Land of the Lost

Out in the woods, off the country road –

There!  Where the out-of-place welcoming sign stands beside the parked vehicles.  Between the greenhouse and the garden beds, there winds the trail – a trail to adventures of the imagination, a trail into the possibilities of the moment.  Go that way, up the hill and through the Douglas firs.  You have found the Land of the Lost, a place for wanderers, students of rebellion, self-exiled romantics determined to make their lives their own!

The first clue for what is to come is the outdoor brewery. What can be learned about a place with no indoor plumbing, or any indoor whatever, when the first primitive pole-and-plywood structure one finds is the 40-gallon brewery?

Continue up the hill, across the stream and on to the kitchen, the gathering area where meals are shared.  Notice the outdoor library.  The titles are mostly in five categories:  food preparation, gardening (permaculture), brewing, rebellion and fictional works of mayhem, wonder and dread.

Of course! You are welcomed to stay, to linger by the creek with your books and journals, to dig in the earth, to play and create music, to drink and share stories around the fires and lanterns.  You learn of mutual friends, not only around the area, but around the globe.  You combat the mosquitoes and hide from the rain and cold.  Each day begins with the anticipation of something wonderful coming, while the view of the surrounding mountain distracts your attention from whatever it was you had in mind, until you want just to be there, overwhelmed with scents and sights and sounds.

It’s a leisure-filled life of unmotivated afternoons and pleasant evenings.  The days melt away until the world of clocks and schedules seems but a distant, disturbing memory.  Yet, the time finally does get your attention.  You were just passing through and have stayed longer than you had planned.  There were destinations, goals, meetings to make:  time demands that you depart.  You leave, wondering why your life can’t always be like this, what makes the compelling reasons for leaving so damned compelling?

As the answer comes to you while travelling the twisting road out of the valley, you have one of two reactions:  you vow to return for a longer stay, to learn to live this way so that one day you, too, will have your breakaway station from the oppressive world of consumption and domination.  Or you speed away with the greatest haste, fleeing the seductive world you’ve found before it’s too late to turn away.

 

about the author: from my eBook “rob’s revolting.”

Rob los Ricos, writer, reviewer and long-term friend of Anarchy…, was released from prison on June 29, 2006, after serving time for hitting a cop with a rock during a protest in Eugene, OR.

Rob stayed busy during his seven-year incarceration, including writing many letters (mail correspondence helped “save his life” he’s said), taking up guitar, running, speech-making, and writing reviews and essays for Green Anarchy, Green Anarchist (U.K.) and Anarchy as well as (with Free Luers – another Anarchist prisoner) pieces that were compiled into a zine called Heartcheck. Rob was one of the prisoners to bring a successful lawsuit against prison authorities for confiscating mail with circle a’s for being “gang-related.” As well, Rob and other folks in Portland, OR, and incarcerated Anarchists around the country, formed the Anarchist Prisoner’s Legal Aid Network to support imprisoned Anarchists.

my mugshot, june 20th, 1999

From Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed #62 Fall-Winter 2006

https://mastodon.social/@roblosricos

https://www.youtube.com/@RobLosRIcos

Envisioning a Post-Western World

by Rob los Ricos and Paul Cudenec

When asked what he thought about Western civilization, Mohandas Gandhi replied “I think it would be a good idea.”

Western civilization is generally thought to be that of Europe and the British Empire. This is a fallacy which historians and other people of learning have perpetuated for many generations.

Europe once had a thriving civilization. There is evidence of sea-faring trade systems which transported goods from around the world. There is also abundant evidence of building techniques which created structures all but impossible to replicate with 21st century technology. Yet all that remains of this early European civilization are the ruins left behind. What happened? Why did it fail so completely that European people do not retain any knowledge of it?

Invaders from Southwest Asia (Asia Minor, the Middle East) methodically and thoroughly obliterated it, and replaced it with their own: a highly authoritarian, highly patriarchal civilization of plunder, rape, and slaughter.

For centuries, the Roman Catholic Church persecuted people of knowledge. Books not written by the hands of trusted clerics were banned. Book burnings were common spectacles, and anyone with knowledge of healing, or who was literate, or who did not willfully silence themselves, or put themselves into the service of Patriarchal authorities was burned alive or tortured to death, and their bodies put on display to terrify the general public into obedience.

This is the genesis of what is today called Western “civilization,” which produced a society that values ruthlessness over compassion, and ignorant servitude to brutal, heartless institutions over knowledge of, and harmony with, the world as it exists.

Plunder, rape, and slaughter are rewarded with wealth and power. Smarmy-mouthed imbeciles are elevated to positions of leadership. People of learning are tasked with developing technologies and techniques to further control or destroy anything which has lasting value to life on this planet, and to destroy any people standing in the way of this destruction.

The West’s current incarnation as Industrial Capitalism poses a severe and unprecedented threat to the health and wellbeing of the living planet in general and the human species in particular.

The very basis of this system is the so-called need for permanent “economic growth”, involving a theoretically endless increase in the exploitation of people and nature that, logically, can only end in disaster.

This system justifies and defends itself by means of a mesh of oppressive constructs such as “property”, “law” and “nation”, which today largely go unchallenged, even by critics of capitalism’s worse excesses.

General acceptance of these constructs serves to camouflage and legitimize the violence used by the system to impose its control. It thereby helps to criminalize any resistance to this oppressive violence.

In the Mexican revolution of the early part of the 20th century, the Zapatistas had a slogan: “It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.”

In the West, the pervasive attitude is currently one of ignorance, fear, and slothful privilege, wherein the suffering caused by Western institutions in far-off lands is not of consequence to the people who are causing it through an unquenchable lust for cheap consumer goods.

Few of the beneficiaries are even aware it is happening, and most wouldn’t care if they knew. If told that wireless technology is causing genocide in central Africa, most Western consumers would likely reply “I like my iphone.” Or their X-box, or their internet-connected refrigerator.

Western consumers have decided that it is – indeed! –  much better to live in ignorance and servitude to corporatized, military police states, and to hell with the consequences, rather than do anything to stop campaigns of genocide beyond their field of vision. The products of privilege produced in the process are precious to them, not human lives, or a living planet.

If the society produced in Europe through centuries of bloody violence and subsequently unleashed to ravage the entire planet can be thought of as “civilization,” an intelligent human being can only conclude that this civilization is something which must be eradicated so thoroughly as to never again be obtainable.

If this does not happen, and soon, our planet will become uninhabitable, and life as we know it no longer possible. Something new will evolve in the toxic, ruined wastelands the West creates everywhere. It will not likely be compatible with living things that have been predominant for the past few million years.

To accept the notion that domination of the world by the West is the result of historic “Progress” is to validate genocide against indigenous Peoples.

To refer to this centuries-long, ongoing process of extermination as “progress” is racist. It is the fundamental foundation of White Supremacy. Acceptance of this ideology discards the notion that human beings belong to the Earth and must dwell here with respect, and to live in harmony with the bounty available in the places we dwell. To do so, the life and life-giving aspects of the land must not be over-exploited or destroyed in the process of resource extraction.

This is most evident in the fact that every nation-state where indigenous Peoples still retain traditions and knowledge of how to dwell in harmony with the Earth and the abundance which it provides, the indigenous Peoples are still being exterminated – to this day. Despite the many international laws designed to “protect” indigenous Peoples from settler violence, and to protect the Earth.

To live within the abundance the Earth has to offer, and not fuck it up so badly that future generations will not inherit it, requires something the West has no regard for: wisdom.

The idea of a humanity living largely in harmony with nature, in communities founded on mutual aid and co-operation, is not an idle daydream but a real possibility (a possibility that has been realized numerous times, across the world, by people who consider themselves to belong to the places where they dwell).

The industrial capitalist system depends for its survival on a complex web of often-unconscious personal attitudes which normalize and facilitate adaptation to its unhealthy structures of domination and exploitation –  examples of these attitudes being sexism, racism, nationalism and the division of human beings into so-called social classes.

In view of all this, it is clear that no mere reform of this system, leaving intact the underlying basis, constructs and attitudes of the industrial capitalist system, will achieve the liberation we desire. A complete destruction, or dismantling, of the entire industrial capitalist system is therefore necessary.

Since no system of privilege and power destroys or dismantles itself voluntarily, a degree of confrontation will inevitably be involved in its removal.

It is important to remember, however, that this confrontation is not an end itself but merely a means to an end.

It is also important to remember that our desire for the destruction of the current system is not nihilistic in motivation, but is born of a yearning for another way of living.

This possible way of living has been denied us not only by the physical violence of the system, which has uprooted us from the soil, imprisoned and isolated us in its machineries of exploitation, but by its psychological violence.

This psychological violence involves the destruction of human dignity and freedom by a process of separation and disempowerment.

Human beings are taught that they are apart from the natural world, which is something to be feared, mastered or exploited. Individuals are further taught that they are apart from all other individuals and that there is no such thing as community and therefore no possibility of societies based on mutual aid and co-operation.

Disempowerment is amplified by the use of constructs of authority, whether in the form of a god, a king or a state and the idea of obtainable wealth for all. People are indoctrinated to believe that their lives depend on their obedience to these authoritarian ideals, that the authorities have everyone’s best interests at heart and that anyone who challenges the legitimacy of these ideals is therefore a threat to all, rather than to the authorities in question.

The first step in overcoming the power of these systems is to reverse the disempowerment and separation which disables any meaningful resistance.

A sense of belonging to community, to nature and to the cosmos was for many thousands of years the bedrock of human psychology and it still survives outside the concrete confines of modern industrial dogma.

In seeking a solid basis for resistance to industrial capitalism, we could look to indigenous cultures for inspiration, as well as to metaphysical currents and heresies that have kept this alternative vision flowing under the surface of Western society, to eco-feminist and deep green philosophy, and to anticapitalist romanticism.

At the heart of all these traditions is the rejection of external divinity or authority in favour of a self-empowerment which begins from within each individual to embrace a holistic sense of belonging to the social organism, the planetary organism and the cosmos.

This deep empowerment and connection combines perfectly with a radical rejection of all the constructs of power mentioned above –  from the lies of “law” and “state” to the mental shackles imposed by patriarchal and racist assumptions.

It would strengthen our collective capacity to conduct a pro-active battle against the system and its physical and psychological infrastructures.

Furthermore, we welcome practical initiatives that reject continued existence within the toxicity of the industrial capitalist system in favour of the development of autonomous communities close to the land and informed by practices such as permaculture and simple living.

Our subsequent resistance to the system’s inevitable attempts to bring them back under its control would thus be firmly based on the defense of another way of living, on the defense of real space and real land, rather than on merely symbolic confrontation.

Justice would clearly be seen to be on our side and the resonance of our struggle would attract increasing numbers of people. If they, in turn, launched similar projects with the same underlying sense of empowerment, the system would be unable to cope and the cracks in its supremacy would start to spread.

It is not important that everyone in active resistance to the domination of the West and its civilization of mass destruction be in agreement in their critiques, in their approach to destroying the power Western institutions have over our lives, or in their end goals.

What is important is that the resistance dismantles the systems of oppression and domination used to keep us in servitude to them.

We have no crystal balls or other tools and methods to foresee the future. We do not know which tactics and methods will work best in which places. Therefore, a multitude of approaches will produce a multitude of results, some more effective, some less. The important aspect is that resistance is what we do with our lives, rather than replicating the domination of ourselves and our world through our daily activities: daily activities which are in place to keep us within the parameters set by oppressive institutions of wealth and power.

There will be vast campaigns of propaganda by the privileged elite. They own the mass media. They are over-represented on social media. Our families, friends, lovers, neighbors will often take the path of least resistance in order to live comfortably within the parameters set by the systems of wealth and privilege currently in power. In order to resist this, we must create a culture of resistance.

A culture of resistance would include feasts, dances, and celebrations, as well as on-going campaigns of counter-propaganda and sustained attacks against the institutions of privilege, power, and wealth.

Establishing a culture based on values in direct conflict with those of the West will take time, and will need to be created both underground and in plain sight. Guerrilla forces in past movements were invisible to the federal or colonial forces fighting them. In many instances, it took decades for them to realize that the guerrillas were everywhere, and damn near everyone.

Much of the structures needed to create such a movement in the West are already in place, but need to be pushed into more radical, more confrontational directions.

A culture of sharing should be the common denominator of all resistance movements. Starving people do not have the strength to fight.

We must expend great effort to see to the well-being of our comrades. Few people want to be either martyrs or live monastic lives of self-denial. In order to encourage people to overcome their ingrained alienation from each other and the world we inhabit, we need to embrace one another with new-found passion. We must revel in one another’s joy, and comfort those who are troubled.

The psychological and emotional damage done to most of us by the institutions of power and domination must be healed. Many healing methods will be required, and some amount of patience as well.

The earth has not been damaged beyond repair. We can help it to heal as well. Humans are clever and adaptable beings. Collectively, we can accomplish any task we set for ourselves.

It may take several generations for us to overcome the current systems of privilege, power, and domination afflicting us and destroying our homeworld. It took 1000 years for the systems of oppression to develop and spread throughout the world like a malignant cancer.

We can act to surgically remove the cancer and develop healthier lifestyles to make sure it doesn’t recur.

There is no reason to think that this has not happened before in the long history of human beings. Some indigenous peoples retain stories of such times in their oral histories. We should listen to them.

There is nothing to be gained by continuing to devote our lives to obtaining money through subservience to wealth and power.

The earth will survive and life will continue to evolve, with us or without us. Our mother earth is willing to embrace us, and teach us all we need to know in order to live here with love and respect for the life she provides.

It is up to us to return to her guidance and reciprocate her love.

reposted from Winter Oak.

This collaborative article was written with the desire of sparking a wider conversation. Please feel free to post comments here or via winteroak@greenmail.net

drug cartel money laundering accounted for 85 percent of global economy for 2012

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power to the imagination!

from the arissa press book, This Country Must Change

The Revolution continues not to happen, despite the presence of many revolutionary organizations in this country. Or is the presence of these groups actually inhibiting revolutionary activity here in the US? I don’t want to examine this point too deeply now, but I do wish to address the first point above, and that is the failure of allegedly revolutionary organizations to gain any following amongst the masses they always discuss at their meetings and in their literature.

The main activity of most revolutionary groups is to educate people about the need to rise up and overthrow the capitalist system which oppresses them. No doubt, they are sincere in this desire to reach out and organize the masses.

Despite appearances to the contrary, most people are too cynical to blindly follow self-appointed leaders — unless they see there is something immediately rewarding to them, personally, in doing so. The difficult part for the revolutionaries is not the actual educational aspects of this form of organizing, but is to be found in the challenge of educating people while not awakening in them a sense of empowerment.

Sure, every revolutionary group would like to see people arise and set alight the Powers That Be – but only if the resulting revolution would result in the rise to power of their revolutionary organization. To this regard, they are not to be seen as enemies of the system, but as yet another faction in contention for State power. The revolutionaries don’t want to smash the State; they want to be the State. This is why so few people – college students, mostly – fall for their schemes.

It’s all but impossible for people to live in this era and not have an opinion about the legitimacy of authority. Almost everyone has run afoul of some code of conduct, law or regulation at some point in their lives, and almost every one of these instances very likely convinced the transgressors of the unfairness of the enforcing authority’s power, or the idiocy of the rule/law/code transgressed. With few exceptions, authoritative power is seen as something rather arbitrary by most people.

This distrust of authority can become a knee-jerk reaction that is difficult to unlearn, as it tends to burn itself deeply into the psyche of the person who it has transgressed. Why do you think we have to attend school for so long? Definitely, it is because we must be trained in obedience. This is why so many kids detest school. They do not desire to submit to an authority that is pre-existent, which they were given no voice in establishing.

Sometime in a person’s life, she must learn to handle the fact that she must recognize some entity’s power over her, whether that power emanates from a religion, school, family, or workplace. This generally does not make the person happy. To most people, it is humiliating.

Looking for a job, for instance, is possibly the least favorite activity most people experience during their lifetimes. Since almost all of us are forced to work by the economic structure society imposes upon us, we manage to struggle through the pain and humiliation as best we can, often with some combination of booze, drugs, pharmaceuticals, religion and sex.

And when we hear someone speak about the need for revolution in our country, even when sympathetic to the message, folks generally tend to hope that someone else will take up the challenge, seeing as how they don’t have the time or energy, or think they don’t have the strength and courage needed to fight against the authorities. This is the weakness the revolutionary groups seek out in their intended victims. If there is a general feeling of something being very wrong in our society, but people feel helpless in the face of the overwhelming task of overthrowing the social order, the revolutionary group has at least a slight chance to convert some of the population into followers.

But, here lies the trick: how does one awaken another person’s sense of indignation at the ills of society, while maintaining that person’s willingness to submit to the group’s purpose? lt would be so much easier for the revolutionaries if they could hypnotize their intended followers into accepting the group’s leadership. This is, of course, precisely what the revolutionaries attempt to do.

By ceaselessly bleating the same slogans, the group can entrap their intended victims into believing that their group is much different than the many other tiny revolutionary groups. Some gullible people will accept the group’s message and begin to adopt that party’s doctrine. If the hypnosis doesn’t take effect, the revolutionaries can always try to use guilt, try to shame people into submission. This works particularly well on people who were raised as Catholics, by the way.

It’s quite a difficult trick, trying to move people to action, while keeping them docile enough to be herded around by the leadership of the revolutionaries. No wonder revolutionaries find so little success in these endeavors. Most revolutionary literature is more boring than can be tolerated. And it is often written in some obscure idiom that is only decipherable to the initiated, much like the Bible. Indeed, the revolutionaries often offer the same thing as the bible-thumpers: salvation!

By joining their movement, people are told, together they can save the Nation, the Earth, the Blue Footed Booby – depending on the focus of the group. Still, there’s that knee-jerk reaction to authority that most Americans never seem to fully outgrow.

Why awaken to one scam, just to be lulled to sleep again by a different one? Why choose Boss 13 over Boss A? This changing-of-the-guard has happened so often that its futility is glaringly obvious, even though this is not bluntly stated in textbooks. The combination of boring obscurity and the spectre of yet another authoritarian regime the  wannabe revolutionary groups represent is not a winner in many people’s hearts and souls. In a nation obsessed by the mythology of self-reliance, it’s difficult to sell doctrines which require blind obedience. Not to the people most likely to arise with the rage needed to achieve any drastic changes in the systems that oppress us. In the marketplace of ideas, then – although the System gets much of the blame for what is going wrong – the revolutionary’s attempt to take over State power, rather than overthrow the System and disperse power into the population, does not gain a wide following. The revolutionaries are content to sit on the sidelines of history, and only make a fuss when some weakness in the System presents itself — like the current economic depression.

Inevitably, they will attract a number of people with their own ideas about what should be done about the situation at hand, and the revolutionaries will patiently explain that only their leadership can provide the proper solutions. Maybe not in this lifetime, though.

During the Bush II regime, Junta leaders demanded that leftists, environmentalists, and scientists never condemn the American Way of Life. That is to say, they were willing to go to war in order to secure oil and gas for Americans to use for whatever purpose they desired. As long as American citizens are willing to send their children to war in distant lands to ensure the flow of petrochemicals to the Fatherland, we can rest assured in knowing that there will be plenty of gas for our commutes to work, trips to the mall, and riding lawnmower races. Rather than criticizing consumers about the incredible amount of damage their lifestyles are inflicting upon the biosphere — as the revolutionaries often do — the Bush Junta insisted that it was inexcusable to suggest that the American Way of “Life” was in any way wrong. Which message do you think most people wanted to hear? That their over-consumption of the world’s resources must end before we destroy our planet’s ability to support life, or that everything’s just fine the way it is? Yes, Americans, like most people, are guided more by immediate self-interest than they are by wisdom gained by introspection and observation. This is what the revolutionary groups recognize as well. They do not call for a drastic change in the way we live our lives, they just want the ability to collect and spend the tax money we pay to the government in order to do so. It would be wonderful to think that the emergence of radical environmentalism would have produced some sort of alternative vision for our collective future at this point in the (end)game, but it hasn’t – and perhaps can’t.

Here we are, 30-odd years after the first Earth Day, and the most extreme change most people can envision in their lives is to drive hybrid cars to their wretched, demeaning jobs.

Youth are at least acknowledging the horrors they will have to face during their lifetimes, but even though they are questioning the consumerist lifestyle, what they generally come up with is more of the same – like riding bikes to their wretched, demeaning, collectively-owned-and-managed jobs, with some recycling thrown in along the way.

It’s clear to me that what we are suffering from is a failure of imagination. We cannot envision a world, or a way of life, that is vastly different (personally rewarding, nurturing, co-operative, gentle on our planet) because it is beyond the reach of our imagination.

At least part of the blame for this is the prevalence of Pragmatism in most educated people’s minds. Pragmatism is a way of thinking that is meant to defeat imaginative thinking and stifle creativity. We are told to be “practical” or “realistic.” This is a way of thinking that is inherently submissive. It is how a slave justifies her continued obsequience to her master, or a person trapped in an abusive relationship rationalizes her consent to remain in the relationship. Pragmatism discards the immense possibilities for the future in favor of those more immediately obtainable.

In this era of dwindling resources, Pragmatism is the logic of gradual, mass suicide, which rejects life and its infinite potential. Few of us find any meaning, comfort, or reward in our present lives, yet we cling to them. It’s all we know. Pragmatically thinking, there are powerful forces in place — economics, religion, police, and military, to name a few — which enforce consumerism, to ensure we do not wander astray of the Ruling Powers’ plans for our lives. This is a philosophy of fear. We are afraid of what will happen to us if we turn away from economics as our source of survival. We are afraid of how the police will treat us. We are afraid of the concentration camps and prisons our government is busy building to contend with the future unrest which will arise as the economy continues to take more from the majority of the population and hands it over to those already massively wealthy. But, by abandoning the workers here in favor of cheaper labor overseas, the Ruling Powers have left us little choice but to look for answers elsewhere, often in black markets. Their economic models just do not work, and require government intervention every now and then in order to continue to exist.

While preaching to American voters that it is tragically inappropriate – even evil – to suggest the government provide healthcare to its people (the way almost every nation on Earth already does), the public mouthpieces of the monied elite demand taxpayer money to protect their investment swindles. When the current economic meltdown began to spiral out of control, the voting public expressed their disapproval for any sort of bailout for the embezzlers and con-men responsible for the mess. Most public officials acknowledged that their constituents were voicing their opposition to such subsidies by a margin of 10-1. Yet there was never even a hint of doubt that the swindlers would get the funds they demanded. The needs and opinions of the general public mean nothing to the people in power in this country. Money — huge, mountainous piles of money, inaccessible to the vast majority of the population – is what this economy is all about.

And where is the outrage over this debacle — the greatest single instance of theft in recorded history? The public has moved on to other issues, mostly because they have to work so much harder in order to maintain their standard of living. Also, many of them were suckered into believing that a changing of the guard in the White House could potentially lead to a re-assessment of priorities by the government. What most people desire is a fix to the economic ills the nation is experiencing. They want what they see on TV. They desire to purchase the good things in life — a home and everything that makes a home life comfortable and desirable. They want social change without having to sacrifice their privileged positions as first world consumers in order to achieve it. If we are not capable of envisioning a lifestyle vastly different from the one handed down to us, or the one depicted in advertisements and sitcoms, it’s because any sort of alternative vision of how to organize our lives has not been presented to us.

The one model we have now (Work or Starve!) was originally forced on people through overwhelming military force. Where people did not acquiesce to such a lifestyle, campaigns of genocide were – and still are to this day – conducted until the resisters are unable to continue with their ways of providing for themselves outside of Western economies. Instead of radically transforming our lives so that we can meet our needs without over-taxing what our environment can provide for us, even the Visionaries among us can only seem to envision more of the same — only “New and Improved,” or “Sustainable!” This society is horribly sick and twisted.

Even now, as our elected (or self-appointed) leaders demand human sacrifice (the war in Iraq, the War on Drugs, etc.) to the god of the marketplace, many people refuse to question the values that shape our society. And how can we, when so many of us require pharmaceuticals, booze or other coping mechanisms in order to function in our day-to-day roles?

Our consumer-driven way of life is destroying us as human beings as well as our planet’s ability to support life, yet we still reproduce our places within it, day after wretched day. What the fuck is wrong with us?

This may sound silly, but it’s something that bothered me as a child and pisses me off to this day: Some of the iconic cartoons I grew up watching on Saturday morning served to re-enforce consumerism in the viewers by presenting it as both natural and never-changing. From the Flintstone’s Stone-Age to the futuristic lifestyle of the Jetsons, the lives depicted were little different from the lives being lived by the viewers. The level of technology may have changed from one show to the next, but the consumerist lifestyle was never any different: Work, buy, try to get ahead, buy some more! How can we break out of this cycle, when every element of society forces us to accept it as some sort of natural occurrence?

It’s not enough that some of us attempt to think outside of the proverbial box. We have to think beyond the means used to produce boxes.

The imperative we face now – those of us who can see beyond the mechanisms of the Ruling Powers – is to enact our visions of very different ways of relating to the places where we dwell. In order to do so, we must band together with strong-willed and like-minded people in order to produce working models of how we think life could be, were there not coercive forces severely limiting our options. It’s also important that more than one model of a different society be created. There should be as many as there are people committed to making their visions manifest in reality. There are, after all, many different ecosystems here on Earth, and each provides different challenges for the people who desire to live within them, based on their unique attributes, as well as the amount of damage industrialism has inflicted upon them.

It is not difficult to live on this planet. It has nurtured an astonishing variety of such ecosystems capable of providing for every imaginable need a human population requires in order to thrive. Everything we need is available almost everywhere, if we only know where (and how) to look for it. The greatest danger and difficulty will be found in the struggle to rid ourselves of the control the Ruling Powers possess in enforcing their lifestyle upon the rest of us.

They will use every method of coercion and violence available to them to either force us back into the vast herd of their docile servants, or kill us if we will not be enslaved. As it stands now, they seem to be poised to jettison the bulk of humanity, as tremendous numbers of us are no longer required to fulfill their needs. To use the U.S. as just the most glaring example: Our standard of living has (just in my lifetime) gone from being equal to or above that of any nation on Earth to being “better than Somalia.” The U.S. ceased being a First World nation when it was crushed under the heel of the Reagan regime. And the bottom of this downward trend is nowhere to be seen. Food prices continue to rise, while people’s ability to purchase food continues to erode, even among those still legally employed.

What we truly require in these times are courage and resolve.

We must turn away from slavish obsequience to this dead-end society. Since we are all but blind to any other vision of a society, there is no blueprint or pathway prepared for us to follow in order to establish a radically different method of conducting our lives. But we must turn away from the one we are trapped in now. In doing so, we will suffer – and not a little. But not to do so is suicide.

We can create options for ourselves and our offspring— human beings are clever and adaptable creatures – and we need to do it immediately!

The one issue that continually comes to my mind is the abolition of economics. At the very least, the use of money as a means of exchange and accumulation should be abandoned. There is absolutely no sane argument for continuing along that path. It has only brought about severe limitations in the way most people conduct their lives, while rewarding thieves, thugs, warlords and swindlers. If that is not readily apparent to you, you should remind yourself every day that during this economic debacle, where over one-third of America’s accumulated wealth has evaporated in less than one year, the oil corporations and their subsidiaries are recording unprecedented profits. Then, ask yourself a question: Is this something worth the sacrifice of our children?