Waking up: freeing ourselves from work

 

Chapter V: The Plan (Part 11)

Taking Action - iv

 

 

Waking Up: Freeing Ourselves From Work

 

Preface

 

I. Being Bossed

 

II. The Two Winds

(1): "Alchemy"

(2): "The State"

(3): "Capital"

(4): "Science"

(5): "Values"

(6): "Theory"

(7): "The Ancestors"

(8): "Our Bodies"

(9): "Solidarity"

 

III. Progress

(1): "The Lost Child"

(2): "Nesucom"

(3): "Us Vs. Machine"

(4): "Being 'Smart'"

(5): "Force"

(6): "Complicity"

(7): "What is Progress?"

 

IV. Culture

(1): "The 'Culture Con'"

(2): "We Are All Tribal"

(3): "We Are All Artists"

(4): "Cauldron of Resistance"

 

V. The Plan

(1): "Preface"

(2): "Seeing Reality" - i

(3): "Seeing Reality" - ii

(4): "Seeing Reality" - iii

(5): "Planning" - i

(6): "Planning - ii

(7): "Planning"- iii

(8): "Taking Action" - i

(9): "Taking Action" - ii

(10): "Taking Action"- iii

(11): "Taking Action"- iv

(12): "Taking Action" - v

(13): "Taking Action"- vi

Claiming the Commons:

 

Body willing, and with the ancestors' help, I intend to print up a few copies of this book, and take the show on the road. And if you give me…weed, whites and wine, and you show me a sign, I’ll be willin’…to be movin’.

I’m referring to that lovely moment in the James Cameron film The Abyss in which the crew harmonizes together, singing these lines – if I learned it right:

I been warped by the rain,
Driven by the snow,
Drunk and dirty,
But don’t you know,
I’m still…
…willin’.

Out on the road,
Late last night,
I seen my purty Alice
In every…,
Alice…
…Dallas Alice.

And I been from
Tucson to Tucumcari,
Tehachapi to Tonapah,
Driven every kinda rig that’s ever been made,
Driven the back roads so I wouldn’t get weighed.
And if you give me…
…weed, whites and wine,
And you show me a sign,
I’d be willin’…
…to be movin’…

There aren’t many songs that adequately convey what it feels like to have to slave, slave away one’s life, to sacrifice…everything…for your family, for your world. This song of Lowell T. George’s ...Willin’ – does.

Bertolt Brecht was right: “fearful is the seductive power of goodness!”

Virginia Woolf was right: “Life…calls for gigantic courage and strength…”
It does. It calls for us to be…“willin’.”

That one word moves me so much.

Drunk, dirty, tired, lonely…but…“willin’.” We get up every morning, drag our asses out of bed, put our dreams on hold, and…eventually…let them go, so this world that despises us can keep on rolling…along.

It’s just so fucking unfair.

 

When Pink asked ...“Dear Mr. President”:

What do you feel when you see all the homeless on the street?
Who do you pray for at night before you go to sleep?
What do you feel when you look in the mirror?
Are you proud?

How do you sleep while the rest of us cry?
How do you dream when a mother has no chance to say goodbye?
Can you even look me in the eye,
And tell me why?

…Let me tell you ’bout hard work,
Minimum wage with a baby on the way,
Let me tell you ’bout hard work,
Rebuilding your house after the bombs took them away,
Let me tell you ’bout hard work,
Building a bed out of a cardboard box,
Hard work…hard work…
You don’t know nothing ’bout hard work…

She put her finger on the problem.

Podrunks don’t know nothing ’bout hard work.

Which explains the confusion of the corporate-chief whose question about his son began this section. Their upbringing is not just different from ours, it’s the inverse of ours. They raise their offspring to believe they are entitled to rule. We raise ours with the expectation of service – not service freely given, but service coerced. The brainwashing is so deep we don’t see it. It lulls us to sleep. Every movie, every television “show” presents us with the option of working or…working. “Gotta get up. Gotta go to work. Gotta bring home the bacon. Gotta pay the rent.” Gotta, gotta , gotta. No choice. That’s just how the world works.

But not for them.

 

We shoulder that boulder every morning, and every morning it’s heavier than the day before, ’til eventually…one day…it flattens us…flattens us right out.

 

Have you ever gone outside early in the morning when the sky is just waking up and watered your garden, your trees, your friends of green?

If you sit with them, after, peace and contentment wash over you, because peace and contentment is washing over them, you can feel it. And you feel, this is good, this is as it should be, this is want I want – I want an end to want.

Which is what it must feel like to rest. Not “rest” in a box surrounded by a world of hate, fear, mistrust, and misery – but “rest” in a world where everyone has what they need, and what they want.

 

What I want is to claim the commons, which is also claiming the “opens.”

There’s a funny caption in a recent Onion with the photo of a man in a prison suit. It reads: “Unsung Heroes. By drawing the entire Burlington police force to his armed standoff, Bill Twible allowed a group of junior high students to skateboard all up and down Church Street without getting hassled for once.”

We are captives in this present system. No doubt. To tunnel out, the energy that animates the shovel must be our dreams – our dreams for what we want.
When we gather in our crews, after we’ve begun to see reality, after we’ve begun to heal, after we’ve taken a good, hard look at the possibilities within ourselves and within our physical environments, with this solid sense in hand, we begin to envision, to manifest, the future in the present – we begin to see what we can make now that reflects it.

Your ideas will be as rich, diverse and fresh as the people who comprise you.

Here’s what I’d add to the mix.

 

[See: "Seeing The Communal Alternative" and: "Wading Into The Muck Of State" ]

 

At the risk of sounding a bit Machiavellian myself, I think there are two levels to our activism, two “faces” with a single underlying aikido. There is the face we must wear for the state, and the face we wear for our communities. This is a temporary necessity, as temporary as the state itself. But the underlying aikido is uniform.

“Aikido” means “way of adapting the spirit.” So what I’m describing is not so much two different faces, as a recognizing of two different realities that require different things of us.

The following are a few theaters in which we must practice our aikido:

 

• Public festivals or street parties;

 

• Growing food everywhere;

 

• Generating electricity everywhere;

 

• Education redesign;

 

• Embracing the excluded (by taking the technology outside with traveling tutorials and earthship construction), and embracing all children and youth;

 

• “Power-down” plans that include: code suspensions and business-license cessations; free online access, domain name registration, and web page hosting; * land trusts that set aside land for communal living arrangements (explaining the “power down” implications of the right to shelter); use of public land for community owned and run Earthship projects, farms, gardens, and electricity generation;

 

• “CoExiSt” plans that include savings associations; land trusts; communal Earthship centers with electricity generation and charging stations for electric or retrofitted vehicles, farms, gardens, and shared living facilities.

 

What we’re trying to call into being – aside from our future freedom – is cooperation from the state and cooperation from the broader community. We need the state off our backs. We need some breathing room.

We’ve discussed the problems that confront our efforts to be whole – these problems afflict all levels of the current system. We cannot escape them by focusing on the local level, but they are more manageable on the local level.

One of the biggest problems, aside from the repressiveness of the state itself, will be neighbors still locked into Division Work. In the face of unresponsiveness from our neighbors and repressiveness from the state, we’ll have to keep in our hearts the courage of people like Fannie Lou Hamer, Liliana Robbins, Paul Robeson, John Brown, Steven Biko (whose face is represented on the cover of this book), Walter Rodney, and Mother Jones, who put it all on the line and followed their hearts when it wasn’t only unpopular but dangerous to do so.

The work that must be done – reclaiming our selves, our earth, and each other – requires us to gather in numbers. This will be threatening to the state and to many of our fellows, especially as it’s precisely those particularly targeted, labeled and despised by this system who must be particularly embraced.

 

On the community front we can begin with some spontaneous street marketing of our wares. As shopping is one of those class society-encouraged activities that is for the most part non-threatening, these festivals should hopefully be received fairly warmly by our neighbors, to the extent that they’re fun, apparently extemporaneous (while actually well-planned), present useful, low-priced, products and disappear quickly, leaving behind no trash. Eventually these ghost-like gatherings could make their appearances unexpectedly all over the city, popping up guerilla warfare-like, extending their stay in time only once they’ve been embraced – both by the broader community, and by the state in the form of a suspension of business license regulations, or at least a moratorium on enforcement.

 

Simultaneously, there will hopefully be folks in our crews who can interface creatively, sensitively, and subtly with the state; folks who can speak its language and persuasively present both problem and solution to the ecological disaster that we’re in – the solution, of course, being us. These crewmates will have the authority and example of both the Transition Movement and Michael Reynolds at their disposal, the latter all the more so to the degree that we win his endorsement. That’s an unknown. But we have his words then, whatever are his words now.

This movement could become the public face of the “power down” strategy. If we seize responsibility now for its design, we can hopefully include many of the key pieces of our overall vision: the rationale for code and business license suspension, universal web access and page creation, earthship-preference in home and building design, growing food everywhere, generating electricity everywhere, redesigning education, land trusts that set aside land for communal living arrangements (explaining the “power down” implications of the right to shelter), and embracing the excluded and especially all youth.

 

 

Continue to "The Plan" - Part 12

 

 

 

 

© Pamela Satterwhite for Nas2EndWork (the NEW)