Words of wisdom from Grace Lee Boggs

It is just a couple of days ago that I wrote about how special interest and vested interest blurs the wisdom of old age. One thing I hope for all of us is the courage to recognise, accept, understand, be introspective, and consequently outwardly changed when we are at fault. I know of several elders, professors included, who were more radical in their youth than in their old days, and one man who has receded so much in his idealism that the status quo seems more reasonable. I hope that we can continue to be as enthusiastic about our visions for a changed world as we grow in age, and not throw up our hands and say of the problems we've created, "Well, it is just human nature...things will never change." I hope we can all strive to be like Grace Lee Boggs, a ninety-six year-old activist and philosopher from the most fascinating of places, Detroit. Take five minutes and listen to her words of wisdom, and although they were directed towards the Occupy movement, they transcend the movement.

Grace Lee Boggs' message to Occupy Wall Street - 10/9/11 from American Revolutionary on Vimeo.

Grace Lee Boggs' Message to Occupy Wall Street Part 2 from American Revolutionary on Vimeo.

Leaving negative cycles and entering positive ones

A cycle is something that perpetuates itself, when one action or thought leads to the next, which leads one back to their original thoughts and actions, making one act on them again, differently or otherwise. David Trombley, who I met a few days ago at Occupy Ann Arbor while traveling at home, said that there are two such cycles--positive and negative. David described a positive cycle in his life, poetry, like so:

My advocation, however, is poetry. I have been writing for five or six years now and also teach with the Ann Arbor Free Skool. I write about my experiences, my worldview. You can do what you want with poetry. It helps me stay centred in the here and now. It is about creative ways of approaching life. It is a positive cycle, an inspiration cycle, an exercise in mindfulness. If you are mindful, you open yourself to inspiration. Once inspiration comes, you can get poetry out of it. Poetry leads to more inspiration, making you stay more mindful.

Mindfulness, inspiration, an appreciation of the here and now are powerful things we should all be thinking about and acting on to tread more lightly on this planet. Negative cycles, though, are those that not only harbor ill-will and ruthlessness and violence in our daily lives, but also when scaled up can cause us to be burdens on other people and the world. David talked about how greed, the violence perpetrated because of greed, and the personal gains because of greed lead to more greed, in a never-ending spiral towards inequality, injustice, and unsustainability. The negative cycles of the world result in some people making a lot of money, resulting in them wielding enormous power and influence, and then setting the system up such that it continues to benefit them at the expense of human dignity and the environment.

At the same time, whether we like it or not, many of us as individuals are stuck in negative cycles that now are social norms. We are compelled to spend our lives working on things that do not interest us, just so that we can pay for a car and a home that will provide us a roof over our heads just so that we can get back into the car, be stuck in traffic, to earn money so that we can pay for gas when we have to next. We are stuck in a mindless drudgery, in an economy that does not care about our feelings, emotions and effort, bur rather about how much time you can spend trying to prop it up, so that it can perpetuate itself, get ever larger, and ever more unstable. We are stuck in negative cycles of inadequacy, in which what we have is never "good enough," compelling us to trash what we have just so that for a while, we can have something that will in a few months be "not good enough" again. The pressures to stay within such a negative cycle is enormous, for everyone we are surrounded by, everyone we see on TV is participating in it.

Positive cycles are those (which on the surface may not seem related to sustainability and the environment, but in all actuality are deeply related to them) that lead to contentment, appreciation, introspection, and then an outward manifestation of those thoughts into actions that will allow us to tread lightly on this planet. Once we start down a line of thinking and doing, like David talks about, we inspire ourselves, pushing ourselves to do more to try to break the negative cycles of existence and replace them with positive ones. We inspire others around us to think for themselves, to rid themselves of the shackles of this mindless drudgery of "the economy," to do something more meaningful for ourselves, our communities, our neighbourhoods, for our world. Positive cycles are exemplified by features that do not need laws or regulations to keep them in check. Rather, they can be let lose in the world without restraint. Who could ever say that inspiration and appreciation and mindfulness should be tamed and regulated? On the other hand, violence, a negative cycle, must be tamed, curbed, enforced.

More reflections on where I live

It has been a while since I traveled at home; I haven't had the directed attention that traveling at home requires. But even still, when I look around me, and I see amazing people doing amazing and creative things, things that are intended to bring communities together, intended to create dialogue and discussion and conversation. While many scenes that I see around Ann Arbor are suffused with privilege, there is more genuineness here than many places I have been to in this country.

It is hard to think that the place I live in is a part of a bigger "sovereign" place whose values don't necessarily align with mine, or many of the people I know in Ann Arbor and elsewhere. But that is okay, I guess, as long as we have the energy for more good work that will turn the tides of injustice, inequality, and ecological degradation, into those of community, kindness, a true acceptance, and a true appreciation for all that we have.

In a previous post, I mentioned how this town provides each one of us the option of choosing to live experimentally and experientially, how this town makes it easy to live so. But while talking to Samantha about living trash-free on the Diag today, I came to a different realisation, one that I am going to go with from now on (until, of course, I have another realisation), and it is this--I realised that given this time, and given this town, living trash-free is the least I can do to fully appreciate where I live. Living trash-free isn't an experiment, and it isn't extreme either. Instead, it is something normal, it is a foundation on which to be more creative and more imaginative. It is the zeroth step on an individual and collective journey of reflection, introspection, and change.

I am very excited about the next steps.

The path from here to there

I question myself at times. Am I doing enough to combat the problems I see in the world? I know I am not, because if I were, I would hope to see much less strife around me. And thinking that I am doing enough can lead to a moral stagnancy and a privileged complacency. Such thoughts are rife with entitlement. Of course there is a sense of satisfaction in small steps. But where we need to be isn't a quantum step from here, but rather a paradigm shift from here. Where "there" is is unclear, particularly because while I can envision a small farm being self-sufficient, the scale of the problems cannot be solved by envisioning a small farm somewhere. We need small farms, of course, but we also need massive structural changes around the world. How can this happen? What is the path from here to there? There are likely an infinite number of paths from here to there, but they all fundamentally need to be founded on a new ethic of our place in the world, the articulation of which is this blog's primary goal.

The journey that I believe we must all be involved in is one of observing, introspecting, changing the self, and then projecting the self outwards. Let me explain a little bit more. We must first face the world openly, and be open to being affected by it. We cannot disconnect ourselves from what we observe and the emotions it evokes in us. That means being affected by observing a homeless person, and being affected by observing the dumping of chemicals in rivers, and being affected by observing discrimination. Such observation allows us to question underlying assumptions we have about the world, and how we are complicit in those outcomes (homelessness, pollution, discrimination, etc.). In the beginning and in the end, it is us who add or subtract legitimacy to structures that perpetuate these problems. I believe this introspection is absolutely essential. The changes we wish to see in the world can come from nowhere else but from our own lives. We must question our morals and ethics, and put ourselves in other people's shoes, not the shoes of the elite and privileged, but those of the oppressed and disenfranchised. Where we go from this point on is a matter of responsibility. As I said previously, for those of us who have realised and understood the degrading effects of this culture, we cannot let others not know. There must be a projection of ourselves outwards. Only this will allow change on the scale that is needed, a scale which is larger than ourselves, but guided and influenced by changes in our own lives.

This process mustn't stop, because we mustn't stop observing.

Contradictions of "progress"

I feel as if I always return to thinking about what "progress" means. I have written about this concept in many forms, explicitly (here, too) and implicitly, over the past months. It is a notion that has caught on almost everywhere in the world - that we must "progress" from the dark ages of yesterday and today, and seek the future.

Yet this progress is an unsettling one, in many ways. It is unsettling in its current scope, and it is unsettling in its outcomes. The scope of progress is clear when you can have massive institutions and organisations such as the World Trade Organisation, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund dictating the rules of engagement in a globalised world, with real, tangible consequences for people not in the global North. The outcomes of progress, unfortunately, have led to massive ecological disaster and climate change, and an acceptance of trade-offs in decision-making that puts costs on those people and places that have borne the most. This is in no way denying the gains that have been made for many, but at what cost and to who? I still can't get past the mess we have gotten ourselves into.

And so, I am constantly struck by the inherent contradictions that exist in this culture - we have "freedom", but we are constrained by the rules of a violent capitalism, we have "progress", but we are undermining what it is that allows us that progress. What has been missing from all of this, therefore, is introspection. No one in their right mind would think that we can constantly degrade what it is that sustains us. Leaving money to future generations in no way brings back clean air and water and land, things that people will need regardless of how big their pockets are.

If you were to ask someone what is meaningful to them on a small scale, in general, they would inherently say that well-being of their family, their community, their friends, their surroundings is what they are most concerned about. So then why does the "progress" we subscribe to on a larger scale inherently undermine all of these for others? Why is it that we strive for an increasingly interconnected world, in which we can interact with people of different cultures, but are unaware of the potential impacts of our actions on them are?

Every decision is moral

When one thinks of morality, generally one thinks of conduct with friends and family, and conduct within social constructs. One might think that the decision to steal something or not is a moral issue. It is; it is a deeply moral issue. But when it comes to buying fruit sprayed with pesticides, or deciding to invest in a car, or flicking on the light switch, are these decisions moral? I would argue that these decisions are as much about morality as they are about anything else. Indeed, most every decision we make in this world is a reflection of our morality and our values. Unfortunately, we've been told constantly (probably subconsciously) that when it comes to every day living and every day choices, morality can take a back seat. And given all we know about the massive problems that face us, it is this behaviour - a dichotomy between what we think is moral and our daily choices - that has perpetuated these problems. I want to write today a little bit about supposedly amoral or neutral aspects of our life - science and technology.

Many scientists and technologists practice their trade thinking that the results produced of their work are amoral or neutral - there is no moral baggage associated with the findings. Just because F = ma doesn't mean the result has moral implications. This is decidedly untrue. There are four reasons that come to my mind (and there are likely more):

• First, because we know, we can use. Laws of science can be used to do many tasteful and distasteful things (like cook a nice meal, or develop a chemical for war). 
• Second, data have import for people's lives, especially in cases like climate change. 
• Third, the processes of scientific and technological development rely on what is available. Technology is not possible without science, but science is also not possible without technology. Where does technology come from? Technology is not made out of thin air, but is rather constructed through the same violent processes that we like to blame for causing ecological and social degradation, like mining and burning fossil fuels. And is this technological development that further allows us to investigate science, and so on, and so on...
• Fourth, just because we cannot see or immediately feel the effects of many of our choices does not mean that the effects are not present. This culture has done a wonderful job of separating ends and means, with technology playing a key role. As Aidan Davison has written about in Technology and the Contested Meanings of Sustainability, the flipping of a light switch just to illuminate a room invokes massive technological and social infrastructures that we cannot see, and therefore, it is difficult to assign a moral value to the action.

In the end, there is no way one can deny the interconnectedness of oneself. It is true now that every choice one makes has had the hand of others in it, and will (unwillingly, at times) affect others, although unwillingly.

What does that mean for our daily lives? It means that we must try to take as much accountability as possible for our choices. It means that decisions cannot be made in isolation, but ought to be made with a full respect for forces at play. It means that we must question what is thrown at us, regardless of how "neutral" something may seem. Assigning moral values to our choices and decisions may allow us a much needed introspection.

On bridging the macro and micro

One of the goals of this blog has been to explore the interconnectedness of the issues that face us, from war to medicine, food to poverty, law to nature. The problems facing us in each one of these "fields" or "bins" of thought are one and the same, they stem from the same trunk. They are branches connected to the same base, and the morality and ethics that feed any one of these branches are the same morality and ethics that feed the other. Indeed, we cannot tackle any one issue in isolation; that is the sort of reductionism that has lead to the issues and problems facing us. To paraphrase Wendell Berry, we cannot do one thing without doing many things, we cannot undo one thing without undoing many things.

More important to me, however, has been trying to articulate our role and our complicity in the creation of these problems, and to hopefully allow us to be more introspective about our positions in the world, and the power that each and everyone one of our choices, individually, have in either patronising systems of oppression and dominance over nature (and consequently people), or in taking a stand against these systems, and taking them down. Meaningful change can come from nowhere else but from within one's own life. Furthermore, the change on larger scales that we advocate for is a reflection of our willingness to be the models of that change. For example, it is entirely plausible that someone that is willing to give up something like plastic out of sacrifice and respect for the environment cannot envision the world without the existence of plastic. Consequently, when it comes to thinking about what this world ought to look like for everyone, we may have limited our imagination to a world with plastic as a given.

Now, as I recognised in a previous post, these issues are complicated, as we are stuck in systems that necessitate ecological degration. These systems are ingrained in our culture and act on scales much larger than our individual lives. Yet, each one of our lives serves as a microcosm for these systems. We form the DNA and RNA of the system, and it is our choices that determine what is commonly accepted and what isn't. In a cell, the DNA and RNA dictate the responses of the cell to stimuli. These cells in turn form the complexity that is our body. While our bodies operate at a scale much larger than our individual cells, it is the choices of the individual cells that determine the overall health of the body. In the same manner, if we, as individuals, lead lives that are healthful and respectful, caring and kind to the environment, there is no way these systems of oppression cannot be taken down. After having talked with a friend yesterday at length about the nature of the writing on the blog, I can see that I haven't continually addressed the "micro" side of issues, which to me is of utmost importance. Introspection on the micro scale is the goal, and I will try to write more consciously toward that end.

Some thoughts on violence

I get nervous when I see a gun. I get nervous because of what it represents in our and of our society, and the power it gives to the one that owns it, and the fear it instills in the ones that don't. I see a gun as a manifestation of our deep insecurities, and a manifestation of an understanding that what we do is not in the best interest of people and nature. A gun is a symbol of a life being forced upon us rather than a life lived in peace with what is environmentally, and consequently socially, acceptable. I don't want to get into a debate over what is acceptable; indeed, all of this blog has been dedicated to drawing these boundaries and extending our imaginations. Yet, as Jay Griffiths has written about beautifully and sadly in the current issue of Orion, guns and violence have been used against people and nature in West Papua for decades now. These unarmed people have fought to preserve their way of living and their mountains from the onslaught of the violence of mining. This is just one example of countless examples.

These past few days have been interesting. They have been days in which masculinity and dominance has been celebrated, ones in which introspection and asking "Why?" have been superseded by the thoughts of retaliation and revenge. Regardless of your stance on the issues,what I can say is that the events of the past few days have changed absolutely nothing, but rather they have further entrenched us in a continued violence that will to wreak havoc on lives, human, non-human and non-sentient. The environment, the ground and air and water that sustains us, will of course be impacted on negatively, despite the "just war theory," which I have written about previously. I can see that in the flag-waving of recent days, many lives and minds and hearts have fully accepted the manner in which we choose to end the fear that pervades our daily lives.

The world I want to live in is one without guns and violence, toward nature and people. It is of course something that has been written on and acted upon by countless, yet violence still surrounds us and pervades our minds. When we look at and make objects themselves with capacity to harm, we are compelled to pull a trigger or push a button that will blow someone or some place up.

I hope to have conveyed over the past months that there is actually no difference between environmental issues and social issues. They are one and the same. Committing violence against people is the same as committing violence against the land, air and water. Violence towards land, air and water is the same as violence towards people; it does not take a logical leap to make the connections. The world I want to live in is one without the fear of consuming toxins in my drinking water.