[Peace-discuss] The Day They Arrested President Roosevelt (comfortable living in your empire...)

[John W.]

On Sun, Jul 19, 2009 at 2:56 PM, Stuart Levy <slevy at ncsa.uiuc.edu> wrote:

On Sun, Jul 19, 2009 at 01:43:22PM -0500, John W. wrote:
>
> > It's not difficult to draw the implication that, unless we are literally
> > willing to "put our money where our mouth is" and renounce our economic
> > privileges - e.g., our gas-guzzling automobiles - we are ALL complicit as
> > war criminals, just as Carl wants to hold the average German accountable
> for
> > Hitler's atrocities (and equate me, for rhetorical effect, with the
> average
> > German during World War II).  Most of us are not in a position to totally
> > alter our lifestyle, so it seems rather pointless and hyprocritical to me
> to
> > make a list of Presidents who ordered others murdered so that we in
> America
> > could all live better.
>
> Well said.
>
> But I do enjoy having a quiet place to live...  having things to give
> away...
> and engaging work to do... and internet communication...  and having fresh
> produce available all year 'round...  and not having to farm for a living,
> or fight over the land or water needed to do it.  Living near the
> prosperous tip of the pyramid has been an awfully comfortable place to be.
> How much do I have to give up?


I don't have the answer to that.  Even as I type this sentence, hundreds of
thousands of Americans are being forced to give up much or all of what they
have, due to the present economic climate which will NOT improve for the
average American.  For a while, at least, you'll probably ascend even
further up the pyramid, in America at least.  But you'll have a great deal
of company from among the Chinese, the Indians, etc.




> Still... may I recommend Derrick Jensen's piece in Orion magazine
> (republished in Alternet this week) -- with an environmental focus,
> but I think closely tied to what we're saying here:
>
>     http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/4801


He makes some excellent points.  Thanks for sharing, Stuart.




>        FORGET SHORTER SHOWERS
>
>    WOULD ANY SANE PERSON think dumpster diving would have stopped Hitler,
>    or that composting would have ended slavery or brought about the
>    eight-hour workday, or that chopping wood and carrying water would
>    have gotten people out of Tsarist prisons, or that dancing naked
>    around a fire would have helped put in place the Voting Rights Act
>    of 1957 or the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Then why now, with all
>    the world at stake, do so many people retreat into these entirely
>    personal “solutions”?
>
>        [...]
>
>    I want to be clear. I’m not saying we shouldn’t live simply.
>    I live reasonably simply myself, but I don’t pretend that not
>    buying much (or not driving much, or not having kids) is a
>    powerful political act, or that it’s deeply revolutionary.
>    It’s not.  Personal change doesn’t equal social change.
>
>
>       [...]
>
>    Besides being ineffective at causing the sorts of changes necessary
>    to stop this culture from killing the planet, there are at least
>    four other problems with perceiving simple living as a political
>    act (as opposed to living simply because that’s what you want to do).
>
>    The first is that it’s predicated on the flawed notion that
>    humans inevitably harm their landbase.  Simple living as a political
>    act consists solely of harm reduction, ignoring the fact that humans
>    can help the Earth as well as harm it. We can rehabilitate streams,
>    we can get rid of noxious invasives, we can remove dams, we can
>    disrupt a political system tilted toward the rich as well as an
>    extractive economic system, we can destroy the industrial economy
>    that is destroying the real, physical world.
>
>    The second problem—and this is another big one—is that it
>    incorrectly assigns blame to the individual (and most especially
>    to individuals who are particularly powerless) instead of to
>    those who actually wield power in this system and to the system
>    itself. Kirkpatrick Sale again: “The whole individualist
>    what-you-can-do-to-save-the-earth guilt trip is a myth. We, as
>    individuals, are not creating the crises, and we can’t solve
>    them.”
>
>    The third problem is that it accepts capitalism’s redefinition
>    of us from citizens to consumers. By accepting this redefinition,
>    we reduce our potential forms of resistance to consuming and not
>    consuming. Citizens have a much wider range of available resistance
>    tactics, including voting, not voting, running for office,
>    pamphleting, boycotting, organizing, lobbying, protesting, and,
>    when a government becomes destructive of life, liberty, and the
>    pursuit of happiness, we have the right to alter or abolish it.
>
>    The fourth problem is that the endpoint of the logic behind
>    simple living as a political act is suicide. If every act within
>    an industrial economy is destructive, and if we want to stop
>    this destruction, and if we are unwilling (or unable) to question
>    (much less destroy) the intellectual, moral, economic, and physical
>    infrastructures that cause every act within an industrial economy
>    to be destructive, then we can easily come to believe that we will
>    cause the least destruction possible if we are dead.
>
>    The good news is that there are other options. We can follow
>    the examples of brave activists who lived through the difficult
>    times I mentioned—Nazi Germany, Tsarist Russia, antebellum United
>    States—who did far more than manifest a form of moral purity; they
>    actively opposed the injustices that surrounded them. We can follow
>    the example of those who remembered that the role of an activist is
>    not to navigate systems of oppressive power with as much integrity
>    as possible, but rather to confront and take down those systems.
>
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