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A New SwadeshiAugust 18, 2005Mahandis K. Gandhi promoted a program of living in place he called swadeshi, emphasizing the community relationship that existed throughout India before British colonial oppression. India's economy was based on local production for local consumption using local resources. The British Raj converted the economy to central capitalism, totally destroying the basis of Indian village life. Gandhi's bahti movement to promote local cloth production, represented by the symbol of the spinning wheel, was a powerful call to revive the stable, sustainable economy of India's origins. We could use a similar program throughout the world to combat globalization and neoliberalism. Globalization and word capitalist hegemony is spiritually, economically and physically bankrupt. It cannot continue, is unsustainable in the long term and will result in untold misery and death when it collapses. Expecting human society to remove itself from the land and huddle in energy-intensive cities is a utopian vision that cannot be sustained. Replacing local products with those produced and transported from thousands of miles away is an absurd squandering of precious resources on unnecessary transportation, as well as a ridiculous destruction of local labor and economic resources. There is no need to sell Dutch cheese in Zimbabwe, Australian wine in San Francisco, Chinese plastic crap in Wal-Marts in every town in the United States. Local production for local consumption not only conserves precious resources; it also provides meaningful work for local citizens. This requires a shift in the basic driving force of western civilization, if that's what this is, from the cancerous growth at any cost philosophy of unbridled capitalism to a nurturing, steady-state ethic of sustainable human community. It means turning our backs on GDP and GNP, in favor of a measure of social and environmental responsibility, a measure that recognizes the difference between destructive expansion and healthy nurturing equilibrium. This is our task then, in considering reinhabitory strategies for living in place. Michael Leona Gulch Pacific Plate Friday, February 18, 2005 War ... and peaceI can still hear John Kennedy saying, "What kind of peace do we seek?Ê Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war.Ê Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave.Ê I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children--not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women--not merely peace in our time but peace for all time." That dream is lost, smothered under the bodies of men, women and childen killed in the name of US imperialism, a Pax Americana that has yet to achieve peace. As the 60s slogans said, "Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity." Not only has the United States government chosen oppression over freedom abroad, the freedoms our citizens have historically enjoyed have been eroded continualy over the past 40 years. Yes, I'm able to publish my dissent on this electronic notice board, and, it is already being perused by agents of the United States government (I know, as I track visiters to my web site.) I expect the slow knock on my front door any day now. All the more important to soldier on, raise the voice of dissent clearly and distinctly above the brawl of war. I am a pacifist. I am no imperialist. I insist that my country follow the path of peace desired by the majority of the people. I insist that those who have stolen this country away from its people retire from the scene before we have to take them out by force. Rebellion is good for the human soul, encouraging us all to rise on our back legs and stand up to the lovers of darkness who seek to steal our country under cover of night. We are the bringers of light. It's time to welcome the dawn. Michael Leona Gulch Pacific Plate Be the ChangeIt's time for a change. No, not your everyday surface level, cosmetic "change" that politicians talk about to exhaustion. We need real change, down to the core, where our sacred cows and deepest beliefs live. We need to rethink how our society functions, critically examine our core beliefs and our basic ideas about how we conduct our daily lives. Our present society in the United States is built on the legacy of the frontier. In the past, if things got bad where we lived, we could always move, further west, further north. When we saw the smoke of our neighbors' fires, we pulled up stakes and headed for the frontier. If the neighborhood got too crowded, if there was insufficient opportunity to make a living, if the crush of civilization got too much, there was always "the land of milk and honey" just over the horizon. There are no more frontiers. Even more, our frontier mentality has done us great harm, preventing us from building a society of community, of interdependence, of mutual aid. The frontier mentality has translated itself into nearly exclusive emphasis on personal property "rights," individual accumulation of wealth, centralized and hierarchical organization and imperialist foreign policy, all at the expense of a sense of local community responsibility and belonging. How do we build a life in community? I'd like to propose an alternative to the usual practice of pulling up stakes and starting anew on some far distant horizon. We all live in community wherever we are, wherever we read these words. Rather than withdrawing our support from the community we inhabit right now, let's work to support and build community where we live. Let's live in place for a while, say a thousand years or so, just for fun, just for the sheer social experimentation of it all. Let's stay in place and learn to live within the biological and geophysical limits of the place we call home, the local watersheds and aquifers, the clean air, the natural, undeveloped habitat for non-human species. Let's learn to live with a place, not on it. Let's learn where our water comes from and where it goes after we've used it. Let's learn how our electricity is produced, where the fuel is extracted for its production and how far it must be transported to reach the generating site. Let's learn about non-human species that inhabit the earth we share, what their needs are and how our activities affect their lives. Let's learn how our natural area, our bioregion, functioned before we humans arrived and how it has changed since our arrival. Let's learn about the climate of the area and how the weather fluctuates from year to year, decade to decade and what affect this change has on water, plants and natural habitat. Then let's take this newfound knowledge and build a human society that works within natural limits. Rather than fighting against natural cycles, rather than guarding against the adverse effects of climate change, rather than gouging our human livelihood from the living earth, let's find a way to live in cooperation with the natural world, to participate in natural cycles of energy and resource flow, to become one with the earth. This is a huge change in the way our society functions. How do we get from here to there? How do we organize and encourage such a deep societal change that affects millions of people. As Mohandis K. Gandhi said, "Be the change you want to see in the world." We "be the change" by making every decision count, in our daily lives, in our existing community. When we buy our food, we buy from local producers, not from "big box" distributors or fast food outlets. When we buy our clothes, we buy from local Mom and Pop businesses, thrift stores and used clothing outlets. When we make decisions on our housing needs, we weigh our choices against the effects these choices have on natural habitat and non-human species. We take part in day-to-day decisions in our homes, our neighborhoods, our communities, our bioregions. More than voting, we participate with our neighbors in developing solutions to local problems rather than depending on centralized government bureaucracies to impose solutions from above. We build democracy in every aspect of our daily lives, from food production to the chair of our neighborhood association. We examine the problems we encounter in daily life from a deep perspective, looking for root causes rather than surface effects. If we have too much auto traffic through our neighborhoods traveling too fast, we don't seek to widen the roads; rather we seek means of calming traffic and reducing the necessity for auto travel. When we perceive a need for child are for working mothers and single parent families, we donÍt create a licensed child care facility, we build a cooperative network of community members to provide care for the communities children. We support those in our community who support our children. If our housing is owned and managed by absentee landlord, we work toward cooperative housing arrangements, resident ownership, tenant associations. We work to empower people to control their own access to shelter and give people the power to choose how and where they want to live. In every aspect of our lives we can either give control of our lives to others or we can choose to retain the power to control our lives to ourselves. When we work together to meet the needs of our community, we accomplish more than relief from our problems. We build a sense of community involvement, we encourage individual and group self-reliance, and we reward personal initiative and self-control. As we expand our circle of influence, we build community in wider and wider spheres, encompassing the non-human as well as the human communities around us. Solutions to the human problems we face in our society are the same solutions to environmental and climate change that threaten all life on earth. Living as active participants in the community of all life, we create a human society based on cooperation and support within natural limits. A sustainable human society must begin in a sustainable community of all life. Michael Twin Lakes Pacific Plate WAR AND PEACE! |
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September 23, 2001 News or propaganda? I don't watch broadcast television, so I have only the word of others to describe what appears there relative to the United States government's preparation for war. I listen to NPR in the mornings, to Democracy Now in the afternoons, two sources that describe the extremes of two wildly different worlds. This morning I visited the CNN and MSNBC websites to get a flavor of mainstream news coverage. There's only one word that dominates the "news" presented in these venues: War. Story after story, in bold headlines, with images of tanks, warplanes, and, repeated over and over, graphics, photos and animations of the destruction of the World Trade Center; interestingly, no images of the Pentagon. The international "news" coverage is of world leaders backing the United States government in its plans to wage war against the Taliban and Afghanistan. I found one story about anti-war demonstrations in LiÚge, Belgium, at the EU Conference, with two paragraphs describing the demonstration, and four paragraphs telling of world leaders support for US military retaliation. In my personal world, here in Albuquerque, I see no such domination. Almost everyone I meet speaks of the need for caution, for appeal to international law, at the most, for justice. I rarely experience talk of rampant hate-mongering and demands for destruction by the US military. Jean and I participated in a peace rally and march Friday night which was overwhelmingly peaceful, but, of course, the news story the next day concentrated on confrontations with motorists and the oppressive police presence at the march. Media coverage of these events have passed beyond any consideration as news, and have stepped over into blatant propaganda designed to build up flagging public support for a war desperately promoted by the military-corporate oligarchy. Who benefits from such a war? Certainly not the people of Afghanistan huddling among the rubble from the last "superpower" that bombed them into the Stone Age. Not the innocents in Iraq dying by the thousands after the United States destroyed their domestic water system and embargoed necessary supplies to build a new one. The people of the United States will not benefit from this war, even those who hold stock in military industries. As we attack Afghanistan, the dispersed terrorists no longer huddling in "training camps" in Afghanistan will visit more destruction on the United States and on United States' facilities around the world, fueled and supported by an Arab world made increasingly militant by US terrorism abroad. We now know we are not safe even in our velvet cage. I keep thinking of Orwell's "1984" and the hated Goldstein held up as the object of hate for all good citizens of Oceania. The country was perpetually at war with an ever changing adversary, but always the hate was inflamed by ubiquitous propaganda. Unfortunately, we've largely misread the message of "1984," or more likely we've been deliberately misinformed. It's not about "Big Brother is Watching You;" it's about the uncapitalized threat of control of public opinion through the control of information. At that our "free press" is far superior to Orwell's "Ministry of Information." Our New Masters don't even have to lie, they merely withhold the truth they don't want you to see. The rapidly growing peace movement around the world is almost completely ignored, or when noted, it is distorted and interpreted beyond recognition. The media marches in lock step to the music provided and controlled by the corporate oligarchy. They speak of a unanimity of opinion that does not exist outside the walls of their corporate asylums. Bush was correct in one statement he made this week. Freedom is indeed under attack, not only by fundamentalist terrorists from the outside, but equally by fundamentalist nationalists on the inside. Lobo Place Rio Grande Valley |