(no subject)

it's been pointed out to me that my comments about rednecks hillbillies and their racist, homophobic tendancies, and my prefering like-minded folk to teach my kids the things i can't, is actually me being racist.

thoughts?

from mcmillan

"we have to accept that there is really only one way to stop the global industrial economy from killing the planet, and that is to stop the global industrial economy."

this is such a simple concept to grasp, but we live in a world based on the perpetuation of the global industrial economy (it's the only way the rich can stay rich), so it's a concept we are brutally disallowed from knowing. this essay is long, but it's fantastic. please read!:


At War
Stephanie McMillan
2007

How is it possible that humans have developed an economic and social system that ends up destroying our entire planet? It’s unthinkable, breathtakingly senseless that we continue to live in a way that is killing ourselves, our home, everyone we love, all the countless wondrous, miraculous plant, animal and other beings around us and in distant lands.

We’re told to blame ourselves for our greed and stupidity, but how much choice do we have as individuals? You and I didn’t build this system. We’re integrated into it from birth, generation after generation. We aren’t given the option of not participating as it destroys and devours, as the clock ticks off each moment closer to the end. The machines keep running, the money keeps flowing, we toil on at our jobs, as factories discharge goods for our consumption.

We know what’s happening. Most of us feel helpless, so we try not to think about it. Others wake in the middle of the night in terror. The few trying to sound an alarm are largely ignored. The saddest thing is that it’s too late to prevent catastrophe. We are, today, in the midst of environmental collapse. It’s been underway, gaining momentum, for longer than we’d like to admit, and now we’re terminal. The world is heating up by the minute, every day hundreds of plant and animal species disappear forever, and still we don’t stop. The economy, wired for ever-increasing growth, can’t stop until everything is dead.

The global economy is a machine with one objective: to extract wealth from the earth and the labor of the poor, convert it to money, and transfer it to the hands of the rich. No sane person wants to waste her or his life working for others’ gain, so the architects and stewards of industrial capitalism continuously implement and refine ways to force our compliance, to embed its hooks into us. It seizes control of every part of our existence until we are utterly dependent on it. No longer can we survive without the system’s food, its drugs, its cities and infrastructure, its jobs, its fuel. It applies coercion through its ideas and distractions. It’s taken over our very emotions and sense of who we are.

If we attempt to escape, to live independently or differently, the system has tools of enforcement at the ready: its police, its armed forces, its detention camps, its laws. Withholding or withdrawing our participation is not an option. We see what happens to those who decide not to pay taxes, and to indigenous people who attempt to continue living their old ways in wild lands.

But this system is murdering the world. Every person of every species, every turtle and giraffe and albatross and orchid and spider and human, is in immediate danger. It’s beyond suicide; it’s omnicide, the most colossal crime imaginable. And we’re out of time.

We face a painful choice. We can die, taking every living creature with us and turning our beautiful unique planet into dust and bones. Or we can seize our last, rapidly shrinking chance to live. It’s a long shot, but perhaps if we stop the destruction now, we can save some of what’s left, and then assist the planet in healing so it can once again support vigorous, healthy, diverse life.

***

We are at war, whether we want to be or not, whether we acknowledge it or not. If we’re not to be slaughtered, we need to identify our enemy and fight it (hint: it’s not any particular country or religion, and it’s not “terror”).

The global industrial economy is waging a brutal war on the planet and on us, for money. It dumps poison into rivers and plastic into oceans, sprays chemicals on leaves and soil, violates the genetic integrity of our food, forces us to pay for shelter and to labor for the profit of the rich. Every time we receive a paycheck or are denied one, every time we turn on the television, every time we eat a factory-farmed carrot or cow, every time a kid goes to school to learn obedience and the colonizer’s history, we are being attacked.

***

We don’t know what trauma caused humans to seek security through control and possession, to turn from sustainable hunting and gathering to domesticating wild animals and plants. This regrettable shift led to a cascade of disasters: surplus wealth, agriculture and private ownership of land, production for exchange, division of labor, patriarchal families, inheritance, monetary systems, competition, towns and cities, class divisions, profit and poverty, international trade, police states, wars of conquest, the accelerated industrial conversion of the entire living world into dead commodities.

The sick drive to dominate everything has been consistently served, protected and defended by every institution in every exploitative economic system in the history of human civilization, from slavery through feudalism and on into capitalism and global imperialism. Today the “right” to accumulate wealth is held so sacred that it’s considered suspect to even question it. It’s more important than freedom, happiness, or life itself. It justifies crushing anyone or anything that gets in its way. Every aspect of modern society has been fashioned to facilitate it.

Those who own and run the system and benefit (temporarily) from it are not going to be very happy if we try to stop it, and they’ll fight like hell not to let that happen. They won’t listen to reason. They won’t stop no matter whom we vote for. They won’t stop if we ask politely, or if we ask firmly, or if we yell and scream. They won’t allow us to start a better system while theirs withers away. Demands, prayers and pleading won’t move them.

Even if those in power did change heart and become the nicest people in the world, they can’t halt the mechanism of constant expansion. If they try, they’ll be instantly replaced with more responsible custodians of capital. The system operates automatically and inexorably. It can’t stop and it can’t be reformed. It will consume everything.

Those in power will do anything, commit any atrocity, to keep the economy growing. They have to. It’s their job, and they believe they are fighting for their lives too. They’ll not hesitate to meet any attempt to stop them with a ferocity that can hardly be imagined, with torture and mass detentions, with war upon war, using every terrible tactic and weapon they can lay their hands on. They will claim they’re doing it for us, for freedom.

This is what the world is up against. This is what many people already contend with, and it’s what you and I must confront. We have to be strong. We have to resist. We need to destroy what is killing us. We must fight this war and we must win.

***

Politicians love to say (and business leaders love to hear) that sacrifice doesn’t sell. No one likes it, so we have to dance around it and pretend other things are going to work. To keep their careers and their economy going, they sell “solutions.” If we just recycle and use energy-efficient appliances. If we just buy green. If we buy organic. They come up with schemes for alternative energy, for conservation, for cutting carbon emissions by whatever percent by whatever year. They desperately want us to believe we can save the planet through our personal consumption habits, without putting a stop to industrial production. They repeatedly assure us that we need not suffer inconvenience, that our precious lifestyles will be preserved, are worth preserving, and are not negotiable anyway.

They are lying.

As the illusions fall away, we have to accept that there is really only one way to stop the global industrial economy from killing the planet, and that is to stop the global industrial economy.

At the individual level, it’s going to suck. It’s going take enormous sacrifice. As the economy is dismantled, we will suffer. A lot. For most of us it will feel like personal failure, an inability to earn a living and buy what we need. It’ll go way beyond discomfort, beyond giving up our fun gadgets and not going out to restaurants. As the economy crumbles, we’ll lose our jobs and our homes, we’ll go hungry and get caught up in riots, lose track of loved ones or watch them die, do things and eat things we’d never have imagined.

But the other choice is even worse.

The economy is breaking down anyway, with or without our help. Unfortunately it’s not happening fast enough to save our world. We can’t wait for the mortgage crisis and the falling dollar and the rising energy prices and the coming recession to do our work for us. Whatever we do or don’t do, the economy will collapse and we will face hardships. The choice we have is to deal with it now, while we still have a world to save, or passively allow industrial production to annihilate everything.

***

How can we dismantle the global industrial economy and the political structures that hold it in place?

There’s no single answer. The revolution will be multi-dimensional.

So often we hear “if everyone did this,” or “if everyone did that,” then our problems will be solved. Well, that’s never going to happen. People are at all different levels of understanding, aren’t willing to do the same things, have different strengths and weaknesses. We’re not all going to agree that the industrial economy even needs to be dismantled (far from it), much less how we’re going to do it.

We’re not going to have some glorious unified resistance movement that progresses logically from one stage to the next until we achieve victory. It would be nice if we had the kind of time we’d need to develop that, but frankly we’ve been moving in the opposite direction. Instead, we have to expect this process to be confusing and chaotic.

***

A healthy ecosystem shows us what to do and how to organize. What allows it to flourish is diversity, cooperation, networks, and mutual support. I can’t think of a better model for revolution than what we’re fighting to save, the natural world, where each individual makes a particular crucial contribution to the success of the whole.

Dismantling the industrial economy will mean, among other things, destroying its infrastructure, overthrowing governments and political systems, exposing and rejecting the culture of lies. It will mean that we must stop the production of commodities, which means we won’t have them to consume, which means we have to become self sufficient at whatever level we can, the larger the better – individuals, families, communities. We need to grow our own food and medicine.

We need to transform exploitative social relations. We need to build localized gift economies. We need to take over the streets, educate people, heal our traumatized psyches, form a global resistance movement.

We need artists, writers, thinkers, and teachers to help open our minds and hearts. We need individuals and small groups taking direct action, and we need mass movements. We need leaders and coordinators. We need wise elders and impassioned youth. We need millions of people to storm the halls of power to drag the Earthfuckers out.

We need to free the land, stop paying taxes and rent, tear down the powerful, dispossess the rich, fight cops, shut down factories, smash the weapons of imperialism, plant trees, get to know our neighbors, organize community gardens, respect and listen to the natural world, obstruct polluters, developers and corporate thieves, and defeat colonizers.

Like each element of an ecosystem is necessary for the wellbeing of the whole, no aspect of revolution is dispensable.

***

We are dying. Our world is dying.

We’ve been cheated, lied to and robbed, and we need to speak bitterness about that, loudly. We need to get in touch with our natural outrage, the emotion of the undefeated. We must stop compromising. We must stop selling our integrity, our water, air, land and food, our lives and the lives of others for cheap entertainments, comforts and diversions. We must break from our collective trance and fight back.

***

This is a very important time to be alive.

We, the humans who are here right now, with all our flaws and limitations, are probably the last ones who still have a choice to either stop or allow the murder of the planet. No one smarter or more enlightened is going to come along and solve this for us. Nor is the perfect moment ever going to arrive. We can’t wait until we’re financially stable, achieve physical fitness, read more books, get family approval, or plant all our fruit trees. We can’t wait until everyone else gets something going first. We have to do this now.

As violent, huge and merciless as the system is, we’re not completely powerless against it. We’re armed with the force of our spirit, with our collective mix of talents, emotions, creativity, and energy. We gain strength by knowing that defending ourselves and the planet is the right thing to do. We have so many allies – the wind and rain, plants and animals and soil, and the millions of humans all over the world who are already fighting, losing, struggling on. We need their help, and they need ours. Together, we might win. It’s not likely, but we have to try. There is no other choice.

At this late date, we each just need to begin, to join in however we can, wherever we understand a need that matches our ability. We need to steel ourselves for the tremendous challenges and difficulties that lie ahead. Whatever is still in our lives that doesn’t serve this struggle needs to be cast aside. We must focus every bit of the willpower and determination we possess, and take responsibility for the future.

It’s time for us to muster our courage, for each of us to decide how we will most effectively engage, and dedicate the rest of our lives to fighting for the survival of all life on Earth.