Going Towards “The Last Taboo”

A recent post on the apt and excellent blog by H.L. Goodall (http://www.hlgoodall.com/), discusses the problems with devout religious believers empowered to make laws that reflect their tightly held convictions (http://www.hlgoodall.com/Blog/The-Last-Taboo-and-Me-and-You.html).

The author of the blog notes that: “Representative John Shimkus (R-Ill), a Christian man who begins every day with a Tweet containing a Bible verse reminding Democrats and Republicans alike of God’s wrath, may become the next chair of the House Energy Committee…” and that “…Mr. Shimkus firmly believes that no one should worry overmuch about climate change because God promised not to destroy the earth again after Noah’s flood.”

In this we have a perfect example of a myth that comes to us from 1000 BCE used to confront, and with an ardent believer of this myth in a position of considerable political power, to attack and deface a very large and growing body of scientific information that tells us we have very much to worry about with climate change.

That would be enough for those of us not so well blessed by all-comforting belief to tear at our hair, right there.

We know, though, a significant minority, if not a majority, of Americans, when polled admit to believing the earth is about 6000 years old and the biblical story of Noah’s flood is an historical account.

These are the sort of people who equate the word “theory” with “just another story”. We aren’t going to convince them of anything by trying to rationally change their minds. It ain’t a-gonna happen.

If we are to reach them, the twice- and thrice-weekly church-goers, we must speak to their hearts. Having been raised among these people, though not now a believer, I am able to accurately tell you that one of the things that most motivate their convictions and their opinion are examples of forthright hypocrisy, particularly when it is presented to them in terms of the language and symbols of their faith.

When we talk about the actions like the Christian Senator Coburn’s consistent support of his Big Oil sponsors, no matter how nastily they behave, or how much his support hurts ordinary people (and we back our talk up with accurate citation of checkable fact), or when when we factually talk about the human costs of dirty coal and Representative Shimkus’ strong support for it, I think we have a chance to show people that these men, and others like them, are worshippers first, of power and the means to achieve it, with the God of the Bible taking a distant second.

Now it is true that for some believers, the arrival of “end times” and the imminent return of Jesus, would offer little reason to try to preserve a depraved and ultimately doomed world. To these folks, we might call attention to the utterance of Jesus himself, speaking of such matters, when he said “no man knows the day or the hour.”

Again, the point is to intelligently invoke their way of seeing and believing to convince them.

When I commented to Dr. Goodall’s blog (a blog which I recommend to everyone without reservation), what I said then would stand as a preface to what I’ve written above. Instead of recapitulating what I’ve already written, I simply copy here what I posted there:

Like the author, I, too “don’t think Representative Shimkus has the right to condemn us (and the rest of the world) to inaction on climate change,” but I would add, “on account of his personal belief in a particular interpretation of the Christian Bible“.

And just as the author says, we do “…live in a nation that recently elected a coterie of Teapublican nabobs intent on forcing their corporate-financed, Fox-mediated nattering nonsense on us all…” who are “…intent on reversing energy, justice, tax, and social policies that contradict their literal interpretation of the Christian Bible.” Their “literal” interpretation, it should be emphasized, is an example of a specific interpretation they call literal, and which derives from a particularly American pietistic tradition that asserts God’s truth comes through the individual quest of a believer reading his or her Bible alone in the company of God’s Holy Spirit–but with a twist. The twist is a little like the Pigs’ role in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, “…all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal…” The interpretations of Churchly “authorities” are to be understood by believers as carrying more weight than just anyone’s. This point is important, in order to understand what is meant by “literal” in this characteristically authoritarian American-style modified version of “me, mah bible, an’ the holy spirit,” and what it is that undergirds present-day temporally empowered American Christianity.

I was most moved to write this comment when I read the following. (You will see why.): “A caveat: I do not claim to know the mind nor the will of God. Nor do I know for sure that climate change will be the one thing that destroys the earth. Could be Armageddon. Could be a widespread virus against which we have no defense. Could be nuclear war. Could be a giant burst of energy or a dark star colliding with the blue planet. So no, I don’t know how things will end. I am, if anything, just an average citizen concerned about the future who reads widely and isn’t shy about applying what we know to solve real problems. I do believe that climate change is a real problem.”

I want to take exception to the author’s careful stance. In a sense, I am going to boldly stand up and claim that I do. “know God’s will” in that I am choosing to pay close attention to my corner of the cosmos and to reliable accounts by others about other corners of it as to what has happened and is happening… particularly with respect to the “big questions” and what religions have done vs. what they have claimed to hold to. (You see, I cleave to the conviction that paying attention to what happens trumps what is said (or what an acquaintance once said “is gassed about.”)

Poignant to the situation in contemporary America convicted Christian belief proves, upon close examination, for most believers, more a defense/threat mechanism against the fear of death than it is anything else. Senator Coburn’s and Representative Shimkus’ view of climate change and the Bible is as much an outgrowth of that, as it is anything else, and we are able to witness the truth of this in watching their reactions (and the reactions of those of like mind) when we offer criticism of their carefully balanced beliefs, or we stand up for the validity of alternative paths and interpretations. The line of “reasoning” goes like this: “If any part of the edifice that assures me that I am not really going to die can be called into question, then any part of it might be, or even the entire thing. If that happens, maybe I am going to die, after all.” (Full disclosure here: I was raised deeply within the American Christian Fundamentalist tradition, and speak with authority, when I comment about what the Fundamentalist sects consider or do not consider important.)

We should not neglect the insight (in the admittedly snarkily expressed) observation that 90 percent of Euro-American religious activity boils down to an admixture of three distinct reactions to the divine: 1) God as our Invisible Friend for whom we are throwing a surprise party, 2) God as the Boss who is coming, in anticipation of whom we must look busy, and 3) God as a Sock Puppet. (The latter designation may require some explanation for people not acquainted with every aspect of online jargon. A “sock puppet” in this sense is an online identity used for purposes of deception, specifically the deception that a different person is speaking one’s own thoughts and convictions, other than oneself. A person creates a sock puppet and then comments on listservs, social networking sites and blogs through it, as though a different individual were speaking.) Acknowledging this, we can only conclude that most of what people accord to God as “his will” and his direction comes not from any outside source of intentionality, but from within, and that “God” gets loaded down in this way with a lot of rubbish (for want of a better, if more off-color term) completely unrelated to anything that might come to a person caught up in the moment of connecting with the numinous.

I’m going to go even further in my claim to knowing “God’s will,” though. From reading that same Bible that guys like Mr. Coburn and Mr. Shimkus mention so often, the Christian God, if he or she is manifest in a form at all like what most people imagine when they give meaning to the word (namely, as a transcendent creator-being of great power who has a deep concern for each and every human destiny), I would like to suggest that Senator Coburn, Representative Shimkus, and others of their ilk are contemporary examples of Pharisees, in the most negatively pejorative sense of the word–here meaning “corrupt and false priests.” From their actions (as noted in the article), we intuit that the gods they truly worship are power, and the monetary means to achieve and augment it. Even a less than a careful reading of the Christian New Testament tells us that in the teachings of that faith’s originator, Jesus (later known as the Christ), hypocrites, self-dealers and takers of the Pharisaical kind become the objects of Jesus’ most pointed condemnation. (In noting this I find myself strongly resisting the urge to quote scripture here to prove my point. Must be the fundamentalist upbringing trying to come out.) If the Christian God had anything at all to do with the formation of His Book then clearly what Senator Coburn and Representative Shimkus are, are fakes, and what their “faith” is, is a lie.

In saying what I say, here, I think I am urging us all–those of us who cherish a different view than the narrow one represented in recent electoral victories by Tea Party advocates, and who feel a compelling desire to confront the lies that threaten our world–to carry “the last taboo” all the way into the territory of the opposition. All the way, speaking with authority in language and terms with which our opponents and their followers are familiar. In other words, not just to use tropes like, “…if God (said or did), then it follows that…” but a more “in their face” assertion that what these people stand for is not God’s will but their own, and their lust for a crown. We need to be willing to make recourse to the same sets of stories from Christian Mythology that they do.

Right now, all we have is the weak advantage of mind. They–these enemies posing as Good Friends–hold the peoples’ hearts. I believe there is room to wrest the hearts of the people away from them, while keeping our minds.

(In this comment, to some, I’m sure I would sound like a Christian, because intelligent believing Christians might make an argument that arrives at a similar place by different means. I may sound like a Christian, but I’m not an Anything.)

PTSD, Conscience and Slaughter

The recent “Fresh Air” program about PTSD and suicide (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=131096642, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=131096344) was gripping and made for very worthwhile and informative listening. Even in this program, though, we see signs of avoidance and denial; a mostly fulfilled wish to avoid discussion of the deeper questions behind what is under discussion.

I read (elsewhere) that nearly 1 in 5 dollars of the Federal Budget presently goes to the various branches and offices of national defense–for warfighting and the preparation for warfighting. Surely, we need to begin questioning that, right now, in the course of discussing the tragic consequences for soldiers (like PTSD and suicide) of our perpetual wars. Our national economy has depended upon keeping the nation on a war footing for decades, and it shows. Everywhere, it shows. In both civilian life and in military life it shows and shows and shows. We’ve re-made the US in the image of war.

At some point, it has to again become possible for us to confront that, question that, and insist that confronting and questioning that is NOT an act of shallow, “feelgood” (disloyal) so-called Liberalism, but honest, trustworthy and patriotic citizenship.

Speaking in India, President Obama declared “…we insist that nothing ever justifies the slaughter of innocent men, women and children.” This would have been in the same week and the same month (and the same year and the same decade) that US forces–actively and with full acceptance by nearly everyone in positions of power and influence–participate in operations the “collateral” consequences of which are specifically known to slaughter innocent men, women and children.

Particularly troublesome are the unmanned drone attacks from the air upon likely groups of assembled people who look like they might be “insurgents.” Far, far too many instances of deadly attacks from the air have proved to rain death and misery down upon innocent people assembled for innocent reasons (such as for a wedding). Two important conclusions might be drawn from the observation, one pertaining directly to the matter of the Fresh Air PTSD program, and one pertaining to what it is we are doing, generally, and what we need to talk about:

1) As long as we are going to be allowing ourselves to conduct the kinds of airborne and on-the-ground operations that the record shows we clearly do, some part (some better part) of the young people we are sending to do this work will come back rightly and properly traumatized and full of guilt. Now, none of this suggests it is good for them to kill themselves, or to feel guilt for their actions lifelong, without healing, but let us at grant them the legitimacy of their grief, guilt and shame. PTSD is a medical affliction, true enough, but when dealing with matters of the human soul and human conscience, we have to admit into consideration that reactions by some of the most sensitive (and PTSD vulnerable) of the soldiers we send into battle might be a signal sent to us by our shared experience that is trying to show us as we truly are–willing to slaughter in the name of expediency, and to send members of an increasingly permanent underclass to do it.

2) If it is truly a principle of our government and our people, as President Obama has publicly and unequivocally declared before the Indian Parliament, “…that nothing ever justifies the slaughter of innocent[s]…” then it directly follows, as President, it is Mr. Obama’s duty to act in the highest interest of American national security to order the halt of all airborne drone bombing attacks. On each and every occasion innocents are killed, the world sees, and compares what we are doing with what we say. Note what he said: “…nothing ever justifies…” That would take in, also, the many violent foreign adventures that we justify to ourselves, for ourselves, as right and proper which inevitably cause innocent men, women and children to pay concretely and ferociously with their lives and dreams of better world.

If nothing else, those watching us will find less reason to be repelled. Nothing quite so repels a skeptical observer as a consistent pattern of hypocrisy. Nothing quite so effectively moves an angry observer in the direction of violent acts of reprisal as a consistent pattern of violent and self-righteous hypocrisy.

Incidentally, it is that sort of thing: President Obama’s unwillingness insist on his watch that the nation live in accord with our declared principles–his demonstrated lack of moral and political courage (which, from the election results didn’t help him, anyway)–has been why so many of us who were inspired by his candidacy have been dismayed and repelled by his presidency. But I digress.

Corporate Conscience

Now Playing: ‘Erection’ by Wet From Birth and ‘Satyagraha’ by Philip Glass…

“The rich you will have with you always…” (New Testament Redactor reported words of Jesus of Nazareth)

[The following evolved out of notes taken during a phone conversation with Mr. Jerry Mander in the late 1980's---this blog's author's ideas were preserved in notes, mixed with Mr. Mander's. Though Mr. Mander's ideas run throughout, albeit transformed, perhaps distorted, the writing is my responsibility alone, right or wrong. Recent events on the national and world scene suggested a revisit to what the reader will find here, with additions and revisions added, reflecting how things have gone some 20 years since that one phone call. ---"Have we come so far, then?" ---"Um... No."]

The ‘shadow,’ in the Jungian sense, of governments, of nation-states, on the world scene, is the corporation… Only dimly perceived, except on the occasions that the world of international commerce intervenes to remake nations within their borders (The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein), the shadow is fully and physically active, making changes everywhere, the consequences of which are only much later seen or understood by the governing bodies charged with their regulation—this in even the most repressive dictatorships.

The collective corporate ideology—as opposed, perhaps, to the ideology of the individual human beings at the top of the corporate decision-making pyramid—suggests that power is the means to increasing wealth, and not vice-versa. Does this point to a thin and ghostly silver lining to the cloud of ongoing corporate hegemony?

Consider: Our best neolithic evidence—the news of the human world from our earliest beginnings as human beings recognizably like ourselves, and even before human time, as hinted in studies of warfare among chimpanzees—suggests that even so long ago, coming out of our long dispersal from Southern Africa, warfare between human groups was commonplace and endemic, if certainly not as organized as it came to be with transformations that spurred the Indo-European and other expansions. Where, in our own time, are we to place our skeptical allegiance, after learning this? (To put it another way: How might any relocalization that will come as the world changes, come without endless conflict? But, in this, I digress. That will remain a question for another time.)

We live when and where organized industrial conflict makes the peril of power obvious and terrifying. I, myself, live trapped within the might of a world power that has been at war, in one form or another, my entire life, from the moment I was born. Chronic, low-level warfare periodically breaks out in spasms of acute and total war. (Again: How is this NOT expected to happen in the course of the coming miracle of relocalization? But, again, I digress.) Peasants all, the great bulk of us, fully aware upon whose head the greatest force of coming blows will fall, we despair of any activity beyond achieving immediate personal pleasure.

There are mighty forces at work who are willing to make satisfying these ‘needs’—pleasure, appetite and diversion—their profitable business. These are the ones whose ideology is noted above: Power is the means to wealth. Often the power sought, when it is sought, is technical power, resource extractive power—the power to reform nature into commodity. The grave threat in this is to be ignored at our peril. Nevertheless, for the moment, it may be slightly better, perhaps, than the other way around, wherein wealth is viewed a means to achieving power, for if power is all, intrinsically rather than instrumentally valued, and its pursuit is unlimited, unlimited warfare right quickly follows. In the times before this one, when power was itself the end—power for its own sake–no limits at all seemed possible to the principalities contending for it. Our history is shot through with example after example of acts too vile to comfortably recount. (This is not said to ignore that many wars are fought over resources and the access to resources, but even there, the corporate model for hegemony has its ‘power as means’ prescription: to own the means for allocating resources rather than admitting to the changes and chances of a risky mad scramble.)

Unlimited warfare—with its potential for total, inescapable devastation—becomes then, for those in power to achieve wealth, warfare carried too far, because it becomes bad for business. Is this the faint and ghostly silver lining mentioned above? Perhaps, only perhaps, this represents a slight advance in collective human experience—a lesson learned—for if unlimited warfare is bad for business, warfare must be at first regionally contained, and then perhaps again, for those interested in ever-expanding business activity, controlled and eliminated within regions. (Of course what will have to go, among other changes, is the strong investment by some concerns in the engines of war. It is not at all clear how this would come about.)

This is not to suggest that warfare held within business-friendly limits won’t find its sponsors, nor that somehow where the corporation is found, peace suddenly breaks out. No, I’m simply suggesting that warfare MAY not be allowed to carry as far as history shows it has in the past. Dead wage slaves make poor consumers. Nor does this mean to suggest that much of irreplaceable value, locally, regionally and even globally, won’t be lost, is being lost, or that we couldn’t do much better than we are doing with the technology we now wield, or (further) that tyranny, extinction and exploitation won’t for a long time prove the rule, rather than the exception. I speak of only an incrementally positive change, if I speak of one at all.

Such a blunting of the extremity of war, when it happens, is able to become a temporary respite from a pattern of violence deeply rooted in our species history. This respite may persist only under conditions where extreme or total war proves to be bad for business. We find, for example, places where extractive industries are able to build for themselves well-defended enclaves inside of which their control can be tightly maintained. In these instances, the industries concerned hardly care what happens outside their ‘green zones.’ Further, when corporations are threatened—or perceive a threat—they seem no less ardent (if presently less well-armed, and better lawyered) than governments in defending themselves; willing to stop at nothing.

So, the ‘silver lining’ to the cloud of rising corporate power, noted above, offers only temporary and contingent respite, but perhaps, just perhaps, this represents enough of a pause to allow other important changes to come.

Whatever ways there might be in going toward the goal of ‘ensouling’ the corporation—or better said, reforming the group mind or culture (or ‘spirit’) in which these collective entities are contained, giving them a conscience—will come, as such changes always come, only through the sacrifice of work and blood and suffering by those willing to offer themselves in dissent and opposition; martyrs of daily discipline and active repose. The way forward to such a goal of ‘corporate ensoulment’ seems impossible now, and no obvious path through the thicket is there to see. Look how long it has taken for our kind to change the idea of what government is for.

Not a few of those who think about these matters have pointed out that we vitally need to change the definition of what was once was termed the ‘standard of living,’ presently defined by material economy and the trappings of consumer lifestyle. Some have suggested we exchange a reduction in wealth of property and possessions for an increase in the wealth of opportunity and time (time to create, time to enjoy, time to rest). Such a redefinition of wealth might constitute as succinct and accurate definition of humanity’s saving transformation as any that might be made—if such a transformation is possible and if, indeed, it is on its way. However, without some sort of corporate ‘ensoulment,’ any change like this would strike directly at the root of corporate wealth and power; its entire reason for being.

Unless we are able to change the way we look at riches and their distribution, people simply will not be allowed to refuse buying stuff when they are told. Look at the works and deeds of entities like Monsanto (‘At the Sign of the Black M’), with inventions like the Terminator gene, or Monsanto’s well-cited actions against farmers who resist ‘Roundup Ready’ corn and soy. We see how the thinking might go: “If they won’t choose our custom, we’ll make ‘em buy. They’ll have no choice.” Monsanto, by no means, stands alone in its willingness to create a permanent market of dependent customers—what at one time used to define the distinction between criminal and worthy business enterprise.

We cannot escape this hard truth: As the people who buy so much, now, start refusing the treadmill, or can’t continue to try to keep up with it, then there will be blood. It won’t only be shed in peaceful confrontation of power by non-violent protests, nor could it. People will fight. The only way this destiny might be blunted, if not avoided altogether, comes through the as yet unseen way of giving corporations–now full-fledged persons under the US constitution–a conscience.

One way to do this might be to revise in statute what has grown up though judicial decision—the notion that the only criteria upon which a corporation’s fiduciary responsibility can be defined is in terms of increasing shareholder return. If these corporations are persons, they are now no longer strictly property, nor strictly private. Accordingly, they must be seen as necessarily fulfilling roles beyond those of mere accumulation. That too, must become an understood investor risk, along with all the other risks investors must accept. Shareholders will have to be held (indirectly) responsible, as will corporate managers, directly, for more than simply ‘improving the bottom line.’ Corporations themselves will have to become willing to experience genuine transformation from consumers to citizens.

Coda:

Finally, I would not agree to claims by those giving this somewhat jumbled essay a superficial reading, that I am standing up in praise of corporate hegemony, or corporate personhood. I would, ideally, rather see a world much different than that, but given our history, it is hard to see how such a world would be better, or more ideal. It may be that the present set of changes is a stage through which our species must pass. Those who would pass quickly through, would do well to think hard about what we humans have tended to do to each other even under the best of times. As they work toward relocalization, among other changes, let them pay close attention to what they want to build.

There will be blood. There will be greed. There will be oppression. There will be violence. But, ‘there is also love in the world.’ (Steven R Donaldson)

We recognize the threat in onrushing peril, and life remains very, very good.

===Further Along in the Dialog===

Continuing to follow the thread of the response to a response to Michael Moore’s “Open Letter to President Barack Obama” — One email exchange later…

It begins here with a comment, in reply to what I wrote, made by Mr. Lurtsema.

***
> I appreciate your response, although I do take issue
> with what appears to by a holier than thou attitude
> with a suggestion of my being empty headed. That said,
> I’ll take that as a miscommunication. Civil dialogue
> rather than name calling is much more interesting.
***

It is not you, particularly, for I hardly know anything about you, that
I’m calling empty headed. That being said, I do consider boneheaded the
arguments typically put forward in support of both the Iraq and the
Afghanistan adventures in military exercise. (I use the term “argument”
most loosely here, to characterize what are most often a haphazardly
organized set of knee-jerk, thought-free responses and prejudices, rather
than actual well-though-out ideas supported by reasonable argument, or
informed by fact.) I call these arguments empty-headed because they are.
If a person so strongly identifies with them that he or she feels painted
by the broad brush of dismissal, then so be it. For the time being let us
allow ourselves to assume you are an exception.

***
> I was sent into harms way by our government when I was
> a poor and somewhat pissed off boy. I still question
> the merit of where and why I was sent. Truth be known,
> I have no idea why I was sent. I went because I said I
> would. When you agree to become a spearhead, you stab
> whatever you are pointed toward or you have a good
> chance of ending up dead.
***

I also served during wartime. I was lucky not to have to go through
what many I know have done. Being in a theatre of war, against my
will (like yourself, having gone because I had given my word to
fulfill an obligation), I reserved the right to look around and pay
attention to where I was, and why I was there–even then, when I was
much younger than I am now. I particularly noted who stood to gain
and who stood to lose, and the people who were sent “into harms way”
(as the current journalistic cant has it), and who were carefully
arranged to be far, far away from any possible danger.

***
> There should be an implicit trust in the government
> that decides to send you or your child into harms
> way. Unfortunately, I long ago lost trust in my
> government. Because of that, I opposed every measure
> that set us on middle-eastern soil from 1991 forward.
> I was appalled that we invaded Grenada and Panama . I
> was deeply saddened at the loss of my brother Marines
> lives to a truck bomb 1982, and I was ashamed of my
> country’s support for a dictator in Iran before that.
***

I am truly sorry for your loss. I am sorry for many losses like it. So
much so, that on memorial day and on veteran’s day, I DO NOT (with few,
specialized, exceptions) participate in the state-sponsored exercise of
fakey national mourning which goes out of its way to tell us that “these
brave men” died “to defend our country”, when typically they were
required to die for rich men’s schemes and rich men’s dreams,
transacting, in the words of President Calvin Coolidge, the business of
America, which ever remains, as he pointed out in a brief moment of
honesty, business. Let us not forget, shall we, that the post-civil-war
US military history is one of more-or-less ongoing, often covert, armed
action some place or another in the world. (Undoubtedly, because we are
corresponding by computer, you must be acquainted with the record, or
can access it as readily as I. It is there to find.) Let us not try to
explain this fact away as some sort of exercise in national defense.
When I’ve visited memorials and gravesites of those who have died,
invariably I have come away with the conviction that it remains ever and
always a travesty for a young man (or now, young woman) to die in the
flower of his (or her) youth so that better profits might be assured to
nameless stockholders, and more power accumulate in the hands of upper
management. It is hard enough to bear when a young soldier dies during
warfare in a war for a worthy cause, as in the second world war, or the
civil war. It is an abomination for a young soldier to die so that
wealthy, old men are able to make more money or put pressure upon a
recalcitrant foreign leader who refuses to obey, or to advance their
political or military careers.

Add to this, my outrage at exercises in national stupidity–which includes
the Reagan administration’s stationing of the Marines in Beirut as well as
the present exercise in no-bid contracts we are now engaged upon–and you
can begin to understand my not-so-peaceful take on the current
war-party-sponsored arguments for the ill-conceived and deceptively
executed Afghan and Iraq adventures.

***
> However, after 9/11, I believed and still believe we
> should go into Afghanistan to decapitate the terrorist
> threat. I was appalled that Bush decided on invading
> Iraq – but I was not surprised either. He did name
> Iraq and several others Terrorist nations that told the
> world that he take care of them. That said, I am still
> for making the people responsible for 9/11 pay for
> their actions, no matter where that leads, whether to
> the caves of Afghanistan or the halls of power right
> here in the United States.
***

There is so much that might be said here. Let’s begin with the favorite
reason for everything in 21st century political America, namely, the
“look-the-other-way” terrorist attack on 11 September 2001. Setting
aside certain anomalous details originating within the Bush
Administration surrounding the events of that day, lets take the attack
at face value as wholly and entirely perpetrated by unassisted foreign
nationals sponsored by ‘Soma bin Laden. Ok. So stipulated. We all know
the US response. The US chose “war in our time” for decades. Here is the
appropriate response: We (along with the entire world who was at that
time behind the US, almost entirely) had a duty to hunt down and
prosecute these criminals who committed violent crimes against humanity.
(Note the designation: Crimes against humanity, not simply crimes or acts
of war against the US, for people of all nationalities and cultures died
in the attacks.) Had we done this, while at the same time isolating
Afghanistan for harboring the criminal cabal who planned and sponsored
these and other terrorist acts, and had we purposefully tried the
perpetrators before the world court (a la Nuremberg), all the terrorists
associated with the attack, including, possibly, Osama bin Laden, would
now be sitting in jail for life. The US would stand tall in the world’s
eyes as a wise nation and to-be-reckoned-with force for peace. Terrorist
enemies of peace would be increasingly brought to justice. More and more
it would be hard to avoid naming terrorists for what they are–violent
wreckers who choose to attack the innocent–instead of allowing them to
remain heroes and fighters for freedom in the minds of many angry and
oppressed people. This was our nation’s chance to do the right thing. It
didn’t happen. Why? Lots of reasons, of course, but one of the main
reasons is that the US arrogantly chooses again and again to reach for
the military gun when confronted with events like this, when they
originate overseas.

Note the sharp contrast with the Oklahoma City bombing perpetrated by
Timothy McVeigh and friends. That was rightly seen as a criminal act.
The perpetrators were found, tried in open court before the eyes of the
world, convicted according to the established facts and punished. (Note
that we did not start a war with McVeigh’s home state for harboring him,
or round up and perpetually imprison his known associates that had no
knowledge of his actions beforehand–some of which harbor rather extreme
“militia movement” views about the US government.)

The POINT of the comment is this: Acts of war happen between
nations. We attacked Afghanistan because they had harbored a
criminal prior to his involvement in a particularly public crime,
and they did not hand him over after a purposefully, ridiculously
short deadline. Our “successful” attack upon this nation happened
with the collusion and active cooperation of tribal interests and
factions within the country who helped us for their own reasons, and
who don’t particularly like or admire our nation, our cultural
traditions, our way of life, or our reasons for being in their
country. (Why should we expect them to think well of the US? Our
nation invaded theirs for its own reasons, not their reasons.
Further, what we want is not what they want, right or wrong. Also,
even if American troops stay in Afghanistan for decades–a neocon
defense contractor’s wet dream–by the historical measure of things,
we will have been there for an eyeblink, and Afghani lifeways will
remain largely untouched by US lifeways.)

***
> For all of my cynicism toward the men and women who run
> this country, from Washington to Wall Street, I still
> believe in America . Don’t get me wrong, I don’t
> believe in an America that bullies others and isn’t a
> good neighbor. I believe in an America that really
> does stand for life, liberty, and the pursuit of
> happiness, and just for me and mine but for all
> people. That includes the right to go in peace and
> follow a different path – what else could liberty mean?
***

I’m not sure what “believing in America” has to do with supporting the
present military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq. I’m not sure what the
phrase “believe in America” here means. Does it mean one believes in the
existence of America? Does it mean believe in the original ideals of the
founders as articulated in the Constitution? Does it mean belief in what
history shows mainstream American culture did with those ideals? Your
subsequent comments seem to suggest that you, personally, believe in the
ideal of individual human liberty. This certainly is praiseworthy, but
I’m not sure what that has to do with debating the pros and cons of a
particularly troublesome policy.

Note that I take pains to emphasize this point perhaps beyond what is
quite necessary. I do that because the implication (and often the outright
assertion) is often made that to question these (or any chosen) military
action is to somehow “hate America” or perform some other (presumably
base) act of anti-patriotism.

Do you have any idea how tired, tired, tired, I am of prominent names on
the right–who by their every demonstrative act and decision show how
little they believe in the ideals which inspired and began the United
State of America–incessantly wrapping themselves in the flag when
questioned by those who don’t agree with their agenda, suggesting that to
not agree is to not “believe in America”?

***
> I am not in the position to debate tactical or
> strategic perspectives on the ground in Afghanistan .
> This may all be an oil war or some other kind of war.
> None of that would surprise me. What I see as an
> interested bystander is charge and counter-charge,
> divide and conquer, squabbles over power, and the world
> marching ever toward more bullshit. The people we have
> elected threw us into the middle of a war. We elected
> them, and we are as responsible for the prosecution of
> that war and the outcome of that war as they are.
> Crying about how we are going to lose, like Russia or
> Alexander doesn’t help and it may be harmful. When
> engaged in a fight, you figure out how to win or how
> not to lose; you don’t whine about defeat.
***

I do not agree that because we elected (given the events in Florida and
Washington DC in 2000, even that is in question) a particularly bad
administration, who made particularly bad and corrupt decisions, that we
are therefore forced to stick with these decisions long past any point
where the utility of these decisions is clearly shown to be nil. Our
current efforts in the Middle East continue to run counter to our best
interests. We are NOT succeeding in Afghanistan, and our present
“success” in Iraq can be only defined so, as a success, by comparing the
situation now, with the mess we created in the dark years of 2006 and
2007. Some promise that with more troops in Afghanistan we will be able
to “defeat” our “enemy” and likewise create a “success”. Often, these
same folks suggest it will take a ten or twenty year US deployment to
accomplish this. This is nonsense, even criminal nonsense.

***
> Furthermore, if you have been in the shit, you know
> that what is going on is never like what is being
> explained to information consumers. Hell, the
> perspectives of the people on the ground changes
> depending on the theater of operation, the particular
> shit hole valley they happen to be fighting in,
> individual experience, and perhaps on whether or not
> the person on the ground got their mail call that day
> or not.
***

Have you read of the morale by US troops on Afghanistan? It isn’t good.
They don’t believe in the mission, either. It would seem only those in
government who don’t want to lose face, senior military officers always
conscious of career opportunities, defense contractors who stand to gain,
and the chickenhawk pundits at Faux News are the only ardent believers in
the Afghanistan adventure that remain. Nearly everyone else is either
tepidly in support (because they are told to be over and over again in the
media), or are actively against continuing the adventure. The polls don’t
show strong support, and often show a majority against. As I said, the
troops, particularly the combat troops, think the mission is
ill-conceived. Most Americans, if they stop shopping or watching football
long enough to answer the question, don’t shout a ringing endorsement.

Couple this with the fact that the Taliban aren’t going to vanish even
if we manage to (temporarily) “defeat” them–they are a social-religious
movement, for chrissake!–it is hard to see any reason for not simply
bringing the troops home, now. The Taliban will likely take back a part
of the nation, perhaps all of it. THAT IS NOT OUR AFFAIR. Even if we
want it to be, it is not our affair.

If we are afraid of what they might do to us–though it is hard to see
how–we are in a much better position to protect ourselves against covert
terrorist attack over here, than over there.

(Really, though, this misses the entire point–the best strategy to take.
I’ll get to that.)

***
> All the information that you and I have is second,
> third, or fourth hand – and properly filtered and
> dispensed through news media for safe consumption.
> Then you give it the meaning you give it, based upon
> what is important to you and I give it the meaning that
> I give it, based upon what is important to me. And,
> neither of us will be entirely right or entirely
> wrong. Or, more precisely, we will probably both be
> wrong, since we are making conclusions based on
> inaccurate information and/or disinformation.
***

Think: This is as strong an argument for leaving as it is for staying. If
everything we know is false or lies, one would have to ask “why”? Who
would stand to gain, who to lose, by dunning us with disinformation? Why
is so much of the message machine dedicated to keeping the US “in the
fight”? Again, who stands to gain, and who to lose? Please note that
questioning or dissenting information about these conflicts is much harder
to come by than information in support.

Further, it’s a bit specious to suddenly suggest, once a critic of a
policy starts making cogent points, that the information about the
situation is faulty. Up to the moment before the suggestion that all was
not well with the plan, everything seemed fine with the information. Why
the sudden doubt of it all?

Undoubtedly, there are details about being in Afghanistan that we don’t
know, just as there are details about living here on the edge of Bush
Alaska you don’t know about, or details about living in Anchorage I don’t
know about. (This principle applies to nearly every example a person could
pick.) Still, we are able agree in the main, unless we have a hidden agenda
(such as corrupt contracts or the like) which tells us we can’t afford to
do so, based upon the things we DO know about, as to the big picture of
what can and cannot work in solving key problems. As ever, the “fly in the
ointment,” here and there, is the hidden agenda, is the secret plan, is
double dealing careerism and the like.

***
> One of the things that I do with my spare time is teach
> self-defense. I’m not just talking about karate at the
> local strip mall, but practical self-defense. In my
> world view there is really no need for violence in most
> all cases. Violence is a tool of last resort. There
> are so many things that one can and should do to
> prevent violence. Don’t show up where the violence is
> or is likely to be. Don’t insult people. Don’t steal
> their belongings. Don’t threaten people. If someone
> engages you in violence, do whatever can be reasonably
> done to de-escalate and/or run away. Be strong, and
> don’t look like a victim. That is what I teach, and
> that is the way I live. I’ve successfully gone through
> my entire life (since I left the Marine Corps 30 years
> ago) without being in a violent confrontation. So, I
> have been personally successful at peace. I also know
> that on occasion, situations arise where all of the
> things that one can do to avoid a violent confrontation
> fail. There are situations where violence is the only
> answer. So, I have trained myself to do that well,
> although in my civilian life I have never been violent
> even once.

> However, if you find yourself in a violent
> confrontation (whether or not you did everything in
> your power to avoid it or not), the fact remains that
> you are in a violent confrontation. You don’t have to
> like it, and nobody does. You can have philosophical
> and moral ideals that tell you that violence is bad –
> most of us hold those types of beliefs. It doesn’t
> matter, you are in the shit and you can survive or you
> can die. It is perfectly acceptable not to fight back
> and hope to survive. It is also acceptable to do
> whatever is necessary to defend yourself and survive
> the confrontation—and you can still die. Any choice is
> viable; the best choice (from my perspective) is the one
> that ensures the survival of the most people – including
> those who are perpetrating the violent confrontation.
> The legal and moral choice is to do the least amount of
> damage required to defend yourself or your loved ones.

>I don’t think the current situation is much different.
***

As laudable as I find your sentiment and your practice, I must hasten to
point out that personal self-defense and the reasons to lead a nation to
war (or, in these instances, project violent power in presidential
executive-branch military adventurism), ARE NOT THE SAME THING. An
analogy between the two–from the personal to the national–leads one
astray. We are not talking about being attacked a single force, here or a
nation state. We aren’t talking about a military attack at all. We are
talking about an egregious act, possible under highly specialized
circumstances (some might suggest, suspiciously specialized
circumstances), of very public vandalism using airplanes against
skyscrapers. The violence authorized under the circumstances–the
“violence” which is “the only answer” isn’t one of military action, but of
criminal policing–investigation, forensics, “most wanted” lists, rewards
for “information leading to…”, etc. Admittedly, aggressive, tireless,
world-wide, international policing can sometimes become very violent–but
policing is what is called for, just the same, followed by apprehension of
the suspected criminals, and public trial by just due process.

I suggest that the best way of all in confronting the kind of act we saw
on 11 September 2001–”the best choice… that ensures the survival of
most people…” is NOT military action which empowers the very causes and
forces we wish to weaken or destroy, and NOT military action which itself
shamefully kills many more innocents than died in the initial 11 September
attacks, but tireless enforcement of the law which at the same time
endorses and strengthens the idea behind and practice of international law
and justice.

(From my point of view, a strong tradition of international
cooperation led by the US over the past 8 years would have readied
the US to lead the world in confronting the very real danger of
runaway global warming–which will happen if the mean global
temperature rises above 2 degrees Celsius over historical mean
temperatures–at a time when we’ve already heated things up by
almost a degree. Nearly everything our species, and the nations of
the world, have confronted up to now is “small potatoes” compared to
facing the changes and challenges we must make to avoid a likely
runaway-warming human-extinction event. Wouldn’t it have been nice
if the US had enjoyed an 8-year record of leading a strong
international coalition of nations confronting an international
problem, instead of what we have instead, a disgraced nation,
accurately portrayed in the eyes of so many of its fellow nations as
a hypocritical torturer, political jailer and blundering, arrogant
confederacy of dunces, known best for “going it alone” and/or
pressuring “the willing” to go along when it doesn’t like what it
hears from its peers?)

***
> I suspect that your desire for a peaceful world that is
> safe for people to live in is similar to my desire for a
> peaceful world. For instance, I recognize that peaceful
> resistance is brave indeed. And, there are no few who
> stand by that with courage, even in the face of
> tremendous horror. History has shown that it works
> pretty well when dealing with people who are able to
> see you and I as real persons with rights. I commend
> it, want to nurture it, want to see it grow, and want
> to protect it.
***

Actually, my desire in this particular instance–of US policy in the
Middle East–is for it not to be so stupidly shallow, short-sighted and
ultimately destructive. In the larger sense, yes, I am deeply committed to
peace (even if my particular version of it is fierce), but for now I’d
settle simply for A LOT LESS WAR.

***
> I say protect, because I am too cynical to believe that
> peaceful resistance will work against an enemy who
> refuses to see you and I as real persons with rights.
> I doubt people like Hitler, Stalin, or Mao would have
> been slowed down for a second, or would have lost a
> moments sleep over slaughtering a few million pacifists
> if they got in the way of their plans. And, there are
> evil fuckers in the world today just like them. Some
> of them have power, they live in boardrooms and caves,
> or they run governments around the world (including
> ours I am afraid), and some of them flew airplanes in
> the world trade center and killed 3000 of our neighbors.
***

We will always have criminals and bullies as part of our story. What we do
is confront them, say no to them, stop them, and isolate them. What we
wisely DON’T do in the name of stopping such people is become like them,
only worse. In so many instances (even in some of those you invoke above)
the early success of a bully has been because we’ve given the bully our
early support.

Again, though, returning to the particular issue in question here, the
Afghan adventure, there is no bully. There is a loose coalition of
independently working, and sometimes covertly funded groups willing to
work under the umbrella of a name invented for them and given to them by
CIA analysts (for that is where “Al Qaida” comes from). There is the
ghostly Osama, who is known to have helped to fund the planning and
execution of certain terrorist actions. In other words, we have criminals,
the naively frustrated who are capable of exploitation, and the righteously
angry who don’t care what they do.

What we DON’T have is an enemy in any meaningful military sense of the
word. We aren’t confronted by a single, motivated force. Those arrayed
“against” us are not unified, and much of their anger arises directly
from our present misunderstanding (if misunderstanding it be, rather
than much darker exploitation) of what we are facing and our actions
confronting it.

The proper model for confronting the international terrorism problem is
the criminal law enforcement model, and NOT military action. (Of course,
law enforcement sells many, many fewer big military contracts to the war
profiteers.)

***
> It is not that I am a war monger or a greedy old man who
> is willing to send children to die for my want. I am
> also a father and a grand father. I don’t want to see
> anybody’s child die for stupid reasons, and I sure do
> not want to see my children die either.
>
> That said, I am a realist that recognizes that there
> are people in the world who don’t care about peace,
> don’t care about our children, and will use the desire
> for peace as a tool to weaken those they want to steal
> from, control, or kill. How do I know that? Because,
> that is precisely what I would do.
***

Please explain to me what is “being realistic” in doing something stupid
over and over and over again, even as it continues not to work? I don’t
get that part. Maybe you can help me.

Might I suggest that the hallmark of a fool is to refuse to be instructed
by experience?

I’m not standing up here for doing nothing. I’m standing up for doing
the right thing, the correct thing, and that which will actually
confront and defeat the problem. (And, I am standing up for confronting
those who would profit mightily from the present course of action.)

***
> Our cultures have been in one clash after another since
> the Greeks defeated the Persians 2500 years ago. Even
> the Crusades are recent to middling history. Do you
> really believe for a moment that if we simply brought
> our soldiers, sailors, and marines home that that would
> be the end of it?
***

This “clash of cultures” argument is another of the war party’s favorites.
There is so much that can be said in criticism of it. Much of this has been
said better than I can do, and in significant detail. The arguments can be
easily found in the journals and on the web, by those who want to find
them (in other words, those interested in reading views that don’t
precisely mirror their own). I need not duplicate them here.

All I will ask is this: We confront many cultures around the world who
don’t agree with us, who don’t like us, and with which we are able to
find various was of establishing a modus vivendi. Why do we only see the
clash with this culture at this time? Could it be they have something we
want, we have made ourselves need? Could that thing be found in the
acronym for the original proposed name for the Bush-sponsored invasion
of Iraq, namely, Operation Iraqi Liberation? (Don’t forget the
possibility of a pipeline across a pacified Afghanistan! We might be
approaching or past Global Peak Oil, but that doesn’t mean we can’t
fight over the remaining stocks.)

***
> Finally, just because I have reached different
> conclusions than you, does not mean I haven’t thought
> about it as thoroughly as you. May I suggest you not
> fall into the fundamentalist trap of believing that
> everyone who thinks differently than you is a dolt,
> immoral, or somehow lacking. That is the beginning of
> a slippery slope. Its also annoying.
***

I am a practical man. For me the essence of a thing is in what
happens–what is seen, heard, thought of, said. It isn’t the different
conclusions drawn by the supporters of the Afghan (and Iraq) adventures
that I dismiss, it is their shaky foundations, the results we are able to
readily observe, and the creepy justification for about any institutional
evil in the name of the War on Terror.

If I am annoying, it is because after 8 years of this crap, I am more
than annoyed. Eight years ought to be enough time to show someone that
something is not working. As we divert our attention, deplete our
treasure, bleed our own people and bleed the innocent people of other
nations, the world gets dangerously hotter and hotter, threatening to
destroy the lives of everyone’s grandchildren. If I’m a bit testy about
this, as a veteran, grownup human and parent myself, I think I’ve earned
the right.

There is this, too: I believe that the rules of speaking out in a public
forum say that anything a person says is fair game. I expect people
reading my words (at, for example, http://strike2012.wordpress.com, or
http://stayinginalaska.blogspot.com, or
http://byhanddelivered.blogspot.com) to hold my feet to the fire even as I
do the same to them.

Annoying or not, my motto is: If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the
kitchen.

Again, I say, though, that I hardly know you. I do think the arguments for
these “wars” (war-like actions) are doltish. That isn’t to say I think you
are a dolt. I don’t know you. You may be, you may not be.

A Response To A Response To An Open Letter

The Open Letter can be found here: http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/mikes-letter/open-letter-president-obama-michael-moore

===

The Response (by a Mr. Mark Lurtsema) and the Response to the Response appear in the following passages:

Reading over your comments in response to Michael Moore’s letter, I cannot help but respond to your response. My replies follow directly from your comments. I choose your response for my response because you trot out so many of the familiar arguments that up to now seem to go unanswered. “Let us at least not repeat lies.”

>>>I know first hand how terrible warfare and killing is.

I also know. And knowing this, I say that again we see the safe, protected and old all too willing to send the young and the confused off into danger to be hurt and killed for what amounts to nothing. Are we to think having Americans in Afghanistan for a few years (or even a few decades) is going to fundamentally change anything in Afghanistan? Those who believe this simply do not understand anything about the history of the region. The cynical might suggest that certain multinational pipeline dreams are the ultimate driver for the current Afghan adventure, and NOT the ever-virtual pursuit of the ghostly Osama. If that is the reason, even more so should we not be sending our young to die for the greed of old men.

>>>I also know that, at least for the foreseeable future, the warfare and killing will continue.

This is no reason to gratuitously foster, enhance and promote it. Our job, if there be any job we still have in the world beyond that of getting our own house in order, FIRST (seeing to “the beam in our own eye”), is to do everything we can to undo war and the effects of war, instead of promoting it in places where otherwise its prevalence might be far less damaging. Please, let us not forget who our “allies” and collaborators are in this Afghan adventure, and why they are so interested in being our “friends.”

>>>I know that we will continue to send our young and our courageous off to battle in places like Afghanistan.

As one who was once sent, and who worked alongside many others sent, though the sentimental phrase “young and courageous” sounds sweet (“Dulce et decorum est…”), in my experience it has been the young and the poor and the confused and the pissed off who have been sent on these foreign adventures.

>>>I don’t like it and it is difficult to accept.

If you don’t like it, why do you so readily endorse it with the familiar and increasingly strained homilies?

>>> On the other hand, we live in a violent world, and we have a committed enemy.  Right now they appear to be in the mountains and caves of Afghanistan …they may own Kandihar.  Better that they be neutralized there, than here.

This is one of the more empty-headed utterances we hear from the pro-war party, that if we don’t “do it over there, we’ll have to do it over here.” First, this is a complete misunderstanding of the causes and situation that created the events of 11 September. Second, it is a complete misunderstanding of Afghanistan and the conditions in Afghanistan (and our role there). Third, does anyone saying this really believe that if we “fail” in Afghanistan, the next stop for the Taliban is the US of A? Oh, come on! Fourth, the Taliban are strong where they are because in large part they have the active cooperation of the population in these localities–not exclusively, of course, but enough support to allow them the scope they have obtained. Try as it might, the US-led effort is not winning the “hearts and minds” of the Afghan people. Even many of our warlord “friends” and allies prove to despise us. Fifth, and most importantly, our efforts there (and in Iraq) are clearly making the enemy stronger, and not weaker. That is the paradox inherent in this sort of foreign adventuring.

>>>Although I am not a pacifist and never have been,…

WHY am I not surprised to hear you say this?

>>> …I understand and respect that thread that runs through civilization.  It is important that some of us seek peace and have the courage to face violence with peace. I also know that some people hide behind pacifism because they are afraid to stand up to violence.

Would you be suggesting that the most prominent voices for peace presently being heard, and who have been heard in the recent past are examples of those “afraid to stand up to violence”? I’d deeply question that. Further, right now, and for a long time, it has been much easier to publicly and privately stand up for retribution, angry retaliation and violent intervention than it has been for peace, for the law of compassion and for forbearance. Surely you can discern that when one path is an easy path, and another path is the more difficult path, that very often to walk the more difficult path is the more courageous walk. I, myself, when reading about or hearing about injustice feel an immediate tug to forcefully intervene. Even as I believe, still, that there are times when just that sort of intervention is needed, I find myself learning to stop, wait, think and breathe, trying to find a way forward that doesn’t return us again and again to the cycle of death-dealing, resentment and revenge. For a long time now, the last tool in our toolbox of responses for which we ought to reach–violence and war–has tended to be the first tool we want to put into our hands. Get this: We want to put that tool into our hands. The question we need to be asking ourselves, is “why?” What knowledge, what understanding, what anguish of awareness are we trying to hide from ourselves?

Further, what in opposing a particularly stupid and pointless war makes doing so the precise equivalent of pacifism? Many who would not necessarily call themselves pacifists oppose the Iraq and Afghan wars.

>>> In any case, at least here in America, that is a choice that you have.  But, it is only a choice because there are rough people willing to do violence on your behalf.

This is another of the pro-war party’s favorite tropes. It is an utterance (and viewpoint for those who honestly hold it) that understands neither violence nor peace. People who stand up for peace do not do so because someone else is making it possible for them to stand up for peace. Also, with very few exceptions, people who choose violence aren’t choosing violence because there is no other option. Example after example to the contrary–of people standing up for peace even at terrible personal cost–deny that old lie. The best that might be said is that sometimes, those willing to justly wield the force of arms have sometimes managed to protect those for whom the courageous choice not to hurt or to kill (and to actively promote peace) is the only choice they can bring themselves to make. (Only sometimes. Usually not. “In whose hand is the gun usually held?” I ask you.) Might I point you in the direction of Velcro Ripper’s recent film Fierce Light for you to see some examples of the courageously peaceful? I daresay people like those shown would choose peace no matter what the cost.

Speaking strictly for myself, I am the “rough person” willing to protect my own deep conviction that our own way forward out of the present mess we’ve created for ourselves as a nation, as a people and as a species is through the path of peace… and I say this as a not particularly peaceful man, battling lifelong a tendency toward wrath and outrage. At least, I have less illusion than I might about the place in the shadow from which my rage wants to spring. I neither need nor want some man with a gun, (or for that matter, some government with lots of guns arrogating to himself (itself) the right and responsibility to do what is rightly for me to do–protecting my peaceful path. What rot.

>>> Our brave young men and women are, in some cases, all that stand between you and me and the wolves.

I don’t buy for a moment that the troops we’ve sent to the OTHER SIDE OF THE WORLD CLOSE TO WHERE THE OIL COMES FROM are there keeping “dangerous wolves” at bay. I remain profoundly unconvinced that the wars our nation is fighting are accomplishing anything like that. These are wars for special interests. Perhaps you (or others) believe in the goals of these special interests. It would be nice, in that instance, for an honest case to be made for remaining at war, instead of wrapping yourselves in the flag, and suggesting that somehow our national or cultural integrity as a people is under threat. The best that can be said is that a recent belief by Americans in their right to drive around cheaply is under threat. (Even that is doubtful.)

>>> Perhaps, Obama is sending troops to Afghanistan, not to serve corporate interests but to protect you and me from the wolves. Perhaps…

Those who are interested in wolves, and the defense of the people against wolves might do well to look much closer to home to find the sorts of wolves that are the true threat. I think even a cursory look around right here at home might find some, and in some fairly prominent places, too.

I would say: Thank you for turning this in. Think again. Think harder. D-.

Response to: Mark Lurtsema <mark.lurtsema@ctg.com>
Subject: An Open Letter to President Obama
Date: Tuesday, December 1, 2009

The Dark Side of Resilience Thinking…

Kenny Ausubel’s opening remarks at the 2009 Bioneers Conference makes a short list of principles key to Resilience Thinking of the kind we are going to need in order for our species, along with many others, to survive through the crises (mostly of our own making) coming over the next 100 to 200 years. (See: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kenny-ausubel/honey-we-shrunk-the-plane_b_70247.html .)

Though mainly in agreement, I am in agreement with caveats. More properly, the title to this posted essay ought to read: The Forgotten Aspect of Localization as We Have Known It for Most of Our History. To keep this reading short, let’s take a brief look at some of Mr. Ausubel’s proposed principles for sustainability and resilience and think about what our history shows past forms of local governmance have taken.

Build community and social capital. Resilience resides in enduring relationships and networks that hold cultural memory the same way seeds regenerate a forest after a fire.

Being both a clever and a hierarchical species, since the advent of the agricultural surplus, our typical manifestation of “communal and social capital” has come with a built-in steep gradient between ‘have-not’ socio-economic primary producers (the peasantry) and their ‘have-much’ rulers and ‘guardians’. (Certainly, as we humans developed the industrial economic system, this steep gradient is not one we’ve abandoned, if we have sometimes flattened it a little. People in positions of relative privilege, such as most members and activists within the Bioneers community, often don’t see how different things can be from the other side of the economic divide. But I digress, for that is the theme for a different essay.) Does anyone think for a moment that if the main source of wealth and production ever turns back to the land and agricultural productivity, that those who endeavor to “run the country because they own it, and own the country because they run it” will suddenly decide not try to own and control as much of the new source of wealth (land) as possible, “farming the farmers” because they wish to avoid work and enjoy the comforts they’ve come to regard as their birthright? What will be the role, then, for the ordinary people, if the plans we are making now allow this to happen? Sharecroppers? Rent-payers to absentee landlords? Serfs? Slaves?

There isn’t a single inhabited continent in the world where complex, agriculturally-dependent, pre-industrial societies grew up and fell, again and again, in which the problem of the steep “have/have-not” gradient hasn’t been present. No post-agricultural society is known to have escaped the problem of the gradient.  Not one: Ancient India? From the 7000 BCE Mehrgarh Culture through the British Raj the familiar pattern is there to find. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_India) Central America? It would be hard to see how an average peasant farmer in any one of the many Mayan or Aztec city-states lived a life, or fulfilled a role much beyond that of minion to those in seats of power. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aztec, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayan). In South America, we know the Incan empire was rigidly ruled from above, top-down (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inca_civilization, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inca_Empire). Ancient China established the pattern familiar (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_China). In North America, what we know of the Mound Builder people and the Anasazi suggests the inevitability of certain patterns–at least if left to unfold naturally. Here, too, the familiar steep gradient between the low and the high in human society can’t be ignored (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mound_builder_%28people%29, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1200/is_n1_v143/ai_13307352/, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Pueblo_Peoples). It hardly needs mention, steeped as we are in our “own” cultural history, to note that ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, Rome, Medieval Europe, Palestine and the present-day ‘Arab world’ again all fall into dismayingly familiar socio-economic patterns.

It is true that each of these examples (and the many, many others that might have been cited) erected enduring patterns and networks that retained cultural memory. That part did happen. What, though, of the experience within these patterns for the people at the bottom–those socio-economic primary producers? I think it is time to let the medieval Peasant Bodo speak here, in testimony: “It is dreadfully hard work, for I am not free.” (http://www.fullbooks.com/Medieval-People1.html)

As we engage in the work of trying to undo the worst effects of the energy-rich and energy-wasting civilization we have inherited, and done our part to build, it would be wise not to forget one of the great reasons for our getting to this place. It has long been the desire of people to move toward liberty. Too often such freedom gained proves to be freedom wasted and attention diverted by those who would exploit a people’s power to choose. If that is why we are where we are, wouldn’t it be wise to keep in mind both the reasons why we left the land and how we’ve squandered our advantages since then, as we look for ways find our way back home?

Is it a simple return to the “good old days” we are seeking? Really? Or, rather, are we after some sort of future informed by both the now and the then–a combination of  the cleverness and deep knowledge of our own time (think of the beauty in Cosmology, here, or hold in your mind’s ear some of the music we know how to make, or consider how present-day understanding of ecology and biology informs a new awareness of life itself) unfolding alongside of, and interwoven with, the rituals, wisdom and deeply satisfying patterns of our ancient, pre-agricultural past? I’m suggesting it is a mistake of astounding naivete to think we are going to automatically turn to a world of equity, opportunity and freedom of expression in our turn toward relocalization. Ours is not an encouraging history in this.

I’m passionately suggesting that as we concentrate upon bringing our attention back to the places in which we reside, to relearn how to live in them, we need to equally concentrate upon the forms such relocalization will take.

Empower local communities to solve their own problems. Governance usually works best when it’s closest to the ground and includes all stakeholders across all levels.

Throughout what might be termed a history of tyranny–our history of tyranny–one constant remains: for most people, and for most of the other creatures caught in the human domain, the nastiest experience of tyranny, of exploitation, of injustice has been local tyranny, exploitation and injustice. As told in Barry Lopez’s Of Wolves and Men, the great predator-killing, however fostered through regional policy, was transacted locally. Or as told in Ishi in Two Worlds by Theodora Kroeber, the foul despite of “Indian hunting” ever remained a series of ongoing local events, locally transacted, and locally sponsored, either actively, or by the silence of those who didn’t approve, but didn’t, or couldn’t object. Only decades ago, way down in the deep south–a region that resisted longest the galloping changes of 20th century consumer industrialization and could be considered an example of lingering local “governance close to the ground”–the history of Jim Crow clearly demonstrates that localization does not automatically equate with including “all stakeholders across all levels”. It took focussed and sustained protest and intervention coming from outside the region to make crucial civil rights changes. Had the protests led by Dr. Martin Luther King and other members of the civil rights movement not prevailed upon the national government to force regional and local changes, localities would have embraced civil rights reforms much more slowly, if at all.

I’m passionately suggesting here that we must not ever come to believe that a return to the local will effect an automatic inclusion of “all stakeholders across all levels.” The latter will prove something to be fought for against powerful vested interests–often corrupt local interests–that will resist changes that empower those previously without much say. If politics is ultimately local, as the saying goes, so must also both the anguish of tyranny and the relief of justice ever be local. In choosing the latter, we will find we must fight for it.

Beware of systems being too tightly connected, because one shock to the system can cause them all to crash at the same time.

Often, the attraction of a “bottom-up,” anarchistic political philosophy–in which I admit a personal and avid interest–goes directly toward the simple fact that systems of law and “justice” all too quickly move toward serving the interests of the privileged, instead of performing the three key functions upon which any form of governance might be honestly justified: 1) redressing wrongs done by the strong and capable upon the weak and disadvantaged, 2) addressing the systemic ill effects of inequities in an inherently unbalanced socio-economic hierarchy, and 3) caring for the community and the ecological setting in which everyone lives, including non-human animals and plants. Without fulfilling these three crucial functions, the anarchist insists that any government is pointless and inutile.

Yet, we cannot escape the facts found in the historical record. Throughout much of the medieval period in England, for example, ordinary folk sought after, and actively chose the King’s Justice over the justice of the local lord. Why? Simple. It was simply fairer–more just. Later in English history things went the other way as enclosure began to eat up the commons. Justification for enclosure depended upon (admittedly) national support for a particularly individualistic definition of private property, the consequence of which were acts of “commons-taking” that remained inevitably local in execution and effect, and, moreover, would probably not have survived legal scrutiny in an earlier era. More contemporaneously, let us again recall the history of lynchings in the US South throughout the early 20th century. These were inveterately local choices, local phenomena–manifestations of local “justice”. In other words, local law enforcement remained compliant and local citizens remained silent, if not covertly acquiescent.

Local polity, reinforced or left alone by regional or national polity is more than capable of being the most inescapably oppressive polity.

Beyond the honest demand upon our attention of the inequities and troubles noted above, there is also this: In most, if not all, societies in which we find the familiar human propensity for hierarchically dominated social and economic life, we also find example after example of ecological overshoot driven by mad lusts for power and the divorce, by the “haves” in these societies, of privilege from responsibility. In other words, the human beings making decisions from the top of the social pyramid increasingly come to see themselves isolated from both the people below and from the negative consequences of their decisions. In most pre-industrial instances, this dynamic revealed itself under what could only be called local conditions. If it is true that throughout much of human history a significant explanatory theme might be found in that human beings tend to deify outstanding individuals of their own kind, certainly is it also true that much of what explains us up to now, at least since the invention of agriculture, can be found in the tendency for well-off human beings to deify themselves.

Seeing this, I am passionately suggesting that we need to pay as much attention to the forms our efforts toward localization will take, as we do to the change-making work itself, always keeping in mind the question, “Who stands to gain, and who to lose, and why?”

It is long past time for our movement–if movement it be, of like-minded people wanting to live a different way–to go beyond general principles to practically and concretely think about what makes a good community, good.

Ultimately, the question comes down to this: If we are simply going to “do it all over again,” making the same familiar and anguished mistakes over and over, is the survival of our species, Home sapiens, worth it? If we prove unable to grow, oughtn’t we die?

On Hope (and Change)

[I've been away for some time, both busy with work right at home, where I live, according to what needs to be done here, first, and because I've held off, watching, with increasing dismay, a disturbing trend in the Obama administration toward hesitant caution rather than courage that cries out that the time for substituting right for wrong and wrong for right is over.

It seemed that for many in the business-as-usual, profoundly compromised Democratic Party, who surround and hope to feed upon the Obama movement, the motto was "where else you gonna go?"

I stayed away, that's what I did. And, I planned to. (That would be the cautionary message to take away from this, Democrat fellow-travelers. Where are we gonna go? Away. From both your houses.)

Yesterday, almost deciding not to go--just in the last 5 minutes before the thing was scheduled to start did I decide I'd actually go--I attended a very small local OFA organizing meeting at the Stone Soup Community Center in Fairbanks, Alaska. [http://www.barackobama.com/index.php, http://healthcare.barackobama.com/]

I was heartened to discover that the spirit which began this campaign, even as its success approaches the end of its first year, was not gone, the manipulative attitude implicit in Obama Administration Chief of Staff Rohm Immanuel’s observation that it is a shame to waste a good crisis, notwithstanding.

Accordingly, I’ve decided to reactivate, in my own fashion, working to connect with like-minded folk, and former Obama campaign supporters here where I live.

Hence the following, written shortly after attending the meeting.]

===

“Where is the thicket? Gone.
Where is the eagle? Gone.
The end of living and the beginning of survival.”
(Attributed to Chief Seattle)

We ought to have started this work 30, even 40 years ago, and certainly 20 years ago, at the end of the Cold War. Instead we turned a troubled democratic republic into a plutocracy, in which American mainstream culture let itself be distracted by a one-and-a-half generation-long shopping spree in which our promise as a people got traded away for cheap running shoes, media fun and fast food burgers, and worse, exported the idea of this way of life to the rest of the world as the highest and best that humanity could achieve.

Throughout that interval, our power elites intentionally and actively presided over the exchange of the finest of what our people and our nation would have been able to add to the stream of human ideas for the most shallow and emptily near-sighted.

These same power elites convince themselves that they remain isolated from consequence; that the destiny that their greedy choices arranges for everyone else won’t fall upon them, and so they convince themselves they do not need to care about what happens. [_Shock Doctrine_ by Naomi Klein]

Now, at the end of this, as the times grow grim for more and more ‘ordinary’ Americans… not just the persons of color at the bottom of the economic pyramid or who fill the many, many jails… the American People begin to see things aren’t as they’ve been promised to be, advertised to be.

A failing middle class economy, bad schools, crappy food, ‘sink or swim’ medical care, the disappearance of home and community in which hardly anyone has anyplace to belong anymore, all contribute, and more, to an increasing national malaise.

A growing number of Americans are starting to turn off the TV, roll up their sleeves, though, and say, “We can fix this. Let’s fix this.”

I, myself, take my (small) place alongside these ordinary heroes, and look up to them.

“Still, and all, and nevertheless,” even so, if every single thing were to get done that most Americans believe needs to be done to restore health and justice to our nation, and were to see miraculous accomplishment, the problems that would remain to face us–the real problems confronting our people in the world we have made–would still demand generations of sacrifice.

For all that needs to be done, there isn’t enough time, there aren’t enough resources, and there isn’t enough wealth left, to do them.

It will take generations to undo the mistakes of a 150-year-long cheap oil spending spree that most in America unquestioningly accept as endlessly sustainable and a natural right.  [_The World Without Us_ by Alan Weisman]

Most of the problems that face us remain invisible by virtue of our way of looking at the world and each other.

Some of the best of us have said, and more of our kind are starting to believe the truth in this, that “The world is one country, and all of humankind are its citizens.”

As laudable and true that utterance is, and as desperately needed, it nevertheless falls far short of the way we need to see in order to avoid not just the death of millions of our kind, but all of us. [_The Spirit in the Gene_ by Reg Morrison]

It doesn’t appear we are ready to say anything like this, also: “The earth is one place, and all creaturekind are its rightful inhabitants.”

We have been told by denizens of the Chicago School of economics, and the like, that an economic model based upon endless expansion of our numbers (6 billion and counting) and our activities, is a natural law–as though our kind and our world were numbers in an infinite field of numbers instead of human animals born into a particular time and place, in a world of bountiful, but finite resources, sharing the space with other living things upon which we utterly depend for our own lives.

Something in our frontier history allowed us to be persuaded, in the face of example after example of things going wrong, that the forests would last forever, that the fish would always be in the sea, that the topsoil would last forever, that the genetic wells of our kind and of the kinds of plants and animals upon which we depend is infinitely deep. This is not so, and now we are on the verge of being sharply, even brutally, shown that.

A close look at natural history, and even our own human history [_Collapse_ by Jared Diamond], demonstrates again and again the ultimate bankruptcy in the dogma of the endlessly expanding economy–and in the present instance, for our civilization and our species, the harsh “teachable moment” rapidly approaches.

These are not a small problems we face, and many of us will fall–will die–in the coming years as we face the consequences of our numbers and of our choices, and as we bravely confront the changes to come, and put our hands to the work called for, and even as some of our kind turn upon others of our kind for doing this work. Our only hope is to work and not be weary, to stand and not faint, to laugh and not be discouraged, to look around and look for beauty rather than spoil.

Seeing all of this. Knowing it to be true down to the basement of my very being, deep in the mineralized flesh of my bones, I still choose to act. I choose to go beyond hope, and in so choosing, to set to work.

The Foundation

If I was confronted, as a citizen holding no generally recognized qualification, with the task of testifying truly in a single sentence before some High Court of Appeal and Adjudication, or some Truth Commission, about what I understood of US History throughout the “American Century,” I would have to say this:

“The United States of America could have been a force for great good throughout the world, but instead chose Empire, and now, the Empire’s poor foundation is rotting, threatening to topple all.”

(When I refer to the poor foundation, above, it isn’t the vision of the founders as articulated in the Declaration and the Constitution to which I refer. These are, rather, the foundations of the open, representative government that was here before, from which Empire emerged, in unholy, tearing birth. The rotting, weak foundation to which I refer as threatening to topple everything can be found in Congressional Acts, Executive Orders, state secrets, foreign policy and US diplomacy since the passage of the National Security Act of 1947.

The threats to which the nation responded, it responded in precisely the wrong ways. The good it did was overwhelmed by the evil it did. We begin to see how much the losers we all are, for that.)

We might easily fall into the trap of scapegoating certain recently exposed Bush Administration memos attempting to erect legal justification, in the name of the War on Terror, for what the founders properly and accurately called tyranny. Bad as these documents are, though, they represent the next logical step or natural extension of policy and practice that has been operant in the US since the Cold War, intended to redefine the relationship of the American people and their government. If we see any change from this over the next handful of years, we will only see small change. How could any one eight-year administration bring to bear sufficient force to change the course of an entire nation that has lasted more than 60 years? The genius (if that word can be used here to describe the man) of George W Bush and his cohort was in going with the flow, rather than against it. President Barack Obama is an inspiring centrist surrounded by longtime mainstream political advisors. This does not sound like a recipe for any but the most immediately accessible changes. Important as many of these may be, they still don’t touch the foundational difficulties.

The Origin of Economics In Antiquated Field Equations

THE massive effort continues to be to “fix the economy”. President Obama’s people are on it. The Washington-New York Axis is on it. We’re promised that everything will be ok again in America if we can manage to bring the good times back in a couple of years.

Again and again we seem to be refusing to return to the one question we need most to ask: In trying to “fix the economy” are we trying to solve the right problem? (Yes, of course, politically, a solution needs to be found as desperation mounts. People need to start feeling that times will get better or they will become unruly. At best they’ll vote the current administration out of office. At worst, who knows… Still, the question, here too, is real: Is the problem everyone thinks we need to solve in the immediate sense, the real problem?)

Imagine if everything magically returned to the way things were, say, in 1998, at the height of the dotcom boom, or, say, in 2004, at the height of the housing boom… Imagine, still further, that things returned to the conditions of those rosy days without the inherent foundational weaknesses recent history shows us to have been there all along (rampant deregulation and concomitant corruption, dotcom schemes that weren’t profitable, sub-prime mortgages given out freely to hundreds of thousands of borrowers who could not pay, etc.). In other words, imagine a repaired economy of perpetual good times without all the mistakes that the Republicans and their sponsors have made over the past 14 years.

Imagine this, and then think. We’d still be confronting: Peak Oil, Global Warming, A runaway human population explosion, Profoundly disequitious Rich Nation/Poor Nation wealth distribution, Widespread global violence (including two unnecessary wars in which the US is a major participant), A worldwide black market slave trade network, Multiple instances of non-carbon resource depletion, Dying fisheries, Massive worldwide deforestation…

Fixing the economy, as we understand it, wouldn’t begin to touch a single one of these or any of the other problems I didn’t list that face us—problems the consequences of which don’t promise to affect the lives of people for years to come, but for decades and centuries to come.

Can anyone paying attention honestly take seriously the simple reassurances implicit in the view that if we manage to handle the current financial crisis, all will be well?

Before offering any reply to this question, for anyone, to anyone, it couldn’t hurt to take a closer look at the field of economics itself—the mainstream study of what it means to understand, and by implication, to ‘fix’ an economy. What does economics have to say about how the world works, or more accurately, what have economists been socialized and educated to believe is true about the ‘economic reality’ in which they do their work? What is the origin or starting-point for economic thinking, both in history and in formative principles (what mathematicians call axioms)?

It’s important to know from where ANY significant enterprise comes. This must be even more so for as vital an enterprise to financial, social and political decision-making as economics has become. Without knowing these things about any systematic way of thinking, including economics, one knows less about it than one thinks. So, let’s look…

Mathematical economics originates, oddly, in the middle 19th century with the antiquated field equations of the German physicist Hermann Von Helmholtz. In adopting Helmholtz’s theory—apparently without any basis for doing so other than a wish to emulate in their ‘dismal science’ the certainties of physics—the founders of mathematical economics did little more than substitute for energy in Helmholtz’s field equations the economic notion of utility. In other words, economists simply substituted economic variables for physical variables, leaving the mathematical framework of the theory unchanged. In this way did economics suddenly become a rigorous mathematical science. (Much more about this history can be read in the works of the Environmental Economist Professor Robert Nadeau, author of The Environmental Endgame and the essay “The Economist Has No Clothes”.)

Now comes the quirkily interesting part, and another example of the immense power in human affairs of denial. After having performed a substitution that was at the time questioned and criticized by mathematicians and physicists in an age when to be a physicist or mathematician was to work somewhere close to the top of the hierarchy of intellectual pursuit, economists and the entire field of economics more or less completely forgot its origin in long-outdated equations of physical field theory.

This would be an historical side-note were it not for the fact that these same equations, and the economic assumptions behind them, are very much alive and well in our time, framing how economists look at the world. Modern economic theory—the very theory that economic students are taught in their first years of study—rests upon on a handful of unquestioned assumptions about the relationship of the human world of manufacturing and commerce to the natural world. The particular way of ‘economic seeing’ framed by these assumptions remains the basis upon which any ‘fix’ to the national and global economy will be made.

In other words, I am about to outline a short list of what economists believe to be true about the world. Let’s see how much agreement between prevailing economic dogma and the events we are facing can be found. Mainstream economic theory is based upon the following assumptions:

1) The market system is a closed system of cyclical flow between production and consumption. (Where’s waste? Not here!)

2) Natural resources come from outside the closed market system. (What is a ‘resource’ is defined by the market system.) They come into the market system from a separate and distinct domain, and the value of these resources can only be determined by the interaction between elements of the closed production-consumption system. In other words, the only value that can be put upon natural resources of any kind is a market value. There is no other economically valid way of evaluating natural resources.

3) Damage or change to the market-external realm or domain from which natural resources come can only be represented as costs elsewhere that cannot be included in the pricing mechanisms of the closed production-consumption market system. (In essence, these external ‘costs’ are not economically meaningful market costs.)

4) Market-system-external natural resources are endless in that they are of a kind that cannot be exhausted, in that substitutes for diminishing resources of one kind will be found in resources of another kind, endlessly, or in that technological or other praxic methods will inevitably emerge to render diminishing resource pools unnecessary.

5) There are no natural (biological or physical) limits to endless growth of market systems.

6) Any place or time here is just like any place or time there.

There is an old saying that has to do with cleaning up messes: “First you have to see the dirt.” It would seem to apply here, slightly modified: First, you have to see you have a problem.

In fact, isn’t that the first principle of addiction treatment? First the addict has to see he or she has an addiction and that the addiction has become a problem?

Any economic theory that insists upon not seeing limits to growth, not seeing the explicit hazards of cost externalization, and not seeing the terminal reality of exhausted resources, is an economic theory, one would think, not well suited for handling the very problems our species is facing as it covers the globe in numbers like never before seen in an animal of our size and scope.

(By the way. Let’s clear something up now. It isn’t the planet we endanger by our unchecked activities. It is ourselves. A planetary life-system that could withstand the asteroidal impact of the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary event in which 70% of all species were rendered extinct, or even the Permo-Triassic boundary event, in which up to 95% of all species were rendered extinct, is a planetary life-system which will withstand anything the human-mediated extinction event can throw at it for the conceivable future. No, our activities threaten, among other large animals, us. We are in peril as we continue to connive in our own destruction, not the planet.)

Reconstitutional Convention for the Local

It’s fairly clear, in trying to ‘fix the economy’ that the Obama administration has had its ear finally bent in the direction of the wrong set of (very self-interested) financial and banking crisis advisors.

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/02132009/watch.html

http://baselinescenario.com/

Still, throughout all the late (and much mourned) macroeconomic ‘talkamancy’, we’ve still yet to see acknowledgment of the one economic truth that necessarily must and will fall from the particular set of crises—global lending and trade slow-down, global warming, worldwide natural capital depletion, peak oil—coming onto all of us in the manner of a ‘perfect storm’. Much to my surprise, not least because this is an administration led by a president famous for community organizing, we have yet to see serious mention of relocalization, and the simple fact that the future of the US economy will depend more and more upon the making and supplying of things closer to home—in and around the towns and regions where individuals and families live.

This change, which is inevitable, could see a re-transformation of the consumer back into the citizen, or it could see a transformation of free people into subjects. It all depends upon the nature the of relocalization, and the relationship of the people involved to each other and to those responsible for governing. A village or regional collection of villages ruled by a warlord and his cohort of thugs, for their ‘protection’, who will kill if not obeyed, is a form of relocalization. Organized criminal rings running the local black market distribution of goods and services (and therefore the locality) is a form of relocalization. Just because our future promises that we will be more in touch with local conditions and the local economy doesn’t mean that such a future is inevitably better—though it could be, if we make the right moves.

The simple fact that economies, with the end to the era of the 2000-mile-hamburger, are expected to be relocalized does not confer anything of promise more than the simple fact that more and more of the things needed and used by people will necessarily come from closer by, rather than as they have, in an era of cheap energy, from far away. (In fact, paradoxically, I suggest, that the more we focus our attention upon ‘fixing’ the present economic system, rather than changing it according to what lies ahead, and the better we prove at doing so in the short term, over the mid and long term, greater will be the numbers of people everywhere forced, sink or swim, to rely upon raw materials, goods and services found close to where they live; forced to forgo most useful things that might come from farther off—unless they are in a position to pay exorbitant ‘fees’ and bribes on top of a vastly increased purchase price.)

The problem faced by everyone in relocalization is this: People will fight. (That people will do something else that starts with the letter ‘f’, too, has something to do with the problem, as rising local and regional population exacerbates the competitive pressure for available resources, increasing the frequency and intensity of the fighting.) The history of the 19th and 20th centuries shows us that concentrated propaganda and other mass mediated pressure upon a population can cause it to hate and to fight and to support a war against a people living far away, even on another continent, or can cause or foster hatred by a majority population toward a minority population living within its midst. Even so, the recent Israeli/Hamas conflict in Gaza vividly points to our dilemma, everywhere: When it comes to actual fighting, people fight with the people at home and nearby.

For a significant number of those who study the history of government, and the formation of systems of governance (something very distinct, by the way, from the social systems of organization and coherence found in band- and clan-based hunter-gatherer or horticultural societies), it is hard to escape the fact that the first governments amounted to little more than a minority subset of powerful, and therefore privileged, people running things for their own benefit—simply ruling that they might have the best things in life. Even under conditions of such ‘primitive’ governance (of a kind we must hasten to assure everyone we have nothing like now!), the extremes of social unrest—violent competition for resources—proves to be counterproductive. The peasants can’t be tilling in the fields if they are allowed to go about bashing and stabbing each other with sticks. The advantages become apparent rather quickly, even for the most self-interested ruling cohort, of enforcing a measure of peace, if not too much peace, as long as there remains some out-group that can be blamed for misfortune.

Beyond this, and more from the point of view of those governed, rather than those who govern, ordinary people often need convincing, or collectively get into a social condition in which they need convincing, that the forces that bind and threaten their lives aren’t their neighbors, and aren’t even those ‘different’ people living in the next neighborhood, so that they are able to unite against what truly threatens their well being, e.g. the predators who would enrich themselves by exploiting the situation.

It is just this necessity to which Jesus is reported to have been speaking when he offered a solution in the exhortation to enact ‘love’ for one’s neighbor as one ‘loves’ oneself [The word translated into English as 'love' from the Greek of the New Testament is agape---"an intentional response to promote well-being when responding to that which has generated ill-being" (Thomas Jay Oord, cited in the Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agape)]. It is this necessity which has authored again and again the many versions of “enlightened tit-for-tat” or the ethic of reciprocity, in the form of the golden rule…

“This is the sum of Dharma [duty]: Do naught unto others which would cause you pain if done to you”. Mahabharata, 5:1517 “

Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful.” Udana-Varga 5:18

“And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise.” Luke 6:31, King James Version.

“Do not do to others what you do not want them to do to you” Analects 15:23

“Do for one who may do for you, that you may cause him thus to do.” The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant, 109 – 110, 1970 to 1640 BCE, Egypt

“None of you [truly] believes until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself.” Number 13 of Imam “Al-Nawawi’s Forty Hadiths.”

“A man should wander about treating all creatures as he himself would be treated. “Sutrakritanga 1.11.33

“And if thine eyes be turned towards justice, choose thou for thy neighbour that which thou choosest for thyself.” Epistle to the Son of the Wolf

“…thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”, Leviticus 19:18

“Do not wrong or hate your neighbor. For it is not he who you wrong, but yourself.” Pima proverb.

“Be charitable to all beings, love is the representative of God.” Ko-ji-ki Hachiman Kasuga

…and so on. [For a much longer list of versions of the Golden Rule, from which these were taken, go to http://www.religioustolerance.org/reciproc.htm .]

We don’t need to be exhorted to breed, or to eat, or to defend our own offspring, or to form friendships, or to defend our friends, showing that which we already do, needs no urging. Unfortunately, another of the things we already do is to fall to fighting amongst ourselves. This happens all too easily, hence the necessity for having to state the obvious in the Golden Rule, namely, that which we do to others is likely to redound upon us in return.

This points to the necessity in the changes we face for thinking about and planning the sort of relocalization many of us alive today will begin to experience soon. Americans have for some time grown unused to, and unpracticed in, the art of living in a community, when ‘community’ is understood to be ‘the people with which I must live’, rather than, ‘the people with whom, through the technology of easy travel and flashy electronics, I exclusively choose to associate’.

So.

If I ‘ran the zoo’, or more accurately, if I’d recently come into a measure of power, as has President Barack Obama, in my efforts to resist pressure from the status quo along the avenues that yet remained free for me to act, I would quietly and immediately form a long-standing relocalization working group—a Reconstitutional Convention for the Local—in which I would retain a strong personal interest. The group, or convention, would be composed of intelligent, imaginative and experienced people selected from mostly outside the business, government and corporate establishment. I would look for people with personal histories of local and community action and commitment. The group would be charged with discovering and creating specific executive policies and legislative initiatives to foster, protect and enhance the kind of relocalization we’d want, and to guard against the kind of relocalization we would not want. [Isn't this a part of what our nation's founders were about?]

Necessarily, the membership of such a group would have to be unbound by a narrowly defined religious, ethnic, educational or socio-economic background. So, in choosing the people asked to serve, choosing not to consult overmuch the mavens of the mainstream or the bigheads of ordinary politics, would be to choose wisely. The situation we face is not ordinary. Anticipatory, imaginative vision is called for, not the same things done in the same way over the past 64 years.

But us… we, out here… the folk, la gente, the people…

What do we need to do? That would be grist for another essay on another day.