2 Things that show us the way towards global change

There were, I realized just this minute (ok, I’m slow, sometimes) two things that have occurred in recent memory, that point the way to change our world(s).

The first was/is the outrage older generations express to “millenials” (ie: everyone younger than them, including their own children and grandchildren) because they are (apparently willfully) “refusing” to buy the expensive things that people in *my* generation assumed would fund a luxurious retirement and keep the system running long enough to see them into the grave in comfort and style.

Houses, for example. New cars. Oil and Gas. Expensive vacations. Meat.

All the things their retirement investments are bound up in. Governments and businesses? They won’t support wind power and solar arrays, or find plastic replacements like hemp or whatever, until we force them to, and the only way to force them to is to make “business as usual” unprofitable.

And babies. Why won’t younger people keep having lots of babies, to ensure that a) there will be enough workers needing jobs and b) that younger people will be bound, as they were, to their wage-serfdom while those wages stay low, so that investors get an ever-increasing return on their money.

The other thing was the effect of Covid lockdowns.

Remember? How almost overnight some of the most polluted places began to recover? Remember how many jobs suddenly became do-able as work-from-home? And the way so many people found, after the first wave, better jobs, and how businesses are still complaining how “no one wants to work anymore”?

So here’s the thing: we could, by voluntary collective action, make the change.

Ditch your cars, as much as you can. Walk more places, and take more public transit. If your boss complains, explain how you cannot, on the money you make, afford to drive long distances. This is huge. It’s real, too, and why you need unions, but failing that, if more and more people simply refused to be bullied into the return to offices or to be even more bullied into desperately trading their lives to the managerial clock, businesses might need to rethink their models.

Shop less and shop local – small businesses, wherever you can, because they need your money, and Walmart doesn’t.

Buying less can make huge waves in the economy. After Covid, friends of mine began having “pub night” at home: everyone brought their own drinks of choice, the host house made bar snacks like nachos and wings, and either people brought their own guitars etc. and made music, or someone played DJ. Instead of $50-$100 per couple, they spent maybe $20, and had tons of good times…and could walk home, a lot of them.

During Covid lockdowns, people started baking bread, or quilting, or gardening…and a lot of them were finding joy in giving products of their labour to housebound friends. When someone got ill, their friends and neighbours made sure they got groceries, made sure they got company: I remember sitting on a friend’s back deck, while she sat inside, with the requisite six feet of distance, and we gossiped and laughed for a couple of hours, because she is immunocompromised, and we didn’t dare take any chances.

People did drive-by gifting – I got a bag of home-made bath bombs and hot chocolate mixes from a complete stranger who had just moved in down the block about a month before everything went sideways, and it made a bond that endured.

We learned to be neighbours again. We learned how to find joy in very simple things.

The fact is, inflation is driven by our continued compliance: we keep buying the stuff, regardless of price.

The fact is, corporations and governments will continue to ignore climate change until we refuse to use the polluting products they keep selling.

We can change the world, by refusing to do what “they”/”the system” wants and needs us to do.

Sometimes it seems hopeless…

But it isn’t. Believe me when I tell that the darkest hour is right before the dawn.

In my teens, we were fighting to end wars, and to see that everyone had equal rights and opportunities. We were in the streets, and in the halls of universities. We were beaten. We were arrested. But we won the battles.

Later on, we fought for women to be allowed those rights, too. And bodily autonomy, and we thought we’d won that battle, too.

After that, we fought apartheid in South Africa, and we thought that at least there, the job was done.

We were wrong, because having won the battles, we confused it with winning the war, but I tell you now, that doesn’t make our efforts and our gains insignificant.

Now some of those battles need to be fought all over again, and there are issues piling up on top of these, things like climate chaos and lgbtq+ rights, for example.

And it’s hard, I know. It feels so exhausting, but we need to stay on it. We (especially my generation) need to get back on the streets and into the boardrooms and fight like hell.

In the beginning, in each of these successive movements, we felt as though we were getting nowhere. That the people in charge would never listen, never change.

In the beginning, we were dismissed as naive, the issues were trivialized and mocked, vilified and insulted.

And then we were subjected to violence.

But little by little, we made gains. People from every age group and every walk of life began to hear our words and quietly at first and then with more insistence, they began to openly support our causes.

We changed their minds and their hearts.

So don’t give up. Redouble your efforts and shout ever louder.

Because eventually, if enough noise is made by enough people, we will scare those fuckers right down into their expensive dress shoes, and they will back down.

It was the best of times….

It was the worst of times…

It might just have been the last good time, in fact.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01B8M16YW

Happy Halloween!

True Believers are the scary ones

A friend and I just had a conversation where he said he didn’t know which of the rw fascists were worse: the True Believers who don’t care what Trump does, they are “with him to the end” and don’t feel there is anything Trump could do that can change their minds and that he’s the only one “standing up for America” OR the cynical supporters who just see an opportunity for them to gain power or just hurt people they hate or fear.

I said it was the True Believers who are the real danger, because they are the ones who would go out and shoot people. They are the potential suicide bombers.

The cynical opportunists?

They won’t risk anything, and certainly not their own precious skin.

They will use the True Believers to do the dirty work.

There’s a reason that some of the Jan. 6 ringleaders were sitting at home or in a DC hotel room: they weren’t willing to put any actual skin in the game.

Bigot Apologetics

“Apologetics” is a term used by/for right wing hardline Christians to explain and handwave away the contradictions and problematic bits of the Bible and their stances on various topics and to bolster their own opposition to the growing convictions that many of us hold about things like kindness, generosity, and acceptance.

And this meme/Facebook post is a shining example of this view.

https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=2281936675326053&set=a.2107934396059616

OK, but you never knew this before – you saw a picture and a name that wasn’t even hers, and swallowed the stereotype without a single thought.

Absolutely none of us gave a rat’s ass who she was up until people of colour began shaming all of us for erasing black history and for making the big bucks off their backs.

In the same way that fundamentalists and evangelicals cherry-pick through both books of the Bible to find that one verse or single sentence in the OT that supports their views, while screaming at the rest of us that we’re taking things out of context when we point out the hypocrisy of the way they completely ignore the parts where Jesus wants peace and tolerance and kindness out of them, and asks his followers to not go around praying in public, bigots of all stripes and their corporate masters try to pretend that it’s other people’s fault that white westerners erased pretty much the entirety of black culture and history.

It’s the way that when the ingrained misogyny of the west is pushed back against, they scream about how much worse it is for women in X country or religion – as if “not being quite that bad” is a virtue and a good reason not to improve (meanwhile trying to wrest away every gain women in the west have managed to win even the most basic of human rights they achieved over the last century…).

It’s part and parcel of the overall scheme of portraying the solution to climate chaos is down to the individual effort (Recycle your garbage! Ban plastic straws! Stop driving!) to deflect attention away from the way their private jets belch out literal tons of harmful emissions every year or how, if we divested from fossil fuels, 40% of all shipping traffic would essentially disappear.

https://qz.com/2113243/forty-percent-of-all-shipping-cargo-consists-of-fossil-fuels

So stop letting the 1% and their water=carriers guilt you up and distract you from the real problem, which is that they utterly refuse to find or utilize the practical solutions to the problems in favour of hate, complicity, laziness, and above all: MONEY.

Trust me. No matter how much you lick their boots, they will never, ever send you a cheque and welcome you in as part of their elite and perfumed little clique.

If you want to know more about why I feel the way I do, you can buy my book:

Why I don’t support Israel…and no one should.

Look – this isn’t about Judaism.

Seriously, it’s not. Israel, despite a half century and more of propaganda, is not synonymous with Judaism. It’s a country, not a religion.

I was born a mere 15 years after WW2 ended, and raised to believe that Israel was just this tiny enclave of “pull ourselves up by the bootstraps” scrappy little enclave a of brave freedom fighters.

And maybe that was true then. Certainly the Arab nations surrounding it were determined to crush it out of existence, and the West, laden with guilt about having ignored the hundreds of verifiable reports of just what Germany was doing to Jewish people for at least a decade (out of, I might add, the West’s own ingrained anti-Semitism), felt they had to support and defend the new country.

But the creation of Israel – the western imposition of fiat decisions displacing and deligitimising the people that had been inhabiting the region for basically forever – was fraught with problems, and these problems were all extremely predictable.

(No. Don’t @ me with bs about how “Palestine never really existed” – there are travel posters from prewar decades urging people to visit Palestine, and anyway, as Shakespeare pointed out: what’s in a name? There were people, real, actual people, who lived there.)

There were a lot of ways that everyone should have known this would go wrong.

Anyway, guilt and the fact that there was money to be made convinced the world to arm the Israelis. They were just trying to live, right?

In the beginning, I guess that was true. They were trying to build a country.

And somewhere along the line, the political class in Israel took the problem and turned it on it’s head. “Trying to build a country” became ‘annexing as much land as possible”, and then morphed into “kill those people we are scared of”, and then the fiction that the area had been a hellhole/wasteland with no one living here” was used to justify pretty much anything.

In the last thirty years or so, that justification began to sound increasingly familiar, and so did the actions that proceeded from that justification.

Lebensraum, anyone?

Look, I don’t know what the answer is. Nobody really does, but a lot of the problem stems from the major powers assuming that Israel is always blameless, that every action they take is defensive, and that because of what we pretty much let the Germans do to Jews in Europe, Israel now has every right to do to the Arabic population they displaced.

I think, after a quarter century of slow genocide and the constant appropriation of land belonging to non-Jews, it is no big surprise that Hamas re-emerged and started to fight back.

I don’t like it. I don’t think it has any chance of a good ending. But I cannot find it in my heart to blame them.

It’s entirely predictable, and considering that in the 60s, people often complained about the fact that the Jews in Germany, Poland, Hungary, Russia, France and all the other places the Nazis invaded never really fought back (not completely true, but, ok) it’s the absolute height of hypocrisy for us to condemn the Palestinian people for resorting, once again, to violence.

Again, Israel is not Judaism. Israel is not a religion – it’s a country. It’s a country that has been, from the very start, reliant on the Holocaust guilt of the west to garner money and arms, and far from defending their borders, have used those arms to expand into other people’s territories, and destroyed other people’s homes and lives.

It’s not a good look, and many people just turn their eyes away and stick with the fiction, but history is merciless, and sooner or later, the willfully blind will answer for this.

We need to find real solutions. Ones that don’t end with “Ooops, sorry about ignoring your genocide” kneejerk reactions, where we find another group of people we don’t give a shit about and displace them, and start the cycle all over again.

If you want to support me and keep me writing, please buy this book:

A Better Smoothie Just for the Lactose Intolerant

This is a great summer smoothie that is perfect for hot summer days!

1/2 frozen banana, cut into chunks

1/2 cup frozen berries or fruit of your choice

5-7 icecubes

1/3 cup (or more, depending on how thick you like your smoothie) unsweetened apple juice

Put everything into the blender and go to town on it till everything is – well, you know: smooth.

Dump into a glass and enjoy.

*Editor’s note: also good with vodka added, but not exactly a healthy choice. Still, there are those days when a little medicinal alcohol might be a good idea.

What you really want…

The one thing this last few days of nonstop Queen’s funeral TV coverage has laid bare is this:

People in the USA want a monarchy. They see their own system, and *don’t* see themselves.

They have deified the office of the president, and mostly, they don’t recognize the problem with that.

Oh, sure: they say the politicians “serve” them. They’ll assert that those people are their “employees”. They’ll confidently tell anyone who will listen that their Founding Fathers based the system on classical civilizations like Athens and Rome.

But they don’t really believe that.

Sure – those bewigged and frock-coated signees to the Declaration of Independence were all classically educated, inasmuch as they were educated at all. And the forms and terms laid out do mimic what we know about how Rome’s Republic, for example, was set up.

But, in reality, they aped a constitutional monarchy, while giving the titular head of that monarchy a lot more power than most people, even at the time, thought kings ought to have. They did away with the hereditary aspect and added in an electoral process, but the Senate and the House are not much more than the House of Commons and the House of Lords with different names.

And they treat the office of the presidency with the same unquestioning loyalty and reverence that most of the English had for their kings. Maybe more.

In fact, like I said, an awful lot of Americans really want a monarchy.

They don’t really want to vote – it seems inconvenient. And they balk at the idea that people who arrived in the last few decades get to have the same rights as those who were already there do – always excepting those who came before any of their ancestors did, of course.

They want someone they can follow blindly.

They want someone to take on the responsibilities they cannot be bothered with.

Now, this isn’t much different than most other countries. People everywhere seem to have lost the desire to be free – or at least, they’ve lost the understanding that freedom entails some active responsibility outside of elections.

But the problem in the USA is that a significant minority has the ability to make these desires a reality, by fair means or foul, and the last few years has only cemented those desires.

Little kingdoms

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/sep/04/super-rich-prepper-bunkers-apocalypse-survival-richest-rushkoff?fbclid=IwAR0wunBfjSmsKCxgnn5iwtFPMQJ2MigMNXq39QgeMojB5rLJvvBJXlWRhV8

The rich are getting ready.

Rather than even make vague attempts at avoiding the disaster itself, the ultra-wealthy are devising ways to protect themselves from the consequences of the environmental collapse that they assume will usher in violent anarchy for the rest of us.

They’re building compounds in isolated places, stockpiling food, and hiring private armies.

Now, please don’t think, as a person earning over six figures, that you are part of this. You are either their enemy or their staff – rid yourself of the notion that because right now, you’re earning enough not to notice rising food prices as anything more than a newsbrief annoyance, that you are in any way protected or on that side of the economic fence. Unless you can afford to buy a 500-acre ranch in New Zealand, you aren’t part of this deal.

And maybe that’s a good thing, because these people are so used to hiring personnel to do almost everything for them, their survival, over the long haul, is probably much smaller than yours.

The really rich don’t actually know how to do anything, and they don’t really understand anything about how the world, when stripped of both servants and technology, actually works.

Just suppose someone decides that the best place to build their refuge is Alaska (one of the many places they think of as isolated enough to be safe). Or in their urban bunkers? Or their gated suburbs?

How to grow food, once the store-rooms have been depleted, how to fix the inverter when the solar collection system goes down, how to treat illnesses without a fully-equipped hospital – they don’t know how to do these things. They certainly don’t seem to understand where the new supplies would be coming from.

And their kids will be even worse, because what their parents don’t know how to do is all the stuff that would need to be passed on but can’t be.

Oh, they might think, in a short-term way, about these things, and build a first aid room and fill it with equipment, and hire a doctor or three, and maybe a nurse or two as well.

What happens if there’s an accident or illness those people aren’t really trained for occurs? What happens when they die? Who would take their place? Their untrained children?

Their hired armed guards face the same problem: how and who will they train?

Most of the articles detailing the plans for hunkering down and riding out the calamities don’t look past the original group’s survival, and they say nothing about taking care of their guards’ or servants’ families, so once these former Navy Seals or whoever age and die off – who does the job then? Who trains the next generation of slaves?

What happens when the ammo runs out? When there are no more spare parts?

Given that the group of “owners” is small (I mean, that’s sort of the point), and the need for underlings is therefore going to be big, and assuming the people in charge think past a decade or so of being housebound – well, this isn’t Mesopotamia of 5000 years ago, and it isn’t Europe of the 1200s.

This is now, and people aren’t quite as powerless or uneducated as they used to be.

Sure – lots of people will sell their souls and their bodies to escape in some small way by working for these people.

But since they don’t need all of us, and since they can’t take away all the guns, or hire all the retired army personnel, and because there will always be more of us than them, their survival is actually less assured than anyone else’s.

We are used to doing things for ourselves. We are used to picking up the pieces. Some of us will survive because we are used to adapting to changing conditions.

It’s almost a certainty that the human race will adapt, if conditions enable us to.

The rich almost inevitably will not – they don’t understand that the world makes us, and not the other way round.