Reflections on Revolution

Hola mi gente,
I attended a coalition meeting this past Saturday and it compelled me to write to short pieces. One I posted yesterday and this one -- a reflection.

I can’t stay quiet and I abhor when conscious communities stop questioning assumptions. 

It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.
 -- Assata Shakur, An Autobiography

The following is a work in progress. Assata’s words bring to mind what I call conscious radicalism. A method of inquiry and practice that questions everything and takes nothing on face value.

It is our duty to fight for freedom…

It’s winter in America, as brother Gil Scott Heron noted. But there’s a new resistance here… 

Rather than passively accept second class status, movements for the liberation of people of color (and our white allies) are defining, resisting, and rising against white supremacy and its many tentacles that have been choking our people for centuries. Unfortunately, I might add (fuck it, I’m keeping it real), some social justice organizations have become part of those tentacles. This newer resistance, however, composed mostly of young black and brown people, is involved in the struggle to be free from subjugation, oppression, and domination. Its pursuit is the manifestation of a truly just, sustainable, and equitable society.

It is our duty to win…

The sheer weight of the task of unravelling a massive social habit of and addiction to violence and injustice cannot be underestimated. It comes with the convenient amnesia about historic transgressions of such enormity it overwhelms the mind. It proves daunting at the least, stunningly and increasingly destructive on mental, physical, material, and psycho-spiritual levels. Even as the effort is meant to liberate, its current methodology was for the most part forged within the same construct it seeks to undermine: competition at the cost of collaboration, power over equality.

We must love each other and support each other…

I am no longer surprised to the degree of chauvinism in the nonprofit sector when it comes to self-care. We work long hours with little pay. The boundaries between our personal lives and mission-related work have become blurred or have ceased to exist at all. In fact, I have observed many within the social justice field take pride in how much they can do without. I get it, this is hard work, and much of my personal mission is closely tied to my collective endeavors. I understand how easy it is to be obliterated in all the mess. But this serves no real purpose. 

Keeping it 100, this is a reflection of the oppressive forces under which we labor. We mirror the same power dynamics of the larger dominant society. We earn little, work long hours, and have even less to show after decades of doing this work. How is that justice? If this set of circumstances was being played out by corporate interests, we would be (rightfully) outraged. Yet we do it to ourselves. We adopt the same oppressive hierarchies that keep us down and then we expect change. We run our organizations and our movements just like corporations and we inflict the same harm, with just a few reaping even a decent living.

Yet I do see a change coming. I see young people seeking a different form of consensus or at least attempting to define a consensus that is truly equitable. Liberation can only come about through love and until we do away the master’s tools, we will continue to flounder. For too long our methodologies have been forged within the crucible of the dominant mindset of colonization, capitalism as religion, corporations as demigods, domination of people and planet, zero-sum mentality, rape and plunder as spoils of victory, human and natural resources taken as objects of subjugation to the very few privileged -- the one percent.

I am taken aback to how easily we fit into our internalized oppression. Even when we are conscious of how the structures we resist can manifest in our work: suppression, depression, martyrdom, and simply taking the abuse until there is no room left in our bodies to contain all that destruction. Eventually, it turns inward and, like the disease that it is, eats at us from the inside-out. Without the habit of questioning our most cherished assumptions, and the practices of self-awareness, and undoing vicarious trauma -- in other words, without love -- the degree of suffering we will unwittingly bring upon ourselves will be too much.

We have nothing to lose but our chains…

Conscious radicalism is about bringing a focus and a method of inquiry that keeps us aligned with our missions. In the final analysis, this movement isn’t about a particular legislation, incremental or revolutionary change, a particular jail closing, or even mass incarceration. This is not about subject and object, practitioner and observer. This is about liberation. A liberation that is both personal and collective. It is not about branding, or taking photos with people in power, or sidling up to the symbols of our oppression. It’s about leadership predicated on the models passed down to us by our ancestors, who have been resisting for centuries. This isn’t about seven effective habits, positive thinking, or prosperity gospel. This is about love in the service of true freedom.

We all bear the scars and wounds of this struggle. Therefore, when we bear witness to this suffering writ large, we also bear witness to the wisdom of liberation from that suffering. And we bear it together.

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.

Self Blame

Hola mi gente,
All I want for Christmas is a new J-O-B. First thing I’ll do when I get paid is go eat some big-assed crab legs.

Self-Blame

Photography: Michael Kenna, England, 1974-2007

The “healthy” person, the true individual, the self-realized soul… is the one who has transcended himself.
 -- Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

I just want to take a brief moment to bring into focus an issue I have found to be prominent in our culture. Many people have turned to different forms of self-improvement such as meditation, diet, and exercise, too) for their benefits. However, we are all going to exit this planet through something we call death. It’s a fact of life that people forget all the time. In fact, we live our lives as if death doesn’t exist.

Currently, there seems to be a notion that if we eat right, exercise, meditate, and use visualization well enough, we will live forever -- or live more comfortably at least. It is obvious enough that our health habits do make a huge difference in the length and quality of our lives, but it is important to remember that even the greatest saints left their bodies -- often from heart disease and cancer. Yet I don’t remember a single one regretting that it would have never happened if they’d meditated better, imaged or exercised more vigorously, or turned down that last cone of ice cream. We all get old and die and some of us -- even those of us who are fit and healthy -- meet death in a flash.

Still, the tendency to blame ourselves is always rearing its ugly head...

This is just plain narcissism -- a resurrection of guilt and blame. To think of illness as a form of punishment and healing as a reflection of our goodness traps us further in the cycle of suffering: the attachment to pleasure and the aversion to pain.

If we go still further and believe that the state of our bodies reflects our self-worth, we are truly doomed to suffering. The only definition of sin that makes any sense to me is this: any thought or action that strengthens the ignorance of our own intrinsic goodness. We are healed when we can grow from our suffering, when we can recast our suffering as an act of grace that leads us back to who we truly are.

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.

 

The Beyond Help Series [Pain and Suffering]

Hola! Everybody,
I’ve been keeping away from posting on the current state of politics because a part of me doesn’t want to give terribly flawed POTUS candidates any attention. I am disgusted by the corporate media’s reality show treatment of this critical moment in our history. I guess that’s it: I’m disgusted.

However, I’m sure I’ll be back at it tomorrow.

Acceptance, Pain & Suffering

Pain is the breaking of the shell of your understanding.
-- Kahlil Gibran

Early on when I first began picking up the pieces of my life, I came upon the phrase suffering is optional. Like most new things, I didn’t understand it at first, but a friend instructed me just to keep at it with an open mind and I would eventually understand.

Today, I make a distinction between pain and suffering. Because of the way we use language, whenever we come face to face with a problem, our first impulse is to fix them. We try to get out of the quicksand. As an evolutionary adaptation and in our external world, this problem-solving approach is effective most of the time. Being able to figure out how to get out of undesirable events, such as being preyed upon, getting eaten, or natural catastrophes, is essential in securing our place as a species.

However, it is also unfortunate that we try to use the same “fix it” mentality when it comes to understanding or coming to terms with our inner world. When we encounter painful psychic content within ourselves, we often resort to what we always do: fix it up and sort it out so we can get rid of it. The truth of the matter is that our inner lives are not like our external world. For one thing, humans live in the context of a history, and time moves only in one direction, not two. Psychological pain has a history and, at least in some respects, the heart of the matter doesn’t entail getting rid of something. It is more a matter of how we deal with it and evolve.

Acceptance as I use it here is based on the perspective that, as a rule, trying to get rid of your pain only makes it worse, entangles you further in it, and eventually makes it more traumatic. This is best illustrated by what I call emotional quicksand: how meeting the suction force of quicksand with tension only makes you more. Our psychological lives are a lot like that. When you’re engaged in fighting for your life, living your life -- thriving -- is often pushed aside. 

The alternative -- a little dangerous to say because at this point it can be misunderstood -- is to accept pain. Acceptance, in the context that I use it here, is not the same as self-defeat; neither is it tolerating and putting up with your pain. It is very different from that. In fact, that type of negative acceptance is a far cry from the vibrant form of acceptance of the moment that can be liberating.

For now, try to think of throwing away the impulse to meet power with power, tension with more tension. Pain is an inescapable fact of life. It happens. You get up early in the morning, and you bang your toe on something. Pain! However, I define suffering differently. I see suffering as pain mixed with tension. Pain can be accepted and even used to transform our suffering. However, if we’re adding tension to pain, then we’re suffering. We have what’s there (pain) and then we have what we bring to the table. Add tension to pain and you have deep suffering. Here it is as a formula:

pain +tension = suffering

Most of us haven’t had much training in the active form of acceptance that I attempting to illustrate here. I want to ask you to keep an open mind and thank your mind for whatever it says this term means, but don’t try to pigeonhole it right now. This form of acceptance is difficult to describe, and learning to be willing to have and live your own experience is something I will focus on a little in future posts. In the meantime, be patient and open -- as well as a little skeptical -- about what your mind might be guessing what I mean right now.

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