A BLANKET DISCLAIMER: The realization that anything we do from here to the end point will be ultimately futile should not be used as an excuse to sit idly by.
I work as a fitness instructor. In this line of work I am often called upon to explain the nature of physical improvements. Physical improvement comes from stressing the system beyond its current capacity in order to stimulate change. For instance if you were to take a 10 minute walk every day that would force some adaptation, if however you never went beyond that 10 minute walk your body would adapt and then it would say okay, got that, what's next? Without continued and sufficient increase in the workload your body simply stops adapting.
Likewise in our society absent a sufficient amount of stress nothing will change. It is up to us to begin to force the change.
Paul Street said in his article In the Time of the Orange Pig "Where are the millions who ought/need to be in the streets every single day fighting this Orange Pig regime and the hideous racist, sexist, and eco-cidal class-rule profits system that hatched it? Shocked, frightened, demobilized, depressed, divided, distracted, overworked, over-extended, indentured, consumerized, traumatized, sick, inverted, browbeaten, jaundiced, propagandized, addicted, smart-phoned, Facebooked, Twitterized, ex-urbanized, sedentarized, immobilized, fatalized, fantasized, incarcerated, felony-marked, branded, stigmatized, shamed, frightened, and, last but not least, electoralized."
Although there is truly nothing we can do in the long term it seems as though sitting back and just letting the coming disaster wash over us is a little irresponsible.
We are used to being in stasis, merely existing, but Sam Shepard said that he was "The eternal enemy of terminal stasis." We are now, unless we are out fighting, in terminal stasis.
There will come a time when you are going to be asked to stand up for what is right. I get a little tired of the pacifists who continually preach non-violence when violence is rained on us daily from the moneyed elite. We appear to have accepted that top down violence is okay but if asked to step up and meet it and fight to defeat it we fall back on our non-violent mantra.
I was told by a client, who had been raped, that she did not believe in responding to violence with violence as that would make her like the person who raped her. This confused me as I could not see her becoming a violent rapist merely by the act of defending herself against a predator.
The word violence is, in most peace loving arenas, a bad word and I believe it is important to understand that, as an example, if someone broke into your house, threatened your family and destroyed your possessions you would feel justified in doing whatever it took to stop them. That is exactly what has happened; powerful people have broken into our house (the planet) threatened and even killed members of our family (all life on earth) and are destroying at an ever increasing rate those things we hold dear.
Roy Scranton, in his book Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, said, "the coal miners struggling for a democratic stake in production didn't just protest, share news stories, and post messages. They didn't just march. The African-American activists struggling for civil rights didn't just tweet hashtag campaigns. They didn't just hold meetings. They fought and bled and died for a world they believed in..."
I believe that, through the medium of the internet, we have become a nation of messagers and hashtagers and protest junkies and as necessary a part of the landscape as these things are they do not complete the picture. The picture will only be finished when we begin to physically take apart the system that is currently in place. If we want to build something new we first; have to know what we are going to build in its place and then we have to tear down the obstacles that are standing in our way.
The powerful depend on us being too occupied with the toys they gave us to ever pose a serious threat to their control. They are right in that we enjoy the toys and sincerely believe that the owners will allow us a voice in what is happening. That is somewhat true but mostly the toys just keep us busy while the rampant destruction continues apace.
Jason Hirthler, in his recent article Death of The Art House:Revolution: Can the Amercanized West Ever Stage a Real Rebellion, said, "You don't have to deconstruct why we are often satisfied to place our faith in entertaining fictive solutions rather than engage in the tedious 'years of struggle' repeatedly called for by the likes of Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, who understood the grim realities of political transformation. The lined faces of lifetime activists serve as testaments to the cut and thrust of battle against the depredations of faceless multinationals and their ever-growing databases of information, through which struggles are defused and disarmed. From mobile phones, from fiber lines, from five-eyed satellites, from wirelines, from surveillance cams innocuously hung from every string of traffic signals. But is it simply the scale of the job that that keeps us from banging pots in the streets like Argentines before they threw the parasitical IMF from their country, or like Venezuelans rallying behind an embattled administration because it represents a movement whose colors they proudly wear? Or, of course, like the emergency-clad French who turn out in the public square week after week despite increasing repression. Are we fatally distracted? Or is it our creature comforts that dissuade us?"
We, as a nation, have become soft and coddled. Our amusements and distractions are so ingrained that any type of active resistance is unthinkable. A protest here and there, signing a petition, supporting different groups is almost worse than doing nothing at all. I do not deny that the protests being staged are raising awareness of the problem we face but with the massive destruction that is being wreaked on the natural world perhaps it is time to start taking a more pro-active approach, at least trying to stop, if only for own redemption, what is happening. The fight must go on to the very end. Which will be, according to all the markers, the very near future. Until then make your power known. Force the people who would blithely continue to destroy our world to understand that, even though it will not ultimately help, we know who they are and we know they are wrong.
"Oh, you gotta hold on, hold on
You gotta hold on
Take my hand, I'm standing right here, you gotta hold on."
I work as a fitness instructor. In this line of work I am often called upon to explain the nature of physical improvements. Physical improvement comes from stressing the system beyond its current capacity in order to stimulate change. For instance if you were to take a 10 minute walk every day that would force some adaptation, if however you never went beyond that 10 minute walk your body would adapt and then it would say okay, got that, what's next? Without continued and sufficient increase in the workload your body simply stops adapting.
Likewise in our society absent a sufficient amount of stress nothing will change. It is up to us to begin to force the change.
Paul Street said in his article In the Time of the Orange Pig "Where are the millions who ought/need to be in the streets every single day fighting this Orange Pig regime and the hideous racist, sexist, and eco-cidal class-rule profits system that hatched it? Shocked, frightened, demobilized, depressed, divided, distracted, overworked, over-extended, indentured, consumerized, traumatized, sick, inverted, browbeaten, jaundiced, propagandized, addicted, smart-phoned, Facebooked, Twitterized, ex-urbanized, sedentarized, immobilized, fatalized, fantasized, incarcerated, felony-marked, branded, stigmatized, shamed, frightened, and, last but not least, electoralized."
Although there is truly nothing we can do in the long term it seems as though sitting back and just letting the coming disaster wash over us is a little irresponsible.
We are used to being in stasis, merely existing, but Sam Shepard said that he was "The eternal enemy of terminal stasis." We are now, unless we are out fighting, in terminal stasis.
There will come a time when you are going to be asked to stand up for what is right. I get a little tired of the pacifists who continually preach non-violence when violence is rained on us daily from the moneyed elite. We appear to have accepted that top down violence is okay but if asked to step up and meet it and fight to defeat it we fall back on our non-violent mantra.
I was told by a client, who had been raped, that she did not believe in responding to violence with violence as that would make her like the person who raped her. This confused me as I could not see her becoming a violent rapist merely by the act of defending herself against a predator.
The word violence is, in most peace loving arenas, a bad word and I believe it is important to understand that, as an example, if someone broke into your house, threatened your family and destroyed your possessions you would feel justified in doing whatever it took to stop them. That is exactly what has happened; powerful people have broken into our house (the planet) threatened and even killed members of our family (all life on earth) and are destroying at an ever increasing rate those things we hold dear.
Roy Scranton, in his book Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, said, "the coal miners struggling for a democratic stake in production didn't just protest, share news stories, and post messages. They didn't just march. The African-American activists struggling for civil rights didn't just tweet hashtag campaigns. They didn't just hold meetings. They fought and bled and died for a world they believed in..."
I believe that, through the medium of the internet, we have become a nation of messagers and hashtagers and protest junkies and as necessary a part of the landscape as these things are they do not complete the picture. The picture will only be finished when we begin to physically take apart the system that is currently in place. If we want to build something new we first; have to know what we are going to build in its place and then we have to tear down the obstacles that are standing in our way.
The powerful depend on us being too occupied with the toys they gave us to ever pose a serious threat to their control. They are right in that we enjoy the toys and sincerely believe that the owners will allow us a voice in what is happening. That is somewhat true but mostly the toys just keep us busy while the rampant destruction continues apace.
Jason Hirthler, in his recent article Death of The Art House:Revolution: Can the Amercanized West Ever Stage a Real Rebellion, said, "You don't have to deconstruct why we are often satisfied to place our faith in entertaining fictive solutions rather than engage in the tedious 'years of struggle' repeatedly called for by the likes of Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, who understood the grim realities of political transformation. The lined faces of lifetime activists serve as testaments to the cut and thrust of battle against the depredations of faceless multinationals and their ever-growing databases of information, through which struggles are defused and disarmed. From mobile phones, from fiber lines, from five-eyed satellites, from wirelines, from surveillance cams innocuously hung from every string of traffic signals. But is it simply the scale of the job that that keeps us from banging pots in the streets like Argentines before they threw the parasitical IMF from their country, or like Venezuelans rallying behind an embattled administration because it represents a movement whose colors they proudly wear? Or, of course, like the emergency-clad French who turn out in the public square week after week despite increasing repression. Are we fatally distracted? Or is it our creature comforts that dissuade us?"
We, as a nation, have become soft and coddled. Our amusements and distractions are so ingrained that any type of active resistance is unthinkable. A protest here and there, signing a petition, supporting different groups is almost worse than doing nothing at all. I do not deny that the protests being staged are raising awareness of the problem we face but with the massive destruction that is being wreaked on the natural world perhaps it is time to start taking a more pro-active approach, at least trying to stop, if only for own redemption, what is happening. The fight must go on to the very end. Which will be, according to all the markers, the very near future. Until then make your power known. Force the people who would blithely continue to destroy our world to understand that, even though it will not ultimately help, we know who they are and we know they are wrong.
