In early 2000, I was walking through Manhattan with three friends on our way to meet a fourth member of our party. This was well before cell phones had become so completely pervasive but still, I was the only one in our group without one. I sarcastically commented on this and was prompted mocked as a Luddite. Then it was on to the essential business of figuring out how to meet up with friend #4.

Out came a cell phone. A call was placed to another cell phone. A meeting place was agreed upon and we were on our way. Friend #1 hung up his phone and turned to me, declaring that this was “one of those times” when a cell phone was indispensable. To which I replied:

“If we didn’t have access to your cell phone or any cell phones at all, we would’ve been simply been more creative in order to come up with a plan that would’ve gotten all of us together without a major hassle. Instead, the phone made us lazy because we knew we could just wing it. Instead of problem-solving, we opted for reliance on consumer electronics.”

A similar rant, of course, could realistically be applied to calculators. Not to mention, the spell-check function on your computer, most software programs in general, and yeah…the computer itself. We no longer have to learn how to spell or remember phone numbers or do math in our heads or memorize directions or even walk up a single flight of stairs. Thanks to the marvels of industrial civilization, we happily delegate such tedious tasks to technology so we can have time to focus on the truly important stuff, like…um…well…uh…removing 90% of the large fish from the ocean, perhaps?

Harmony: Agreement in feeling or opinion

We each possess a physiology that evolved to negotiate the Stone Age. Unfortunately, we live in the Space Age. There’s the rub. We are urban cavemen — overmatched in our daily battle to navigate an artificial reality because we have lost contact with our instincts.

“Pediatricians nowadays see fewer kids with broken bones from climbing trees and more children with longer-lasting repetitive-stress injuries, which are related to playing video games and typing at keyboards,” writes Sally Deneen at The Daily Green. Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods, calls this “nature deficit disorder.” As a fourth-grader quoted in Louv’s book explains: “I like to play indoors better, because that’s where all the electrical outlets are.” Nature deficit disorder is obviously not a medical term; it’s more of a social trend, a trend that plays in factoids like this: American children between the ages of 8 to 18 spend an average of 6.5 hours a day indoors using computers, video games, television, and MP3 players.

The payoff for all this spectatorship is a lifestyle based on imitation, competition, materialism, and self-delusion. The dominant culture keeps us inactive while our biology desires movement. The dominant culture sells us junk food while our bodies crave nutrients. The dominant culture trains us to be obedient while our minds yearn for freedom. The dominant culture teaches conformity while our souls demand individuality. The dominant culture denies our biology and puts us out of balance with nature.

Among many others things, it can be posited that we did not evolve to experience artificial light after sundown, live inside four walls under that artificial light, eat processed and refined food products, ingest chemicals and pharmaceuticals, sleep during the day and stay up all night, drive cars, travel in an airplane across time zones with such rapidity, become obese, remain sedentary, consume animal flesh or mammary secretions, usurp our immune system with toxic vaccines, exist on a man-made time schedule, be surrounded by copious human-induced electromagnetic radiation, climb giant mountains, travel to space or underwater, wear shoes or eyeglasses, lift weights and develop hypertrophied muscles, exist without community, give birth lying down, live in a world devoid of top soil and nutrient-rich food, smoke cigarettes, be hyper-exposed to toxic pesticides, endure global warming and the greenhouse effect, use cosmetics, or manage the high level of stress and noise that is synonymous with our so-called progress.

Koyaanisqatsi…this is what the Kogi Indians of Colombia call “life out of balance” and this is what we have created as our culture. When I say “culture,” I am referring to what Jason Miller calls “the pitiless, soulless, murderous machine of capitalism and industrial civilization inculcates, indoctrinates, entices, bribes, and coerces nearly everyone to participate in its bloody, rapacious, and relentless assault on the Earth and its sentient inhabitants.” This culture has quickly fucked up the entire planet. So much so that the elusive Kogi have issued a warning to us, their Younger Brothers.

Equilibrium: A condition in which all acting influences are canceled by others, resulting in a stable, balanced, or unchanging system

Even the eyes of veteran activists glaze over when I talk about 80% of the world’s forest being gone. They want to debate the latest political minutia while all life on this planet is under relentless assault. It’s cliché to declare that our problems cannot be solved by the same type of thinking that created them. Cliché but accurate. Elections, legislation, protests, petitions, and so on will not stop the flow of pesticides or the use of nuclear power or the glorification of war and its volunteer soldiers or our culture’s relentless march toward total destruction.

Life on Earth is out of balance. Corporations, politicians, judges, cops, and soldiers can’t fix this. In fact, most of them can’t even perceive the imbalance. The change has to come from somewhere else. The change will come from somewhere else, of that we can be sure. The details of outcome, however, are far less certain.

Symbiosis: A relationship of mutual benefit or dependence

One final note, on the medium by which I have shared these thoughts: The aforementioned Kogi have no written language. In part, this is to assure they remember. They talk, they pass down stories, and they remember. “The Kogi attach great importance to memory,” explain the editors of Ode Magazine. “The memory of events with which the community has been confronted, the memory of social regulations within the group and so forth. ‘Memory,’ they say, ‘is like eyes which were made to see. If they close, everything becomes darkness.’ For them, this memory cannot be written down, it must be spoken, passed down by members of the group. In writing, memories are separated from the people and lose their effectiveness.”

So, I ask: what memories are we creating and what are we doing to ensure there will be someone left to appreciate and remember them?

Synergy: Cooperative interaction among groups

California-based organizer, educator, activist-writer, and playwright (and, oh yes, home schooling father and devoted spouse) Richard Oxman knows the answer. He’s more than aware that our current system – our very culture – is designed to shove the “big” questions to the fringes. This is why Oxman has conjured up a unique form of dissent: TOSCA — Taking Over the State of California.

“A necessary, urgent action,” he calls its, “designed to put thirteen non-politicians into the Sacred Seat in Sacramento (the Governor’s seat)… with all of those citizens having an equal say… along with the working figureheads who will be our candidates for Governor and Lieutenant Governor in the 2010 gubernatorial race.”

Oxman feels California is ideally suited for such an effort and has begun the important work of getting the campaign (so to speak) rolling. I recently asked him some questions via e-mail and here’s how it went:

Mickey Z: What is it about the state of California and its political apparatus that makes it a logical venue for your efforts?

Richard Oxman: The Governor of California can wield great influence in the state, having the legal right to move unilaterally on many fronts without having to compromise with opposing politicians. The state itself is tremendously influential, nationwide, internationally. Her/his role — the Guv’s — in Higher Education alone could change the world. Think divestment, for one. And because California is in serious — historic — trouble on several counts, citizens there are primed to follow a new paradigm for change. They are desperate.

MZ: If/when this succeeds, what might be the first obvious difference the public would notice?

RO: It will succeed, it must… or we are doomed. Everything else on the table is either disingenuous or moving at an arthritic snail’s pace. Once in office all decision-making meetings will be filmed for public consumption, to help citizens to self-educate, and decide for themselves who has their interests at heart, what to demand, who to pressure, etc. Our Guv can actually teach citizens HOW to pressure. That’s one of several aspects of TOSCA that have no historical precedent. Our tenure in office will be citizen-centered and communally-centered, NOT about the self-interest of career politicians or their money men.

MZ: Speaking of money…

RO: Our campaign will be waged on a ZERO budget. Whereas people concerned with the influence of money in campaigns to date have tried to change things with efforts such as campaign finance reform… we will Be The Change We Want To See. Meaning, we intend to demonstrate what miracles can be wrought with no money. TOSCA is all about opening up a window to see what the public will do on their own once they see how much can be accomplished without any funds whatsoever. How much pure joy can be generated, how much human connection can be had… with nothing in one’s pocket.

MZ: Considering the roadblocks involved with even getting a candidate on the ballot, how do you intend to accumulate enough votes?

RO: One thing we’re going to do is do away with all the time, energy and money that’s always put into getting on the ballot. What we save there we’ll put into recruiting… on an intimate basis. Not with signs, petitions, online blah blah, meetings, announcements or any of that habitual generic stuff. Sure, we’ll accept high profile plugs, but our basic m.o. will be to have friends contact friends one-on-one, bonding in an unprecedented way, passing the word incessantly; we have a huge jump on others already. No real time needed. That 61% who didn’t show at the last statewide election will provide mucho. Then there are the voters whose votes weren’t counted because of carelessness, more than what the Green Party garnered! None of our unaffilitated write-in votes will be lost in that Black Hole. I can’t fit “reasons” and much else into this telegraphic bite, but… contact me. There will be easy crossovers from major and marginalized parties… for it’ll be effortless to sell the notion that we need deep institutionalized changes… like detaching our economy from the Pentagon… which no one else can offer. Before much longer highly influential souls will take up TOSCA’s cause… almost exclusively. And then the first step in our legal, non-violent revolution will kick in.

MZ: Okay, I’ve asked to sound-bite and condense and reduce your idea to an easily digestible morsel to keep it ready for prime time…but now imagine you have a totally different audience: radicals, activists, etc. Why should, say, an anarchist get on board the TOSCA Express?

RO: Express, yes! Everyone should get on board “yesterday” because individual freedom will be of paramount importance — on an ongoing basis — for all connected with TOSCA. There are different kinds of anarchists, of course, but like the vast majority of anarchists… TOSCA’s core members believe that an appropriate economic order cannot be created by the decrees and statues of a government. We’re into the collaboration of workers in all aspects of production… keeping in mind, however, please… that we have no intention to approach “production” along traditional, environmentally destructive lines. The taking over of management in all facilities by the producers themselves is of prime importance to us, and of great appeal to most anarchists, I believe. We see separate groups within industry as independent members of the Big Industrial Picture, carrying on production/distribution of products in the clear interests of particular communities… on the basis of free mutual agreements. That said, it doesn’t mean that the thirteen people serving as Governor together will not be trying to influence decisions made in each little corner. Everyone has an obvious vested interest in moving in solidarity respecting certain environmental facts, at the very least. And, by the way, this business of anarchism should not scare anyone away. For everyone who opposes the Pentagon being inextricably bound up with our economy’s success, functioning… must, absolutely must acknowledge that we’re going to have to have radical institutional changes in order to create greater democratization in society. To say nothing about other equally important (related) issues…like abominations abroad… which we will spotlight daily on our own media outlet.

MZ: When you talk about the need to move in solidarity respecting certain environmental facts, are you saying that we may differ on certain issues but everyone is heavily impacted by 80% of world’s forests being gone?

RO: Perfectly put. We are all doomed if everyone is merely doing their own thing. TOSCA would respect anarchists more than any other group in office in history, but… we would do our damnedest to help everyone self-educate about our mutual environmental threats, and do what we could to encourage those making decisions in little corners to deeply consider larger communal concerns. Their own survival, to put in another way.

MZ: Who — besides me — have you asked to serve as an advisor and who have approached about being a candidate? What kind of response have you generally gotten?

RO: High profile figures and others such as Howard Zinn, Michael Parenti, Bill Blum, Derrick Jensen, Glen Ford, Afshin Rattansi (in Iran at present), Jennifer Loewenstein, Greg Moses, Wallace J Nichols, Michael Stocker (of Ocean Conservation Research), the great African specialist who constantly risks his life to get great news to us… Keith Harmon Snow, Dave Lindorff, Cindy Sheehan, Ron Jacobs, Kim Petersen (of Canada), Henry A. Giroux (who Routledge named as one of the top fifty educational thinkers of the modern period), L.A. attorney/author Ellen Brown, Argentina’s Marie Trigone, Bruce Anderson (of the Anderson Valley Advertiser), Devinder Sharma (of India), Ronnie Cummins (Executive Director for Organic Consumers Association), David Yearsley, organic farmer Dr. Shepherd Bliss of Sonoma State University, Murray Dobbin (of Canada), Stephen Martin, and artist Jerry Fresia (in Italy) are just some of the people who have offered us their public imprimaturs.

We’re still in the process of trying to recruit Mike Davis, Paul Hawken, Michael Albert and Arundhati Roy… and everyone else! Noam Chomsky hasn’t come on board yet, but we haven’t given up on anyone, and even people like Noam — who for very legitimate reasons want to take “a little more time” to consider all aspects of what we’ve put on the table before adopting a public stance — have taken the heartbeats to go back and forth with us, very generously. Much is not written in stone, and so we can take the time to ask people to make recommendations, to feel free to tweak this and that to, possibly, suit their own purposes… their angle on society.

MZ: So the reactions have been encouraging?

RO: Everything considered, I’d say that we’re getting an over-the-top positive response. I mean, the above list was compiled over a period of only about two weeks of me working alone, spending only minimal time on recruitment. That’s actually phenomenal by any standards, yes? And one really has to factor in that we’re coming out of nowhere, dumping ourselves in the inboxes of individuals and organizations quite suddenly, absolutely no prep for what’s essentially, arguably, the most radical proposal in the realm of politics… for the electoral arena… in the history of the country. IRV is one of our big/small potatoes.

Some groups and some activists are truly puzzling in their responses, but that’s another book, as they say. The reasons for silence in response to my missives sometimes, the dropping of the ball inexplicably by some, the lack of nurturing well-intentioned efforts like TOSCA’s, and premature dismissal of what we put on the table for consideration now and then is all part of the animal we’re taming. By which I mean any effort to mobilize citizens for the purposes of moving in solidarity meaningfully — not in lockstep automatic meaningless mode following old paradigms for protest/change — is going to encounter all kinds of resistance for all kinds of reasons, not the least of which is what I call territorial trauma. But that’s part of the beautiful satisfaction that’s coming our way, this TOSCA making a dent in all that. The fact is that there’s nothing else on the table that I know of which has a shot in hell at saving this “heaven on earth” in time.

MZ: How can readers learn more and get involved?

RO: Readers should contact me directly IMMEDIATELY. They can reach me at tosca.2010@yahoo.com or at headburg@yahoo.com for starters. Urgent connection is crucial… whether one wants to limit one’s participation to only ten minutes total running up to the election in 2010, OR whether one wants to work alongside me 24×8 to create this watershed in history. PLEASE NOTE that I always get back within 24 hours at the outside. If one doesn’t hear back from me directly within that time frame, something’s amiss. The link http://oxtogrind.org/archive/353 is a decent place to start learning about TOSCA, and a reading of that can be followed by encouraging others to contact me.

So…the undefined guy weighs his options and promptly enlists in the United States Marine Corps. The few, the proud, and all that.

Everyone—and I mean, everyone—in his immediate circle applauds this decision. Not only will undefined guy pull himself out of financial hardship, they reason (sic), but he also gets to “serve his country.” Bravo…

Meanwhile, the poor black kid weighs his options and promptly “enlists” in the Crips.

The poverty-stricken Hispanic weighs his options and promptly “enlists” in Latin Kings.

The uneducated Italian kid weighs his options and promptly “enlists” in the Mafia.

Like the “heroes” in the military, these three kids are also facing a stark choice—being poor or choosing a uniform and gun—but no one hangs yellow ribbons for them, no one makes excuses them when they kill innocents.

No one argues when these kids are called “criminals.”

Why?

Well, there’s one colossal difference between them and the men and women who volunteer to join the US military and get paid to wage illegal and immoral war:

Even though the US military is far more dangerous than any street gang or Mafia family, the US military is considered legal.

Founded in a rural region of Maryland dominated by the poultry industry, the sanctuary provides a haven for hens, roosters and ducks who have escaped or been rescued from the meat and egg industries or other abusive circumstances, such as cockfighting. Not surprisingly, pattrice and company take things further than your average sanctuary. “We work within an ecofeminist understanding of the interconnection of all life and the intersection of all forms of oppression,” she explains. “Thus we welcome and work to facilitate alliances among animal, environmental, and social justice activists.”

As the sanctuary begins a move from Maryland to Springfield, Vermont, I thought it would be the perfect time ask pattrice a few questions, via e-mail:

Mickey Z.: What led you to such work? Why hens, roosters, and ducks?

pattrice jones: We found a chicken in a ditch. Seriously. Miriam Jones and I (then partners, and still family) were both experienced social justice activists when we inadvertently landed in poultry country, having moved “back to the land” with Green Acres dreams of going off grid. At the time, it was not uncommon for birds to flee to freedom by jumping from transport trucks, and “growers” for the poultry industry would sometimes let us rescue birds they were supposed to cull (the industry has since tightened its transport and security procedures.) One bird became two then five then thirty-five… within six months of finding the first bird, we incorporated the sanctuary.

MZ: Fortunately, there are many animal sanctuaries but I’m curious to know more about what you call the ‘gendered form of animal exploitation.”

pj: That first chicken was a rooster we originally mistook for a hen. I had to work hard to feel the same way about him once I knew he was a rooster. He was the same tenderly friendly bird he’d always been, but all of those “rooster” ideas — cocky, aggressive, etc. — were interfering with my ability to see him clearly. That got me thinking about the ways that people project gender stereotypes on animals and then read them back as evidence that traditional sex roles are natural, a process I have come to call the social construction of gender by way of animals. So, when we got an urgent call about 24 roosters who had been living together peacefully but all other sanctuaries had turned away under the theory that so many roosters cannot possibly get along, we said yes. Besides livening up the place, that colorful crew inspired us to try to figure out a way to rehabilitate roosters used in cockfighting, which we have done.

MZ: What do you mean when you say “rehabilitate roosters”?

pj: Roosters confiscated from cockfighting operations used to be automatically euthanized, on the presumption that they were too aggressive to ever live peacefully with other birds. But that’s the propaganda of cockfighting enthusiasts, who argue that they are just watching roosters doing what comes naturally. In fact, chickens — like the wild jungle fowl from which they descended and to whom the birds used in cockfighting are very nearly genetically identical — naturally live in flocks in which multiple roosters coexist peacefully. Roosters in the wild fight to the death only against predators, not against each other! They sometimes will have highly stylized fights with each other, but these are not the pitched battles to the death that we see in cockfighting.

MZ: Why do fighting roosters fight?

pj: Raised in isolation and constant frustration, they never learn the social signals by which roosters resolve their conflicts and figure out their places in flocks. Prior to cockfighting bouts, they are often injected with testosterone and methamphetamines. In the bouts, they face opponents who, like themselves, have had their combs shaved (so they look more like a hawk than another chicken) and their spurs augmented by sharp blades. It’s kill or be killed. What we do is give former fighters the chance to learn, by observation and gradual participation, the social skills they need to coexist peacefully with other birds. We give them a safe space from which to do this and, over time, recover from the trauma to which they have been subjected.

MZ: Your approach with the roosters sounds like a logical, compassionate strategy for any living thing that has undergone trauma.

pj: Right. We all — or at least all social species — need the same things when we’ve been traumatized, including safety or sanctuary and the chance to restore the relationships (with others and within ourselves) that have been strained or severed by trauma. I talk about that, for people, in my book Aftershock. In relation to animals, I’m happy to be working with Gay Bradshaw of the Kerulos Center and other members of the new International Association for Animal Trauma and Recovery; we’ve all been thinking hard about how to apply what we know about trauma and recovery among people to the task of helping animals who have suffered human-engendered trauma.

MZ: So now you’re bringing this approach to a new location?

pj: Our move to a larger property in Vermont, a small state with 33 factory farms serving the dairy industry and adjacent to Maine (the home of the infamous DeCoster egg factory) will allow us to expand our bird rescue capacities and also expand our activism to include dairy, which — like cockfighting — is a gendered form of animal exploitation.

MZ: How can readers help and get involved?

pj: Because we were founded in one rural agricultural area and are now moving to another, we depend entirely on support from afar to fund our programs. Because we are a small and chronically underfunded sanctuary, even small donations make a big difference. And we fall all over ourselves with gratitude for those who can afford to give more and do. Folks can find donation information on our website.

If you live in a big city, another way to help out with money is to hold a vegan pot luck fundraiser at your house. Eat, watch a movie like Peaceable Kingdom or Chicken Run, and then pass the hat for the sanctuary.

In terms of volunteering, folks who live near our new location in Springfield, Vermont might want to pitch in on coop cleaning and grounds maintenance. We need folks in our original locale, on the Delmarva Peninsula, to occasionally help out by driving local birds to sanctuaries in Maryland and Virginia. As we expand our rooster rehab program, we’ll be needing folks up and down the east coast to sign up to sometimes drive birds to us from wherever they might be confiscated by authorities after a cockfighting bust.

We need everybody to have a look at the information and ideas on our website and then subscribe to our blog so that they will receive action alerts as we continue and expand our efforts to fundamentally reform food and agriculture while building bridges among social justice, environmental, and animal liberation activists. We’re going to be coordinating a new, explicitly feminist, campaign concerning dairy later this year. Watch for it!

You can e-mail pattrice at: sanctuary@bravebirds.org.

Website: http://www.bravebirds.org

“How much can you know about yourself if you’ve never been in a fight? I don’t wanna die without any scars.”
– Tyler Durden (Fight Club)

Click…

William Burroughs once wrote about how we humans—like the bull in a bullfight—tend to focus on the elusive red cape instead of the matador. Indeed, we are all-too-easily distracted from real targets by an attractive image or illusion.

Of course, some bulls see right through the red cape, uh, bullshit…and quite justifiably introduce the matador to the business end of their horns. Before you mistake that for a lesson and/or inspiration, don’t forget that such bulls are promptly killed while the matador is mourned as a brave hero.

Here’s my question: If every bull in every bullfight were to gore every matador, how long would it be before bullfights were a thing of the past?

Click…

Malcolm X sez:

“It is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks.”

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In the late 1960s—thanks to Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers (UFW)—deciding whether or not to buy grapes became a political act. Three years after its establishment in 1962, the UFW struck against grape growers around Delano, California…a long, bitter, and frustrating struggle that appeared impossible to resolve until Chavez promoted the idea of a national boycott. Trusting in the average person’s ability to connect with those in need, Chavez and the UFW brought their plight—and a lesson in social justice—into homes from coast-to-coast and Americans responded.

“By 1970, the grape boycott was an unqualified success,” writes Marc Grossman of Stone Soup. “Bowing to pressure from the boycott, grape growers at long last signed union contracts, granting workers human dignity and a more livable wage.”

Through hunger strikes, imprisonment, abject poverty for himself and his large family, racist and corrupt judges, exposure to dangerous pesticides, and even assassination plots, Chavez remained true to the cause…even if meant, uh…”stretching” the non-violent methods he espoused:

Once in 1966, when Teamster goons began to rough up Chavez’s picketeers, a bit of labor solidarity solved the problem. William Kircher, the AFL-CIO director of organization, called Paul Hall, president of the International Seafarers Union.

“Within hours,” writes David Goodwin in Cesar Chavez: Hope for the People, “Hall sent a carload of the biggest sailors that had ever put to sea to march with the strikers on the picket lines…There followed afterward no further physical harassment.”

Click…

To me, the following quote reads like a poem…so that’s how I’ll present it:

You’ve got to learn
that when you push people around,
some people push back.
As they should.
As they must.
And as they undoubtedly will.
There is justice in such symmetry.
– Ward Churchill

Click…

When early American revolutionaries chanted, “Give me liberty or give me death” and complained of having but one life to give for their country, they became the heroes of our history textbooks. But, thanks to the power of the U.S. media and education industries, the Puerto Rican nationalists who dedicated their lives to independence are known as criminals, fanatics, and assassins.

On March 1, 1954, in the gallery of the House of Representatives, Congressman Charles A. Halleck rose to discuss with his colleagues the issue of Puerto Rico. At that moment, Lolita Lebrón alongside three fellow freedom fighters, having purchased a one-way train ticket from New York (they expected to be killed) unfurled a Puerto Rican flag and shouted “Free Puerto Rico!” before firing eight shots at the roof. Her three male co-conspirators aimed their machine guns at the legislators. Andrés Figueroa’s gun jammed, but shots fired by Rafael Cancel Miranda and Irving Flores injured five congressmen.

“I know that the shots I fired neither killed nor wounded anymore,” Lebrón stated afterwards. With the attack being viewed through the sensationalizing prism of American tabloid journalism, this did not matter. She and her nationalist cohorts became prisoners of war for the next twenty-five years.

Why prisoners of war? To answer that, we must recall that since July 25, 1898, when the United States illegally invaded its tropical neighbor under the auspices of the Spanish-American War, the island has been maintained as a colony. In other words, the planet’s oldest colony is being held by its oldest representative democracy—with U.S. citizenship imposed without the consent or approval of the indigenous population in 1917. It is from this geopolitical paradox that the Puerto Rican independence movement sprang forth.

This movement is based firmly on international law, which authorizes “anti-colonial combatants” the right to armed struggle to throw off the yoke of imperialism and gain independence. UN General Assembly Resolution 33/24 of December 1978 recognizes “the legitimacy of the struggle of people’s for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial domination and foreign occupation by all means available, particularly armed struggle.”

Prison did not dampen Lebrón’s revolutionary spirit as she attended demonstrations and spoke out to help win the long battle to evict the US Navy from the tiny Puerto Rican island of Vieques in 2003.

Click…

Emma Goldman sez:

“No great idea in its beginning can ever be within the law.”

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In her excellent 1995 book, Bridge of Courage, Jennifer Harbury quotes a Guatemalan freedom fighter named Gabriel, responding to a plea to embrace non-violent resistance: “In my country child malnutrition is close to 85 percent,” he explains. “Ten percent of all children will be dead before the age of five, and this is only the number actually reported to government agencies. Close to 70 percent of our people are functionally illiterate. There is almost no industry in our country—you need land to survive. Less than 3 percent of our landowners own over 65 percent of our lands. In the last fifteen years or so, there have been over 150,000 political murders and disappearances… Don’t talk to me about Gandhi; he wouldn’t have survived a week here. There was a peaceful movement for progress here, once. They were crushed. We were crushed. For Gandhi’s method to work, there must be a government capable of shame. We lack that here.”

Click…

Huey P. Newton sez:

“In the spirit of international revolutionary solidarity, the Black Panther Party hereby offers … an undetermined number of troops to assist you in your fight against American imperialism. It is appropriate for the Black Panther Party to take this action at this time in recognition of the fact that your struggle is also our struggle, for we recognize that our common enemy is U.S. imperialism, which is the leader of international bourgeois domination. There is no fascist or reactionary government in the world today that could stand without the support of United States imperialism. Therefore our problem is international, and we offer these troops in recognition of the necessity for international alliance to deal with the problem … Such alliance will advance the struggle toward the final act of dealing with American imperialism. To end this oppression we must liberate the developing nations … As one nation is liberated elsewhere, it gives us a better chance to be free.”

(Excerpted from an October 29, 1970 letter to the National Front for Liberation and Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Viet Nam)

Click…

Arundhati Roy sez:

“People from poorer places and poorer countries have to call upon their compassion not to be angry with ordinary people in America.”

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In his book Endgame, Derrick Jensen tells of a discussion he had with a longtime activist. “She told me of a campaign she participated in a few years ago to try to stop the government and transnational timber corporations from spraying Agent Orange, a potent defoliant and teratogen, in the forests of Oregon,” Jensen writes. All too predictably, the dedicated demonstrators assembled to protest the toxic spraying were, “like clockwork,” ignored by the helicopter pilots. Both humans and landscape ended up thoroughly doused with Agent Orange—time and time again. The protest campaign obviously had no effect, so a different approach was taken. “A bunch of Vietnam vets lived in those hills,” the activist told Jensen, “and they sent messages to the Bureau of Land Management and to Weyerhauser, Boise Cascade, and the other timber companies saying, ‘We know the names of your helicopter pilots, and we know their addresses’

“You know what happened next?” she asked.

“I think I do,” Jensen responded.

“Exactly,” she said. “The spraying stopped.”

Click…

MLK sez:

“When you’re right, you can never be too radical.”

Armenia

Mickey Z: This April, President Barack Obama broke campaign promise #511, namely to explicitly acknowledge the Armenian genocide as U.S. President. What happened on his recent visit to Turkey? What are the ramifications of his breaking this promise?

David Boyajian: President Obama visited Turkey from April 6 to 7, where he did not use the word “genocide” when referring to the 1.5 million murders committed by the Turkish Ottoman Empire against its Armenian citizens from 1915-1923. As a candidate, Obama had promised several times to do so. His statement in Turkey that he had “not changed his views”–implying he still believes it was genocide–was still a clear breach of his promise to use the “G word.” It was a case study in verbal gymnastics and political duplicity and should be studied in political science courses. Obama’s broken promise obviously eroded his credibility. The same holds true for Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who, as senators, supported the Armenian genocide resolution. They’ve since fallen disgracefully silent. Dr. Samantha Power should also be embarrassed. She’s the National Security Council’s genocide expert and a Pulitzer Prize winning author. As a campaign advisor to Obama, she made a video telling Armenian Americans that as president, Obama would definitely acknowledge their genocide. “Take my word for it,” she said.

Appeasement of a genocide-denying country such as Turkey is bad policy because its message is that genocides can be committed without consequence. Appeasement also erodes U.S. credibility on human rights and its stated desire to be a leader in genocide prevention. Unlike what lobbyists for Turkey would have us believe, Armenian genocide affirmation by America would not harm U.S. national interests. Turkey depends on the U.S. for weapons systems, support for billions in loans from the International Monetary Fund, security guarantees through NATO, advocacy for Turkish membership in the European Union, and more. Some 20 countries, including Canada, France, and Switzerland, as well as the parliaments of the EU and the Council of Europe, have acknowledged the Armenian genocide. None has ever experienced much more than a Turkish temper tantrum in retaliation.

MZ: Two days prior to Armenian Genocide Remembrance day — which annually falls on April 24 –Turkey and Armenia announced that they had agreed to a “roadmap” to normalize relations. What was the significance of this timing? What does the “roadmap” contain?

DB: Behind the scenes, the U.S. State Department had long been twisting Armenia’s arm to agree to a so-called “roadmap” with Turkey before President Obama issued what has become a customary “April 24 statement” by U.S. presidents marking Armenian genocide memorial day. The “roadmap,” announced on April 22, provided political cover for Obama to not use the “G word” on April 24. That is, since there was now supposedly a roadmap for normalization of relations — no matter how vague and hurriedly slapped together — Obama could say that he did not want to upset Turkey and the touted-as-highly-delicate Turkish-Armenian negotiations by using the “G word.” Notice that Obama did not consult with Armenian-Americans or Armenia about this. So much for promises and moral principles. It’s disgraceful that Obama, simply to help Turkey save face, not only broke his promise, but showed blatant disregard for the activists — not just Armenians — who labored so hard for many years for the cause of recognizing all genocides.

Armenia has always said that it was ready to normalize relations with Turkey — which would include Turkey’s re-opening its border with Armenia-without pre-conditions. Suddenly, however, Armenia has had pre-conditions imposed on it in this “roadmap.” According to the Turkish press, the “roadmap” allegedly contains pre-conditions such as: Armenia’s agreeing to a joint commission to examine the veracity of the Armenian genocide — yes, you heard right, Armenia’s formal recognition of current Turkish boundaries — which contain the Armenian homeland, and, possibly, Armenia’s accepting Turkish mediation in the conflict between Armenians and Azerbaijan over the disputed Armenian region of Karabagh — which is absurd since Azerbaijan and Turkey are allies. It appears that Armenia’s president, whose electoral legitimacy is in question, has been worn down in these negotiations by Turkey, the West, and possibly even Russia. And because the Armenian president is grappling with his legitimacy, he is not heeding the cautions being voiced by the people of his own nation about the “roadmap.”

MZ: The U.S. administration and mainstream media would have us believe that Turkey is seeking to “reconcile” with Armenia. Is “reconciliation” really a possibility, or have we misunderstood what’s going on?

DB: The word “reconciliation” in relation to Armenian-Turkish relations is largely an invention of U.S. policymakers, their emissaries, and the mainstream media who take their cues from them. What the U.S. and Europe would like to see is a more stable Caucasus — that is, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia — with open borders. Open borders, you see, would facilitate laying more oil and gas pipelines that would originate in the Caspian Sea region and proceed west to Turkey and then to energy-hungry Europe and Israel. The U.S. and Europe don’t want to put it quite that crudely — no pun intended — so they try to depict Armenia and Turkey as possibly “reconciling” and thus resolving all their differences. Turkey closed its border with Armenia in 1993 out of sympathy with its ally Azerbaijan, which was in a war with the Armenians of Karabagh, a historically Armenian-populated autonomous area within Azerbaijan that Stalin handed to Azerbaijan. Turkey has also been infuriated that Armenia and Armenians worldwide have been demanding that Turkey acknowledge the genocide it committed against Armenians.

Turkey has to acknowledge the genocide or there will never be peace between it and Armenia. And although the Armenian government has not put forth any claims for reparations arising out of the genocide, or for territory, many Armenians do have these goals. They cite the Treaty of Sèvres of 1920, which provided for Armenian sovereignty over Armenian lands upon which Turkey committed the genocide, and which have since been incorporated into what is now eastern Turkey.

MZ: The countries of the Caucasus are Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan. Most Americans, including the mainstream media, could not find these small countries on a map. Why are Russia and the U.S. — the latter being thousands of miles from the region — so interested in these three small countries?

DB: The Caucasus is truly Ground Zero in Cold War II, the ongoing conflict between the U.S. and Russia. The U.S. — along with Europe and the NATO military alliance — regard Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan as middlemen between the West and the gas and oil-rich regions around the Caspian Sea. The West has already laid gas and oil pipelines from Azerbaijan through Georgia and then on to Turkey and the west. The U.S. wanted those and future pipelines to bypass Russia and Iran because those two countries could shut such pipelines to pressure the U.S. and others. The only possible pipelines routes, therefore, are through Georgia or Armenia. But Turkey shut its border with Armenia in 1993, and Azerbaijan closed its border with Armenia even earlier due to the conflict between it and the de-facto Armenian region of Karabagh. That left Georgia as the only place for these Western pipelines. After the Russian-Georgian was last year, however, opening an alternative route has become more urgent. That largely explains the West’s renewed interest in Armenia. Conversely, Russia sees the Caucasus as within its traditional sphere of influence, and regards U.S. and European interest in the region as hostile acts.

Simultaneously, NATO has been pushing into the region. Georgia, Azerbaijan, and to some extent even the ex-Soviet republics on the other side of the Caspian Sea, are on the path to joining NATO. Russia was already upset that, following the Cold War, NATO had absorbed the former Warsaw Pact nations of Eastern Europe. NATO is now attempting, in effect, to do the same thing on Russia’s southern border. Russia fears that it will eventually be virtually surrounded by NATO. As a result, we have Cold War II: The U.S. and NATO are trying to push into the Caucasus and Central Asia, while Russia is trying to keep them out.

MZ: Why is Israel interested in the Caucasus, and what role is that country playing? Why are Israel and the pro-Israel lobby dead set against recognition of the Armenian genocide by the U.S. Congress?

DB: Israel is interested in getting some of the oil and gas that flow out of the Caspian Sea region. That is, from countries such as Azerbaijan, oil and gas flow west through Georgia, and then on to Turkey and other countries, possibly including Israel. After all, the U.S. and Turkey, which are important players in these pipelines, are obviously also very friendly with Israel. Israel also welcomes all non-Arab supplies of energy since they would make its Western allies less dependent on Arab oil and gas. And Israel has long had what it calls its Periphery Policy. Historically, Israel has not had good relations with its Arab neighbors. Therefore, to serve as counterweights, Israel befriends those countries further away, especially Muslim countries that aren’t necessarily sympathetic to Israel’s Arab neighbors or Palestinians. Azerbaijan, the only Muslim nation in the Caucasus, and some Muslim nations to the east, such as Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, are such countries. Fortuitously for Israel, they also possess significant deposits of gas and oil.

For decades, Israel and Turkey have had very good relations, mainly because they have a common ally, the U.S., and common adversaries, namely Arab nations. In the 1990’s, Israel and Turkey signed a number of military, economic, and political agreements that solidified their relationship. Even before that, but particularly after that, Turkey felt that it did not have sufficient lobbying muscle in Washington. So the Turks asked Israel to convince some of the pro-Israel lobby — the Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish Committee and others — to serve as advocates for Turkey. The Jewish lobby groups agreed. So these groups, as part of their deal with Turkey, deny or call into question the Armenian genocide and work to prevent U.S. acknowledgement of that genocide. These groups won’t tolerate anyone questioning of the Holocaust, and yet hypocritically work against acknowledgment of the Armenian genocide. Interestingly, for the last 2 years, Armenian Americans have exposed the ADL’s hypocrisy. In Massachusetts, for example, fourteen cities severed ties with an anti-bias program sponsored by the ADL because of the latter’s hypocritical and anti-Armenian stance (see NoPlaceForDenial.com). Armenians are determined to challenge genocide denial whenever it occurs.

MZ: Is there a problem with the way the mainstream media has been covering Armenian issues?

DB: Yes. The mainstream media have several problems. First, they know very little about the Caucasus or Armenians. Reporters tend, therefore, to copy each other and repeat clichés and falsehoods — such as that Armenia and Turkey are on the verge of a historic “reconciliation.” Media also tend to accept at face value the propaganda issued by Western governments whose interest in the Caucasus is — let’s be frank — not “reconciliation,” democracy, or human rights, but rather self-interested economic, political, and military political penetration of the Caucasus.

Turkey has about 30 times more people and territory, and 50 times more Gross Domestic Product, than Armenia. The power differential is enormous. Turkey has infinitely more allies in Western media, governments, think tanks, and multi-national corporations-and knows how to use them. Commentators who have a vested interest in touting Turkey for their own political and even financial reasons have particularly come out of the woodwork to deride legitimate Armenian demands. But we rarely hear commentators speak of how a small country that has been the victim of genocide, that has had most of its territory stripped from it, and that has been blockaded by the denier of that genocide — Turkey — is being threatened by that very same unrepentant denier. Mainstream media largely fail to appreciate the foregoing facts. Hopefully, Mickey, this interview will help the media and your readers understand the issues and the region a bit better.

We have become a nation of pawns with lawns. Food comes from the drive-thru, entertainment is televised, the concept of play exists on hand-held computers, democracy is a reality show every four years, and that tiny parcel of land we allegedly share with some bailed out bank is inevitably set aside to be a lawn.

As described by Ted Steinberg, author of American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn, when it comes to lawns, social and ecological factors often work in coordination. “Perfection became a commodity of post-World War II prefabricated housing such as Levittown, NY, in the late 1940s,” writes Steinberg. “Mowing became a priority of the bylaws of such communities.”

Lawn mowers produce several types of pollutants, including ozone precursors, carbon dioxide, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (classified as probable carcinogens by the CDC). In fact, operating a typical gasoline mower produces as much polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons as driving a car roughly 95 miles. Since some folks are legally required to maintain a lawn (more about that shortly), here’s a suggestion or two: human-powered mowers or try using your bicycle.

Besides the air and noise pollution of mechanized mowers, there’s another form of toxicity directly related to America’s lawn addiction. “Lawns use ten times as many chemicals per acre as industrial farmland,” writes Heather Coburn Flores, author of Food Not Lawns: How to Turn Your Yard into a Garden And Your Neighborhood into a Community. “These pesticides, fertilizers, and herbicides run off into our groundwater and evaporate into our air, causing widespread pollution and global warming, and greatly increasing our risk of cancer, heart disease, and birth defects.”

“If the Bill of Rights contains no guarantee that a citizen shall be secure against lethal poisons distributed either by private individuals or by public officials,” wrote Rachel Carson almost five decades ago, “it is surely because our forefathers…could conceive of no such problem.”

We now produce pesticides at a rate more than 13,000 times faster than we did when Carson wrote Silent Spring in 1962. The EPA considers 30% of all insecticides, 60% of all herbicides, and 90% of all fungicides to be carcinogenic, yet Americans spend about $7 billion on 21,000 different pesticide products each year. “Prior to World War II, annual worldwide use of pesticides ran right around zero,” says author Derrick Jensen. “By now it’s 500 billion tons, increasing every year.” As a result, about 860 Americans suffer from pesticide poisoning every single day; that’s almost 315,000 cases per year.

As mentioned above, maintaining a noxious and unproductive lawn isn’t just a simple case of one-size-fits-all conformity in the face all logic and evidence; it’s often the law.

In October 2008, for example, Joseph Prudente of Beacon Woods, Florida, was sentenced to jail for failing to sod his lawn as required by the local homeowner covenants. Before you label Mr. Prudente a modern day insurrectionist, take note that the reason he failed to live up to his suburban obligation was predictable: he couldn’t afford to replace his sprinklers when they broke. “It’s a sad situation,” said Bob Ryan, Beacon Woods Homeowners Association board president. “But in the end, I have to say he brought it upon himself.”

I’m guessing Mr. Ryan has never heard of Food Not Lawns.

Imagine, as the folks at Food Not Lawns do, each house not with a lawn but instead with a small organic “Victory” garden from which the family is fed. Imagine those without a lawn joining their local community garden to re-connect and grow their own. Or perhaps you’d like to imagine them engaging in some green graffiti and/or seed bombing.

(For the uninitiated, seed bombs are “compressed balls of soil and compost that have been impregnated with wildflower seeds. Jettisoned onto barren, abandoned, or otherwise inhospitable land, including construction sites and abandoned lots.” Liz Christy—who started the “Green Guerillas” in 1973—coined the alternative term, seed grenades. Smaller versions are commonly called seed balls. No matter what you call them, seed bombs are part of the ever-increasing international trend of guerilla gardening and you can find kindred spirits here.)

“The vast expanse of forever-green American lawn is not only the most resource intensive agricultural crop in the world,” writes Tobias Policha in Green Anarchy, “but also an obscene icon to our arrogant privilege and total alienation from a life in harmony with nature.”

The sterile lawn—complete with its requisite sprinkler, chemical cocktail, bug zapper, and “keep off the grass” sign—is an ideal symbol for America’s cookie cutter culture. Lawns, writes Ted Steinberg, are “an instrument of planned homogeneity.” He asks: “What better way to conform than to make your front yard look precisely like Mr. Smith’s next door?”

To which we must reply: Fuck homogeneity and fuck conformity.

Why don’t more people step away from the coast-to-coast mall mentality? Once reason is the looming Green Scare, a term which refers to “the federal government’s expanding prosecution efforts against animal liberation and ecological activists, drawing parallels to the “Red Scares” of the 1910’s and 1950s.”

The answer to this tactic, as always, is more solidarity. More of us need to embrace ideas like dumpster diving, off the grid living, wwoofing, billboard liberation, monkey wrenching, radical love, bartering, freeganism, veganism, transition towns, and other forms of the DIY ethic. We need organic vegetable gardens, not lawns. We need two wheels, not four. We need food not bombs. We need immediate courageous collective direct action, not “hope and change.” We need comrades, not pawns with lawns. And we need it all now.

So, the Pope of Hope announced his (purported) objective of closing the military detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba (“Gitmo”) within one year and we’re expected to herald this announcement as a drastic break from the past. But—as some of the regulars on my blog instantly declared—if President Obama were serious about hope and change, he’d close the prison tomorrow, apologize to the detainees, and offer them financial reparations. That could be promptly followed up with the immediate indictment of all government officials (including those in Obama’s administration) responsible for supporting torture, secret prisons, extraordinary rendition, extrajudicial punishment, etc. And why not toss in the immediate closing of the US military base at Guantánamo Bay and the return of that land to Cuba? That, I submit, would be a minuscule first step upon which we could build.

Waiting a year to close a single prison is nothing to celebrate. Transferring those illegally detained humans is not change anyone can believe in. Public promises about not torturing have been heard before and even if we could trust such dubious assurances, why are we so goddamned appreciative when a US president merely declares his theoretical intention to think about adhering to fundamental international law?

The Chairman of Change has made no secret of how he wholeheartedly adores the bogus war on terror. Closing Gitmo (an act which still falls squarely into the believe-it-when-you-see-it category) is at best a strategic sidestep by a cautious and calculating new president.

A related New York Times piece began oh-so-cleverly: “Is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed coming to a prison near you?” In the Jan. 24, 2009 article—“Guantánamo Detainees? Not in My State,”—journalists (sic) Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane wrung their hands over the 245 remaining inmates being “released into quiet neighborhoods across the United States.” It’s illustrative of the utter depravity we tolerate as normal in the home of the brave that war criminals like Henry Kissinger, Madeleine Albright, Dick Cheney, Wesley Clark, Colin Powell, Bill Clinton, etc. etc. walk freely among us while the newspaper of record preys on gullible readers with sensationalism and xenophobic fear mongering.

In that same Times article, Mazzetti and Shane inadvertently offered another manifestation of America’s cultural rot when they mentioned a discussion of reopening San Francisco’s Alcatraz Prison specifically for the assumed terrorists detained (illegally) at Gitmo. But a spokesman for California Senator Diane Feinstein was quick to clarify that Alcatraz was a “national park and tourist attraction, not a functioning prison,” and that the senator “does not consider it a suitable place to house detainees.”

I suggest you take a few seconds to contemplate the depth of moral vacuity it requires for a society to accept a former prison as a national park and tourist attraction. Alcatraz is not an ancient artifact that curious humans are lining up to explore but rather, it’s merely a inactive part of still fully active injustice system. More than one out of every 100 American adults is imprisoned in the land of the free while others plunk down cash to tour a prison?

As of December 31, 2007: 2,193,157 prisoners were held in Federal or State prisons or in local jails. That’s an estimated 506 prison inmates per 100,000 US residents. Breaking it down more specifically, there are…

• 481 white male prison inmates per 100,000 white males in the US
• 1,259 Hispanic male inmates per 100,000 Hispanic males
• 3,138 black male inmates per 100,000 black males

(Of course, this doesn’t include all the dis-labeled folks locked in nursing homes against their will and the innumerable animals in laboratories, zoos, etc.)

As Angela Davis sez: “There’s always a tendency to push prisons to the fringes of our awareness [so] we don’t have to deal with what happens inside of these horrifying institutions.”

Take-home message: Gitmo is a symptom. Barack Obama is a symptom. Obama promising to close Gitmo is like placing a band-aid over a cancerous tumor.

To that, I’ll add: Anyone who knows anything about hydroelectric dams comprehends and laments the damage they cause: From climate change to the destruction of rivers to human displacement to disappearing salmon…and beyond. As Jacques Leslie, author of Deep Water: The Epic Struggle over Dams, Displaced People, and the Environment, points out: “The world’s dams have shifted so much weight that geophysicists believe they have slightly altered the speed of the earth’s rotation, the tilt of its axis, and the shape of its gravitational field.”

Bearing all this in mind, it should come as no surprise that some activists have contemplated the demolition of dams. It should also come as no surprise that such musings are deemed “terrorism” by the powers-that-be. What might come as a surprise to some is that those same powers-that-be have absolutely no problem blowing up a dam…if it serves their interests.

During World War II, British scientists invented a spinning cylindrical “dam buster” bomb specifically to demolish German dams. Conversely, of the 185 Nazis indicted at Nuremberg, only 24 were singled out for the death penalty. Among those two dozen was the German High Commissioner in Holland who ordered the opening of Dutch dikes to slow the advance of Allied troops. Roughly 500,000 acres were flooded and the result was mass starvation. That their crimes merited capital punishment in the eyes of the Nuremberg Tribunal can serve as a measuring stick when we review similar crimes committed by others.

During the Korean War, the US Air Force (USAF) bombed the Toksan Dam (among others) in order to flood North Korea’s rice farms. Here’s how the USAF justified this tactic: “To the Communists the smashing of the dams meant primarily the destruction of their chief sustenance—rice. The Westerner can little conceive the awesome meaning that the loss of this staple food commodity has for an Asian—starvation and slow death.”

Fast-forward to the US assault on Southeast Asia: In a now-declassified memorandum dated April 15, 1969, evangelist Billy Graham urged President Richard Nixon to blow up dikes which “could overnight destroy the economy of North Vietnam.” Even without Rev. Graham’s heavenly sanction, US bombing of dikes in South Vietnam was already a common and uncontroversial tactic.

The moral of this story: Attacking a dam is terrorism…except when it isn’t.

For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? What shall a man give in exchange for his soul?

– Matthew 16:26

I wasn’t supposed to be born. After my mother gave birth to my sister, the doctors told her she’d never have another child. They couldn’t say exactly why (later, she was diagnosed with endometriosis) but they were pretty damn certain…the way doctors tend to be pretty damn certain. Wisely, my mother ignored such white coat condescension and less than two years later, yours truly arrived on the scene. Mom called me her “miracle baby,” and I think this played a role in the amazingly close relationship we always had.

In the U2 song “Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own,” Bono warbles: “That’s all right, we’re the same soul.” This simple line have given me the poetic license to imagine that my mother defied the medical odds by choosing to “share her soul” (so to speak) with me. This selfless act is what made it possible for me to be born and for us to have been such good friends.

We’re the same soul…

When my mother passed away last year, I found another quote to help me deal with the devastating loss of my soul mate. This one from the Tom Joad character in Grapes of Wrath.

Tom sez: “Maybe we’re not all individual souls, but maybe we’re all part of one big soul.”

Again, so incredibly basic but within that simplicity lies the secret: If we were to look upon all living things as part—along with ourselves—of one collective soul, it becomes impossible to live in denial about war, global poverty and disease, oppression, the destruction of our eco-system, etc. It becomes unbearable to visualize animals in a slaughterhouse, a laboratory, a circus, or a zoo. For anyone dwelling anywhere near the realm of reality, it is downright excruciating to contemplate 80% of the world’s forest and 90% of the large fish in the ocean being gone. If we are indeed “all part of one big soul,” as Tom Joad wonders, how can we not weep uncontrollably when—on this planet of abundant resources—a human being starves to death every two seconds?

Yet this is precisely the type of brutal culture we have helped create and, as a result, we are now haunted by billions and billions of lost souls. The souls of the victims of war, of greed, of our callous indifference and denial. Human and animal souls…and souls with roots, too. We are haunted by the souls of 100 animal and plant species going extinct each and every day. Souls like those of the Dusky Seaside Sparrow.

Once found mainly on Florida’s Merritt Island, the dusky seaside sparrow had its salt marsh habitat sprayed with DDT and cleared so it could be taken over by the space program. The last Dusky died in 1987.

We could all live more easily in a world without NASA but instead we’re stuck on a planet devoid of dusky seaside sparrows (and soon devoid of polar bears, California condors, Woodland caribou, whooping cranes, wolverines, etc.).

Our irrational behavior has corrupted Tom Joad’s hypothetical “one big soul” but perhaps—as I like to visualize my Mom doing—we can offer new life to the myriad lost souls by sharing and giving more of ourselves. We can do this by waking up, by remembering, by speaking out, by no longer playing the role of silent partnership as everything is consumed or poisoned or destroyed.

Do it for yourself. Do it for the planet. Do it for the future. Do it for the tortured souls, the victims of human progress (sic).

To give a voice and a new life to all those lost souls is to see ourselves, as Subcommandante Marcos once suggested:

“Marcos is gay in San Francisco, black in South Africa, an Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San Ysidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel, a Mayan Indian in the streets of San Cristobal, a gang member in Neza, a rocker in the National University, a Jew in Germany, an ombudsman in the Defense Ministry, a communist in the post-Cold War era, an artist without gallery or portfolio. A pacifist in Bosnia, a housewife alone on Saturday night in any neighborhood in any city in Mexico, a striker in the CTM, a reporter writing filler stories for the back pages, a single woman on the subway at 10 pm, a peasant without land, an unemployed worker, an unhappy student, a dissident amid free market economics, a writer without books or readers, and, of course, a Zapatista in the mountains of southeast Mexico. So Marcos is a human being, any human being, in this world. Marcos is all the exploited, marginalized, and oppressed minorities, resisting and saying, ‘Enough’!”

He could’ve added: “Marcos is a dusky seaside sparrow in Florida.”

Or perhaps Eugene V. Debs said it best: “While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

I’ll see you on the front lines, comrades. Don’t forget to bring your soul…

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) estimates that nearly 200,000 veterans are homeless on any given night and nearly 400,000 experience homelessness over the course of a year. Forty-five percent of America’s homeless veterans suffer from mental illness and half have substance abuse problems. According to the National Survey of Homeless Assistance Providers and Clients, veterans account for 23% of all homeless people in America.

The homeless vet is barely noticed by the 30-something corporate lawyer whizzing past him, on his way to dinner. It’s a holiday gathering to celebrate hope, change, and all that good stuff. The lawyer—still proudly wearing his Obama button—is running late and his colleagues have already ordered appetizers: shrimp cocktails all around (for only $17.00 each).

The United Nations Environment Program has estimated that a quarter of the destruction of mangrove forests stems from shrimp farming. After the 2008 Burma cyclone, Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) Secretary-General Surin Pitsuwan blamed “encroachment into mangrove forests, which used to serve as a buffer between the rising tide, between big waves and storms and residential areas.” He added: “All those lands have been destroyed. Human beings are now direct victims of such natural forces.”

The homeless vet sees a Wall Street type—still proudly wearing his Obama button—approaching him. “Hey buddy,” the vet tries, “how about a bailout?” The Wall Street type doesn’t laugh. The Wall Street type doesn’t even see the homeless vet. The Wall Street type tosses his half-finished Coke onto the sidewalk.

As labor activist Ray Rogers explains, “The reality is that the world of Coca-Cola is a world of lies, deceptions, corruption, gross human rights and environmental abuses!” Rogers told Democracy Now that Coke “contracted with paramilitary death squads to torture, kidnap, and murder union leaders at its bottling plants in Columbia.” If geo-political issues aren’t enough to move you, consider what Marion Nestle, author of Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences, says about Coke and its ilk: ” The relationship between soft drink consumption and body weight is so strong that researchers calculate that for each additional soda consumed, the risk of obesity increases 1.6 times.”

The homeless vet picks up the Wall Street type’s Coke and downs it in one big gulp. Afterwards, he tosses the empty cup onto the sidewalk and glances to his left just in time to look through the restaurant window and see the corporate lawyer cheerfully biting into a piece of shrimp.

At that precise moment, an underwater tremor deep in the Pacific Ocean creates a powerful wave that will develop into a tsunami aimed directly for a popular vacation destination once protected by mighty mangroves.

I notice five sea gulls flying overhead—north to south—well above the buildings, asphalt, and internal combustion engines. No more than a few seconds later, another eight gulls pass so I decide to count. Why not? In no time, I’m over 50.

To my right, in the beautifully symmetrical little tree that graces my block, the sparrows are chirping up a storm. Proud parents zip in and out of the branches—still covered with green leaves—to feed their young. The result is a symphony of cheeps, peeps, and tweets.

I’m at 75 sea gulls now. Not sure if this is atypical or perhaps just a daily occurrence I’ve somehow never detected. As I near the century mark in about a ten-minute span, the sparrows are louder than ever. Are there more sea gulls passing than sparrows in the beautifully symmetrical little tree? I’ll never know but I’m digging the fine, feathered experience no matter what. It’s what passes for nature in these parts. Outside of the rare raccoon sighting, we’ve got cats and dogs and squirrels and we’ve got plenty of birds: pigeons, crows, starlings, sparrows, and sea gulls.

125-126-127…but I can’t help but imagine what it might have been like in pre-Industrial—hell, pre-Colombian—days. “I have never seen a river full of fish,” Derrick Jensen writes in Endgame. “I have never seen a sky darkened for days by a single flock of birds. (I have, however, seen skies perpetually darkened by smog.)”

The sparrow quiet a bit…almost as if they can read my overburdened mind. A sky darkened for days by a single flock of birds? Seems like another planet to me.

I reach 168 sea gulls before heading back inside. My neighbor’s imprisoned parakeet squawks as I climb the stairs.

Okay, so maybe St. Barack is a tad less progressive than we imagined but you have to admit he’s brilliant and eloquent and half-black. And c’mon, folks, he’s not even in office yet. Give the poor guy a chance. Once he’s in, we’ll hold his feet to the fire and make real progress. We’ll get permits to hold weekend protests (with none of those nasty anarchists invited) and we’ll give voice to the voiceless…in our designated free speech zones, of course. President Obama will hear us, I’m sure. He’ll prove there is a difference between the two parties. After all, you can’t tell me you didn’t shed a tear when you saw all those young people celebrating in the streets. The youth have spoken! The future has arrived! Bushism is dead!!! Let’s rejoice!!! Let’s sing along with Ani DiFranco’s amazing new song, “Yes We Can”!!!

In fact, I’m willing to go out on a limb right now and boldly predict that by the year 2011, the number of US combat troops in Iraq will have decreased by at least 10-15%. To those who want more, I ask: We can’t expect Obama to simply withdraw those brave, heroic, gallant, valiant, superhuman men and women in one shot, can we? No way, there’s no cut and run for America. (And remember: we wouldn’t be in this mess if that damn egotistical Ralph Nader hadn’t ruined everything in 2000. He shouldn’t be allowed to run. Make it illegal, I say.)

At least Obama is forming a strong centrist coalition. “A team of rivals,” they say. Some may nitpick and point out that every single appointee is a Washington retread who supported the war and could’ve just as easily been chosen by John McCain had he won, but Obama is clearly in charge and he’s brilliant. He makes the decisions, and he’s so articulate. He promised hope and change and, being that he’s so eloquent, I’m positive he will deliver. It would be negative, bitter, and cynical to think otherwise. In fact, anyone not thrilled with the historic election of a half-black man should not be allowed to breathe our precious oxygen. (Ain’t that right, Tim Wise?)

Looking ahead, we’ll have bumps in the road (like many years of recession, escalation of the war on Afghanistan and subsequent blowback, reinstitution of the military draft, drastic cuts in social programs, an ongoing policy of torture and extra-judicial trials, the use of US troops to quell dissent by US citizens on US soil, to name but a few) but I’m confident we’ll have the brilliant, inspirational Obama in office until 2016…followed by America’s first female president—Hillary Clinton—until 2024. Hooray!!!!! What a proud moment for the world’s greatest nation. Gender equality is ours!!! No more patriarchy!!!

Sure, those mean Republicans may steal an election or two. They may even stage one of those infamous false flag operations that a Democrat would never participate in. But we’ll prevail. We will prevail. Progressive values will never die and no slimy Republican or more-radical-than-thou nihilist can tell me different. I have faith. I have hope. I believe. I read The Nation and Z Magazine. I watch Jon Stewart and Rachel Maddow. I leave comments at Daily Kos. I’m part of the solution, pal. If you’re not with me, you’re against me!!! This is change I can believe in!!! How about you?

As this century progresses, we’re bound to see the first Hispanic-American president, the first Asian-American president, the first indigenous-disabled-transgender-atheist-undocumented-communist president and who knows what other proud breakthroughs lie ahead for the land of the free and home of the brave? Maybe we’ll cut emissions by 2-3%, the minimum wage will rise by at least 25 cents, and being a loyal American consumer will be so much easier when that national ID card becomes mandatory.

What’s that you say? 10,000 gallons of gasoline are burned in the US every second? We’re losing 200,000 acres of rain forest every 24 hours? 2.2 billion pounds of pesticides are used by Americans each year? 100 plant or animal species go extinct each day? 81 tons of mercury are emitted into the atmosphere each year as a result of electric power generation? Every square mile of ocean hosts 46,000 pieces of floating plastic? 13 million tons of toxic chemicals released across the globe each and every day? 70,000 new chemical compounds have been invented and dispersed into our environment since 1950? There will be no glaciers left in Glacier National Park by 2030? The Arctic region expected to have its first completely ice-free summer in 2040? Coastal glaciers in Greenland thinning by 3 feet per year? 90% of the large fish in the ocean are already gone? 80% of the world’s forest are already gone? Every two seconds, a human being starves to death and 29,158 children under the age of five die from preventable causes every single day?

Slow down, Mr. Negative. Don’t bum me out with your pessimistic stats and unconstructive attitude. You’re full of bad news but you never offer a solution. You have no plan. We have a plan—a plan that comes equipped with its own soaring oratory, a plan named Barack Obama. Besides, it’s always best to focus on the positive and not dwell in gloom and doom. How else can we maintain the hope we need to make a difference? How else can we each become the change we wish to see in the world? How else can we justify our Obama worship?

Sure, some things are a little messed up but I deeply sense in my heart of hearts that change will come. It will come slowly, but it will come!!! By the time we get to that all-important 2076 election, true radicals will finally be able to vote their conscious. At long last, we’ll have a president that the people (well, the few people that are still alive) can support without compromise. No more lesser evil. No more hold your nose and vote. Nope, stay tuned for 2076, folks. Democracy, peace, justice, and solidarity will be ours on America’s 300th birthday…and it all begins on January 20, 2009 with our very own brilliant, eloquent, half-black Pope of Hope!!!

I’ll see you in the future…

As I was walkin’ I saw a sign there
And that sign said “No tresspassin’”
But on the other side, it didn’t say nothin’
Now that side was made for you and me
In the squares of the city/In the shadow of the steeple
Near the relief office, I see my people
And some are grumblin’ and some are wonderin’
If this land’s still made for you and me

Woody sez: “This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, ‘cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.”

Let’s not forget that Guthrie penned “This Land is My Land” in response to Irving Berlin’s saccharine “God Bless America.”

And let’s not forget the words Woody scrawled on his guitar: “This machine kills fascists.”

Let’s also not forget the power and prescience of Guthrie’s lyrics, like this from “Jesus Christ”:

Jesus was a man who traveled through the land
A hard working man and brave
He said to the rich, “Give your money to the poor,”
But they laid Jesus Christ in His grave

And this from “Pretty Boy Floyd”:

Yes, as through this world I’ve wandered
I’ve seen lots of funny men
Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen
And as through your life you travel,
Yes, as through your life you roam,
You won’t never see an outlaw
Drive a family from their home

Woody Guthrie laid the foundation for generations of American singer-songwriters to use their music and lyrics to challenge the prevailing platitudes of popular music…and to provide a Greek chorus of protest and outrage to keep us all more honest and aware.

With the stakes having never been higher and the denial never deeper, what we choose to do with this awareness and outrage—right now—is genuinely a matter of life and death…

Here’s how The Sierra Club begins its discussion of mountaintop removal mining: “In places like Appalachia, mining companies blow the tops off mountains to reach a thin seam of coal and then, to minimize waste disposal costs, dump millions of tons of waste rock into the valleys below, causing permanent damage to the ecosystem and landscape.” That is a valley fill.

Then comes word—on October 18, 2008—that the Interior Department has “advanced a proposal that would ease restrictions on dumping mountaintop mining waste near rivers and streams, modifying protections that have been in place, though often circumvented, for a quarter-century.” This from a New York Times article, which continues: “The department’s Office of Surface Mining issued a final environmental analysis Friday on the proposed rule change, which has been under consideration for four years. It has been a priority of the surface mining industry … The proposed rule would rewrite a regulation enacted in 1983 that bars mining companies from dumping huge waste piles, known as “valley fills,” within 100 feet of any intermittent or perennial stream if the disposal affects water quality or quantity.”

Like any good American, after subconsciously blocking out the faint sounds of slave chains clinking and bull whips cracking, Uncle Sam’s first chore of the day is to check e-mail. No time for him to contemplate e-waste, now is there?

E-waste (discarded electronics and electrical products) has some potential in supplying secondary raw materials to keep the entire system afloat, when not properly treated properly it becomes a major source of carcinogens and toxins.

“A whole bouquet of heavy metals, semimetals and other chemical compounds lurk inside your seemingly innocent laptop or TV,” adds Jessika Toothman at HowStuffWorks.com. “E-waste dangers stem from ingredients such as lead, mercury, arsenic, cadmium, copper, beryllium, barium, chromium, nickel, zinc, silver and gold. Many of these elements are used in circuit boards and comprise electrical parts such as computer chips, monitors, and wiring.”

According to the EPA, in 2005, “used or unwanted electronics amounted to approximately 1.9 to 2.2 million tons. Of that, about 1.5 to 1.9 million tons were primarily discarded in landfills, and only 345,000 to 379,000 tons were recycled.”

Uncle Sam decides he wants eggs for breakfast and what Uncle Sam wants, Uncle Sam gets. Not even the din of doomed chickens can slow down this hungry man.

Karen Davis of United Poultry Concerns has written a narrative of what a battery hen might say if it could speak human language. The narrative begins: “I am battery hen. I live in a cage so small I cannot stretch my wings. I am forced to stand night and day on a sloping wire mesh floor that painfully cuts into my feet. The cage walls tear my feathers, forming blood blisters that never heal. The air is so full of ammonia that my lungs hurt and my eyes burn and I think I am going blind. As soon as I was born, a man grabbed me and sheared off part of my beak with a hot iron, and my little brothers were thrown into trash bags as useless alive.”

Battery hens produce the vast majority of eggs you’ll find in your market.

With food now in his stomach, Uncle Sam joins the vast majority of Americans who take at least one form of pharmaceutical drug each day. Choosing to ignore the agonized screams of tortured animals, Uncle Sam gulps down his pills.

Aysha Z Akhtar, M.D., M.P.H., is a senior medical advisor and Jarrod Bailey, Ph.D., is a senior research consultant for the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. “The more we study the relevance of animal tests, the more apparent their shortcomings become,” Akhtar and Bailey state in a Feb. 9, 2007 letter published in the British Medical Journal. “Even subtle physiological differences between humans and animals can manifest as profound differences in disease physiology and treatment effectiveness and safety. For example, numerous differences in spinal cord physiology and reaction to injury exist between species and even strains within a species. These differences likely contribute to the repeated failure of spinal cord treatments that have tested safe and effective in animals to translate into human benefit.”

“Results from animal tests are not transferable between species, and therefore cannot guarantee product safety for humans,” agrees Herbert Gundersheimer, M.D. “A major shift in our research paradigm is long overdue,” declare Akhtar and Bailey. “The move away from animal experiments toward more accurate methods of studying disease and intervention is scientifically superior and more ethical for humanity, as well as for animals.”

“Ask the experimenters why they experiment on animals, and the answer is: ’Because the animals are like us,’” writes Professor Charles R. Magel. “Ask the experimenters why it is morally OK to experiment on animals, and the answer is: ’Because the animals are not like us.’ Animal experimentation rests on a logical contradiction.”

Uncle Sam’s medicine is washed down thanks to store-bought water. As he packs his water bottle in his work bag, he could swear a cruise missile has soared past his house but instead nods his head in disbelief.

“Americans buy 30 billion single-use water bottles every year, the majority of which end up in landfills,” writes Dominic Muren at TreeHugger.com. “In fact, 845 bottles end up in the land fill every second. All these water bottles are made from petroleum, and require petroleum to be shipped around the world. All that, and there’s no evidence that bottled water is any cleaner than tap-water.”

Catherine Clarke Fox of National Geographic adds: “But all those plastic bottles use a lot of fossil fuels and pollute the environment. In fact, Americans buy more bottled water than any other nation in the world, adding 29 billion water bottles a year to the problem. In order to make all these bottles, manufacturers use 17 million barrels of crude oil. That’s enough oil to keep a million cars going for twelve months. Imagine a water bottle filled a quarter of the way up with oil. That’s about how much oil was needed to produce the bottle.”

Tired of getting animal blood on his socks, Uncle Sam reaches for his leather shoes…courtesy of the $1.5-billion-and-100-million-animal-skins-per-year U.S. industry.

“Leather is not simply a slaughterhouse byproduct,” says animal issues columnist Carla Bennett. “It’s a booming industry and an important part of the slaughter trade, since skin accounts for approximately 50 percent of the total byproduct value of cattle.” Leather is also made from slaughtered horses, sheep, lambs, goats, and pigs. “When dairy cows’ production declines, for example, their skin is made into leather; the hides of their offspring, ‘veal’ calves, are made into high-priced calfskin,” adds Bennett. “Thus, the economic success of the slaughterhouse (and the factory farm) is directly linked to the sale of leather goods.”

Another tactic for procuring animal skins is hunting. Species such as zebras, bison, water buffaloes, boars, deer, kangaroos, elephants, eels, sharks, dolphins, seals, walruses, frogs, crocodiles, lizards, and snakes are murdered solely for their hides. These animals are often endangered or illegally poached—and death is rarely swift or painless. Alligators are clubbed with axes and hammers and may suffer for hours. Reptiles are skinned alive to achieve suppleness in the leather and may take days to die. Kid goats are boiled alive.

A clever diversionary tactic of leather makers is to label their products “biodegradable” while pointing out that synthetic versions are usually petroleum-based. However, says Sally Clinton in Vegetarian Journal, the tanning process acts to “stabilize the collagen or protein fibers so that they are no longer biodegradable.” In turn, the Kirk-Othmer Encyclopedia of Chemical Technology explains, “On the basis of quantity of energy consumed per unit of product produced, the leather-manufacturing industry would be categorized with the aluminum, paper, steel, cement, and petroleum-manufacturing industries as a gross consumer of energy.” The primary reason for this is that over 95 percent of U.S. leather is chrome tanned. “All wastes containing chromium are considered hazardous by the EPA,” writes Clinton. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the incidence of leukemia among residents in an area surrounding one tannery in Kentucky was five times the national average. According to a study released by the New York State Department of Health, more than half of all testicular cancer victims work in tanneries.

Uncle Sam heads for his beloved SUV, trying his best to not only find his cell phone but also to avoid stepping on the thousands of dying frogs that litter his driveway.

The South American tree frogs’ population is declining and biologists are blaming global warming. These frogs, it seems, have the very un-froglike habit of basking in the hot sun (most frogs normally avoid prolonged exposure to light due to the risk of overheating and dehydration). According to a research team at the University of Manchester, “global warming is leading to more cloud cover in the frogs’ natural habitat. This, in turn, is denying them the opportunity to ’sunbathe’ and kill off fatal Chytrid fungal infections, leading to many species dying out.”

Andrew Gray, Curator of Herpetology at the Manchester Museum, says: “With a third of the world’s amphibians currently under threat it’s vitally important we do our utmost to investigate the reasons why they are dying out at such an alarming rate.”

Uncle Sam starts up the engine and plugs in his cell phone headset, ready for a drive’s worth of important, essential, and utterly crucial business calls…but how can he hear over the sorrowful primate calls echoing off the SUV’s interior?

Here’s how the United Nations describes it: “Columbite-tantalite—coltan for short—is a dull metallic ore found in major quantities in the eastern areas of Congo. When refined, coltan becomes metallic tantalum, a heat-resistant powder that can hold a high electrical charge.” Tantalum from coltan is used in consumer electronics products such as cell phones.

Why would the UN be involved in describing a component of your cell phone? Well, coltan is mined in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, an African nation besieged by a brutal civil war. The mining and sale of coltan is used by both sides in the conflict to fund their military mayhem. In addition, the UN explains: “In order to mine for coltan, rebels have overrun Congo’s national parks, clearing out large chunks of the area’s lush forests. In addition, the poverty and starvation caused by the war have driven some miners and rebels to hunt the parks’ endangered elephants and gorillas for food.” Within the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the number of eastern lowland gorillas has declined by 90% over the past 5 years, and only 3,000 now remain.

Uncle Sam (on the phone): “Yeah, I’m on my way. (pause) I’m fine. Just got a headache. So much damn background noise lately. (pause) Ah, stop your worrying. It’s all gonna be fine. What could possibly go wrong now that Obama is in charge?”

(To be continued?)

One of the good things about everything being so fucked up—about the culture being so ubiquitously destructive—is that no matter where you look—no matter what your gifts, no matter where your heart lies—there’s good and desperately important work to be done.

– Derrick Jensen

In 1850, the Fugitive Slave Law was passed and both Northerners and Southerners were now legally required to turn in runaway slaves. One year later, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin (or Life Among the Lowly) as a serial in an antislavery paper, The National Era. In 1852, the Boston publishing company Jewett published it as a book and, as they are wont to say, the rest is history.

Widely considered to be the first social protest novel published in the United States (and the first major novel to have a black hero), Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold more copies—with the exception of The Bible—than any book had ever sold in America until that point with sales reaching 300,000 copies in the first year.

Stowe’s graphic depiction of slave life—based on true stories—personalized the issue, reclaiming it from the sanitized domain of courtroom legalese. Her story outraged some and inspired many others. To her critics, she answered with A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1853 to provide documentation that every incident in her book had actually happened. Upon meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1862, Abraham Lincoln remarked: “So you’re the little woman that wrote the book that made this great war.”

There was a time when slavery was believed too deeply entrenched in American culture to ever be abolished. The movement to end this “peculiar institution” was made up of individuals willing to recognize that some things in life are bigger than any of us. Whether they literally risked their lives by rescuing slaves and running the Underground Railroad or they did their part by sewing clothes or blankets for escaped slaves or, yes, writing books like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the movement needed every single one of these brave humans doing their part—small or large.

What seems impossible and irreversible today can be addressed if we’re willing to wake up and do the hard work. If we’re willing to stop making excuses for the reprehensible leaders (sic)—both political and corporate—who profit from our complacency.

So, the next time you’re deciding between watching a Will & Grace re-run or updating your Facebook book, step up instead. Take a good, long look into heart and an even longer look at the choices you make all day, every day—not from place of guilt and shame but with a sense of revelation. Accept the challenge to be better human being, a more responsible earthling. It takes courage to perform self-examination. It takes courage to accept everything you know just might be wrong. It takes far more courage to do this than to volunteer to wage illegal and immoral wars.

Let’s face it: Things sucked under George W. Bush. Things will suck under Barack Obama. Things have sucked under every president. Nothing will change until we change our minds. We can’t be as indifferent as those before us. They didn’t think enough about future generations so now we have to work twice as hard. It sucks, I know, but this not an issue of fairness. It’s about survival.

Some things in life are bigger than any of us. The anti-slavery movement recognized this. Today, the entire planet is enslaved…to profit-seeking corporations and the corrupt politicians they own (yes, including the Pope of Hope). Are this generation’s abolitionists ready to step up and create change? Not ask for change, create change.

Why not embrace your outrage and frustration and let it challenge you, inspire you, and motivate you? Instead of channeling your ambitions toward climbing a mountain, running a marathon, or striving to make your first million before you’re 30, what greater goal could any of us ever aim for than to leave the planet much better off than how we found it?

You have nothing to lose but your chains…

You don’t stick a knife in a man’s back nine inches, and then pull it out six inches, and say you’re making progress.

– Malcolm X

Another Election Day approaches and I’m reminded of something the late Pakistani dissident, Eqbal Ahmad said about Noam Chomsky in the book, Confronting Empire (2000): “He (Chomsky) has never wavered. He has never fallen into the trap of saying, ‘Clinton will do better.’ Or ‘Nixon was bad but Carter at least had a human rights presidency.’ There is a consistency of substance, of posture, of outlook in his work.”

But along came 2004…when Chomsky said stuff like this: “Anyone who says ‘I don’t care if Bush gets elected’ is basically telling poor and working people in the country, ‘I don’t care if your lives are destroyed’.” And like this: “Despite the limited differences [between Bush and Kerry] both domestically and internationally, there are differences. In a system of immense power, small differences can translate into large outcomes.”

Standing alongside Chomsky was Howard Zinn, saying stuff like this: “Kerry, if he will stop being cautious, can create an excitement that will carry him into the White House and, more important, change the course of the nation.”

Fast forward to 2008 and Chomsky sez: “I would suggest voting against McCain, which means voting for Obama without illusions.” And once again, Howard Zinn is in agreement: “Even though Obama does not represent any fundamental change, he creates an opening for a possibility of change.” (Two word rejoinder: Bill Clinton)

This strategy of choosing an alleged “lesser evil” because he/she might be influenced by some mythical “popular movement” would be naïve if put forth by a high school student. Professors Chomsky and Zinn know better. If it’s incremental change they want, why not encourage their many readers to vote for Ralph Nader or Cynthia McKinney? The classic (read: absurd) reply to that question is: “Because Nader or McKinney can’t win.”

Of course they can’t win if everyone who claims to agree with them inexplicably votes for Obama instead. Paging Alice: You’re wanted down the goddamned rabbit hole.

Another possible answer as to why folks like Chomsky and Zinn don’t aggressively and tirelessly stump for Nader or McKinney is this: 2004 proved that the high profile Left is essentially impotent and borderline irrelevant. Chomsky and Zinn were joined in the vocal, visible, and vile Anybody-But-Bush ranks by “stars” like Michael Moore, Susan Sarandon, Medea Benjamin, Sean Penn, Barbra Streisand, Manning Marable, Naomi Klien, Phil Donahue, Barbara Ehrenreich, Martin Sheen, Bruce Springsteen, Eddie Vedder, Cornel West, etc. etc. and John Kerry still lost.

News flash: The “poor and working people in the country” that Chomsky mentions above are paying ZERO attention to him or anyone like him…and that’s a much bigger issue than which millionaire war criminal gets to play figurehead for the empire over the next four years.

Zinn talks about Obama and the “possibility of change.” It seems odd to be asking this of an octogenarian but: Exactly how much time do you think we have?

Every twenty-four hours, thirteen million tons toxic chemicals are released across the globe; 200,000 acres of rainforest are destroyed; more than one hundred plant or animal species go extinct; and 45,000 humans (mostly children) starve to death. Each day, 29,158 children under the age of five die from mostly preventable causes.

As Gandhi once asked: “What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?”

I promise you this: The human beings (and all living things) that come after us won’t care whether we voted for Obama or McCain in 2008…if they have no clean air to breathe, no clean water to use, and are stuck on a toxic, uninhabitable planet. They’d probably just want to ask us this: Why did you stand by and let everything be consumed or poisoned or destroyed?

Conclusion: A vote for either John McCain or Barack Obama is—at best—an act of criminal negligence.

I’d like to preface my presentation with a little story about September 11. Not September 11, 2001. September 11, 1973. On that date, the US government helped fund and sponsor a military coup in the South American nation of Chile. The democratically elected president, Salvador Allende, was overthrown and killed. They said he committed suicide…with a machine gun. In his place, the US propped up the dictator, General Augusto Pinochet. Not surprisingly, under Pinochet taking power, human rights violations in Chile skyrocketed. Surprisingly, someone within the US power structure talked about it.

A man named David Popper was US ambassador to Chile at the time and he sent a cable to the State Department about the human rights issues. The Secretary of State in the mid-70s was none other than Henry Kissinger. His response was short and sweet: “Tell Popper to cut out the political science lectures.”

Now, I may not have anything approaching a college degree, but I have taken one political science in my life. So I get it and, in a rare case of synchronicity with the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Henry Kissinger, I promise there will be no political science lectures here tonight.

Okay, here we are, in the year 2008…or, as I’d prefer to call it, the 28th consecutive year of the Reagan administration. This is the point in the evening when the speaker typically implores everyone to turn off the cell phones. But, as far as I’m concerned, you can leave yours on. This way, every time someone’s phone goes off, we can be reminded of the fact that half the humans on the planet have never made a single phone call.

Or maybe, when a phone rings, we can focus on these six simple words: The Democratic Republic of the Congo. We’d do that because one of the primary components of cell phone circuitry is a metallic ore called Columbite-Tantalite—or “coltan.” Eighty percent of the world’s known coltan can be found in African nation of The Democratic Republic of the Congo (or DRC), which just so happens to be embroiled in a brutal (even by current standards) civil war since the pre-cell phone days of 1994. Over time, all sides in the unrelenting struggles adroitly began using the mining and sale of coltan not only to nourish the West’s seemingly insatiable cell phone addiction, but also to fund their inexorable mayhem. Civilian deaths in the DRC during this time—mostly from war-related disease and malnutrition—are estimated not in the hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands, but rather in the millions…making it the world’s deadliest military conflict since the Second World War.

And it gets worse. Just ask an Eastern Lowland Gorilla, the world’s largest primate, found almost exclusively in the DRC. According to National Geographic: “Following a decade of civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, new estimates suggest that the number of eastern lowland gorillas may have plummeted by 70 percent. Conflict, illegal mining for a mineral used for electronic-device components, and the growing bush-meat trade have all taken their toll.” The UN Environment Program has reported that the number of eastern lowland gorillas in eight DRC national parks has subsequently declined by 90 percent. We can only hope that some enterprising soul has already recorded the eastern lowland gorilla’s call so it can be used as a ring tone long after they’re gone.

So yeah, go ahead and leave your phones on and enjoy your next text.

So here we are…in New York City in New York State in the white supremacist capitalist homophobic patriarchy we call America. Or, as it’s known by the indigenous crowd, “the occupied territories.”

Speaking of occupied territories, while I’m up here, let’s not forget that each and every one of us is sitting or standing on stolen land.

Let’s not forget that with each minute that passes, the US government spends one million of our tax dollars spent on war.

Let’s also not forget that on this planet of abundant resources, every two seconds, a human starves to death.

That usually quiets the crowd and gives me a chance to remind you that I am available for children’s parties.

Speaking of millions spent on war and too many people dying, I’d like to mention a forgotten anniversary: August 6, 1990. To most people—particularly activists—the starting date for the war in Iraq is March 19, 2003. However, to accept that date is to put far too much blame on one party and one president. A more accurate and useful starting date is August 6, 1990. Iraq invaded Kuwait—with US permission-on August 2, 1990. Four days later—at the behest of the US—the United Nations Security Council imposed murderous sanctions upon the people of Iraq. The war on Iraq began that day.

It is widely accepted that these sanctions were responsible for the deaths of roughly 500,000 Iraqi children under the age of five. US Ambassador the UN in the mid-90s was Madelaine Albright. In 1996, Leslie Stahl asked her on 60 Minutes if a half-million dead Iraqi children was a price worth paying to pursue American foreign policy. Albright famously replied: “Yes, we think it’s worth it.”

Shortly after that, Albright was named US Secretary of State by noted liberal Democrat hero, Bill Clinton.

I highlight Clinton’s alleged liberal reputation because I’m not here to preach to the choir. I’m guessing most of you don’t need me to tell you what’s wrong with the Bush administration so I’d rather not just focus on the latest figurehead of empire. Instead, I’d rather dig deeper to the heart of our culture. A culture riddled with violence and hypocrisy. And speaking of riddles: Who gave up a life of luxury and turned his back on millions to fight for what he believed in, in the mountains and caves of Afghanistan and, as a result, is now revered by many as a “hero”?

Most people guess Osama bin Laden, but there’s another, equally accurate answer: Pat Tillman. Perception is reality and whether or not you think Osama or Tillman is a hero depends mostly on which propaganda is reaching your ears. Sure, I know “propaganda” is not a word commonly heard in polite discourse in this country—we prefer euphemisms like public relations, spin, or hype—but don’t kid yourselves: We live in a corporate propaganda state.

Perhaps my favorite illustration of life in a corporate propaganda state is the daily New York Times corrections box. Each day, the newspaper of record comes clean about what it got wrong the day before. For example, in early 2008, the Times ran a cutting edge article on the topic of tattoos but referred incorrectly to the status of Gwen Stefani’s tattoos. The next day, in the corrections box, came a dose of reality: Gwen Stefani has no permanent tattoos.

Our long national nightmare is over. We can all sleep better tonight knowing that Gwen Stefani has no permanent tattoos. So, don’t let it ever be said the corporate media does not admit its mistakes. It’s all there in black and white every single day.

Of course, the tacit message behind the daily New York Times corrections box is this: Besides a few minor typographical errors, everything else in yesterday’s paper was correct. It was accurate. It was, to use their phrase, fit to print…and has now passed on to become part of our official history. This is typical of life within a society dominated by a corporate-run press.

Whether you label them liberal or conservative, most major media outlets are large corporations owned by or aligned with even larger corporations, and they share a common goal: to make a profit by selling a product—an affluent audience—to a given market: advertisers). Therefore, we shouldn’t find it too shocking that the image of the world being presented by a corporate-owned press very much reflects the biased interests of the elite players involved in this sordid little love triangle.

That’s why every major daily newspaper has a business section, but not a labor section. Why at least once a week those same newspapers run an automobile section, but no bicycle section. This is why when the Dow Jones Industrial Average drops, it makes headlines. But if the global infant mortality rate rises, it’s questionable if it will even make the papers (and if it does, it’ll be buried on page 23). In other words, if you created a blueprint for an apparatus that utterly erased critical thought, you can make none more efficient than the American corporate media.

We may live in a relatively free country but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to break free of the cookie-cutter formula being rammed down our throats at every turn. I remember eating lunch in a diner in Virginia Beach, Virginia—lots of military bases around there—when we heard a deafening roar from outside. We asked the waitress what it was and she smiled proudly: “That’s an F-14. The sound of freedom.”

What sounds like freedom or looks like freedom or feels like freedom is often nothing more than longer chains and bigger cages. What passes for rebellion in this country is usually co-opted, sanitized, and sold back to us as a trend or commodity…and it starts young. Clarence Darrow once said: “Just think of the tragedy of teaching children not to doubt.” In a poem, Ani DiFranco gives us one example of teaching children not to doubt. She talks of a test we all face in kindergarten or the first grade. You know the deal. They show us two squares and a circle and the inevitable question is: Which one doesn’t belong? Thus, at the tender age of five or six, we’re being taught that different doesn’t belong, different is wrong.

That same child, by the time they graduate high school, has seen an average of 360,000 television commercials. If they grow up and reach age 70—an increasingly difficult proposition, I might add—they will have spent ten of those 70 years watching TV.

Thanks, in part, to corporate media propaganda…

…we exist within a system in which the “Department of War” was magically transformed into the “Defense Department” just after World War II

…we exist within a system in which the US uses helicopters called Apache to quell ethnic cleansing

…we exist within a system in which more than one out of every 100 American adults are in prison, but we still live in the land of the free

…we exist within a system in which we can carpet bomb civilians from 15,000 feet in the name of humanitarianism and we still live in the home of the brave

…we exist within a system in which a war criminal like Henry Kissinger can be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize

This same system allows for free and fair presidential elections open to any candidate over the age of 35…who, of course, praises god and the free market (or am I being redundant?), describes his/her enemies as “evil,” understands that the rest of the world hates us because we’re free, and, oh yeah, can raise at least a half-billion dollars.

This same electoral system see third party candidates routinely barred from public debates (and often censored by misguided “progressives,” for that matter), only half the eligible voters will even bother showing up, and when all else fails, you can count on the Supreme Court to set things straight (and I do mean straight).

Since we have reached the electoral portion of tonight’s program, I’d like to present a public service announcement. I’m going to provide some of the many, many reasons you shouldn’t vote for McCain:

He’s raised twice as much money from Wall Street than his opponent. He voted for every Iraq war appropriation bill he faced. He refused to be photographed with San Francisco’s mayor for fear it’d be interpreted that he supported gay marriage. He voted against single payer health care. He supports the death penalty, the Israeli war machine, and the fence on the US-Mexican border. When asked if “there’s anything that’s happened in the past 7 1/2 years that the U.S. needs to apologize for in terms of foreign policy?” he responded: “No, I don’t believe in the U.S. apologizing.” He voted to confirm Condoleezza Rice as Secretary of State and to reauthorize the Patriot Act. He…uh-oh. Sorry, I messed up and gave you some of the many, many reasons you shouldn’t vote for Barack Obama. My bad…

Regardless, I do believe that either McCain or Obama can help make this country what it once was: an arctic region covered with ice (insert rimshot here).

In 2006, the Democrats gained a majority in Congress. How’s that working out for you? Asking this reminds me of something Steve McQueen said in the movie, The Magnificent Seven. When asked how things were going, he replied: “It’s like that fella who fell off a ten-story building. As he was falling, people on each floor heard him say, ‘So far, so good.’”

After 2006 election, we were led to believe the bad times were over and the evil ones had been vanquished. What could be better, right? How about a Democrat in the White House? Well, those who want an idea of what life might be like under such a scenario need only to reflect back upon the years 1993 and 1994—when President William Jefferson Clinton was enjoying the “advantage” of a Democratically-controlled Congress.

In just two years, liberal hero Bill Clinton abandoned his pledge to consider offering asylum to Haitian refugees, backed away from his most high-profile campaign issue: health care, and reneged on his promise to “take a firm stand” against the armed forces’ ban on gays and lesbians.

In 1993-4, Clinton presided over the invasion of Somalia (which resulted in some 7000-10000 dead Somalis), signed a little something called the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), increased Pentagon budget by $25 billion, fired Jocelyn Elders, dumped Lani Guinier, ordered the bombing of Iraq and the Balkans, renewed the sanctions on Iraq, ignored genocide in Rwanda, and passed a crime bill that gave us more cops, more prisons, & 58 more offenses punishable by death.

All this came before Newt Gingrich and much-hyped Republican “revolution” in 1994 (perhaps the most astonishing use of the word revolution in the history of the English language). Can someone please explain to me why the right wing didn’t love Bubba?

And I haven’t even gotten to the environment. In the first three years of the Clinton-Gore regime—two of which involved a Democratic House and Senate—Clinton and his green buddy gave us fun stuff like: The passage of the salvage logging rider, the continuation of the use of methyl bromide, the weakening of the Endangered Species Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act, the lowering of grazing fees on land, the subsidizing of Florida’s sugar industry, the reversing the ban on the production and importation of PCBs, and allowing the export of Alaskan oil.

When Clinton and Gore ran for re-election in 1996, David Brower, former president of the Sierra Club, wrote an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times called “Why I Won’t Vote for Clinton.” In this piece, Brower declared that Clinton and Gore had “done more harm to the environment in three years than Presidents Bush and Reagan did in 12 years.” That’s Bush the Elder, not Bush the Lesser.

I could go on for hours about the rest of Clinton’s reign, like the repeal of welfare, the telecommunications bill that further narrowed the already laughable parameters of public debate, the Defense of Marriage Act, and the fact that after eight years in office with no political price to pay, he still did not pardon Leonard Peltier. But I’ll just focus on one more Clinton gem: The Anti-Terrorism & Effective Death Penalty Act, signed into law on April 24, 1996. This USA PATRIOT Act prequel contained provisions that Clinton himself admitted “make a number of ill-advised changes in our immigration laws, having nothing to do with fighting terrorism.” This unconstitutional salvo severely restricted habeas corpus and expanded the number of federal capital crimes—and the PATRIOT Act is mostly an extension its legal foundations.

For a little more two-party context, consider that John Kerry—Democratic presidential candidate in 2004—voted for Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act in 1996 and wrote parts of the PATRIOT Act in 2001, Hillary voted for in 2001 and both she and Obama voted to reauthorize the PATRIOT Act in 2005. Hooray Democrats.

With all the public outcry for Bush and the his gang, I’m wondering: Where was all the outrage for liberal hero Bill Clinton? Where was the outrage when he ordered 78 days of bombing over Yugoslavia in 1999, including the use of depleted uranium? (At the time, Secretary of State Albright asked: “What’s the point of having this magnificent military if we never use it?”)

Where were the simplistic Nazi references when Clinton blew up a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant to distract us from Monica’s cigar fetish?

Where were the Hitler mustaches when Clinton bombed Iraq in response to an alleged plot to assassinate Bush the Elder and ended up killing Leila Attar, that country’s best-known female artist?

If we want to provoke genuine social change, we must always remember that “anti-war” doesn’t just mean “anti-this-war” and it definitely doesn’t just mean “anti-Republican.”

“I think it is dangerous to confuse the idea of democracy with elections. Just because you have elections doesn’t mean you’re a democratic country.”

Arundhati Roy said that.

“If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.” Emma Goldman said that.

“The next time someone tells you America has a two-party system, I suggest you demand a recount.” I said that.

In 2004, 65% of congressional races were uncontested and 58% of incumbent Senators who ran were unopposed. Overall, the candidate who raised the most money won 91% of those races.

In the words of the esteemed political philosopher Cyndi Lauper: “Money changes everything.”

As Ralph Nader reminds us, if the Democrats and Republicans were corporations, they’d be sued for and convicted of anti-trust violations.

To me, America’s two-party system is like buying a ticket on a commercial airline. You can request a seat on the right side or you can request a seat on the left side of the plane. But it doesn’t matter as long as the pilot is in control.

Sure, voting for Barack Obama will prove once and for all that you’re more open-minded than your Republican brother-in-law but it’s time to recognize the most consistent and primary difference between Republicans and Democrats is this: they tell different lies to get elected.

There’s one thing both parties agree on. No matter who we are, no matter who we vote or, no matter how we feel about this war or any war, all Americans must band together and “support our troops.”

For some, the phrase “support our troops” is merely a euphemism for: support the policies that put the troops there in the first place. For others—particularly on the Left—it is a safe way to avoid taking an unqualified stand against this war (and all war). Many who passionately identify as “anti-war” will just as passionately defend the troops-no questions asked—and the excuse making typically falls into three categories:

   1. They were just following orders
   2. It’s a “poverty draft”
   3. The troops are fighting for our freedom

Let’s start with the freedom myth. I can’t tell you how many e-mails I’ve received over the years that read something like this: “While you sit at home in your luxurious apartment, making money off your writing (insert laugh track here), those brave men and women are putting their asses on the line to fight for your freedom to write your anti-American garbage.

I say: Bullshit.

The troops in Iraq and Afghanistan are not fighting for my freedom. They are fighting to keep the world safe for petroleum. If anything, since 9/11, our freedom has been slowly eroded and the presence of the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan makes it harder for anyone to speak up in dissent. If I were in an airport, and I spoke aloud what I’ve written in this article, I’d likely be detained or arrested.

The only following orders excuse has no illegal foundation. You can use the Google function on your Internet machine to find the many treaties, charters, and agreements that back up this point, but here’s one to get you started: Principle IV of the Nuremberg Tribunal (1950) states: “The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.”

Besides this, it can be easily posited that “only following orders” also has no moral footing. Of course, the facile example would be Nazi Germany. But surely every suicide bomber is merely following orders as are those detonating IEDs in Iraq. The Left praised Vietnam era draftees who fled to Canada. Yet, today’s volunteer warriors are given a free pass because they didn’t give the orders in an illegal war and occupation. This is not only illegal and immoral; it also lacks any radical credibility. Somehow, individuals and groups can stand tall against war and military intervention but refuse to shine a light on those who choose (and get paid) to fight. Nowhere else in the realm of activism does such a paradox exist.

Consider the animal rights activists struggling to end the morally indefensible and scientifically fraudulent enterprise of animal experimentation. Can they expose the corporations and academic institutions but somehow “support” the actual scientists performing the lab experiments? Surely, they are “just doing their job” and “following orders.”

How about those fighting to end unfair labor practices? Is it acceptable to call out the CEOs of Nike and The Gap but hang yellow ribbons for those who handle day-to-day operations of a sweatshop in, say, Vietnam? These men and women are just as “stuck in a bad situation” as any grunt in Iraq or Afghanistan.

The second excuse usually sounds like this: “It’s a poverty draft. These poor souls have to enlist because they any economic options.” America is certainly an unjust economic society and this would be a compelling argument…if it were true. A 2006 New York Times op-ed highlighted a study by Tim Kane and Mackenzie Eaglen that “analyzed demographic data on every single enlistee, not just a sample, and found that in terms of education, last year’s recruits were just as qualified as those of any recent year, and maybe the best ever. Over all, wartime recruits since 1999 are in many respects comparable to the youth population on the whole, except that they are on average a bit wealthier, much more likely to have graduated from high school and more rural than their civilian peers.” They also found that youths “from wealthy American ZIP codes are volunteering in ever higher numbers” while “enlistees from the poorest fifth of American neighborhoods fell nearly a full percentage point over the last two years, to 13.7 percent. In 1999, that number was exactly 18 percent.”

For the sake of argument, let’s say those numbers are inaccurate and let’s say that most of today’s enlistees volunteer because they lack almost any other economic options. What I’m wondering is this: Would this same economic excuse hold water for those who opt to become gang members for the same exact reason? A poor black kid “enlists” in the Crips, a poverty-stricken Hispanic “enlists” in the Latin Kings…for that matter: an uneducated Italian kid in Bensonhurst “enlists” in the Mafia.

These kids are also faced with a stark choice—being poor or choosing a uniform—but no one hangs yellow ribbons for them, no one makes excuses them. There are two major differences between them and the men and women who volunteer to join the US military:

   1. The US military is far more dangerous than any gang or Mafia family
   2. The US military is considered legal

Are some of the soldiers in Iraq there primarily for economic reasons? Sure. Did others sign up for a chance to shoot some “ragheads”? Probably. After factoring out these two relatively small groups and rejecting the illegal, immoral, and reactionary “only following orders” defense, I ask this of anti-war activists: Exactly how are the men and women who willingly signed up to wage war in Iraq and Afghanistan immune from any and all scrutiny and/or blame?

After all, what do you think “our troops” are doing? “We know that 99.9% of our forces conduct themselves in an exemplary manner,” says Donald Rumsfeld. “We also know that in conflicts things that shouldn’t happen do happen.”

If only 1/10 of 1% of US soldiers make “things happen that shouldn’t happen,” what are the rest doing to have us standing and singing “God Bless America” during the 7th inning stretch at Yankee Stadium? How do we define exemplary manner?

By Rumsfeld’s reckoning (and the standard company line of most every politician, pundit, and peon) “exemplary” includes (among other things) waterboarding and other forms of torture, the use of Daisy Cutters, cluster bombs, napalm, depleted uranium, white phosphorus, and the launching of cruise missiles into crowded cities.

“Things that shouldn’t happen do happen,” Rumsfeld explains. But what about all the stuff that this society accepts “should” happen? Why would anyone besides a sadist feel compelled to support that unconditionally?

It should come as no surprise that my take on the “support the troops” mantra is typically greeted with unrestrained hostility from all over the political spectrum. What offends the right wing flag-wavers most is when someone actually makes use of the freedom they claim to adore. Somehow I am ungrateful for my liberty if I have the nerve to exercise it. These so-called patriots claim to celebrate freedom but want to refuse my right to exploit it. These are the same folks who walk around crowing about how they’re “proud to be an American”—as if they had anything to do with it.

The most predictable knee-jerk reaction from the liberals is that I’m too radical and I might hurt the “movement” by alienating soldiers and families. I promise to get back to the word radical later. For now, I’d rather focus on the concept of a movement. This is not semantics but rather, it gets to the heart of our discussion here tonight.

The state of global affairs has long passed the proverbial tipping point and is more likely flirting with the dreaded point of no return. Yet most folks, it seems, have confused the occasional weekend parade, I mean, protest with a full-blown movement.

Here’s a news flash: Anti-Bush bumper stickers and a heartfelt commitment to recycled toilet paper don’t constitute a movement. Neither do candlelight vigils, vegan diets, petitions, voting drives, letters to Congress, monthly donations to Greenpeace, yellow ribbons, red ribbons, pink ribbons, or becoming the change you wish to see in the world.

All you need is love? Yeah…that and a million dollars a minute.

This is not meant to denigrate or mock but rather to point out that there is a huge difference between having a sincere minority of Americans partaking in such gestures and having a tangible, functional, effective movement capable of inciting, inspiring, demanding social change. The rest of the world knows this…why don’t we?

As Arundhati Roy explains: “People from poorer places and poorer countries have to call upon their compassion not to be angry with ordinary people in America.” Ward Churchill takes it further…warning us that the same people Roy refers to “have no obligation-moral, ethical, legal or otherwise-to sit on their thumbs while the opposition here (in the US) dithers about doing anything to change the system.”

Consider this: If your neighborhood was bombed into the Stone Age—your children buried in the rubble—and taxpayers funding those bombs (in some cases, willingly funding those bombs) walked around saying you were ignorant enough and narrow-minded enough to hate them “because they’re free” and “for what they believe in,” how forgiving would you be?

Americans wield more influence and power than any people on the planet but, while an obscene number of humans live in abject poverty, we live our lives in such a manner as to threaten every living thing on Earth. Everything I’ve talked about so far (and much more) is being done in our name. In other words—with few exceptions—there are no innocent bystanders in America.

I have a question: How many of you think the planet is in peril? (Just about everyone raises his or her hand)

A second question: How many think those in power—those most responsible for putting the planet in peril—will relinquish their power voluntarily any time soon? (Everyone raises hand)

So, if most of us think the planet is in peril but the elites are not going to surrender their power, I have yet another question: How much more are we willing to tolerate before we act?

Here is some of what we’re already enduring without any serious fuss:

*Epidemics of preventable diseases: cancer, heart disease, diabetes, etc.

*Poisoning of our air, water, and food (including mother’s breast milk)

*Global warming, climate change, animal & plant extinctions, disappearing honeybees, destruction of the rain forest, topsoil depletion, etc.

*1/3 of Americans uninsured or underinsured: health care

*More than half of the world’s top 100 economies: corporations

*61% of corporations do not even pay taxes

*Presidential lies, electoral fraud, limited debates, etc.

*The largest prison population on the planet

*Corporate control of public land, airwaves, & pensions

*Overt infringement of our civil liberties

*Bloated defense budget, unilateral military interventions, war crimes committed in our name, legalization of torture, blah, blah, blah…

Before you know it, the government might start spying on American citizens and detaining prisoners without charges while corporations ravage the earth in pursuit of profit, wiping out entire eco-systems in the process. Oops, sorry…they’re already doing all that without being stopped.

Take a look at your watch. Since yesterday at this hour, 13 million tons of toxic chemicals were released across the globe; two hundred thousand acres of rainforest were destroyed; more than 100 plant or animal species went extinct; and 45,000 human beings died of starvation (most of them children).

What will we say in 20-30 years when we’re asked why we didn’t do more to challenge all this? What will we say when we’re asked why cared more about Gwen Stefani’s tattoos than how our tax dollars are spent? What will we say when we’re asked why we focused on imaginary evildoers instead of the corporate pirates raping the planet and controlling our minds?

It’s not as if we don’t have choices. Ask yourself this: Which do you prefer, a consumer culture or an ozone layer? SUVs or forests? Cell phones or Eastern Lowland Gorillas? Would you give up the ability to text ttyl to your BFF in order to save a species from going extinct? In 2008, it’s not an unreasonable question.

The precarious state of things is not the result of some preordained theology or unstoppable force of nature. We’re in this mess thanks to human decisions. If different decisions had been made in the past, it’s likely that we would’ve had different outcomes. If different decisions are made now, perhaps we’ll have better outcomes in the future.

Speaking of the future, the humans (all living things) that come after us won’t care if we gave talks like this or marched in protests or held open doors for old ladies…if they have no clean air to breathe.

It won’t matter to them if we ate organic or drove a hybrid or switched to recycled toilet paper…if they have no clean water to use.

You can be damn sure they won’t care if we voted for Obama or McCain…if they end up stuck on a toxic, uninhabitable planet.

They’d probably just want to ask us this: Why did you stand by and allow everything to be consumed or poisoned or destroyed?

But before that question is asked of us, we still have time to ask this of ourselves: Will we ever disrupt our seemingly comfortable lives and dedicate ourselves to stopping—by any means necessary—global warming, US military interventionism, economic exploitation, factory farming, environmental devastation, etc. or will we continue preserving and defending our way of life?

The US constitutes 5% of the earth’s population but consumes more than 25% of the earth’s resources. Another news flash: Our way of life is the issue.

Besides, if our way of life is so worthy of being defended at any cost, why do we need so many homeless shelters, alcohol and drug rehab centers, rape crisis hotlines, battered women’s shelters, and suicide hotlines? Why does a sexual assault occur every 2 1/2 minutes?

If America is the world’s shining light, why are its citizens left with no choice but to organize to protect human, environmental, civil, & animal rights? Why can’t we drink the water or breathe the air without the risk of becoming ill from corporate-produced toxins?

If America is the zenith of human social order, why does our vaunted “way of life” provoke terror both as a tactic and an emotion?

Whether we want to admit it or not, our “way of life” was built on a nearly exterminated indigenous population, the African slave trade, and all those killed in places like Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Southeast Asia, Central America, the Middle East, etc. It was built on stolen land with stolen oil. Our way of life was built on terror.

For an example of such terror, I’ll look back to the “good war” (a phrase in which Studs Terkel said the noun and adjective don’t match): In early 1945, US General Curtis LeMay and his 21st Bomber Command laid siege on the poorer areas of Japan’s large cities. On March 9-10, the target was Tokyo, where tightly packed wooden buildings took the brunt of 1665 tons of incendiary bombs. By design, the attack area was 87% residential. By May 1945, LeMay’s campaign had killed an estimated 672,000 Japanese civilians. An aide to MacArthur called the raids “one of the most ruthless and barbaric killings of non-combatants in all history.” Secretary of War Henry Stimson worried that US would “get the reputation for outdoing Hitler in atrocities.” LeMay himself said: “I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have tried as a war criminal. Fortunately, I was on the winning side.”

The men that devised and carried out this attack are generally considered to be part of this country’s greatest generation yet, by any sane definition, what I just described is terrorism.

No matter what you call it, there is an alternative to terrorism. It’s called justice. But to seek justice, we must first recognize injustice—even if we play a direct or indirect role. To do that, we have to open our eyes and then take action.

To do that, we have to maintain what Gramsci called the “pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will.”

To do that, we have to become aware of ourselves as potential agents of collective social change.

To do that, we have to remember that the few successful movements in this country’s history—civil rights, women’s suffrage, labor—prevailed in part because they utilized tactics that were outside of what was permitted at the time.

Now, I’m gonna go out on a limb and take a guess that the world has more than enough corporate lawyers, investment bankers, Wall Street executives, and real estate brokers. If you agree, clap your hands. (Much applause)

Okay, time to play another hunch I say the world could never have enough dreamers, poets, artists, activists, romantics, visionaries, fighters, militants, rebels, radicals, and non-conformists. (Loud applause)

How many non-conformists do we have hear tonight? (Most people raise hand) Okay then, I’d like you all to take the non-conformist pledge with me. Raise your left hand and repeat after me.

I am a non-conformist (everyone repeats)

I think for myself (everyone repeats)

I do not repeat what people tell me to say (laughter)

We need more non-conformists and we need more saints. When I say saint, I am using Kurt Vonnegut’s definition of a saint as someone who behaves decently in an indecent world. Therefore, I ordain each and every one of you a saint—or at least, a saint in training—and starting right this second, you must start acting decently in this terribly indecent world.

Because everyone has something to offer. We all have boundless compassion, creativity, wisdom, and courage. We can each inspire ourselves and others toward peace, justice, and solidarity. We can all rediscover the subversive pleasure of thinking for ourselves.

But consider yourself warned. Now that you’ve listened to all this, you’re committed. As Arundhati Roy sez: “The trouble is that once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And once you’ve seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There’s no innocence. Either way, you’re accountable.”

I know it’s not easy. Author E.B. White once said: “If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between the desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”

Well, to make it a little easier to plan your day, I’ve enlisted the help of some friends:

Albert Einstein sez: “The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.”

Voltaire tells us: “We’re all guilty of the good we didn’t do.”

MLK says: “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is this: What are you doing for others?”

Noam Chomsky reminds us: “We are responsible for the predictable consequences of our actions.”

Three simple words from Gandhi: “Action expresses priorities”

And finally Kurt Vonnegut tells us: “There is no reason good can’t triumph over evil, if only angels will get organized along the lines of the Mafia.”

Clearly, the old strategies are not working but until our tactics evolve, we remain accomplices to the perpetual global crime we call civilization. What kind of tactics? That’s up to you but, before you rule anything out, consider this: Let’s say I step out side get some air and see one of you lying on the ground. Standing above you is a large, menacing man with bad intentions and clearly, he has incapacitated you with a surprise blow. Your eyes meet mine and you indicate you need help.

I could pray. I could meditate. I could chalk it up to bad karma. I could ask you to recognize that the attacker is a human and tell him that you love him. I could blame patriarchy, the Republicans, or gangsta rap. I could ask myself: What would Jesus do? What would the Dalai Lama do? What would Oprah do? I could try to remember that excellent saying about non-violence I got from my Pilates teacher.

OR: I could stomp my foot to draw his attention downward and promptly whip out a finger jab to his eyes. When he brings hands up (too late) to protect himself, he leaves his mid-section exposed. I kick him in the balls—doubling him over—then grab him by the hair and bring his face down into a powerful knee blow. Then I’d grab the victim get the fuck out of there as fast as we can.

It’s either that or chanting. The choice is yours.

Again, we need new ideas and contrary to our chauvinistic opinion, we don’t know where the new ideas will come from. We have to keep our ears, eyes, and minds open.

The paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould was once asked a silly question about the biological difference between Einstein’s brain and the rest of our brains. His answer, however, is relevant now. He said: “I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”

I’m guessing most of us here in this room have opportunities to use our talents. Are we? And if so, are we also working to free others and give them the same chance?

I believe the changes we need could start by bringing everything down to its most basic and human level. To explain what I mean, I’d like to share a lesson I’m still learning, a lesson that came at the end of my mother’s life.

My mother passed away on January 12, after a long illness. She was nearly 72 and had been very ill since mid-2005. Intellectually, one might think that perhaps I had time to “come to terms” with a sense of inevitably…yet I remain brokenhearted. Despite having almost three years to “prepare” for this reality, her death is teaching me previously unimaginable lessons about grief, sorrow, and loss.

Amidst my mourning, I can’t help but visualize the feelings of grief, sorrow, and loss being experienced in places directly and indirectly impacted by US foreign and economic policies. Imagine if you will, a mother in Iraq. She walks to the market as an American bomb levels her home. Her parents, her husband, her children (none of whom were affiliated with the “insurgency”): all killed. What of her grief, sorrow, and loss? I had nearly three years to “prepare” and I remain inconsolable. Can we imagine how this woman feels? And why do we relate more to the men and women who volunteer to drop the bombs than those under the bombs? When was it decided that their lives matter less than ours? Where did we get the balls to feel so superior?

And it’s not just military murders. As I said at the beginning, every two seconds, a human starves to death. That’s more grief, sorrow, loss—more anger and frustration, too. There’s a line in the song, “Middle of the Road” by the Pretenders: “When you own a big chunk of the bloody Third World…the babies just come with the scenery.”

Speaking of babies, UNICEF tells us: One in six of the planet’s children are severely hungry; one in seven have no access to health care; one in five have no safe water; one in three have no toilet or sanitation facilities at home.

29,158 children under 5 dying from mostly preventable causes every day.

The next time you’re at a sporting event or rock concert, glance around and get a feel for what 29,158 looks like. Then try your best to conceive of the feelings of grief, sorrow, and loss inspired by those 29,158…each and every day. These are humans, not statistics. They feel as much as you or I. They cry, they mourn, they miss loved ones, and they ask why when the UN says the basic nutrition and health needs of the world’s poorest people would cost only $13 billion a year (a mere fraction of what the US spends on war).

The question of this millennium so far is this: “Why do they hate us?”

I’d say we give them an excellent reason every 2 seconds and a million more reasons every single minute. Ask yourself this: How much of our tax money was spent on war while I stood up here blabbing away and how many children did we lose…tonight?

The historian Howard Zinn said: “I wonder how the foreign policies of the United States would look if we wiped out the national boundaries of the world, at least in our minds, and thought of all children everywhere as our own.”

Here’s a novel idea: Instead of blowing up babies in the Third World, let’s start feeding them, and respecting them, and loving them? Yes…loving them. Che Guevara tells us that the “true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.” If Che was right, comrades, it’s high time we start showing the world some revolutionary love.

Remember, the most powerful force in the world is not the US military or economy or culture, it’s you. That’s why they’re working so damn hard to pacify you and working so damn hard to take away your rights. But if they want to take away our rights, I say we take away theirs: Their right to pollute, their right to exploit, to wage war, to steal, and to treat all living things as if they were expendable.

The author Derrick Jensen said: “One of the good things about everything being so fucked up—about the culture being so ubiquitously destructive—is that no matter where you look—no matter what your gifts, no matter where your heart lies—there’s good and desperately important work to be done.”

This is much more than most of us have been willing to do so far, but we need this commitment. We need the type of commitment displayed by Bob Marley back in 1973. There was a politically motivated assassination attempt on his life and two days later, there he was, up on stage at a giant outdoor concert. He was asked how he could get back on stage just two days after nearly being killed. His answer: “The bad people trying to make the world worse never take a day off, so why should I?”

This is the kind of focus and courage and persistence and perception what we desperately need. If you choose this path, you may find yourself called a “radical”—as if it were an insult. I say: Wear that label with pride. The Latin origin of “radical” is the same as the Latin origin of the word “root.” A radical is one who gets to the root of things. Plus, as Martin Luther King told us many years ago: “When you’re right, you can never be too radical.”

I sometimes end of that MLK quote but I have a little more tonight. I’ll take for granted that most of you are somewhat familiar with the book or film, The Grapes of Wrath. It tells the story of families thrown off their land during the Great Depression…in particular the Joad family. The Joads head out looking for work and suffer terrible indignities until tom, the oldest son, starts to organize and fight back.

He knows his work will put his family in danger s he decides to sneak away…but his mother catches him. She and Tom were very close and she worries how she will know if he’s okay. Tom’s reply is one of the greatest little speeches in literary and film history. In his song, “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” Bruce Springsteen embellishes this speech a bit and I’d like to share that with you.

Tom’s Mom asks: “How will I know where you are? How will I know you’re okay?” Here is how Springsteen sang his answer:

Tom said “Ma, wherever there’s a cop beatin’ a guy

Look in their eyes, Ma, you’ll see me, you’ll see me”

Thank you for listening…

Preface: In 1853, several pairs of the previously unknown European house sparrow were set free inside Brooklyn’s Green-wood Cemetery. By picking the hayseeds out of horse droppings from the carts used for funerals, these tiny birds flourished and are today one of the continent’s most ubiquitous creatures. In other words: When all they feed you is horseshit, it’s up to you to pick out the hayseeds that enable you to not only survive, but to thrive.

Prologue: In the 1999 film Run, Lola, Run, the female protagonist is magically given three chances to cope with a tricky situation. Like having a reset button on a video game or computer, if Lola screws up, she gets to go back and start from the beginning.

Many people imply that unless a critic expounds a specific strategy for change, his/her assessment is worthless or, at the very least, too negative. This somewhat understandable reaction misses the essential role critical analysis plays in a society where problems — and their causes — are so cleverly disguised. When discussing the future, the first step is often an identification and demystification of the past and present.

In order for us to hit the reset button, we must collectively agree that we got it wrong the first time.

Preamble: “How many other countries give you the right to write what you just wrote?” This was one of the many responses I got to a recent article of mine. Let’s put aside the unintentional tongue twister and the question’s obvious answer: plenty of other countries would give me the right to write what I just wrote.

The larger issue, as I see it, is how we each choose to evaluate our freedom. Is freedom just a matter of bigger cages and longer chains? Is it merely a commodity sold to the highest bidder? Must the majority of us sit by and drool while freedom fries on the grill of capitalist greed?

Freedom, according to Rosa Luxemburg, is “always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.” To merely have more freedom than, say, a woman living under Taliban repression is not the same as being free. But it is the same as settling for less subjugation instead of demanding more liberty. The “it could always be worse” excuse is no way to judge the quality or quantity of anything.

Begin: It was September 14, 2001. The F-16s were no longer circling overhead. But there were people on my block holding candles, waving flags, and singing the National Anthem as an SUV cruised by with the words “Nuke ’em” soaped onto its rear window. These people were all craving normalcy. Even with the severity of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, the ultimate goal at the end of the day was always normalcy.

Despite the lingering fear, sorrow, doubt, and anger, we waited breathlessly for the authorities to pronounce: “Don’t worry. Things were bad but now, we’ve gotten everything back to normal.”

What is normal in our country and on our planet? What type of society have we humans cultivated as we sit arrogantly atop the intellectual food chain?

The New York Stock Exchange was shut down by the attacks, but once things returned to normal, Wall Street went back to making decisions that impacted horrendously upon the large majority of the globe while the top one percent of Americans carried on owning wealth equal to the bottom 95 percent. That’s normal.

The SUV owner I just mentioned might have wiped the soap off his window and driven onto the island of Manhattan where, once again, cars had free reign. The toxic haze caused by the two towers collapsing was now replaced by the normal toxic haze induced by America’s automobile culture.

Those I heard singing songs of patriotism could return to stepping over homeless people to go buy products made in sweatshops. That’s normal.

Contemplating normal reminds me of something Charles Bukowski wrote: “As we go on with our lives, we tend to forget that the jails and the hospitals and the madhouses and the graveyards are packed.”

Normal means each month, 100,000 Americans lose their health insurance…while, each minute, one million of our tax dollars is spent on war.

Normal means 15 million animals are slaughtered each day although up to 14 times as many people could be fed by using the same land currently reserved for livestock grazing.

Normal means one billion earthlings live on the equivalent of one US dollar a day while my neighborhood is teeming with 99 cents stores. But these establishments aren’t offering Third Worlders subsistence for 24 hours. No, they’re where folks like me can purchase cheap goods — probably assembled in China by pre-teen girls. If you need an earpiece for your coltan-containing cell phone, it’s all yours for one dollar and eight cents…after tax.

Normal means taking off your shoes at the airport, being shot at by overzealous cops, and getting priced out of the neighborhoods you grew up in…but never having to walk more than two blocks to find your nearest Starbuck’s. Wait, did I say “walk”? I meant “drive,” of course. Walking: how Third World of me.

Whether we realize it or not, thanks to corporate scientists, normal also means that when a human gene is introduced to a sheep’s mammary glands to produce a protein called alpha-1-antitrypsin, that sheep is no longer a mere sheep…but rather, it’s a legally patented commodity known as a “mammalian cell bioreactor.” Not a sheep, not a lamb, but a mammalian cell bioreactor. Try it out: Mary had a little mammalian cell bioreactor. Sound normal to you?

Normal means two indistinguishable political parties, corporations that never pay taxes, and yellow ribbons as far as the eye can see.

On a normal day, more than 100 plant or animal species go extinct. On a normal day, 45,000 human beings die of starvation.

Normal means slavery — on so many levels — like this:

In the most remote regions of Brazil, slave labor is employed to cut down grand swaths of the precious rain forest to make room to grow eucalyptus which is then burned by male slaves (who exploit the body, mind, and spirit of female slaves forced into prostitution) to make charcoal for the steel mills of Brazil where the poorest of the poor toil for wages that do not sustain them so that steel can be shipped to a General Motors plant in Mexico (GM is the second largest employer south of the border) where the poorest of the poor suffer maquiladora conditions so these automobile parts can then be shipped to a GM plant in the U.S. (roughly 50 percent of what we call “trade” consists of business transactions between branches of the same transnational corporation) where even the poorest of the poor proudly take on imposing debt to possess a car “made in the U.S.A.” so they can clog the highways that were paved over countless eco-systems, filling the air with noxious pollution as they make their way to the drive-through window of an anti-union fast food restaurant that purchased the beef of slaughtered cattle that once grazed on land cleared by male slaves who exploited the body, mind, and spirit of female slaves in the most remote regions of Brazil. That is some of what we accept as normal…

Normal means land mines, factory farming, and the death penalty
It means racial profiling and the shooting of abortion doctors
Normal means gay bashing and it means “illegal” is a noun
It means pesticide, homicide, suicide, genocide
Normal means the WTO, the FBI, CIA, NSA, and KKK
GMO, HMO, Guantanamo.
It means banned books, the war on drugs, and the PATRIOT Act
Normal means: “have it your way” and “just do it”
Global warming, water boarding, People magazine
It means no cod in Cape Cod and soon: no ice at the North Pole
Normal means strip malls; normal means strip mining
It means pre-emptive strikes and humanitarian bombing
It means shock and awe
Normal means if you kill someone while wearing a uniform, you get a parade. Do it in gang colors and you get the electric chair.
Normal means we live in a society programmed and conditioned to lust for revenge instead of unite for peace and justice

After 9/11, normal also came to mean a perpetual war on terror. You know what? Maybe a war on terror is precisely what we need.

No, I’m not declaring public allegiance to the current jihad against a tactic (which is in actuality a war against terrorist attacks not perpetrated by the US or its allies). Instead, I’m thinking of another meaning entirely for our new favorite, post-9/11 word: “terror.”

Author Don Lutz has written that terror is “what one feels when being kidnapped or raped.”

He goes on to list other terrifying examples:

“Terror is what poor people worldwide feel when approached by uniformed, armed men; what animals feel in research laboratories; what people feel when their families are faced with starvation; what a child feels when an adult starts to hit; what millions of families feel when they hear planes overhead; what fish feel when hooked in the mouth; what people feel under threat of having loved ones tortured or killed; what forest dwellers feel when the loggers come in to clear-cut; what people feel when they are threatened with invasion; and what animals feel at slaughterhouses.”

You wanna wage war against terror, why not find a worthy adversary? No shady FBI stings, unconstitutional wire tapping, or panic-inducing color-coded warnings that conveniently pop up at the most politically expedient intervals. The variety of terror I just described is genuine and endemic and it is the real problem.

Many Americans automatically defend their country’s rampant illegalities because they perceive these actions as falling under the seductive justification of “defending our way of life.”

The U.S. constitutes roughly 5% of the earth’s population but consumes more than 25% of the earth’s resources. Maybe “our way of life” makes us the real terrorists.

Besides, if our way of life is so sacred, so ideal, so worthy of being defended by any means necessary, why do we need so many homeless shelters, alcohol and drug rehab centers, rape crisis hotlines, battered women’s shelters, and suicide hotlines?

Why does a sexual assault occur every 2 1/2 minutes?

If America is the world’s shining light, why are its citizens left with no choice but to organize in a desperate attempt to protect human, environmental, civil, and animal rights?

Why can’t we drink the water or breathe the air without the risk of becoming ill from corporate-produced toxins?

If America is the zenith of human social order, why does our vaunted way of life provoke terror as a tactic and an emotion?

I know what some of you are thinking: Surely, Mickey Z., humans aren’t as bad as you make them sound. They can’t possibly be the most dangerous species of all time. Humans aren’t more dangerous than a T. Rex, right? To you, I ask: In all the millions of years dinosaurs roamed this planet, did a single stegosaurus ever feel the need to invent nuclear weapons?

Even today’s “monsters” are far less harmful than we “intelligent” humans. No great white shark created DDT, napalm, or the internal combustion engine; you can’t blame cigarettes, greenhouse gases, hydroelectric dams, or mercury-laced vaccinations on a pit bull; and rest assured no non-human conjured up zoos, animal experimentation, or the circus.

With the point of no return fading in the rearview mirror (or at least obscured by a Hummer), the time is long overdue for all of us to recognize the real enemy is that which inspires terror. The real enemy just might be what we see as normal.

And what can be more normal than the American Dream? You all know the American Dream myth, the fable of individualized success. If we’re tough enough and willing to fight our way past the competition, this is the land of opportunity: anything is possible. If you succeed, it’s because you worked harder and better and deserved it more. If you fail, the blame is all on you.

William Burroughs sez: “Thanks for the American Dream, to vulgarize and falsify until the bare lies shine through.”

Vulgarization. Falsification. Compromise. Conformity. Assimilation. Submission. Ignorance. Hypocrisy. Brutality. The elite. All of which, as Rage Against the Machine reminds us, are American dreams.

All of which are American dreams…

So, how about cultivating some new American Dreams?
Dreams not for sale
Dreams not based on celebrity
Dreams not based on material consumption
Dreams not based on physical beauty
Dreams not based on military conquest
Dreams that promote unity and collective action while maintaining individuality and independence
Dreams that challenge us to think for ourselves and about others
Dreams that help us pick out the hayseeds amidst the horseshit

Postscript: In his 1941 classic, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, Henry Miller contemplated what it might be like to bring an American Indian back to life and show him the steel mills of Pennsylvania. Miller imagined the Indian thinking: “So it was for this that you deprived us of our birthright?”

Miller pondered, “Do you think it would be easy to get him to change places with one of our steady workers? What sort of persuasion would you use? What now could you promise him that would be truly seductive?”

I think I know what might win over that resurrected soul. A reset button, just like the one Lola had. For if this is the best humanity could produce with the gifts we’ve been given; if this is what is accepted as normal by the majority of Homo sapiens on the planet, what we really need is to hit the reset button…before it’s too late.

But then again, what do I know? I’ve always been the black mammalian cell bioreactor in my family.

Gina’s latest novella is Mother Puncher and the lead character, well, punches mothers. Specifically, he punches mothers just after they give birth… ostensibly to teach them a lesson. Ranalli’s brilliant dystopian vision never strays too far from what passes for reality today—and that’s where Mother Puncher delivers the knockout blow (sorry, couldn’t resist). She holds up a mirror to a clueless culture on a collision course with oblivion.

Here is my e-mail conversation with Gina Ranalli:

Mickey Z: Noam Chomsky once said: “It is quite possible—overwhelmingly probable, one might guess—that we will always learn more about human life and human personality from novels than from scientific psychology.” What can Mother Puncher teach us about “human life and human personality”?

Gina Ranalli: I think Mother Puncher draws a very clear portrait and points out, very blatantly, how as a species we tend to look to our leaders and just blindly swallow whatever it is they happen to be feeding us that day. Human beings are very “monkey see, monkey do” regardless of how preposterous something might be. People are taught from a very early age not to think for themselves. We’re told what to buy, what to eat, who to vote for, who to hate, who to love, which God we need to believe in. It’s never ending and it’s both sad and scary that so few people pause and say, “Hold up a second. I think FILL IN THE BLANK is untrue or unfair or that’s not what I believe.” The book takes all that blind following to the next level. But it also shows the “rebels” in the society, who disregard the laws, but they do so basically at the expense of the rest of the world. There just are no easy answers.

MZ: Your protagonist, Ed Means, is a Mother Puncher… and he spends an awful lot of time trying to justify and rationalize how he makes a living, where he lives, and how he lives. For me, his “banality” echoed Hannah Arendt’s writings on Adolph Eichmann. She discussed a “new type of criminal,” who “commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing wrong.” How did the character of Ed Means come to be?

GR: Ed really wasn’t a hard character to come up with. We all know people like him. And I do think that at his core, he’s an okay guy, in a bizarre kind of way. He thinks, probably rightly so, that there are hundreds of other guys that would take his job in a heartbeat, simply because they’d enjoy popping a woman in the face and knowing that there would be no repercussions for those actions. Hell, they would be paid to do it. He considers his job unsavory, but necessary. He doesn’t enjoy having to do it but realizes that these people are better off in his hands, so to speak, instead of in the hands of a militant misogynist, for example. So, in his mind, he’s actually protecting them.

MZ: Ah yes, lesser evilism. A very familiar concept in an election year. I imagine you will take some heat for the title Mother Puncher and the fact that it’s literal. Do you think it’s easier for a woman to create such a concept? What I mean is that you won’t have to deal with the accusations of sexism and can focus more on the social realities you touch on in the book (e.g. class, patriarchy, reproductive rights, etc.)?

GR: Yeah, I figured I’d take heat for the title and the book itself. I haven’t heard anything too bad yet, but I won’t be surprised when/if it happens. It might be easier for a woman to “get away with it.” But maybe not. It could just as easily go the other way and in fact I just assumed it would be feminists and women in general who’d be calling for my head on a stick. But, who knows. I recently wrote a short story told from the perspective of a child molester and the editor told me that a bunch of his initial readers were not only unsure of whether to publish it, but also went as far as to say, “If this had been written by a man, we’d never touch it.” So, I think the whole issue of gender is a roll of the dice when it comes to what readers will accept. Or maybe they don’t care at all. We’ll just have to wait and see.”

MZ: Gender issues notwithstanding, your writing is usually described as “Bizarro.” Can you explain?

GR: Sure thing. Bizarro is, for lack of a better term, the genre of fiction that I currently write in. It’s weird, it’s surreal, it’s bizarre. It’s distorted, absurd and twisted. It’s David Lynch on paper. There are no boundaries, really. For a better, more complete definition of exactly what bizarro is, I would highly recommend checking out the website BizarroCentral.com. It answers every question anyone could have about the genre, in addition to a catalog of bizarro books, articles, author bios and an active forum where you can chat with the authors and other fans. It’s the best jumping off spot for anyone interested in checking out bizarro as a whole.

MZ: Where can you be found on the Web?

A: I can be found on the web in several places. I have a MySpace page (www.myspace.com/ginaranalli), an online journal, and of course anyone can check me out and chat with me at BizarroCentral.com. I always love meeting readers, other vegans/vegetarians, and kindred spirits.