will be consistent with the resources that we have in this world.”

The successful bankers I have met in the course of time uniformly display a certain imperious reserve associated with excessive wealth and power as well as a willful religiosity that forbids them from speaking out loudly and clearly about such things. Perhaps they will tell you what I have been told for many years, SILENCE IS GOLDEN.

Hi, I wanted to talk about the idea of slowing down and technology, if it seems that I am just repeating a subject that yall have allready discussed, sorry about that. To me, slowing down means taking time to think about something, observe things that I would not notice if i did not consciously acknowlege my slowing down. I have hiked on the Appalachian Trail a few times, and have noticed that I “slowdown”  without consciously choosing too. I believe that it was in the absense of technolgy that causes me to look at the “romantic” side of the trail instead of the “classic” side. Therefore, technology is a clock on the dashboard of a car that tells us how fast we need be to not be late. The speedometor tells us how fast we are going and how fast we are NOT going. On the AT, I did not wear a watch because I wanted to run my own life without the need to speed up based on technology, but based on me. In the classic world, with deadlines, jobs, paychecks, and cars, life is not based on me, but on the big machines of corperations and clocks. If all this is true, are we not all just working for a big, black and white clock that has a fourth hand, the hand that has the power to kill?

Unless I read you wrong, Chuck, it seems to me you’re talking about the need to maintain a state of awareness, call it consciousness, that will permit you to earn a living and discharge your other obligations with a certain amount of detachment.

This detachment is not the sort we see all around us, with people perpetually on their cell phones, never satisfied with where they are, always needing to project themselves into some other place, anyplace but this place.

What they’ve done, in my opinion, is to accept completely uncritically whatever cultural values, technologies and other consumer widgets (including abstractions like fashion or style or design) that the corporations disgorge. In this universe, the only significant change is a change of product. Or brand.

No, the detachment I’m talking about is a kind of clarity about the world and one’s place in it. That clarity underlies a type of freedom one can enjoy even at the office, even on the factory floor.

When you have that kind of clarity, work still consumes much of your free time, but you’re not defined by it. Your interests are not bound up in the endless cycle of production and consumption that we’re told life is all about.

If your freedom consists of nothing else, it consists of this: You know that the version of what’s real promoted by those with money and power is a total sham. And they know you know it. And it makes them very nervous.

If you don’t want the version of reality they’re selling, they have no power over you. That sounds like freedom to me.