Tame To Save: Turning Innocent Fire Dancing Into Religious Ritual

Fire dancing is a lively example of the childish—childish as a term of affection, not as one of derogation—creative capacities that are usually suppressed and repressed in our modern culture. If one mentioned people dancing around a fire with scant clothing and hypnotic drum beats, what would probably pop into your head is something akin to this:

Common commentary would be that this dancing is somehow related to a specific religion (which it may very well have been in the first, but no westernized modern interpretation could do it any justice) and is occasioned by spiritual other worldly concerns. However, what wouldn’t be admitted, or even conceived of, is that the fire dancing may have—in its original conception—been completely related to living in this world, and enhancing the time that these humans were having when they lived here. This thus turns us to consider the childish immediacy of experience that isn’t naturally concerned with death and an afterlife as an end in its own right, an often overlooked point. If nothing good and lucidly enjoyable came in this world, why should a people even create after-life as a concept? What out of this world could have originated the notion of a perfect and beautiful afterlife if there wasn’t something good and perfect occasioning this world from which to conceive of it? Perhaps what follows from this is a situation where specific geographic locales with an especially austere environment, breed atheists who flourish there because the idea of anything good or perfect is so alien to the entirety of their experience. Their cold living space has so colorblinded them to sketching a blueprint for an afterworld, for how could they never having had any exposure to the blues?

There must have been some original sacredness to this world (that I don’t think is beyond redemption) that could have allowed the original childish enchantment durable to be fully embodied by the full grown adults likewise—I think here specifically of Columbus’s description of the Arawak Caribbean Natives. The originary non-religious necessity of fire-dancing that I am positing is also given support as a default as by the question: could humans have even wanted to conceive of an extension beyond death in a state of lived sacredness? This is my thinking at present, which may regress or evolve to argue with myself if you, dear reader, don’t beat me to it.

Jumping back into our own time, the fire dance could only survive modernized adult ridicule if it was to be ensconced in ritual. The ritual aspect protects the pure creative joy of fire dancing that was the immediate enhancement of experience, by both a vital warmth and the visual dance of the flame, an intensely differentiating allure taking place at the very most complex mereol level of our day—the chemical. In possibly a beta iteration, what I’m saying is that these ancient people who wanted to protect the childish vitality of their world and their very existence, put a ritualistic air around such an act as dancing around a fire. Possibly what they thought in so doing was that this was the best way to weather the siege of increasing seriousness as humans “aged” out of innocence into civilized rigidity.

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I have a great need of haste as the ideas for posts pile up and the demands of the civilized worlds draw me away from this blog, not to mention dilettantism in our complicated world spreads one very thin. So, to that end—and you may see the connection as I do to the rest of the above post—I will dump, rather uneloquently, as is not my wont, a Tonka meme that speaks to modern adults embodying the negative connotation of childish (and maybe you’ll catch my vibe that I fucking hate shiny misused trucks):

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Cascadian Independence: A Change Before the Crisis

I often live under a rock (a fertile place, see below*) with the Cascadian Independence Movement just entering my narrow radar screen. After some investigation, however, it seems the movement itself also dances between rock-roofed dormancy and active assertions of the human striving for freedom from unnecessary shackles. There are many humans in social media circles that give off revolutionary vibes, standing atop the rock as one would a soapbox, exuding that something big politically will be happening very soon; who am I to cast doubt and preclude such a future? I have a taste for their revolutionary energy, and all I wanted to do when I first realized this was a real movement within the American continent I occupy—where the political imagination is generally as fluid as a desert—was go hug the nearest conifer and have someone take a me and tree selfie, and photoshop that onto a Cascadia flag with the words “Solidarity With Cascadia”.

The Cascadian nation’s coming into existence is important beyond just those that it will include (I wouldn’t say “contain”, as that has a statist connotation and I think Cascadia is far more a free and open nation), as it could serve as both a model for emerging nations and a further disintegration of the overgrown, malnourished, obese post-imperialist empire euphemistically labeled “the United States”. Cascadia is another front against the sprawling Empire to help take it further off balance; another stronghold of a mountainous island to not be drowned out when the real threat to it’s residents—the one to its east (District of Columbia) not west—topples from within. Cascadia has a deep enough of a foundation in place that it cannot be faulted as being a mere reaction to the politically and economically decadent times. Cascadia is full of insight and foresight that put it in a different league of nations than most that have arisen in the last century; it will prove to be a one word poem, prompting other nations to arise before such a possibility is precluded. Cascadia is yearned for by the people within, not a convenience contrived by people without!

A blogpost on Cascadia could go into many different tributaries that wouldn’t lend itself to the linear writing style here employed, so I will return to the rock metaphor, as a matter of course. On this theme, the vanguard revolutionaries need to be prepared psychologically and not lose their far-sighted visions, when another winter comes and they need to migrate back underground to warm and nourishing places. Their thrusting efforts to birth a new sovereign nation may likely be averaged-out and watered-down by their spermicidal, prudish, conservative “let’s stay put” neighbors that don’t have the same lust for an open-ended Cascadian future. However, I have a sense that the number of winters between their hopes of an unoccupied Cascadia nation and its reality, are quickly thinning. The most important reason for this is the revolutionary zeitgeist: Cascadian pride is a phenomenon that might be comparable to a vine spiraling upwards, clinging to a cliff-side at times, but only to return and reveal more of its glorious self higher up, daringly exposed and awe-inspiring. The vine has deep roots that I cannot appreciate, that are larger and more fertile than Ecotopia even understood, though that book was immensely important in its current growth strides. For me, I am gazing up at the vine, rooting it on. I see more hope for it still because what might be the most important inhibition barring the Cascadian nation from bearing its first fruit (a fir cone baby) is a negative that may soon be negated. The Cascadia nation’s biggest natural predator averred to above—the United States, along with its global reserve currency status—is going to be having organ failures of all sorts that will put it in a hospital bed before too long. In such a state the federal government might become too impaired to grasp at a fledgling nation. One must wonder if FEMA’s imminent deployment in response to the fault line is a pretext for federal presence, “reminding” residents that they are not free to self-determine. In any event, at some point this governmental force will release the Cascadian land from its grip, enabling the people to put on full display the beautiful ideas informing their struggles.

Change before the Crisis: “Get ahead of the times with silver ParaDimes”. One triage tactic the region can take up (if it hasn’t already begun to do so) to further ensure it isn’t as injured by any American economic collapse, would be the encouragement of converting dollars into physical silver and bartering with it for trade. This transition to a silver backed currency will allow a more seamless transition when the need arises, as well as becoming another social glue between the Cascadian people. Even more to the revolutionary side of things would be a continued push for an organic economic method of sharing and mutual aid, which I know already exists locally in many different places over Cascadia where people are even further ahead of their times.

*I admittedly couldn’t figure a way to put in this further elaboration without further confusing the text, so I thought I would say it here. With regards to living in proximity of a rock: there is much bio-activity that happens during all seasons, as permaculture profounder Sepp Holzer has displayed in his “symphonies of nature”. A man ahead of his time is surely not unheard of in a place that is ahead of it’s time, and those familiar with his love of rocks would know that they regulate temperature, increase moisture to dry areas, clean and mineralize water, among many other talents known and unknown such as creating an appropriate pH for a fir tree sapling to grow strong and tall!

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Related:

https://cascadiablogs.wordpress.com/the-cascadian-independence-project/

https://freedomcaravan.wordpress.com/2013/10/13/cascadia-freedom-caravan-to-the-tear-down-the-walls-national-gathering/

http://www.seattlecascadianow.org/

The Graduation Speech They Deserve

As Jake walked across the stage, shuffling by the front row of insignificant, self-important deans and other inflated assholes, his smile grew. He was about to be put at the helm, and they couldn’t react until the damage was done. As he drew near the black podium, there wasn’t much applause coming from the graduating class, and that didn’t bother Jake: there wasn’t much reason for it since nobody really knew who he was. He had written a few noteworthy poems for a small niche of readers, and had managed to stay in touch with his former professor still at the university. Because of this his work was circulated and lauded, allowing his name to be nominated and then selected as a “successful” alumni to give a commencement address for his alma mater.

After his speech, he knew his status in the minds of others would change. Certainly the faculty would publicly abhor him, but what about the youth out there, beyond the podium microphone? He was now looking out at them, a great mixture of diverse, 21 and 22 year old bodies all accepting the rigidity of traditions that would have them spend 100 dollars on some ugly black gown that they would only wear once, this once. Would the speech rile them up, or would it be dampened out, as so much of significance seemed to be these days? He was now going to find out.

“Those who know, those who no longer wander—they are the ones who are lost, and they shall now be put last”, began Jake, looking from left to right. Realizing that his point may not have resonated in all of his audience, he inserted: “That’s a reference to the tattoo you put on your ankle two summers ago, for those of you who I lost.”

“As an older man now, no longer a peer but perhaps old enough to be your parent, what wisdom can I offer you? I can start by saying that I’m not quite sure there is much wisdom that has come down through the ages, evidenced by the strife at every level of society, from the global, all the way down to the single individual at war with himself, herself…. otherself, other otherself. I coined quotable question, that may put it succinctly: Which is the more important lesson? Babies teaching their parents the lesson of life, or parents teaching the lesson of death, frequently with multiple examples? Many among my generation, and the older generation,” he motioned with an arm to the distinguished faculty, “we—they—like to blame your generation for the ‘moral decadence’, the ‘grotesque’ acts of confused sexuality, the cultural violence, and so on. I might be an anomaly in saying this, but the problems are far older than the youth, and in fact youthfulness is their greatest antidote. The university is not a refuge from this strife, but complicit in its elicitation. It is a collection of strategies to oppress the other of your choice—stored in brains, books, and other media. The irony is that the oppression is implicit right from when you sign the contract with the school, and like an abused victim, you go on to become a perpetrator later. I am not here to inform you of your victimization, I am here to implore you to become the generation that makes the great turn, that both sees the murderers in plain site and disarms them, dismembers them when appropriate, and not take up membership in their institutions.”

“I have a bigger point, a series of points—most of them negative—to make clearer why you should do this. What was Hitler’s age, when he planned operation Barbarossa? When he invaded Poland? When he moved to change his sick fantasy world into an actual world. Closer to home—a different sack of shit, no less evil—Harry Truman—the only human ever to decide to use an atomic weapon against people, and he did it twice, just to cement his evil legacy. How old was Obama, back in 2009, when he sold out on his campaign message and became cocksucker in chief, a douchebag just like the rest of the political world? He used our generations wind power to blow his sails. He doesn’t care that we don’t have any air now.”

“How old are generals that oversee war without generally risking their own lives? Alexander the Great conquered but did not subjugate, neither his own folk nor his enemies. His father Phillip, maybe, for he was older and more political, but he Alexander faced those he enemized directly on the field, never from a remote command center. The last thought on Alexander, the one of your age, is that though he loved war he did not use war to further other ends, he sadly and recklessly saw it as its own end, madly in love with it for it’s own sake, embodying a naiveté not yet extruded. Let’s turn to business. How old were Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling from Enron when they had and used the power to screw hundreds of people from their savings? How many more are there like them who just haven’t been caught, or who have paid off those with the nets to catch them?”

“A few good apples don’t turn a human profit out of the rotting tree of corporatism. These are your enemies, who flaunt their successes as if they are yours to share, when really they are at your expense. You’ll find that the most successful of enemies are not those that stab you in the back, no; they are those who day in day out slowly rob your energy for their own purposes. This method of slow methodical extraction of energy is so successful, that it has ideologies spouted by all forms of media to structure language to its own defense—thank you universities for teaching Karl Marx. This is a method employed largely by the mature, rather over-matured, middle aged people. Those who have learned all the subtleties to subordinating others, which is particularly useful because they have less control over their own bodies as the aging sets in. Put another way: as their fertility wanes, their appetite for destruction waxes. If only a midlife crisis was something internal that affected only the individual; no, their crisis becomes all of ours. And might I add, this is not something peculiar to western culture, this ageism that oppresses the youth is just as engrained in eastern societies, albeit in different manifestations.”

A man seated on the stage rose, his accumulated and repressed fury now evident in his snarling face. His chair squeaked, and Jake gazed over to regard him. Leaning in to the microphone, Jake decided to scold the man approaching him before he was able to pull the plug on his speech. “Sit down! How rude of you to try to interrupt. I’m lecturing now, and for once it’s something worthwhile, and here you are trying to shut me up. How many times in your aged career did somebody try to take away the stage from you? Not often enough!”

The man started to walk off the stage, bellowing: “I’ve heard enough of this non-sense, I will not take any more of it.” A few others followed him, as well as a few graduates from the crowd.

“What a convenient luxury it is to the lofty, to be able to walk out and not face any consequences, to be put on trial and be afforded the escape route,” spoke Jake eying the deserters. “It’s a show trial, to be sure, but it can have real consequences for all involved. You can burn your diplomas, and let this mill grind no more. Beat down these deans… it’s a way of honoring them. By doing so you show them that you have learned, for it is they who have used these institutions to beat the youth down, shape them into the hideous middle aged creatures that they have now become. There is no wisdom in the baby boomer generation… they are a bag of bones, their minds are more corroded than their stupidly fed diabetic bodies. There are exceptions to their rule, but we must realize that their rule is not acceptable. It has not been for a very long time, and if we are to redeem this earth, we need to loosen it from their grips. They are pathetic, and deserve to be stripped of their power by those younger and more deserving of power, because it is the youth who have the longest time left on earth, and who have this huge mountain of problems to deal with. The youth will deal more honestly with the many problems and in trying to not create new ones because they cannot just retire out of the problems. You need to be in power, not them.

“Some of you may think,” he continued, “that I am alienating a huge group of people. Do not fear, they have already alienated themselves by both their actions and in-actions. Fortunately for me, I am not a politician, and I do not want their votes. I will not stand in the way of any fires you start, and I would add that you needn’t feel guilty about any of the quote-unquote ‘damage’ you may cause. Don’t blame fire for burning, blame that which is old and dried up.”

Capitalism and Islands of Socialism: A Response to the Trotskyist Argument for International Revolution

To many anti-capitalists capitalism seems like a daunting enemy—a goliath—but those who take this big view to see global capitalism for the awful thing that it is, should perhaps zoom out even further to take in an even bigger picture, one that belittles capitalism and brings into focus the history of life and of the planet as a whole. For as much as capitalism seems to have going for it, it still needs constant and growing energy inputs, and some level of innovation in a world where it is largely responsible for having destroyed it. Most large organizations are under it’s fold, namely state’s and corporations, but there are many other resilient organizations (beyond socialist worker parties) that Trotskyists seem unable to give appropriate weight to. There is a sense among them that short of global revolution and the total destruction of capitalism, any other socialistic efforts will be co-opted, but I think this is to the denial of the many vital things that are not products of capitalism and are not beholden to it, and are often antithetical to it. Yes, capitalism is the dominant economic system between humans who are consumers, producers, others (I felt the need to add this third category in this age of economic perversity), but in many places in the world capitalist modalities scarcely enter into the oldest and most enduring human organization—the family. Thinking anatomically, within human bodies the economy between cells, and between organs and muscular-skeletal systems connecting through nerves and blood flow, is very cooperative displaying socialistic principles of sharing and “from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs”. Eco-systems that blend the three kingdoms of life and the less animate, inert earth, are largely symbiotic and a teacher that is too often not read (our nature literacy is at an all time low).

Capitalist relations do invade patterns of thought, and there is a suppression of a genealogical understanding of the development of all things in preference for a transhistorical view of the present as having some natural, eternal purpose. Capitalism projects itself backwards in time, overshadowing the real past, but an honest look backwards would show that just 250 years ago capitalism was not yet global, something practiced by a peculiar English minority in a much larger world of other traditionally exploitative systems. And capitalism was arguably only poised to be spread so virulently because of the discovery of fossil fuel energy potentials, not some teleological force within capitalism that made it unstoppable and somehow logical to be a conquering force: if a giant asteroid hit the earth and killed all mammalian life, would capitalism still have taken over?

Capitalism did not come to be all at once, and it does not necessarily need to be destroyed (unsubscribed from) all at once, with every single worker being class conscious and squaring off with everyone’s common enemy, the exploitative land owner. Besides, to accept the capitalists as the actual owners of the means of production is to accept the property ideology of capitalism, which seems to be regressive, non-revolutionary thinking. A revolution to transfer ownership from one class to another, sounds more like a regime change within the larger umbrella of propertied economic systems. Sticking to the topic of global worker revolution, think also of the huge efforts it would take to link and organize such multi-lingual, multi-continental efforts, and keep them from being hierarchical bureaucracies as some of the socialist parties desire (while other parties accept the idea of hierarchical organizations as a means to an end).

The argument put forth against creating “islands of socialism” is that they will come to be immediately under siege by capitalist forces, and there is a lack of truly understanding that such a way is a reaction to capitalism not a true break from it. Couldn’t it be equally as true that such islands put capitalism under siege, as pockets of land and pockets of potential consumers are taken out of the exploitative loop? I believe that such islands—some of which already exist imperfectly as small scale communes—serve as inspirational models that service a concrete contrast to the capitalist system that has so destroyed the imaginative capacity to envision an after-story to capitalism. A truly communistic society, no matter how small, is sure to invoke passions and energies from its purveyors that the capitalist system has never tapped into because of its alienating, deadening manner. Islands also serve as social experiments to teach lessons of what works well and what doesn’t as much.

I think we should feel relieved and happy to start socialism small and manageable, as this is in line with how every species (or economic/social system) always has started, allowing time and space for it to grow. We start with ourselves, in our bodies that share nutrients through our blood to all the different parts, in a very harmonious way. This is a great place to start, and we only have to grow in small ways beyond this level… To play on some Marxist prose, we have to impregnate this old, harmful society with a new, humanistic one. Babies don’t kill their mothers, but with enough caring they do outlast and replace them.

This post is a continuation/conclusion of Strikes r Out

A Zone 4 Earth: A Permaculture Approach To Create Primitivists’ Utopian Paradeisos

From Propaganda of the Deed to Propagation of the Seed

A core principle of conduct embraced by many anarchists is the notion of direct action—humans engaging directly in political or social acts without seeking recourse through a diluted, indirect pathway. Indirect actions could be categorized as those commonplace processes most of us partake in daily in modern industrial society, where we employ cadres of “middle men” to get our needs met, even at the expense of living in an alienated and hierarchical world.

Where and how we get our food is a realm fertile for direct action that has far too often been overlooked, and the more human efforts are put directly into getting our food in nature—something an anarcho-primitivist strives for—the less need and the less desire we will have to separate ourselves from the natural processes by using modern machinery and agriculture techniques that keep us out of the loop, ultimately keeping nature out of the loop too. Permaculture offers the surest bridges to allow humanity to cross from a concrete and machine besieged existence back into a thriving symbiotic connection to the rest of the living world. The paradeisos—the plentiful, self-perpetuating lush groves of our dreams—can be realized as actual places that we can stumble upon for a filling meal in our recapturing of the nomadic way of life. Our nomadic sensibilities are not irretrievably lost, but we may need to piece together a different game trail to migrate forward, back in time.

Seven Billion Nomads?

An anarcho-primitivist professing the wonders (and wanders) of a nomadic lifestyle might from time to time encounter a stickler who responds: “but there wouldn’t be enough food to support the seven billion humans; do you really think we should allow a mass die-off?” This is an uncomfortable corner for such an anarchist to be painted into—especially if it’s by other anarchists—and it’s a corner where (mental) starvation will eventually occur and a primitivist may quit on the fertile, migratory utopia. Permaculture heroically shines light into the dark forest, growing multifarious roots out of such a trap, the wise path being a generally “zone 4” approach.

It would take far too long, in terms of human lives (and billions of human deaths), to wait for the succession of the modern monocultured forests back to the dynamic, efficient, high yielding places of yesteryear. Anyways, it’s doubtful the succession would privilege human’s food needs, i.e. humans, nor the bottleneck of species they have domesticated for food, could have had the evolutionary time or pressure to be fully equipped with all the appropriate digestive enzymes to enter into a diverse ecosystem and gain nourishment from thousands of different plants. The zone 5 mentality of letting nature do it’s thing must be dropped, and the zone 4 mentality of changing nature in analogous ways to fit human needs must be adopted. Here is a non-exhaustive list of permaculture ideas that primitivists can become familiar with and possibly implement in even a “guerilla gardening” fashion, depending on their accesses to land:

– Since forests are such masters of the hydrologic cycle, turning non-forested land—such as grasslands, deserts, and abused agriculture lands—into diverse food forests would prove the most immediately beneficial for producing a surge in available biomass fit for human consumption.

– Start figuring out foods that can be wildcrafted, “eating the weeds”, and introducing them to the palates of others as well as your own; once someone realizes they can eat lettuces growing wild in the forest, their lenses are changed and they start considering what else they can eat (bark? berries? bugs?).

– Sabotaging trees that are low in what they provide the ecosystem, and favoring and seeding trees that are much more beneficial to human needs and the ecosystem as a whole; this is especially relevant to our monocultured forests that are daily wasting the energy potential granted from the sun.

– I had other ideas when I conceived of this post, but they are currently unavailable; when they occur to me, I will edit them in.

Strikes r Out

As the happenings from May Day get more vague, I thought it was a good idea to skip church (for me personally, it’s ‘most always a good idea to skip church) and type up a couple of thoughts.

My position that I voiced on Friday was that we radicals need to leave New York City and start communal villages where land is currently—though not indefinitely—much more affordable and much more valuable from a human perspective: “where land is not a concrete desert upheld by massive petroleum inputs”. I encountered some who were open to this idea, but many too—Trotskyists in particular were a strong presence at the gathering, distributing their own literature—who believed we need global revolution coming from a uniting of the workers of the world. I wanted to focus this post now to worker’s power, and talk more about global revolution in an upcoming post.

Workers under capitalism have historically been deemed—rightly so—to be the true power of capitalism, with one of the most obvious ways of displaying that power to themselves, and to the naïve, unlearned capitalists, being the strike. Striking is very effective when workers do indeed hold the real power and can bring their masters to heel. Work has evolved into “work” in many places, and there are many unproductive underlings that could just as easily go on strike and be dismissed without so much as a reaction from their employers. On this point, it seems to me that corporations like Walmart feign a need for employees, but truly it’s a facade to further their on the ground presence. There would be no need for a scab when the limb is already dead, being propped up by invisible strings.

But maybe if ALL employees globally agreed to strike indefinitely and were able to prevent scabbing, they could shake the foundations a bit, but I am uncertain how much this would hurt the supposedly existing capitalists at the top. Important to note is when it comes to important employment such as food production, wouldn’t striking probably lash those workers at the bottom of the scale the worst? It’s difficult for the workers of the world to unite behind striking when there are such vast differences in what they would be sacrificing by putting their livelihoods on the line. Would employees who are much higher on the pay scale ever agree to identify with those at the bottom, when they are so close (at least in their minds) to the top? Further, why would people who work in some societally positive industry (it seems so hard to come up with an example) want to ally with, for example, workers in a bullet factory, when those workers being paid at all for such a ghastly profession is itself a primary question in their mind? Another difference separating workers from one another is that some have the choice of where they are employed—even if they don’t have much say over the amount of pay—while others have no choice, and so the efforts to bring coherency and a sense of fairness for a global program is multiplied immensely.

I believe striking isn’t the answer for widespread change, moreso today than ever before, largely because it is ineffective, but so too because demanding more pay (or workplace changes) for a job that ethically or practically doesn’t really warrant it, is not a justifiable arena to put efforts into. On the other hand, leaving your job to build up practical, important skills related to growing food (such as adopting the low impact permaculture philosophy), is much more in sync with creating a radical and beautiful future; a future where slaves won’t require masters, nor other slaves, and they will lose their chains…

From a Lowly Culture to Permaculture

Where can a writing on something political begin? Surely not focused on great political leaders with the delusions that a few powerful people wield all the power and the story unfolds as their whims dart across the landscape where the lesser insects dwell. Nay, not the great man theory of history, for great men whom also wield power is dubious, and would anyways be next to impossible to identify, and fruitless nonetheless. Then what? The class theory of peoples who claim different degrees of property, from vast holdings to mere mass produced trinkets? Nay to this too—though such a neo-marxist undertaking would be venerable/applaudable—for it is too simple for our age, or perhaps rather, our age has become too simple for it.

We could say we are all too variable and on too many shifting paradigms, that a sociologist looking to analyze us would never be ADHD enough to keep up with our shifting technological society and the frequent off-shootings of cliques and resonances that come and go with an upgrade to a smart phone. This grasping for a post-modern explanation of the current political fogginess is a lazyman’s false idol. Why not just let Jesus bear the burden while we relax our guard and assume that events are part of some larger play of force, too big for any of us to make an impact upon because we are all just too different? “Our differences are different, and even our similarities are different.”

It is hard not to fall into this trap, and the only clear way I see is TO NOT ANALYZE THE POLITICAL PRESENT. Too much analysis and practices akin to analysis have weakened and particularized society from a once rich tapestry with harmonious strings, to a war fraught rag where there are neither allies nor foes, just confusion and non-microbial driven decay.

Perhaps I have already wasted too much text on the present, and in this paragraph I will here say that it is “the future”, but more accurately “a” future, that I would like to talk about. There is currently no good beginning from which to launch a political program. An end must be sought, and from this end we can let roots grow down into the present, vines from which we can swing ourselves out of this ObaMadofFacebooKremlin muck that isn’t worth a newspaper nor a future history tome to offer explanation.

So where to find this future? The best page to look at in such a worthy history book is the first. The first page, where we begin our tinkerings in agriculture and left behind our nomadic understudy of nature. It is back to these days we must ponder, when we stopped being a part of nature, and cut down a tree and made paper to write about nature. So followed our thinking that nature was no longer fit to seed itself, we were obviously chosen to do this (and questions of who chose us to do these tasks soon followed). Nature’s great child would now do the seeding, masturbating its various species, and picking mating partners for superficial qualities that blind vision and deaf hearing spoke to. Nature became the ignored parent, estranged at first, but the road has been long and darkening, the asphalt layers thicker and thicker. A helicopter ride reveals the varicose veins—the plaque, as ecosystems are actively marred. In this “post” industrial age it is to the point of nature being daily abused and systematical tortured and disfigured by a warped and deeply disturbed child. No child in the history of the earth has been so disturbed as the human species.

But lo! For I have strayed from a future and from a promise I made, something we all too often have done and will continue to do for it has become our second nature. We must accept this part of us for the present, and guard against its happening too frequently, as we seek to build a future, a future which includes us. Our agricultural beginnings were fraught with perils, most deeply that we put ourselves as master and nature as slave. Let’s this time change both the roles and the whole relationship, and put ourselves as student and nature as teacher. I am speaking of the permaculture future, where we as humans have small but important jobs as laying macro-landscapes to create microclimates where we let nature fruit to its fullest. We leave behind the follies of delving into depths smaller than our naked eyes can see, for these have brought great misery, as too have the extremes of macro-organization that went beyond our own bodies’ abilities to shape materials and required a machine to implement. The best way to dig ourselves out of our current problems—cultural, mental, environmental, and you fill in the rest—is to dig in to the world of permaculture that relieves us from the weight of the world we put on ourselves to manage.

Grounding Ourselves

(I am not referring to self-flagellation, though the rigorous work that lies ahead for we who will not be part of the capitalistic—or future feudalistic—world is sure to be laborious)

Some cities (I have New York in mind) do have cultural acceptance for “the other”, as many social radicals may seek refuge there for their marginalizing differences, and this may give relief to the ailment of being strange.

However, concentrating in the urban areas leaves them all (you all) in a precarious position of extreme vulnerability and gridlock. The viability of having the cooperative larger world built that we left-of-center radicals would like to see come to fruition is quite distant when we stay locked up, in a flat on the 9^th floor, with hired doormen to allow entry or deny it, depending on the whims of circumstance. A place like New York ensnares people ever deeper into capitalism—they must earn more and pay more to live on rented land—and they are surrounded by the most advanced aspects of the system: intense commercialism, industrial pollution, alienation amidst high population, and other issues.

On the other end, and where I think a great deal of anxiety lies on the minds of we radicals, is that the rural areas are somehow transcendentally and ahistorically backwards and intolerant. I believe that the state of much of rural America can be explained by the peculiar history of the land, and is by no means natural and needs to continue.

That being said, it is my position that we must start leaving the places that have been spent and that have no future, like the concrete jungles of urban density, and go to places where our ideals have to be compromised much less, and can be sown more immediately. Suburbs can act as a transition zone, or even semi-urban areas (west of the Hudson River) where money goes a lot farther and can keep you from being a landless thing, that would be quickly become dust in the wind if great social changes were to take place. Grounding yourself gives you some leverage to shape the future world as the current one unravels. It is much more desirable than to be shaped by those, of the capitalist ilk, who have land now and later on can force their will and values on you and your friends.