Sunday Sermon [Species Extinction]

Hola Everybody,
I’m simply amazed, for lack of a better word, at the bitterness coming from Hillary Clinton supporters these days. People have lost their minds.

Extinction Spasm

The new world is not only possible, she is on her way. When I am quiet I can hear her breathing.
 -- Arundhati Roy

As I was reflecting along with some friends about the spectacular failure of the Hillary campaign, and the Democratic inability to take responsibility for that failure, I have come away with the resolve to never ever vote for a Democrat (not that I ever did). I mean, they lost to a clown -- the very person they wanted as a candidate. But, you know: the Russians did it! Instead of taking leadership on the racist practice of crosschecking, the HillBillies have reduced themselves to trolls. SMDH

Almost none of my friends are on the internet and they think the energy I put into the “blogging thing” could be better put to use actually writing. Well, blogging helps me write. If I didn’t blog, I probably wouldn’t write. I am lazy.

Anyway, as I was laughing about the kind of person who would go to the extreme of becoming verbally abusive on account of something as irrelevant as a post on the moral cowardice of neoliberal Democrats, I thought about the very real crisis we’re all facing as a species. We may very well be the first species to make ourselves extinct. And it’s this type of thinking -- this narcissistic wish fulfillment of doing harm to others -- that is at the crux of our problem.

Anthropogenic global warming (catastrophic environmental degradation caused by human activity) is a fact and it has some of us thinking. Recently, I read an article stating that basic human needs are destroying our planet much more quickly than previously thought. The article cited a four-yearmultinational study, “The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment,” which found that humans “have ruined approximately 60 percent of the earth’s ecological systems to meet our demands for food, fresh water, timber, and fuel.”

Research shows that we’re in the middle of the sixth largest species die-off in biological history. What naturalists call an “extinction spasm,” which to me evokes an image of the earth purging itself of unhealthy organisms.

It appears that we do have something to fear and it is us.

I would ask why, but I think I already know. We can’t handle our technological advancements. It’s as if evolution has given a child a loaded gun and we’re playing with it with the safety off.

When I reflect on the mindset of the idolization of the individual, I am reminded of the paradox of the egomaniac with low self-esteem. It’s how I have heard the addictive personality described, but I am confronted with this narcissistic behavior too often, and I have to wonder if it doesn’t apply to our society as a whole. The issue at hand today, my brothers and sisters, is that we have to do something. If crisis is a measure of opportunity, then opportunity abounds.

Many of my friends were moved by the last election to decide to become more politically active, through dialog or local politics, and that’s where we all have to start. Each of us has our own temperament, but we engage we must. Perhaps your way is to picket an oil company. Others may fight to save an endangered coral reef. Maybe part of the challenge is bringing back a sense of awe and reverence for everyday life. So you might want to engage in some nature-loving pagan ritual. Go ahead, hug a tree, or bow down and kiss the earth.

We race around in these little boxes of steel, chasing after instant gratification and in the process we’ve forgotten our own humanity.

Stop... look... listen... breathe.

I have one suggestion that I think will help the most and you can begin to implement right now. Here in NYC, some companies give away tiny squares that unfold to a large map of the NYC subway system. It’s the size of a credit card and not much thicker. What we need in order to save ourselves is keep a bigger perspective in our pocket, just like the NYC subway map. A big perspective that you can unfold in your head at a moment’s notice. Too often, I see comments in my social media streams and from people in the real world that betray a singularly selfish perspective. We seem to have lost the ability to understand things from a larger perspective. “Don’t raise the minimum wage!” some of us screech, resenting the perception that as small business owners, or higher-paid workers some are not getting any “handouts” (they do). But if no one can afford your products, who would buy your services/ products?

We seem to want to demonize those we see as different, forgetting that in denying a working poor person the right to an honest (living) wage for an honest day’s work, we erode our own rights. Too many are willing to allow tens of thousands die simply because we want to cling to the concept of health care as a privilege rather than a basic human right. We decry taxes that could make our schools better, but are blind to the taxes that funded the land-mine some child in some far-off land just step on... 

This very moment... and the next...

Think! Or rather, think differently. Think with the larger perspective. If we take consideration from the advantage of a more panoramic perspective, we quickly learn that denying others their rights erodes ours. And the answers are not the problem. It is the will, or lack of, that will doom us. Just think that if we all did something as seemingly insignificant as stop using plastic bags, it would have an immediate and tremendous impact.

We need to hold a big perspective to remind us that nature is one tough bitch, and life has so far survived the collision of continents, mountain ranges erupting in volcanoes, murderously cold ice ages, the plague, your ex mother-in-law, and even the parade of neoliberals who have abdicated their role as leaders even as we vote for them (well, the jury still out on that last one).

The Big Picture also carries your inner understanding that you are part of it all, and so are they (<--insert a="" along="" anyone="" blacks="" describe="" didn="" enemies.="" etc.="" father="" friendly="" get="" great="" had="" he="" hold="" immigrants="" men="" my="" people="" phrase="" resentment="" span="" t="" to="" towards:="" used="" whites="" with="" women="" you="">

This is a species-wide problem. We’re living the curse of “interesting times” with plentiful opportunity and need to act wisely and with compassion. If your Big Picture doesn’t include a Bigger Love then we’re doomed for sure.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization… 

Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it, please consider helping me out by sharing it, liking me on Facebook, following me on Twitter, or even throwing me some money on GoFundMe HERE or via PayPal HERE so I can keep calling it like I see it.

Sunday Sermon [The Global Trance]

Hola Everybody,
Yes, I am lending whatever skills I have and my body to the protests that arisen as a result of the election of trump. But I hope we’re smart this time and that we find a way to sustain the uprisings. No, appointing a semi-progressive to a key spot in the corporate-run Democratic Party machine will not effect the kind of change we desperately need. 

We the people need a people’s party. We need to wake up.

Awakening from the Trance

The planetary crisis we’re facing is an awakening signal. If we don’t shift our consciousness... we can destroy ourselves.
-- Barbara Marx Hubbard

I am a radical, but I understand that the only revolution that’s going to make a real difference is one that transforms us into human beings more capable of intelligent responses to the many crises we face.

Though we have confronted major problems throughout our shared history, the challenges we face today are unique in one important aspect -- they now affect the entire globe as a whole system. Never before has humanity been on the cusp of wiping out the earth’s biosphere and crippling its ecological foundations for countless generations to come. Never before have we been faced with the very real prospect of being the first species to cause its own extinction. Never before has the entire human family been called to work together to build a sustainable and meaningful future. Never before have so many been called to make sweeping changes in so little time.

Monarchs, dictators, oligarchs, or even elected governments no longer control the world today. We live in a world controlled by multinational corporations. Most of us work for them, we eat and drink their products, we are exposed to their pervasive assault on our senses via their advertising campaigns, and we live in an abusive relationship with a living entity -- this planet -- that provides the raw materials for endless corporate “production” and the storage for their endless garbage. Corporations have become more powerful than the governments that are supposed to regulate them, and in fact, they pay for the process by which a government can afford to be elected.

Throughout the world, McDonalds, Coca Cola, Nike, and corporate marketing are invading local cultures. The danger of this encroaching corporate presence lies in its basic motivation. Corporations are legal fictions primarily responsible to their shareholders. Profitability has more value than the health or well-being of our children, for example. Creating and satisfying short-term goals and profits are more important than environmental sustainability or social justice.

In this way, the gifts of the earth are all being patented and made into commercial by-products.

In the past oppressive regimes such as the British in India or Nazi Germany exploited a population that were eventually rejected by revolution or the intervention of external forces. The power of commercial interests, however, is more insidious. It is a power similar to the relationship between a drug pusher and an addict, a power that runs on the addictions of a population, without necessarily serving its well-being. This is the collective trance of a consumer society and the global economy it creates. It works only because our collective feeling of lack. It thrives on the inner sense that something is missing, that there is something wrong with us and our lives. 

It is quite simple: you are compelled to believe that you need to buy their product. Drink this soda, this machine or pill will make you less fat, this car, this house, this grill; fly to this great place for a vacation and you will feel better. Look at all the happy people smiling in this photo here. They feel better. See?

The global economy as we know it would not work with a contented or actualized population. You would have a hard time selling endless plastic gizmos to people who feel connected to themselves, to their environment, and who feel whole, who feel generous and grateful, and who know they have enough. This trance of lack recreates itself endlessly; it never reaches a level of contentment. You want more, and more, and more... and it does not bode well for our future. We live in this trance from birth to death.

The fact is it will only take a very small percentage of the world’s population to wake up for there to be a global awakening. This isn’t some pie-in-the-sky optimism. There is evidence that one man’s stand against gang violence, for example, was directly responsible for the decrease of overall violent crime in New York City. The more people raise their consciousness and wake up, the more those people will be affected by a collective awakening. And the more they are open to that, the more it will facilitate their own awakening, and that of others. So it becomes a positive feedback loop. It is like a snowball gaining momentum as it rolls down a hill.

If you awaken from the trance, then someone you know will resonate with your awakening. They in turn will affect others, and that’s how real change happens. It’s always been like that and it is the only thing that will save us.

So if you awaken to the reality that society has become a runaway train rumbling on at breakneck speed. The passengers sleeping or drunkenly unaware of the impending disaster, be sure to wake the person next to you. Together we will avert disaster. 

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…

Making Hope Possible

Hola mi gente,
This is for the energy freaks who may not adequately appreciate that attention to all of life, and not just the positive, is essential in envisioning and creating a better world.

Please consider making a donation to my campaign HERE. Alternatively, you can use PayPal, where you can also set up a monthly donation, HERE. 

Your generosity will support my writing and advocacy as well as my desire to amplify the voices of those who don’t get heard, but are the ones most directly impacted by the compromises we in the advocacy world make on a daily basis. In fact, id there is a heaven, the first words you might here are, "Good thing you gave to Eddie when you did, otherwise your ass would be out." LOL

Making Hope Possible

Los Indignados march in Spain. The banner reads "It's not a crisis, it is the system."

To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.
 -- Raymond Williams

The above quote appears in all my email signatures and serves as a reminder for me… 

So! Some of you may ask, “Who are you to ask for a donation? What have you done and are doing?” Simply put, I am a dedicated activist, writer, and advocate who for the past 20-plus years has fought for human rights at a time in our shared history that demands that the human species achieve some fairly unprecedented evolutionary advances. 

I don’t want to run a long laundry list of the world’s problems, but I think it’s safe to say that humankind now faces some fundamental and unprecedented challenges. These include questions about our modern forms of social organization and governance, and questions about our planet-destroying system of maximum production and consumption.

The answers to these very important questions are my challenge.

The shadow looming over us all, of course, is climate change global warming caused by human activity -- a technological incubus that has been haunting us for more than a generation even as our so-called leaders look the other way. That is surely because to confront the sources of global warming and its consequence, climate change, is to confront the very foundations of capitalism itself. The very real possibility that we are about to unleash an ecological disaster that will make all extinct is simply the most urgent of a long cascade of other environmental crises now underway -- the massive species extinctions, dying coral reefs, depleted groundwater, lead zones in the ghettoes, and so on. Our impact on the planet’s ecosystem is so pervasive that it now qualifies as a separate geological era, the Anthropocene.

It is customary to speak about problems such as “the environment” and “economic inequality” as if they were something out there as abstract policy issues somehow separate from us. But in fact these problems are rooted deeply inside of us -- in how we relate to our world, how we relate to each other, and how we have structured our institutions. We are still under the Cartesian delusion that our bodies and minds are separate, and by extension that humanity is different from nature. This lets us maintain the dangerous denial that we can continue to recklessly pillage the biosphere, particularly if there’s money to be made.

So why do I bring up these troubling thoughts? 

I think we are also at a time and place in which we have rare opportunity to plant a seed for creating a society based on compassionate logic and ethic -- and to make coalitions with others who are searching for a new way to live. The same technological advances that threaten our existence on the one hand, can serve to bring us together to envision and create the kind of world we want to live in on the other. It can start different types of conversations, movements, and projects. The ripple effects of these efforts could go far beyond the local to the global. In fact, we have seen such nascent movements appear. There are the global occupy movements here in the States and Los Indignados in Spain, for example. There were the Arab Uprisings. And before that, there was the anti-nuclear movement, and the Zapatistias in Chiapas, and on and on… 

While we stand at the precipice of extinction, we’re also at the start of evolutionary quantum leap the likes that we have never seen before. As with every evolutionary leap, there are several potential outcomes -- death and life being the two main ones.

But before I on to why I have these wild visions, let me share some of my experiences on the frontlines of activism. It might help explain why I see so much potential. 

I “re-awakened” during the early 1990s, and became depressed at the sorry state of the U.S. political culture -- and the even sorrier state of progressive activism. The neoliberal Trojan horse, Bill Clinton, was the one who gave us telecom deregulation that resulted in massive media consolidation, the loosening of securities and banking laws that culminated in 2008 financial crisis, and so-called welfare reform has decimated poor people and the most vulnerable in our society. At the same time, nonprofits have become so professionalized and locked into their funding base, they don’t dare to experiment or innovate lest it marginalize them politically or, worse, be cut off the nonprofit-industrial teat (more on this in a post to come soon).

I came to realize that liberalism, at least as co-opted by the U.S. two-party system, was not going to produce the kinds of changes our society really needs. It became clear that conventional public policy and law have been taken hostage by the two major political parties, which themselves are both under the thrall of business elites. It is an incestuous alliance of the two great forms of power in our country, which systematically seek to diminish both democracy and the power of the people.

I am not saying that we simply walk away from politics, policy, and law. These institutions remain vital arenas of engagement. But, if we are honest with ourselves, we would admit that our politics today is too structurally compromised to produce much significant change. The game is rigged and most of us know this. We live in a runaway society -- an oligarchy of crony capitalism, poorly performing government institutions, declining democratic participation, and slow-motion ecological collapse.

But if the 1990s created despair in me, I also discovered the great, transformative potential of the power of the people -- the commons -- which has been my passion for more than twenty years. One way to understand the commons is as everything that we inherit or create together, which we must pass on, undiminished, to future generations. The commons could be understood as a social system for managing shared wealth, with an emphasis on self-governance, fairness and sustainability. The commons is also a worldview and ethic that is ancient as the human race but as new as the Internet. 

There were two other things going on in the 1990s that pushed me out of the liberal tradition and into the grassroots. The first was the emergence of the World Wide Web in 1994 as a popular medium. As I began to write for the web (first in Usenet newsgroups then as a blogger), it gradually became clear to me that parts of cyberspace is a realm in which neither the state nor the market is the driving force. Here, social cooperation is the norm and hugely productive without markets or formal law. I learned to see that the Internet is really a massive hosting platform, a new fantastically adaptive infrastructure that is generative because it lets people self-organize their own resources.

When blogs, wikis, and social networks began to proliferate in the early 2000s, it was clear that something very new and different had arrived: a more democratic, less hierarchical way to organize and to challenge the mainstream narrative. This phenomenon simply cannot be explained by mainstream economics and its model of human beings as selfish, rational, utility-maximizing materialists.

The second thing that I encountered since then was the unlikely rise of an eclectic social movement based on the principles of common interests. It has had several notable international social movements, and it has many active hubs of strategic action. It is what makes hope a reality.

Which brings me back to the great British critic, Raymond Williams, who put it so well: “To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.” That is the real challenge that we face, to overcome cynicism and hopelessness, and to bring about the many serious alternatives awaiting our creativity.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery for civilization…