INTERVIEW / Jonah Raskin : Occupy's Nathan Schneider on Anarchy and Radical Catholicism

Nathan Schneider, June 17, 2012. Photo from Occupy.

Interview with Occupy’s Nathan Schneider:
Anarchy, activism, and radical Catholicism

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / September 19, 2013

"It's hard to pick a revolution about which one doesn't have major misgivings. But they also have peak moments: the nuns kneeling before Marcos' tanks in the Philippines; the queer crusaders emerging out of the Sixties; the cacophonous assemblies at the Paris Commune; the pockets of anarchist rule in Catalonia; the Christians and Muslims in Tahrir guarding one another's prayers." -- Nathan Schneider

If Nathan Schneider had a middle name it might be “Contrary” or “Confrontational.” There isn’t a sentence that he writes or speaks that’s not provocative. In that sense, he’s a child of the Sixties, though he wasn’t born until the Reagan 1980s, and more precisely in 1984, the year that George Orwell warned us against.

“Half Jewish,” as he calls himself, he grew up in the free-floating spiritual environment that characterized the end of the twentieth century in America, which meant that he was touched by secular Judaism, secular Christianity, and “a strong dose of Eastern Spirituality” -- through his mother. Not surprisingly, given his family and background and the force of his own quest for a spiritual matrix, he converted to Catholicism at the age of 18.

After he graduated from public schools in Virginia, he attended Brown and then the University of California at Santa Barbara, but gave up on academia to pursue his “education through journalism.” Schneider has been connected, as an observer and a participant, to the Occupy Movement for two years, beginning in 2011 and continuing until the present.

He tells the story of his conversion to Catholicism in God in Proof, and the story of his engagement with Occupy in Thank You, Anarchy which Rebecca Solnit calls, in her introduction, a “superb book.” It’s not the first book about Occupy but perhaps it’s the most comprehensive.

On the cusp of 30, Schneider has quickly become one of the “best and the brightest” -- to borrow a phrase from the 1960s -- in a generation of intellectuals and activists who are reinventing the American radical tradition. In the under-30 crowd, there’s probably no one with a deeper affinity for the Sixties than Schneider, and no one more eager to question the legacies of the Sixties than he — all of which makes his books and articles provocative and entertaining.

Nathan Schneider, March 19, 2012. Photo from Occupy.

Jonah Raskin: An Old Left friend of mine -- Alexander Saxton -- used to say that there was a gene for utopia. Do you think that there’s a gene for anarchy?

Nathan Schneider: Maybe it's the same gene. Or maybe it's a mood or a moment. Many people who were talking the anarchist talk during Occupy are now more or less back to doing the same-old-same-old. The Occupy mood or moment was caused partly by a failure -- from the Democratic Party of Obama to radical left organizations -- to bring young folks into the fold. A few years after Obama's election - - with no limits on Wall Street or the security state -- there were no viable alternatives. So, there was a craving to do away with everything, take over a square and start from scratch.

My Catholic friends tell me that I’m a closet Catholic. I’m motivated by guilt and by the need to confess. There’s more to Catholicism than guilt and confession isn’t there?

Guilt motivates me, too, but I don't attribute that to Catholicism. Despite evidence to the contrary, thanks to 2,000 years of baggage, the Catholic Church is supposed to be a durable institution that helps people live out the gospel of faith, hope, and love. I've found a great deal of inspiration and support in communities of radical Catholics such as the Catholic Worker. But my faith is enlivened just as much by acts of witness that aren't done by Catholics -- and Occupy was chock full of them.

Do you wish you had been alive in 1968? If so what might you have done?

I might have kept to the sidelines. My mother was in France that year and my father in Southern California, yet their proximity to rebellion didn't seem to impact them appreciably. Occupy could just as well have passed me by if I hadn't happened to be in on it from the beginning. I had time on my hands.

What if you were alive in Paris in, say, 1789?

I would have liked to be a pamphleteer.

Or in a Nazi concentration camp in 1944?

I probably would have died, as members of my family did.

I remember Tom Hayden popularizing the notion that repression leads to resistance. In Chile, for example, repression lead to the death of a movement that had culminated in the election of Salvador Allende. Is there a more nuanced view of repression and resistance in Hayden’s?

In Occupy, repression inspired wider resistance only for the first few weeks. Occupiers, especially in early 2012, got addicted to repression and couldn't understand why their arrests stopped inspiring the public. Movements in far more repressive regimes tend to understand this dynamic instinctively. Activists need to be strategic about how much to invite the repression of the state and how much to circumvent it.

What you attribute to Hayden is related to the horrible notion that "things have to get worse before they get better." No Thanks!

When you say in Thank You, Anarchy that the revolution isn’t far off, what are you actually saying? What do you mean by “far off” and what do you mean by “revolution”?

I was thinking of a conversation I had with an Egyptian activist. I asked whether, she expected that Mubarak would be out of power. She said, "Not in a million years." Social transformation is hard; when it happens it can seem so easy and inevitable, until it gets really hard again. In the passage you're quoting from, I'm trying to play with the dialectic. As for what we mean by revolution, take your pick. I'm trying to talk about the way in which revolution can't be talked about.

You have published two books this year? What other books do you have in the works?

My goodness, two's not enough? They've got me plenty busy. But I am also working on an essay about dispensationalism, a popular form of apocalyptic theology.

What political writers have taught you the most about writing about politics?

Jeff Sharlet -- who also writes at the intersection of politics and religion -- has long been a mentor, though I can't come close to imitating him. He introduced me to JoAnn Wypijewski who guided me at a formative time. As the initial occupation approached, I was reading Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night -- about the 1967 anti-war march on Washington -- which I loved and hated, because all that seems to matter to Mailer is what he’s thinking. At times his thoughts are brilliant. Lastly, I've learned a lot from Joan Didion, especially how her thinking is less important than what she reveals.

How white was Occupy Wall Street?

Schneider on Occupy.

It started out pretty white, and then became less white and then white again. We saw some of the wrinkles in our supposedly post-racial society when it turned out that people didn't know how to relate to each other across racial lines.

The other day, I saw a young black man in my neighborhood wearing one of Jay Z's "Occupy All Streets" T-shirts. The movement forced Jay Z to discontinue those shirts. In Occupy Atlanta, John Lewis, a civil rights hero, was denied a chance to speak. A lot of the beauty in us and in our society that’s normally hidden under a bushel was allowed to shine in Occupy. So was a lot of ugliness.

Can you say more about Jay Z and the T-shirts?

People were very sensitive to rip-offs and co-optation. It was a tough decision because if the shirts had been around they might have led to more connections to communities of color.

Is there a revolution from the past that inspires you more than any other?

It's hard to pick a revolution about which one doesn't have major misgivings. Every revolution betrays. But they also have their peak moments: the nuns kneeling before Marcos' tanks in the Philippines; the queer crusaders emerging out of the Sixties; the cacophonous assemblies at the Paris Commune; the pockets of anarchist rule in Catalonia; the Christians and Muslims in Tahrir guarding one another's prayers. Still, it's hard to pick one that I'd be willing to wish on anyone.

The Left used to have a monopoly on the word “contradictions.” Now it’s everywhere. What would you say were the main contradictions, in the Marxist/Maoist sense, of Occupy?

So many: autonomy and accountability, sanity and madness, order and mischief, creativity and frustration, occupation and colonization, relief and recovery, grievance and self-sufficiency, ecstasy and failure. The moment these contradictions resolved themselves, and one element in them came to dominate over the other, the dynamism went away.

Why do you think it is that every generation in America over the past 60 years or so has wanted to define itself in opposition to an earlier and an older generation? Why not emphasize continuities between generations?

Occupy had the potential to be powerfully cross-generational. From the outset, young folks were driving it, but they were very eager to hear from elders. They wanted advice, support and help. Many leading organizers had grown up in political families, and, while they viewed their parents as more moderate than themselves, they credited their upbringing for their politics.

Sounds like you have a theory on this. 

I think that the Sixties generation of radicals had to rebel so hard against their parents that, when they became the new establishment in left wing groups, they had an Oedipal fear that later generations would do the same to them. So they didn't make a priority of raising young leaders.

If you look around at the established radical organizations, especially in New York City, you'll be hard-pressed to find more than a tiny minority of young people involved. But as those who turned out for Occupy showed, it's not for lack of young activists. Before and after Occupy, young folks eager to get involved in radical politics had to hustle to find mentors and material support. Friends of mine affiliated with the political right don’t seem to have this problem.

Are you calling for defiance against older generations?

I’m trying to bridge the gaps between generations. I tend to get along with older people.

My favorite political quotation is from Gramsci about the pessimism of the intellect and the optimism of the will. What’s yours?

Mine is the entirety of the commencement speech that the poet-priest (and friend) Daniel Berrigan once gave at a Catholic prep school in Manhattan: "Know where you stand and stand there." Not that I follow it, really -- I just like it.

What’s your connection to Berrigan?

We met about five years ago. I started going to his monthly community suppers. We talked and saw that we had common interests. I see him regularly now, but his health is deteriorating rapidly. I don’t know how much longer he’ll be around.

In a nutshell what does anarchy mean to you?

A society in which some people don't wield unnecessary power over others, and one in which the needs of all are put before the privileges of a few. "Anarchy" has so many connotations, and in the book I like to play off of several of them at once. It's a very ambidextrous word: chaos, freedom, organization, and structurelessness. I want them all.

[Jonah Raskin, a regular contributor to The Rag Blog, is a professor emeritus at Sonoma State University and the author of For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman and American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and the Making of the Beat Generation. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]

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Jonah Raskin : Occupy Austin: This is Just the Beginning

Occupy Austin, Friday, Oct. 6, 2011. Photo from Occupy Austin.
Occupy Austin:
This is just the beginning

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / October 10, 2011

See photo gallery below.

[West Coast writer, activist, and Rag Blog contributor Jonah Raskin attended the first day of Occupy Austin, held outside Austin City Hall, October 6, 2011, and shared the following impressions.]

AUSTIN -- Occupy Austin attracted the young, who found it new and wonderful, and the old, who found it familiar and wonderful, too. On October 6, 2011, about 1,500 youthful demonstrators, aging protesters, and ageless rabble-rousers gathered outside Austin City Hall to voice their anger about Wall Street greed and about a variety of social and political issues. There were hundreds of signs, almost all of them handmade, that practically shouted views and opinions such as “Decolonize Wall Street” and “Love America Enough to Protest America.”

There were tie-dyed T-shirts, tattoos galore, pierced noses, ears, and more, and a marching band that played the old standby “Ain’t Gonna Study War No More” that the crowd recognized immediately and sang the lyrics to loudly. Yes, it was called “Occupy Austin” but a more apt phrase might have been “Liberate Austin.”

It certainly felt liberating to old and young, students and retirees, union folks and the unemployed. I was in town to talk about the cause of marijuana law reform and couldn’t keep away, not with my 1960s roots still showing, and not after a heart-felt invitation to join the rally from Rag Bloggers Thorne Dreyer and Jim Retherford who introduced me to their friends and to friends of their friends.

By the end of the afternoon, I felt initiated into radical Austin, a city with a long history of radicalism, countercultures, underground newspapers, and resistance to all forms of what we used to call “oppression,” a word that’s once again on the lips of the young and the restless -- along with cellphones, Facebook, and Twitter, all of which helped to launch Occupy Austin and, which, according to Gary Chason, will make this movement impossible for the government to stop.

Ashley -- who is 22 and who wore bright red leather boots -- carried a sign that read “Wake Up, Austin!” How long had she been awake? “Only a few weeks,” she told me. “I woke up after I heard about the protests on Wall Street. I had given up on my generation because they seemed to me to be lazy, selfish, and didn’t care about the larger world. I thought ‘nothing will ever change,’ and I felt so small and insignificant. Now, there’s a sense of hope, a feeling that things might begin to become unstuck and move again.”

Her comments sounded familiar. I had heard them -- or at least words very similar to them -- 50 years earlier at the start of the 1960s, when the United States was wrapped up in the Cold War and just about everything -- except for the civil rights movement -- felt frozen and dead. America needed awakening then, too.

The Rag Blog's Jonah Raskin at Occupy Austin, Friday, Oct. 6, 2011. Photo by James Retherford / The Rag Blog.
Occupy Austin had some of the flavor of a 1960s protest, though most of the signs had little or nothing to do with 1960s issues such as war and racism. The signs and the slogans were mostly about corporations, social and economic inequalities, and greed. “Not so fast you greedy bastards,” one large sign with bright red letters read.

Many of the signs proclaimed, “We’re part of the 99%,” a figure that nearly everyone seemed to understand. The police officers in the crowd understood the reference to the 1% of the population who own 99% of the wealth. African-American city manager Mark Ott understood, as did police chief Art Acevedo, who praised the protesters for peacefully demonstrating. Fire Chief Rhoda Mae Kerr, in a bright white uniform, asked everyone in the crowd to put out lit cigarettes. The Texas drought and the danger of fire were on her mind and on the minds of many others.

Yes, the city showed its face at Occupy Austin. The local news media showed up, too, and the event was at the top of the evening news and made the front page of the Austin American-Statesman in a story that lauded protesters and the police for good behavior.

The old-timers mostly kept to themselves and didn’t interact with the 20-somethings, though there were conversations that crossed the generational divide. When Bob Cash, a former SDS member who now lobbies for fair trade, was asked for advice from a young protester, he thought a moment and said, “Don’t trust anyone over the age of 30.”

Katherine, an ex-New Yorker in her 60s who had just retired, said that Occupy Austin was her first ever demonstration. That didn’t seem plausible to me. “Really?,” I asked incredulously. She paused a moment, went down memory lane, and remembered that she had protested once before, in 1970. “I went out into the streets after the students were shot and killed at Kent State,” she said. “That was an outrage. Now I’m outraged at New York Mayor Bloomberg and all his money on the stock market.”

After a few hours outside City Hall the bongo drums seemed to grow louder and louder. I was ready to leave with Dreyer, Retherford, and my new found Austin friends and, yes, comrades too, if you’ll pardon the expression. We crossed the street. I looked back at the crowd. My eye caught one sign that read, “You are breaking my balls,” and another that said, “This is just the beginning.” That seemed about right. It was a beginning, and the protesters did feel a sense of hurt -- deep down hurt that only real social change could alleviate.

[Regular Rag Blog contributor Jonah Raskin, a communications professor at Sonoma State University in northern California, was active with SDS and the Yippies in the Sixties. His most recent book is Marijuanaland: Dispatches from an American War (High Times). Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]

• Read more Rag Blog coverage of Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Austin.

Photo by James Retherford / The Rag Blog.
Photo by James Retherford / The Rag Blog.
Photo by James Retherford /The Rag Blog.
Photo by Terry DuBose / The Rag Blog.
Photo by James Retherford / The Rag Blog.
Austin police chief Art Acevedo signs a petition for Leslie Cunningham of the Texas State Employees Union. The petition calls for restored funding for higher education in Texas. Photo by Jose Orta / The Rag Blog.
Photo by Jose Orta / The Rag Blog.
Photo by Terry DuBose / The Rag Blog.
Photo by Terry DuBose / The Rag Blog.
Photo from Occupy Austin.
Austin's Minor Mishap Marching Band leads group at Occupy Austin. Photo from Occupy Austin.
Iraq vet John Buhler, a former U.S. Marine Corps sergeant, in full dress uniform at Occupy Austin, Oct. 6, 2011. Photo from Occupy Austin.
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Robert Jensen : Nature Bats Last

"Celebrating Global Warming." Art quilt by Laura Wasilowski / PAQA.
Nature bats last:
Notes on revolution and resistance,
revelation and redemption

By Robert Jensen / The Rag Blog / August 14, 2011

[An edited version of this essay was presented as a talk to the Veterans for Peace conference in Portland, Oregon, on August 4, 2011.]

My title is ambitious and ambiguous: revolution and resistance (which tend to be associated with left politics), revelation and redemption (typically associated with right-wing religion), all framed by a warning about ecological collapse. My goal is to connect these concepts to support an argument for a radical political theology -- let me add to the ambiguity here -- that can help us claim our power at the moment when we are more powerless than ever, and identify the sources of hope when there is no hope.

First, I realize that the term “radical political theology” may be annoying. Some people will dislike “radical” and prefer a more pragmatic approach. Others will argue that theology shouldn’t be political. Still others will want nothing to do with theology of any kind. At various times in my life, I would have offered all of those objections. Today, I think a politics without a theology is dangerous, a theology without a politics is irrelevant, and radical is realistic.

By politics, I don’t mean we need to pretend to have worked out a traditional political program that will lead us to the land of milk and honey; instead, I’m merely suggesting that we always foreground the basic struggle for power in whatever work we do at whatever level. By theology, I don’t mean that we need to believe in supernatural forces that will lead us to a land of milk and honey; instead, I’m merely pointing out that we all construct a worldview that is not reducible to evidence and logic.

In politics and theology, it’s important to be clear about what we know, and even more important to recognize what we don’t know, what we can’t know, what is instinct and emotion.

And all this needs to be radical -- not in the self-indulgent “more radical than thou” style that crops up now and then on the left -- but rather in the sense of an unflinching honesty about that unjust and unsustainable nature of the systems in which we live. Whatever pragmatic steps we may decide to take in the world, they should be based on radical analysis if they are to be realistic.


Revolution

I’m not interested in speculating about future revolutions, I don’t take seriously anyone who predicts a coming revolution in the United States, and I doubt that the traditional concept of a revolution is even relevant today -- the dramatic changes that lie ahead likely won’t arrive that way. Rather than dream of revolutions to come, it’s more productive to think about the revolutions that brought us to this moment.

Ask an audience to name the three most important revolutions in human history, and the most common answers are the American, French, and Russian. But to understand our current situation, the better answer is the agricultural, industrial, and delusional revolutions. While those national revolutions had dramatic effects, not only on those nations but on the course of the history of the past two centuries, these other revolutions not only reshaped the lives of every human but remade the world in ways that may spell the end of human history as we know it. The agricultural, industrial, and delusional revolutions were -- to use a current political cliché -- real game-changers.

The agricultural revolution started about 10,000 years ago when a gathering-hunting species discovered how to cultivate plants for food and domesticate animals. Two crucial things resulted, one political and one ecological. Politically, the ability to stockpile food made possible concentrations of power and resulting hierarchies that were foreign to band-level gathering-hunting societies, which were highly egalitarian and based on cooperation.

This is not to say that humans were not capable of doing bad things to each other prior to agriculture, but only that large-scale institutionalized oppression has its roots in agriculture. We need not romanticize pre-agricultural life but simply recognize that it was organized in far more egalitarian fashion than what we call “civilization.”

Ecologically, the invention of agriculture kicked off an intensive human assault on natural systems. While gathering-hunting humans were capable of damaging a local ecosystem in limited ways, the large-scale destruction we cope with today has its origins in agriculture, in the way humans started exhausting the energy-rich carbon of the planet, first in soil.

Human agricultural practices have varied over time and place but have never been sustainable over the long term. There are better and worse farming practices, but soil erosion has been a consistent feature of agriculture, which makes it the first step in the entrenchment of an unsustainable human economy based on extraction.

We are trained to think that advances in technology constitute progress, but the post-World War II “advances” in oil-based industrial agriculture have accelerated the ecological destruction. Soil from large monoculture fields drenched in petrochemicals not only continues to erode but also threatens groundwater supplies and contributes to dead zones in oceans.

While it’s true that this industrial agriculture has produced tremendous yield increases during the last century, no one has come up with a sustainable system for perpetuating that kind of agricultural productivity. Those high yields mask what Wes Jackson has called “the failure of success”: Production remains high while the health of the soil continues to decline dramatically.[1]

That kind of “success” guarantees the inevitable collapse of the system. We have less soil that is more degraded, with no technological substitute for healthy soil; we are exhausting and contaminating groundwater; and we are dependent on an agriculture tied to a fuel source that is running out.

That industrialization of agriculture was made possible, of course, by the larger industrial revolution that began in the last half of the 18th century in Great Britain, which intensified the magnitude of the human assault on ecosystems and humans assaults on each other.

This revolution unleashed the concentrated energy of coal, oil, and natural gas to run the new steam engine and machines in textile manufacturing that dramatically increased productivity. That energy -- harnessed by the predatory capitalist economic system that was beginning to dominate the planet -- not only eventually transformed all manufacturing, transportation, and communication, but disrupted social relations.

People were pushed off the land, out of communities, and into cities that grew rapidly, often without planning. Traditional ways of knowing and living were destroyed, by force or by the allure of affluence. World population soared from about 1 billion in 1800 to the current 7 billion, far beyond the long-term carrying capacity of the planet.

This move from a sun-powered and muscle-based world to a fossil fuel-powered and machine-based world has produced unparalleled material comfort for some. Whatever one thinks of the effect of such levels of comfort on human well-being -- in my view, the effect has been mixed at best[2] -- the processes that produce the comfort are destroying the capacity of the ecosystem to sustain human life as we know it into the future, and in the present those comforts are not distributed in a fashion that is consistent with any meaningful conception of justice.

In short, our world is unsustainable and unjust -- the way we live is in direct conflict with common sense and the ethical principles on which we claim to base our lives. How is that possible? Enter the third revolution.

The delusional revolution is my term for the development of sophisticated propaganda techniques in the 20th century (especially a highly emotive, image-based advertising/marketing system) that have produced in the bulk of the population (especially in First World societies) a distinctly delusional state of being.

Although any person or group can employ these techniques, wealthy individuals and corporations -- and their representatives in government -- take advantage of their disproportionate share of resources to flood the culture with their stories that reinforce their dominance. Journalism and education, idealized as spaces for rationally based truth-telling, sometimes provide a counter to those propaganda systems, but just as often are co-opted by the powerful forces behind them.

Perhaps the most stunning example of this is that during the 2000s, as the evidence for human-caused climate disruption became more compelling, the percentage of the population that rejects that science increased.

Why would people who, in most every other aspect of life accept without question the results of peer-reviewed science, reject the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists in this case? Some have theological reasons, and for others perhaps it is simply easier to disbelieve than to face the implications. But it’s clear that the well-funded media campaigns using these propaganda techniques to create doubt have been effective.[3]

Even those of us who try to resist it often can’t help but be drawn into parts of the delusion; it’s difficult to keep track of, let alone understand, all of the fronts on which we are facing serious challenges to a just and sustainable future.

As a culture, these delusions leave us acting as if unsustainable systems can be sustained simply because we want them to be. Much of the culture’s story-telling -- particularly that which comes through almost all of the mass media -- remains committed to maintaining this delusional state. In such a culture, it becomes hard to extract oneself from that story.

Singer/songwriter Greg Brown captures the trajectory of this delusional revolution when he speculates that one day, “There’ll be one corporation selling one little box/it’ll do what you want and tell you what you want and cost whatever you got.”[4]

In summary: The agricultural revolution set us on a road to destruction. The industrial revolution ramped up our speed. The delusional revolution has prevented us from coming to terms with the reality of where we are and where we are heading.

Art and resistance: Mural on the Palestine Wall. Image from Tidings.

Resistance

Even if a revolutionary program is not viable at the moment, strategies and tactics for resistance are crucial. To acknowledge that the social, economic, and political systems that have produced this death spiral can’t be overthrown from the revolutionary playbooks of the past does not mean there are no ways to affirm life.

We face planetary problems that seem to defy solutions, but the U.S. empire and predatory corporate capitalism remain immediate threats and should be resisted. An honest, radical assessment of our situation doesn’t mean giving up, but it requires us to be tough-minded. We need to understand which resistance strategies and tactics are likely to be most productive at this moment in history.

To advance that discussion, let’s think back to February 15, 2003. Many of us on that Saturday participated in actions in opposition to the planned U.S. invasion of Iraq. It was an exhilarating day, the largest coordinated political protest in the history of the world.

At least 10 million people participated across the globe, with a clear message for U.S. policymakers: The invasion being planned is illegal and immoral, and we reject not only this war but your right to use violence to achieve your political and economic goals. I was the emcee of the event in Austin, and I remember being amazed at the thousands who gathered at the Texas Capitol, stretching back so far that our loudspeakers couldn’t reach the entire crowd.

We had a compelling message, rooted in international law, political principles, and moral values. We had huge numbers of people. We had an international presence. And none of it mattered; the war came.

Why could U.S. policymakers ignore us without consequence? First, those elites knew that a large segment of the public either actively supported the war or would passively support almost any war that was out of sight/out of mind. Second, they knew that when that day of protest was over, most of the people in the streets would go home, satisfied with their public statement and unlikely to go beyond that polite expression of dissent.

Political movements are most potent when people are willing to take risks; without a large number of such people, the powerful know they can wait out protests.

For most people, attending an anti-war rally posed no risk. Immigrants and people in targeted groups (Arabs, South Asians, Muslims) had reason to feel threatened, but people who look like me -- with only rare exceptions -- don’t face serious repression in the United States today for engaging in peaceful political activity, though that can change quickly.

What were most of us willing to do beyond attending a rally in opposition to a war being planned? A month later, when the war came, we got a partial answer. The crowd for the standing call to come to the Capitol when the bombs fell was at best one-fourth of the pre-war rally. Most of the people who came on February 15 weren’t willing to come out in public once the nation was at war; even that trivial a risk was too much.

I could be cocky and say that in 2003 I was willing to risk my job, my physical safety, even my life to stop the war. It might be true; I certainly felt the urgency of the moment. But the question is moot, because at that time there was no strategy for taking such risks. These decisions about risk are made by individuals but in the context of options developed collectively, and the movement I was part of had not discussed such options.

So, when certain resistance tactics don’t work as part of a strategy that’s not clearly articulated, it’s time to rethink. I have no grand strategy to offer, and I am skeptical about anyone who claims they have worked out such a strategy. But I am reasonably confident that this is not a mass-movement moment, not a time in which large numbers of Americans are likely to engage in political activity that challenges basic systems of power and wealth.

I believe we are in a period in which the most important work is creating the organizations and networks that will be important in the future, when the political conditions change, for better or worse. Whatever is coming, we need sharper analysis, stronger vehicles for action, and more resilient connections among people. In short, this is a cadre-building moment.

Although for some people the phrase “cadre-building” may invoke the worst of the left’s revolutionary dogmatism, I have something different in mind. For me, “cadre” doesn’t mean “vanguard” or “self-appointed bearers of truth.” It signals commitment, but with an openness to rethinking theory and practice.

I see this kind of organizing in some groups in Austin, TX, where I live. Not surprisingly, they are groups led by younger people who are drawing on longstanding radical ideas, updating as needed to fit a changing world. These organizers don’t have all the answers, and I don’t agree with some of the answers they do have, but I am drawn to them because they recognize the need to dig in.


Revelation

Most discussions of revelation and apocalypse in contemporary America focus on the Book of Revelation, also known as The Apocalypse of John, the final book of the Christian New Testament. The two terms are synonymous in their original meaning -- “revelation” from Latin and “apocalypse” from Greek both mean a lifting of the veil, a disclosure of something hidden from most people, a coming to clarity. What is the nature of this unveiling today? What is being revealed to us?

A reactionary end-times theology turns that particular book of the Bible into the handbook for a death cult, fantasizing about an easy way out. That isn’t the direction I will be heading. Rather than thinking of revelation as divine delivery of a clear message about some fantastic future above, we can think of it as a process that requires tremendous effort on our part about our very real struggles on this planet.

That notion of revelation doesn’t offer a one-way ticket to a better place, but reminds us that there are no tickets available to any other place; we humans live and die on this planet, and we have a lot of work to do if, as a species, we want to keep living.

That process begins with an honest analysis of where we stand. There is a growing realization that we have disrupted natural forces in ways we cannot control and do not fully understand. We need not adopt an end-times theology to recognize that on our current trajectory, there will come a point when the ecosphere cannot sustain human life as we know it.

As Bill McKibben puts it, “The world hasn’t ended, but the world as we know it has -- even if we don’t quite know it yet.”[5]

McKibben, the first popular writer to alert the world to the threat of climate change, argues that humans have so dramatically changed the planet’s ecosystems that we should rename the Earth, call it Eaarth:

The planet on which our civilization evolved no longer exists. The stability that produced that civilization has vanished; epic changes have begun. We may, with commitment and luck, yet be able to maintain a planet that will sustain some kind of civilization, but it won’t be the same planet, and hence it won’t be the same civilization. The earth that we knew -- the only earth that we ever knew -- is gone.[6]

If McKibben is accurate -- and I think the evidence clearly supports his assessment -- then we can’t pretend all that’s needed is tinkering with existing systems to fix a few environmental problems; massive changes in how we live are required, what McKibben characterizes as a new kind of civilization.

No matter where any one of us sits in the social and economic hierarchies, there is no escape from the dislocations of such changes. Money and power might insulate some from the most wrenching consequences of these shifts, but there is no escape. We do not live in stable societies and no longer live on a stable planet. We may feel safe and secure in specific places at specific times, but it’s hard to believe in any safety and security in a collective sense.

This is a revelation not of a coming rapture but of a deepening rupture. The end times are not coming, they are unfolding now.

Bill McKibben. Image from The Boston Globe.

Redemption

Just as revelation can be about more than explosions during the end times, redemption can be understood as about more than a savior’s blood washing away our sin. In a world in which so many decent people have been psychologically and theologically abused by being called “sinner” by jealous and judgmental scolds, sin and redemption are tricky terms.

But we shouldn’t give up on the concept of sin, for we are in fact all sinners -- we all do things that fall short of the principles on which we claim to base our lives. Everyone I know has at some point lied to avoid accountability, failed to offer help to someone in need, taken more than their fair share.

Given that we all sin, we all should seek redemption, understood as the struggle to come back into right relation with those we have injured. If we are to live up to our own moral standards, we must deepen our understanding of sin and its causes so that we can understand the path to redemption.

For Christians, sin traditionally has been marked as original and individual -- we are born with it, and we can deal with it through an individual profession of faith. In some sense, of course, sin is obviously original. At some point in our lives we all do things that violate our own principles, which suggests the capacity to do nasty things is a part of normal human psychology.

Equally obvious is that even though we live interdependently and our actions are conditioned by how we are socialized, we are distinct moral agents and we make choices. Responsibility for those choices must in part be ours as individuals.

But an individual focus isn’t going to solve our most pressing problems, which is why it is crucial to focus on the sins we commit that are created, not original, and solutions that are collective, not individual.

These sins, which do much greater damage, are the result of -- we might say, created by -- political, economic, and social systems. Those systems create war and poverty, discrimination and oppression, not simply through the freely chosen actions of individuals but because of the nature of these systems of empire and capitalism, rooted in white supremacy and patriarchy. Humans’ ordinary capacity to sin is intensified, reaching a different order of magnitude, and responsibility for the resulting sins is shared.

There is a politics to sin, and therefore there has to be a politics to redemption. That desire to return to right relation with others in our personal lives is not enough; collectively we have to struggle for the same thing, which requires us to always be working to dismantle those hierarchical systems that define our lives.

Within hierarchy, right relation is impossible; assertions of dominance and concentrations of power create domination and abuses of power. That includes the most abusive of all hierarchies: The human claim to a right to dominate everything else. Our most important struggle for redemption concerns our most profound sin: Our willingness to destroy the larger living world of which we are a part.

The first step in redemption is to not turn away from that lifting of the veil, to face honestly what we have done, to contest the culture’s delusions wherever possible. Then we can face what we must do to enhance justice and build sustainable living arrangements.

What does this kind of redemption look like in practice? I think we should proceed along two basic tracks. First, we should commit some of our energy to the familiar movements that focus on the question of justice in this world, such as anti-war struggles. We redeem ourselves -- especially those of us with privilege that is rooted in that injustice -- through that commitment to fighting empire, capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy.

But I also think there is important work to be done in experiments to prepare for what will come in this new future we can’t yet describe in detail. Whatever the limits of our predictive capacity, we can be pretty sure we will need ways of organizing ourselves to help us live in a world with less energy and fewer material goods.

We have to all develop the skills needed for that world (such as gardening with fewer inputs, food preparation and storage, and basic tinkering), and we will need to recover a deep sense of community that has disappeared from many of our lives. McKibben puts this in terms of a new scale for our work:

The project we’re now undertaking -- maintenance, graceful decline, hunkering down, holding on against the storm -- requires a different scale. Instead of continents and vast nations, we need to think about states, about town, about neighborhoods, about blocks... We need to scale back, to go to ground. We need to take what wealth we have left and figure out how we’re going to use it, not to spin the wheel one more time but to slow the wheel down... We need, as it were, to trade in the big house for something that suits our circumstances on this new Eaarth. We need to feel our vulnerability.”[7]

Nature bats last

The phrase “nature bats last” circulates these days among people who have their eye on the multiple, cascading ecological crises. The metaphor reminds us that nature is the home team and has the final word. We humans may be particularly impressed with our own achievements -- all of the spectacular home runs we have hit with science and technology -- but when those achievements are at odds with how nature operates, then nature is going to bring in the ultimate designated hitter and knock the human race out of the ballpark.

OK, let’s not try to stretch this too far -- no single metaphor can work at every level needed. The point is simple: We are not as powerful as the forces that govern that larger living world.

The metaphor offers one other crucial lesson, in this case because of its limitations. When we say “nature bats last,” it implies we are one team and nature is on another, as if it were possible for us to compete with nature. But we are, of course, simply part of nature, one species in an indescribably diverse living world. To imagine ourselves as competing with nature would be like our lungs competing with our heart -- either those organs work together, or an individual human dies.

Unfortunately, the architects of modern science didn’t see the world that way. One of the most often-quoted, Francis Bacon, believed that modern science and technology “have the power to conquer and subdue [nature], to shake her to her foundations.” Rene Descartes, another of these founding fathers, believed humans could achieve the knowledge and develop the means to know:

the force and action of fire, water, air, the stars, the heavens, and all the other bodies that surround us, as distinctly as we know the various crafts of our artisans, we might also apply them in the same way to all the uses to which they are adapted, and thus render ourselves the lords and possessors of nature.

These thinkers also contributed to our understanding of the workings and power of the natural world. But this language of domination -- to conquer and subdue, becoming lords and possessors -- is the language not of a baseball game but of war, which brings us to the relevance of this to Veterans for Peace. VFP members have seen through and gone beyond the egotistical rhetoric of our national fundamentalism -- with all its fraudulent claims about “fighting for freedom” -- to reject the U.S. wars of empire and stake out an audacious goal: “To abolish war as an instrument of national policy.”

We also need to see beyond the egotistical rhetoric of our technological fundamentalism -- the claims that infinitely clever humans will solve all problems with gadgets -- and stake out an even more audacious goal: To end the human war on the rest of living world.

3-D concept art by Alex Broeckel, Germany / CoolVibe.

Life is hard

If all this seems too much to ask of ourselves, that’s because it is. We live in a time when we must face honestly the whole truth, but to do that is too much to bear. We struggle to claim our power at the moment when we are more powerless than ever, and find hope where there is no hope.

On power: Those of us in dissident movements understand we face difficult odds, fighting entrenched forces of the state and corporation. We know the keys to prevailing: Fight organized money with organized people; compromise to build a power base but never abandon core principles; find ways to delegitimize authority; raise the social costs for elites to pursue unjust policies; hang in for the long haul. Those organizing basics don’t change, though the application of them must constantly adapt to changes in the structure of power. But the ecological crises change things in the big picture.

First, we should not assume the long haul is as long as we’ve always imagined. No one can predict the rate of collapse if we stay on this trajectory, and we don’t know if we can change the trajectory.

There is much we don’t know, but everything I see suggests that the world in which we will pursue political goals will change dramatically in the next decade or two, almost certainly for the worse. Organizing has to adapt not only to changes in societies but to these fundamental changes in the ecosphere. We are organizing in a period of contraction, not expansion.

Second, we can’t be satisfied with contesting imperialism in the nation-state and the concentration of wealth in corporate capitalism, but also must change the human relationship to the living world.

Dissident movements have an advantage, given that a larger percentage of people involved in left/radical politics have less of a commitment to maintaining the dominant culture’s delusions. Radicals don’t have the wealth and power that can appear to insulate us from collapse, which means we have more room to think about what living arrangements are consistent with reality. Elites, who typically mistake temporary domination for real power, have a harder time recognizing that humans are powerless in the face of the forces we have been trying to conquer and subdue.

In the end, we can never be the lords and possessors of something larger and more enduring in time. Many traditions recognize this basic reality: We don’t own the earth, the earth owns us. Our power comes in recognizing our powerlessness and adapting to the world as it is, not the world as we imagine it to be.

How does this approach give people hope? It doesn’t, and it shouldn’t, because hope is not something you give to people. The political organizers on the liberal/left who are always touting a new way to restore the American Dream are peddlers of false hope, offering allegedly exciting opportunities to allegedly new movements that are stuck in the same old failed ideology of the dominant culture, steadfastly ignoring the depth and scope of the ecological crises.

Real hope comes with abandoning the false prophets and moving on to accomplish something. Authentic hope comes when we honestly confront our condition and dig in to create new, or revive old, forms of community. Hope comes from proving to ourselves that we are competent to manage our own lives. Hope doesn’t fall from the sky but rather is built from the ground up.

That hope doesn’t ask for guarantees that our movements will prevail. That hope doesn’t require us to pretend we know whether the human experiment will go on forever. That hope comes from the understanding that while we did not choose to live in a desecrated world, such is the world into which we were born.

All we can do is act out of respect for ourselves, for each other, and for nature, in the hope that we can restore the sacredness of the individual, the human community in which individuals find meaning, and the living world of which human communities are a part.

Organizers have long said that the key to successful organizing is making it easy for people to do the right thing. Today, our task is to be honest about how difficult it is to do the right thing. Anyone who thinks it can be easy to do the right thing is part of the delusional culture. Rather than delude ourselves, let’s face the truth and recognize the difficulty of the path that lies ahead.

Other social movements have prevailed in the face of great difficulty, but no social movement has had to face this simple but profound reality: We have to become the first species on the planet to practice restraint in the scramble for energy-rich carbon. All life on this planet is based on that scramble, but if we continue on the path unchecked the planet will be incapable of sustaining human life as we know it.

That is a brand new organizing challenge. In facing it, we need to leave the platitudes at home.

The radical political theology I believe we need for this moment in history would acknowledge, rather than try to mask, our confusion and uncertainty. We know we are in deep trouble; beyond that, it’s guesswork. Facing that takes a new kind of courage.

We usually think of courage as rooted in clarity and certainty -- we act with courage when we are sure of what we know. Today, the courage we need must be rooted in the limits of what we can know and trust in something beyond human knowledge. In many times and places, that something has gone by the name “God.”

Religious fundamentalism offers a God who will protect us if we follow orders. Technological fundamentalism gives us the illusion that we are God and can arrange the world as we like it. A radical political theology leaves behind fear-based protection rackets and arrogance-driven control fantasies.

The God for our journey is neither above us nor inside us but around us, a reminder of the sacredness of the living world of which we are a part. That God shares the anxiety and anguish of life in a desecrated world. With such a God we can be at peace with our powerlessness and alive in hope. With such a God, we can live in peace.

References:

[1] Wes Jackson, New Roots for Agriculture (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980), chapter 2. Many of my points in this talk were greatly influence by the work of Jackson and The Land Institute, http://www.landinstitute.org.

[2] Tim Kasser, The High Price of Materialism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).

[3] Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010).

[4] Greg Brown, “Where Is Maria?” from the CD “Further In,” Red House Records, 1996.

[5] Bill McKibben, Eaarth: Making Life on a Tough New Planet (New York: Times Books/Henry Holt, 2010), p. 2.

[6] McKibben, Eaarth, p. 25.

[7] McKibben, Eaarth, p. 123.

[Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where he teaches courses in media law, ethics, and politics -- and a board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austin. His books include All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice, and Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity. His writing is published extensively in mainstream and alternative media. Robert Jensen can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu. Read more articles by Robert Jensen on The Rag Blog.]

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Paul Beckett : Madison and the Revolution at Home

Photo by Paul Beckett / The Rag Blog.
The revolution at home:
Dispatch from the Madison front

By Paul Beckett / The Rag Blog / March 8, 2011

MADISON, Wisconsin -- My wife Kathie and I have been to the Capitol square in Madison, sometimes inside, sometimes outside the Capitol building, most days since February 13 when the demonstrations began. It’s been cold, often snowy, usually with a wind chill of 20 degrees or less. Pretty uncomfortable. And they’ve been some of the best days of our lives.

We are proud of Wisconsin. We have new hope (dare we hope so much?) for America. According to Michael Moore , everyone is a Wisconsinite now. Welcome! Badgers of the world, unite!


Background to protest

Scott Walker provoked the demonstrations Friday, February 11, when he tabled his 144-page “Budget Repair Bill” and insisted it be passed the following week without significant alteration. The first thing that leapt out of the bill was its frontal assault on Wisconsin’s public service unions: the bill would eviscerate the unions and effectively eliminate the collective bargaining process.

Quickly it became apparent that there were many other right-wing dreams buried in the bill that would be instantly made law.

SB11 attacked public-sector pensions and health care (resulting in public service pay reductions of 8-10%); provided authority for the Walker administration (without further legislative consideration) to sell off public owned power plants on no-bid contracts; and it separated the University of Wisconsin-Madison from the State of Wisconsin University System.

There were many other far-reaching provisions as well, together with ominous undertones foretelling drastic cuts that would be included in the biennial budget still to come: cuts to local schools and services, and to Wisconsin’s very successful Medicare initiative (Badger Care). Many suspected that Wisconsin’s huge and fully-funded public service pension fund would soon have crosshairs on it.

Understanding spread that, first, most of the provisions had little or nothing to do with “repairing” the present-year budget; and, second, all were part of a national right-wing agenda best articulated by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, and funded by billionaires such as the Koch brothers. (The latter, Charles and David, were heavy funders of Walker’s election campaign, and they had just opened a lobbying firm a block away from the Wisconsin Capitol.)

As all of this came out, the Budget Repair Bill seemed radical to the core in turning back Wisconsin’s progressive traditions and in transferring important legislative powers to the Governor’s administration.

Walker threw a match into this pail of gasoline by preemptively remarking that if there were worker trouble he would call out the state’s National Guard.

In the state Assembly, the Republican majority was strong enough to pass the bill without a single Democratic vote, or even the presence of a single Democrat. But in the Senate, while Republicans held a 19 to 14 advantage, at least one Democrat had to be in the chamber to count toward quorum to legally pass the bill.

The Democrats made themselves scarce. The Republican leader of the Senate instructed his father (since Walker’s election, the head of the State Patrol) to bring them in. Suddenly, on Thursday, February 17, all heard the news: the 14 Democratic Senators were safely out-of-state, in Illinois. The bill could not be passed.

Meanwhile, demonstrations had begun. They started small with a few of Madison’s “usual suspects” (people like myself) and members of the UW-Madison’s Teaching Assistants’ Association. But in a day or so protesters numbered in the thousands: unprecedented in recent history.

The numbers grew exponentially as understanding of the bill’s implications sank in. Teachers caught a collective cold; the schools had to close; high school students marched down in phalanxes to join the crowds. University students were there en masse, and parents brought their children. The Capitol’s marble rotunda became a gigantic resonator for the opposition: packed on three levels, festooned with signs, reverberating with drums and chants: “Walker is a weasel, not a badger!” “What’s disgusting? Union busting!” “Kill the Bill!”

And among the teachers, the parents, the school children, the university students, the retirees and other townspeople were: the unions! The unions really got it from day one: they knew that this battle had the significance of the 1981 air controller’s strike: a last ditch struggle to hold on to the remnants of our trade union movement (and with it, much of the progressive achievement of the twentieth century).

The unions knew this was not a local issue, not a Wisconsin-only issue, and not a budget issue. (Early on, the public service unions indicated they would agree to the salary cuts -- for health and pension payments -- that the Budget Repair bill demanded; they thus took the genuine deficit-reduction issues off the table.)

Walker had cunningly tried to separate the police and fire fighter unions from the rest by exempting them from the bill’s provisions. What a great moment it was (we were there, and up front) when a long line of fire fighters, many in uniform, carrying solidarity placards, marched in a file through the crowd which cheered them ecstatically. And this happened over and over again: fire fighters, police, prison workers condemned the anti-union provisions.

Taken in by a prankster, Walker said to a caller he thought to be David Koch that the demonstrations were dying down and consisted mainly of out-of-staters. (See the complete transcript of the call.)

He wished! The demonstrations were only getting going!


The joy of protest

What does it look and feel like? First, really huge crowds. Thursday, the 17th, when the 14 Senators fled, the crowd is 25,000. The next day, 40,000. On Saturday, 68,000. The following Saturday, more than 70,000. (This despite the constantly below-freezing temperatures). The wide streets that make the square around the Capitol are packed all the way around. The crowd moves slowly, drumming, chanting, waving signs. The procession moves (wouldn’t you know it!) in a leftward direction.

There are some pre-printed signs, mainly from the many (more than 60) unions that are participating. They predominated on the first day or so, but quickly were swamped by thousands of wonderful, whimsical hand-made signs. Each communicates its maker’s own sense of the essence of the problem or the solution.

Humor is adopted as a weapon by many. Plays are made on the name of Scott Walker’s corporate backers, the Koch brothers (the funders of Americans For Prosperity, which already is taking out ads and organizing bus tours to support Walker).

“Scottie, kick your Koch habit.” Or, referring to the infamous 20 minute phone conversation with “David Koch:” “Scott: Koch dealer on 2.”

Many, a little ribald for these pages, play on the Koch brothers’ name mispronounced. Many other signs, always greatly appreciated by the crowd, proclaim: “I voted for Walker. And am I sorry.” You see the figure “14” everywhere: “14 Heroes!” Or just “14.” We all know who they are.

By the time of Saturday’s big demonstration on March 5 (when Michael Moore spoke) the variety of hand-made signs has come to seem infinite. Even dogs are displaying signs, on the order of “I smell a weasel!” or “Bad Scottie! Bad! Bad!”

Inside and out, music and drumming has a spontaneous character. Many of the drums are plastic drywall tubs, sometimes with a tin can inside to impart a ring. We also saw pans, cow bells, snare drums, African drums, even a ukulele. South African vuvuzelas blare discordantly.

Here and there, inside and out, speeches are being given. Most loudspeaker systems are minimalist, hand-held. Some speakers (or, shouters) use only old-fashioned unamplified megaphones (probably made at the kitchen table an hour ago).

Amid the drumming and the chanting in the Capitol, most speeches can’t be heard by most people. But that doesn’t stop us from cheering and applauding. We feel sure the speech was right on, saying just what we think!


Getting warm In Madison (I don’t mean the weather)

Monday, February 28, a new stage was reached. The Capitol reverberated throughout with the people’s voices. Governor Walker would present his budget on Tuesday evening. How could the television-watching public be allowed to see and hear the tens of thousands of citizens that would be outside the chamber?

Solution: close the Capitol to the public. He did. That added more fuel to the fire. The Dane County sheriff withdrew his men and women from the job of closing the entrances, making the unhelpful statement: “My deputies are not a palace guard.”

The Capitol police, assigned the job of clearing the rotunda of the tens, sometimes hundreds, of protesters who had camped there for two weeks, declined to do so, saying the protest had been remarkably peaceful, safe and respectful, and they saw no necessity of arresting and dragging out the campers.

A Dane County judge decided it was not legal to close the building to the public. He issued an injunction against the closure. This was overruled (not legally, of course) as Walker’s Department of Administration simply announced they were in compliance, but then did not open the building.

Some remarkable scenes ensued. Senator Glenn Grothman, a Tea Party Republican, left the Capitol for some reason and for some time could not get back in. He knocked on a window to attract the attention of his staff inside, and they assumed he was a demonstrator and ignored him. Meanwhile the crowd walked with him, wherever he went, and shouted “Shame! Shame! Shame!” (This was the refrain of the Democrats in the Assembly after the Budget Repair Bill there was passed -- or “passed” -- in a surprise vote at 1 a.m.

Finally, Grothman was rescued by a Democratic Assembly member who came out, calmed the crowd, and brought him back into the building. Afterwards, somewhat strangely, Grothman referred to the “slobs” who had “attacked” him, even though the crowd is dressed in pure Wisconsin and is almost embarrassingly middle class in character.

A Democratic Assembly member meanwhile was denied entrance to the Capitol completely; she had her official ID card but insisted it should not be required for her, as a Wisconsin citizen, to enter. Another Democratic Assembly member was tackled and taken to the floor by police (on video), even though he WAS showing his state ID card.

By the end of the week the Department of Administration had to retreat from their manifestly not-legal closure of the building. They then imposed a “security” system so elaborate as to make entrance an onerous, hour-long job. By Saturday March 5, this too was backed away from as a much more reasonable security check was administered by friendly police officers.

The Republican Senate then passed a resolution defining the absent 14 as in contempt, and ordering their arrest. But police spokesmen indicated they would not attempt to arrest them.

Still one more Walker initiative did not work out well. Probably feeding into Tea Party stereotypes involving long-haired, bad-smelling “radicals,” his administration announced that it would cost $7.5 million dollars to remove tape and repair other damage done to the beautiful Capitol building interior during the occupation.

Alas for Walker, both the painters union and an expert in landmark building preservation surveyed the building and reported that damages were slight to non-existent.

Finally, a Fox TV interview show about Madison by Bill O’Reilly cut in footage showing “unruly” (read dangerous Communist?) protesters. Unfortunately, in the scenes shown there was no snow, trees were leafed out, and palm trees could be seen. Oops: not Madison! (Ever since this report, some protesters have carried plastic palm trees.)


Beginning of a movement (or not?)

Where are we now? On Saturday, March 6, it is clear from speeches and conversations that most people feel that we are winning. Whistling in the graveyard? We can’t know for sure. But things seem to be swinging our way.

Walker was forced to present his biennial budget before getting the special powers provided in the Budget Repair Bill. Now, throughout Wisconsin communities are realizing the extent of the hit they are about to take, especially to their schools. Teachers all over Wisconsin are already getting layoff notices.

“Luxuries” like school athletic programs may have to go. Ambulance service may be cut. Smaller towns’ personnel budgets typically are about half police and firefighters and they are exempt from the anti-collective bargaining provisions (even if Walker gets them). Most communities already have multi-year contracts with their public workers anyway.

Demonstrations are beginning in the small towns. The polls make very bad reading for Republicans. Stay tuned.

My wife and I are old enough to remember the anti-Vietnam protests of the 60s. How does this compare? Larger, we would say, and happier. The participants are passionate about the issues: the attack on workers' rights to collective bargaining and on their pensions and health care; cutting Medicaid eligibility and funding; pushing a state deficit down to the local level; and pushing the deficits born mainly of tax concessions to the rich and the corporations onto the schools and the young.

But also, humor seems to bubble through it all, and there is an enormous sense of fellowship. The police have mainly been wonderful (that’s a contrast!). The crowds are a complete cross-section of Wisconsin’s working (or studying) population, and all ages are participating.

Everyone admits that, while they are campaigning seriously for the old Wisconsin (good schools, good government, clean government, union rights, democracy), they are also having the best time that they’ve had in a long time. Emma Goldman would have loved it.

Is this the beginning of a nationwide mobilization of the center and the left against right-wing extremism? All here in Madison hope so. We’ll have to wait to see. In the meantime, we feel that our protest here is, indeed, exactly “what democracy looks like!”

[Dr. Paul Beckett lives in Madison, Wisconsin. He can be reached at beckettpa@gmail.com.]

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Robert Jensen : Coping With Anguish

Art from toonpool.
Struggling to be ‘fully alive’:
Reports on coping with anguish

By Robert Jensen / The Rag Blog / July 12, 2010

I don’t have anything to say that hasn’t been said many times over the centuries.

That may have been the most insightful response to my essay asking people to report on how they cope with the anguish of living in a world in collapse.

That simple statement is a reminder that (1) the social and ecological crises we face have been building for a long time and (2) the best of our traditions have, for a long time, offered wisdom useful in facing those crises.

The unjust social systems and unsustainable ecological practices of contemporary society started with the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago, when humans began dominating each other and the planet in evermore destructive fashion, and intensified dramatically over the 250 years of the industrial revolution. (For a historical perspective, see “The delusional revolution.”

And for nearly that long, some people have resisted the power of elites and tried to protect the land. (For a contemporary example, see “Where agriculture meets empire.”)

So, we struggle in the moment with complex problems that defy simple solutions -- problems that may be beyond our capacity to solve in any meaningful way. But describing the basics needed for a better world is not difficult if we draw on that wisdom. Here’s my condensed version:

We need to transcend systems rooted in human arrogance and greed that lead us to believe that any individual is more valuable than another, that any group of people should dominate another group, or that people have a right to exploit the living world without regard for the consequences for the ecosystem. Because each of us has within us the capacity for constructive and destructive actions -- for good and evil -- our collective task is to shape a society that helps us act with caution and compassion.

This radical message of humility and solidarity comes from a deep conception of respect: Respect for oneself, for other people, for other living things, and for the earth as a living system. That message animates the best of our philosophy, theology, poetry, and politics, and it was at the heart of nearly all the 300 responses to my essay. This notion of respect wasn’t defined as “being nice” or “not being judgmental.” Respect takes work -- to understand the other, make judgments, and engage constructively when there are disagreements or conflicting needs.

Along with those calls for love, there was a lot of anger in the responses, much of it directed at elites -- the politicians, business executives, and media propagandists who so often not only promote arrogant and greedy behavior over humility and solidarity, but also rationalize and prop up the political/economic/social systems in which the destructive behavior is fostered.

And many wrote that while the anger we may feel toward elites is justified, we have to start with self-critique and examine our own place in these systems. For example, the anger toward BP officials over the “hole in the world” at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico co-exists with the recognition that we all live somewhere in the system that demands that oil:

I speak of the oil spill going on and I acknowledge how implicated I am in it. My lifestyle -- despite efforts to eat wild foods, look at waste streams as resources, and live frugally -- depends heavily on oil. It’s like there are these [oil] stains on my hands, all over my hands, my body and the ground around me.

In such a world, it is easy for those of us who live in affluent societies to be drained by an awareness of all this:

My personal ambition seems to decrease in proportion to the increase in world suffering. I think that’s part of my emotional reaction to crisis. I don’t think I am fully alive. I’m not depressed, just weirdly diminished.

Why would someone feel diminished today? For almost all of the people who responded, the heart of their struggle was in the realization that the human species, locked into industrial societies dependent on high-energy/high-technology systems to produce food and fuel, is on a path leading to the edge of a cliff. No one offered predictions for an end time, but:

[W]hat I see as the reality of our situation -- ecologically, politically, economically, and culturally -- is that we are in the last days of our species, and I just don’t know what to do with that. The emotions are much too powerful, the grief, the sense of doom -- how does one deal with the real possibility of the extinction of not just millions of species, but of one’s own species?

Feeling isolated but resolved to act

Where does that reality leave us emotionally? My essay inquired specifically about the feelings that accompany the intellectual understanding that we live in a world in collapse. That question led not only to descriptions of those emotions, but strategies for dealing with them. No single comment could sum up so many different people’s responses, but this one comes close:

So I feel hopeless. I feel sad. I feel amused at the absurdity of it all. I feel depressed. I feel enraged. I feel guilty and I feel trapped. Basically the only reason why I’m still alive is because there are enough amazing people and things in my life to keep me going, to keep me fighting for what matters. I’m not even sure how to fight yet, but I know that I want to.

One common response was gratitude for having a place to communicate these thoughts without worrying about being ridiculed. Many wrote about how isolated they felt, even from friends and family who don’t want to talk about these matters and either deny there are reasons to be concerned or ignore the evidence:

I’m a drug addict with over 20 years clean, and I know all about using up my future and farting out lame excuses. I promised myself an honest life to stay clean, and the double-edged sword is that I started seeing just how much our culture swims in denial.

Pressing these important questions about systemic failure and collapse leads to resistance from others, who then assert that the real problem is anyone who wants to talk about collapse:

I have been writing for a year and a half on a lot of things as it pertains to humanity’s lack of awareness and the potential to reconnect before we destroy the earth and each other. People get angry at me for it and call me "dark" and "negative" and"sinful" telling me to instead move to the "light," "positive" and "love." Whatever.

Some see a general “desensitization to the destruction of our planet [that] is nothing short of heart breaking” and worry about what the loss of the capacity for empathy means:

It is considered feminine and naive to care about trees or animals. ... In addition, it is also considered weak and feminine to empathize or display a proper emotion. We are becoming a nihilistic culture which is creating citizens who are numb to their emotions. This is doing us all a disservice. We are missing out on our bodily wisdom and becoming less and less in tune with our earth.

Though people have different views on the role of high-technology responses to ecological collapse, everyone who wrote recognized that more gadgets aren’t going to save us:

I have thought for a long time that the human species, notwithstanding its endless self-flattery, really is not very intelligent. One of the signs of its stupidity is, in fact, the very way that it equates intelligence with technological prowess.

One of the most compelling comments on advanced technology came from a doctoral student in engineering at a prestigious university:

I have come to this firm conclusion that any more technological development is purely unnecessary and technological progress is hyper-glorified by the developed countries just as a tool to continue their agenda of robbing the resources of our planet from the third world (and perhaps soon from neighboring astronomical bodies, too). And what is glorified as the rational, intellectual research that folks like me are doing over here is just a means towards facilitating this robbing activity; this implicit imperialism; this invisible killing of our planet earth.

People also recognize the inadequacy of technological solutions to the end of cheap, plentiful energy. While endorsing more research on alternatives to coal, oil, and natural gas, those who wrote to me were wary of claims that alternatives can magically replace the concentrated energy of fossil fuels and allow us to motor on in our affluence:

[T]he only way that the terrible catastrophes on the way could have been softened would have been for everyone on the planet to have dropped business as usual 10 or 20 years ago, and to have started retooling all of society while there was still a reasonable surplus of high EROEI (energy return on energy investment) fossil fuel left to power the *energetically* costly conversion process of re-engineering energy production, housing, cities, suburbs, farming, fishing, and transport. That didn’t happen. And having lived through the period, it would have been completely impossible to motivate in the first or third world. But just as important, it is *even more* unlikely that this will begin to happen now. This is because growing energy scarcity will cut into our flexibility as people scramble to prop up floundering systems.

In addition to these critiques of life in the affluent world, many wrote of the grotesque disparities in wealth in the world today. As we struggle with fears of the future, billions of people cope with severe limitations in the present:

[W]e in the U.S. are essentially living behind a military barricade. I heard a quote recently that "collapse means having the same lifestyle as the people who grow your coffee." I really, really liked that.

And in many of the critiques of the affluent First World, there was an understanding that the heart of the problem is the United States:

Although some wrote with certainty about their conclusions, more people expressed confusion and weariness over the effort needed to understand such a complex world:

I spend a lot of time in my own head going back and forth over theories, philosophies, etc. Pretty much going through a process once a month of discarding everything I thought I knew and re-learning it. While this may be a good thing in the future, it does not feel good now. Sometimes it makes me feel like I am alone and lost and that I can’t find any truth in anything because I have so many different voices telling me what is right and wrong. Yet, I can never stop going back and looking at what’s happening to this real, physical, lovely and loving planet and feel outrage, sorrow, and confusion and why this culture is so insane.

Even with all this talk of their own struggles, the people who wrote were not asking others to feel sorry for them. Instead, the focus was outward, on how this affects others. That was clear in the comments not only of parents and grandparents, but also of people who chose not to have children -- what is the fate of future generations?

Being the parent of a young child right now is a mixed blessing: He’s my reason for waking up every morning and doing whatever it takes to keep up some semblance of normalcy, but it also frightens and worries me deeply when I think about his future.

In the face of challenges that feel overwhelming -- in the face of problems that may have no solutions -- what should we do? Very few of the people who wrote suggested we should give up; most are committed to action:

I guess the best thing we can do ... point out problems, suggest solutions, work for radical system changes and not just reforms that too often are more cosmetic than substantial, and above all: keep the faith ..... and we need to project to others that we have the faith, or get the hell out of the work and retire or just wait for Armageddon.

Many responses focused on the need not only to act collectively but also to reduce our consumption individually:

I read a statement in the book Hard Times by Studs Terkel that I really liked: "Security is knowing what I can do without." Every day, I find something new that I can do without. My fiancé and I now grow much of the food we eat, we purchase necessities only, we shop at the Goodwill.

and learn skills that have atrophied all too quickly in an affluent, high-energy culture:

I’m not an old hippie that wants to return to sex, drugs and rock and roll on the commune. ... I believe in hierarchy, rules and skills, but we must start something new, difficult and dangerous. We must also learn to not trust power and create small, subsistence communities. Instead of trying to mend the empire we should be teaching ourselves skills of our rural grandparents.

Tipping points and panic

But still the question haunts us: What if the unsustainable systems in which we live are beyond the point of no return? There certainly are rational reasons to assume that we are past a tipping point.

For example, the March 2005 report of the United Nations’ Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, based on the work of 1,300 researchers from 95 countries who spent four years examining 24 ecosystems worldwide, offered this “stark warning”:

Human activity is putting such strain on the natural functions of Earth that the ability of the planet’s ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted. ... Nearly two thirds of the services provided by nature to humankind are found to be in decline worldwide. In effect, the benefits reaped from our engineering of the planet have been achieved by running down natural capital assets.

This kind of knowledge can be so overwhelming that people feel it’s not safe to open up emotionally:

I would like to mourn but have not been able to let my guard down. I could understand 9/11, but now I am witnessing the destruction of the planet and I don't understand the magnitude of what that means. I feel on edge. I feel like I am waiting for the other shoe to drop.

How to live in that world and remain fully engaged, intellectually and emotionally? This comment sums up the task and a path:

Recently several of our visionary thinkers have moved from the illusion that "we have 10 years to turn this around." They now say clearly that "we cannot stop this momentum." It takes courage and faith to speak so plainly. What can we do in the face of this truth? We can sit face to face and find the ways, often beyond words, to explore the reality that we are all refugees, swimming into a future that looks so different from the present. We can find pockets of community where we can whisper our deepest fears about the world. We can remain committed to describing the present with exceptional truth. We can cultivate a practice that enables us to witness suffering with hearts and minds open and with our faces turned toward one another.

It would be easy to close on that note, blunt but positive. But for many, that kind of approach is difficult. I sent my essay to a political activist who is one of the most well-informed people I know in matters concerning politics and ecology. His response:

I guess my emotional reaction is actually to suppress the emotional reaction. ... [P]anic, which would probably be the emotional reaction, is something to be deferred until the situation is relatively safe. So I try to think about what is to be done and can be done, and promise myself that if we do get past these crises, I will enjoy the moment to panic about how dangerous a situation we were in.

My response:

I understand what you say, but it seems to me that an appreciation of the nature of the crises is necessary for sensible strategy, and I don’t know how to engage that intellectually without having emotional reactions. ... My fear is that if we don’t discuss it, those of us struggling with these emotions will fade away from collective action. So, instead of this kind of discussion necessarily leading to political paralysis, I think it can prevent paralysis in some people.

My friend didn’t contest my analysis:

I don’t advocate for my emotional response, but it is what it is.

Though he didn’t argue with me, I didn’t feel as if I had won an argument. Emotions are what they are, and we don’t “win” by telling people what they should feel. It’s enough of a struggle to understand what I feel and why I feel it; I don’t think I’m qualified to dictate to others what they should feel.

In dealing with multiple crises on all fronts -- economic, political, cultural, and ecological failures that pose a significant threat to human life as we understand it -- it’s folly for any one of us to imagine we figured out the right approach, or that there is a single right approach, or that there is any right approach at all.

The only thing I’m sure of is that, to quote singer/songwriter John Gorka, “the old future’s gone.” The future of endless bounty for all, which some once imagined would be the product of the application of human reason to problems of the world, is not the future we face. How can we open a conversation about what’s coming when so much is unknown and so many resist? Rather than pontificate, I will end with the reflections of an elder:

I’m about to celebrate my 70th birthday. I live in a rural intentional community, close to land that feeds us and supports us. I’ve lived long enough now to be very aware of how different the world has become, how the cycles of nature are off kilter, how the seasons and the climate have shifted. My garden tells me that food doesn’t grow in quite the same patterns, and we either get weeks of rain or weeks of heat and drought. This is the second year in a row that our apple trees do not have apples on them.

But most people get their food in grocery stores where the apples still appear, and food still arrives, in season and out, from all over the world. This will soon end, and people won’t understand why. They don’t see the trouble in the land as I and my friends do. I grieve daily as I look on this altered world. My grandchildren are young adults who think their lives will continue as they have been. Who will tell them? They can’t hear me. They, and many others, will have to see the changes for themselves, as I have. I can’t imagine that anything else will convince them.

My grief for the world, and for them, is compounded by this feeling of helplessness because there is no way we can have the collective action you speak of when the "collective" is still in denial. Thank you for listening.

[Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austin. He is the author of All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice, (Soft Skull Press, 2009); Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007); The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege (City Lights, 2005); Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (City Lights, 2004); and Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream (Peter Lang, 2002). Jensen is also co-producer of the documentary film Abe Osheroff: One Foot in the Grave, the Other Still Dancing, which chronicles the life and philosophy of the longtime radical activist.]

• Please read the original essay by Robert Jensen on The Rag Blog: "Robert Jensen: Emotional Reactions to Collapse."

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