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… 

Legacies: Creating the World we Want

Hola mi Gente,

The two things that bother me the most about Hillary Clinton’s campaign is that, first, it’s a campaign of diminished expectations and, secondly and more importantly, that the left has bought into that cynicism wholeheartedly. Her campaign motto should be, No we can’t! I can’t -- I refuse -- to respect that.  I have come to see neoliberals like Hillary Clinton is much the way that Martin Luther King eventually came to see white moderates:

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice… Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

-- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, Letter from Birmingham Jail, April 1963

* * *

Organizing is getting the masses off their asses.

-- Saul Alinsky

It’s not much, it’s a small patch – a lot – in the middle of a Brooklyn block. The lot is teeming with children on a bright NYC day and there are flowers, and a playground. There’s even a wooden stage and on some evenings, you can come to this lot and watch plays, or listen to music. Towards the back of the lot, there’s a patch devoted to growing vegetables, and Don Americo, an aged and gentle man tends to his “children,” this year’s crop of corn and tomatoes. There’s talk of building a casita, so that the people of the neighborhood can use the lot during cold winter months.

To step into this little green oasis in the middle of the stark urban decay that surrounded it, is to be transformed. And I smile because it wasn’t always like this… 

As I sit down on one of the benches, I reflect back to several years before when this lot was a rat-infested abandoned lot where crack addicts and sex workers took care of business under the cover of overgrown weeds. I never imagined it at the time, that it could become something like this – a safe place for children and the people of the neighborhood. 

Several years before, I took a job as an organizer for a national organization. The pay was miserable, the hours long, and it was a thankless job, but I took it because I hadn’t been able to work steadily for almost two years. My past was serving as an obstacle to gainful employment. I had to quit graduate school and a long-term relationship had dissolved. It seemed as if everything I had worked for was imploding. So I took this job as an organizer and they put me in one of the neighborhoods I was raised in -- Bushwick, in Brooklyn.

Organizing is a very difficult job under any circumstances, but on top of trying to convince a largely disaffected population to get involved, I also had to convince them to pay me for the opportunity to do it. The organization I worked for relied on membership dues and collecting those dues was a large part of my job. Now, I have a lot of experience in separating people from their money and in the beginning, I was getting members left and right. Then, one day, a woman gave me five of the last ten dollars she had because she believed in what I was saying. After that, I said fuck the membership dues.

By then, I had become disillusioned with the organization and with the people I was trying to organize. People didn’t care and nothing was being done. I had returned to Bushwick hoping to make a difference, but the neighborhood had changed tremendously since I had last set foot there and, well, shit wasn’t working.

One day I walked by this empty lot and decided that I would concentrate on that. I really didn’t have a plan, but somehow that lot called to me. I began by knocking on each and every door on the block. My pitch was simple: I would ask people how they felt about the lot, what they would do with it if they had the power to change it, and then tell them that there was a group composed of their neighbors working to make such changes -- basic organizing 101 type-shit.

I knocked on every door on that block and I got, like, maybe five people who were interested. One of them was a girlfriend from when I attended Bushwick High School, who had become a teacher. She would become my champion. She was the true organizer, fast on her feet, full of energy, and really aggressive. Three were church people who wanted to make their neighborhood safer. Lastly, there was Doña Maria, who would become my leader, my muscle. Doña Maria could browbeat anyone into submission. She was the Universal Mother, who knew everybody’s business, and joined my group because she was watching me walk up and down the block, and demanded to know what the fuck I was up to. 

The lot was really Doña Maria’s idea. She took me the front of the lot and told me that if I wanted to do something, do something about that fuckin’ lot. And that’s how it started. Enid printed up flyers, started a database of members, and was in charge of recruiting. Doña Maria and her daughters made sure people on the block joined, and the church people convinced their pastors/ ministers/ priests to let me address their respective congregations. My personal story is pretty much a variation on a redemption song and I would use that as part of my orientation. Soon, my ragtag group of women had managed to create a stir on the block, people were getting interested, but the majority was still laying back, checking out to see if this was the real thing.

When people -- strangers really -- first get together they are merely a crowd. They are just a group of people thrown together by economic or political forces. That crowd can eventually become a group – an informal network of people somehow connected through these same circumstances. Eventually, that group can become a force once they get to know one another and learn of each other’s strengths and weaknesses. My crowd had become a group very quickly and was now evolving into a force to be reckoned with and I needed to help them realize their power. I noticed a street lamp wasn’t working, so I made that our first campaign. My group did the research, learned who to petition and they got the streetlamp fixed. Now, maybe to you it doesn’t sound like a lot, but for my people, it was a big thing. They had effected change. They had tasted their power and now were thirsty for more.

The next step was to get the city to clean the lot. This is where lives were changed. It was decided we hold a protest and during the protest, a police officer pushed one of the church ladies. Now this particular individual was as far removed from me, politically speaking, as could be. She probably was very conservative, socially speaking. But that officer unwittingly created my fiercest, most radical member by his action. She was outraged that she was treated that way. 

One step at a time, that group was successful in taking over that empty lot and creating a community garden. That garden has the seal of the New York City Parks Department and it can never be taken away. That community garden transformed that block, driving away the drug dealers and the sex trade. I was fired from my job for not collecting membership dues and by that time, the group had grown into over a 100 members -- and growing. Neighboring blocks saw what was happening on our block and had become interested. When I told them I could no longer work with them, they pooled all their money, they held a block party and collected money, and they offered it to me.

Of course, I refused the money. I told them to use it for the community garden to plant something for me. Doña Maria, always the hard ass, told me that she always knew I would leave them. But her face had a shadow if a smile, which is probably the greatest compliment you could get from that woman. I had also been offered another job as a counselor, so staying on officially was not realistic. But they didn’t need me. They had become a force of their own. When I left, the group was strong and in reality, I wasn’t leading jack. They were leading and teaching me. It was time for me to move on anyway.

A year later, they created the most beautiful garden. I love that garden. They were also successful in taking over an abandoned property and developing affordable housing.

Did it change the world? Did Bushwick change? Did it make that much of a difference? I don’t know. One day I asked Doña Maria, who has now become an organizer herself – I asked her, “Why do all this if it isn’t going to make a difference?” Her answer is what drives me; it’s what gives my life meaning. She told me that it didn’t matter if you effected change. She told me she would fight even if she knew her struggle would be useless. “I fight because I’m not going to let these motherfuckers get the last word. That’s why I fight,” she told me.

Listening to Doña Maria that day, I was reminded of the following words, spoken by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr toward the end of his life, that still hold power for me:

There is nothing wrong with power if power is used correctly. You see, what happened is that some of our philosophers got off base. And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites, polar opposites, so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and power with a denial of love.

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

The Other Occupation

¡Hola! Everybody…
Haven’t been writing as much lately mostly because I no longer have a laptop and I’m spending most of my free time at #OccupationWallStreet. There’s so much I want to share, but things are happening so quickly, it’s hard to keep up.

* * *

-=[ The Two Occupations ]=-

Thinking is an action; critical thinking is a subversive action.

The other night, I happened to look over and saw a sea of sleeping blankets and I smiled because it was the section where parents, representing the heartland of America, did a "sleep over" as a show of solidarity with the Occupation of wall Street. I smiled as parents held their children (some were infants!), who sat through a long general assembly because, as one parent told me, "I want my child to know what true democracy looks like." What an inspiration and how different from the stereotype the media uses to frame the occupation protests now taking place in over 900 cities all over the world.

And that's how it is here at the NYC site at "Liberty Square." Not all is as it seems...

Recently, during one of the working group meetings I belong to, someone joked about “the other occupation” (I literally spent all of my Saturday at occupation-related “working groups”). We all laughed because this is the side of #OccupyWallStreet almost no one reports on or knows about.

It’s not that it’s kept secret. #OccupyWallStreet has at least 50-60 different working groups all addressing a multitude of issues ranging from on-site logistics (medical, sanitation, comfort, media) to various political issues (People of color working group, Politics and Electoral Reform), to internal organization (Structure, Facilitation).

All these take place near the #OccupyWallStreet and it’s where all that happens here is made possible. Most people and the media focus on the General assembly or going to the Liberty Square (Zuccotti Park) site to get a feel for the occupation, but it’s the working groups where the real action is at. At least it is for me.

There are all kinds of trainings offered by experienced activists who have been part of struggles all over the world. For example, this past Saturday I was sitting next to a gentleman who was one of the organizers/ protestors at Tiananmen Square. At a later meeting, I was able to exchange ideas with/ learn from two women who had just come from Palestine and Greece. They were part of the flotilla that was “captured” and detained, accused of running arms (the charge was bogus and it backfired because the activists had actually invited media to inspect the boat before the charges were hurled). Another had a special affinity for me, because she had done work around the bombing of the Puerto Rican island of Vieques!

From the gentleman from Tiananmen Square, I learned about ways to better streamline meetings and setting structure and accountability. The two activists just back from Greece held a day-long meeting for a “training the trainers” seminar (unfortunately, I wasn’t able to attend). The Structure working group I joined is looking at organizational models borrowed from successful global movements such as the Zapatistas, the anti-nuclear movement, and occupations occurring in Athens and Rome. Today there’s a day-long conversation on “Re-envisioning Money” (here) and a training by the working group, Direct Action (here).

In short, what you might perceive as random or even chaotic is actually a very well organized, consciously and intelligently planned movement. This past Saturday, a reporter from the NY Times left in a huff because we took a group consensus asked that he not tape our meeting. Having been burned by a media that is more interested in getting a handle on the movement in order to frame it from a perspective unable to grasp a grassroots consciousness, many of us are cautious in allowing such access. This has been one of the strokes of genius about our movement because the media cannot find a way to repackage our message, which is not defined by a list of demands, a set of goals, or any single issue. I speak for myself when I say the following, but I believe this is true: the “occupations” now taking place all over the world are really about a re-conceptualization of the kind of world we desire. We are forcing the social discourse to consider alternatives that have not been entertained; we are forcing society to grapple questions that haven’t been asked; we are helping create a new language that can engage a narrative that can see the possibility and engage the human potential for a society that is more just, more empathic, informed by the fact that we -- all of us -- are interconnected in ways we have ignored.

and the beauty of all this is that it’s all taking place in a purely transparent process, without the control of money or of the old dinosaurs that must surely realize their way has failed and failed miserably.

Mark my words, years from now, people will ask, “What were you doing when the #OccupyWallStreet movement first took hold.” what will you say?

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

Enemies of the Open Society

¡Hola! Everybody...
Today, some idiots from the right wing are actually saying that the racial epithets used at tea party rallies proves racism is dead . One of these goobers is Bill Bennett, the “morals” crusader-cum-obsessive gambler once submitted that you could aborted every black baby and the crime rate would go down. This makes sense to some people, BTW. I am not making this up.

* * *

-=[ The Open Society and its Enemies ]=-

A demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.

-- H.L. Mencken

The following rambles, but it makes a point (I think)...

Not too long ago, I walked by a “community garden” in one of Brooklyn’s less affluent neighborhood. It’s a garden full of beautiful plants and even tomatoes and some corn growing by one corner. You can hear the laughter of children as they play on the swings and the little carousel, or act out on the makeshift stage. Mothers with newborn children in their carriages stroll through... and I was reminded that when I first saw that small plot of land, it’s was an empty lot full if refuse, overrun by tall weeds, and the working space of a few local prostitutes.

I once knocked on almost all the doors of that run down city block (and several adjoining blocks), asking people about the rat-infested, dirty, dangerous empty lot. I listened to the countless stories of babies being bitten by the infestation of rats caused by the empty lot. How crack heads would gather there, and the countless times children were exposed to the open-air sex trade.

After listening, I asked each person who opened his or her door to me one question, “If you had the power, what would you do to fix that empty lot?”

I heard many solutions, very innovative -- from building affordable housing to making it into a park, etc. I would invite everyone I engaged to join a “group of concerned neighbors” who were doing something to change that lot and everything it represented.

Actually, I really didn’t have a group; it was part of my strategy.

Eventually, I would help bring together a small group of community residents organized around that empty lot. At first it was small -- maybe 7-9 people. One day, I was able to convince two mothers. You know the type if you were raised in any kind of community. These were the archetypal “universal mother” -- everyone’s mother. Leaders among their neighbors who nobody fucked with. With their help and the help of the rest of my rag-tag group of leaders, we were able to grow that community group to over 100 members. Many of those members were far from radical. Many were very conservative, in fact. Some were anti-choice devout churchgoers, others were more progressive. In short, these were working stiffs tired of that lot and everything it represented.

When I got enough people, I invited my group to attend a rally. During that rally, police needlessly manhandled a few of the church ladies. This changed everything! The church ladies didn’t understand why they were treated disrespectfully. After all, they were working people, they paid taxes, and followed rules, were law-abiding citizens!

They got the fever...

Eventually, this group (still in existence), took over that empty lot, and through a series of actions and negotiations, they made the city clean it and eventually it was given “park” status, meaning it was officially under the direction of the City’s Park Dept. They didn’t stop there. They took over several area abandoned buildings, made the city take over them and utilizing state/ city programs (sadly done away with as soon as Giuliani took over) created permanent affordable housing. That block was transformed, as well as some of the surrounding blocks, and while the neighborhood isn’t Park Avenue, it’s a far cry from what it used to be. Today, the Yuppies are taking over in droves as gentrification creeps up from the now unaffordable Williamsburg.

This post isn’t about me, so please, don’t emphasize that part. This post is about what it means to be a participant in the democratic process. I worked as a community organizer for a very short time. Too short. I left mostly because of philosophical differences with the organization. Still, that organization did a lot to help people like those hard-working church ladies of my group. They also did a lot to help millions vote.

Today, that organization doesn’t exist. It doesn’t exist because the right-wing focused their cross hairs on the group and took it down. They took tapes and edited them to make it look as if the workers of that organization were agreeing to agree to traffic in prostitution when in fact, they were doing the exact opposite (click here to view an exposé of this cowardice).

That organization was called ACORN and today it doesn’t exist because those who fear and loathe the democratic process wanted to take it down. They succeeded and today we’re less of a nation because of it.

Eddie