Projects/caac
I'm tired of putting so much pressure on myself vis-a-vis the content of this site. I'm not gonna worry with that anymore. I'm not gonna worry with whether this is wiki-worthy material. I'm just gonna post whatever is on my mind until I'm forced to stop. This is now officially my weblog. I'll back the other material posted here previously up in BackupAsclepius.
12/27/10
It's the Christmas season. I'm home here in Clanton, Alabama. I spent yesterday with the extended family. Particularly, I spent much of that time talking with my cousin Scott. He is researching and compiling our family's genealogy. He has discovered much of where my maternal family's roots are in Europe. It turns out that I have roots in Norfolk Co., England and West Prussia all the way back to the 15th and 16th centuries.
We also discussed the family land in South Alabama that was recently sold off. Both of us lived there at different times when we were babies and our respective parents were trying to establish nascent economic security.
I am going to be done with my undergraduate degree at the end of this coming January. I'm trying to figure out what I want to do with myself thereafter. The notion of trying to move back here, more specifically to try and somehow reacquire that property, crossed my mind.
I am tired of money. I am tired of the way that it runs my life and everyone else's around me. I have been listening to many of the lectures given by writer Derrick Jensen. The idea that we have to pay someone just to live, just to have food, water, and shelter, is fundamentally wrong. We are so, as he would put it, "metabolized into the system", that we don't realize!: food doesn't come from grocery stores, it comes from the earth, rain, and sun. Water doesn't come from the metal tubes in our houses, it comes from streams and rivers. Shelter doesn't come from rent money, it comes from the trees and other living things of the earth. I know that Natalie Portman is pregnant and engaged to some French dancer, but I don't know 10 edible plants within a mile of where I sit right now.
But Derrick talks about blowing dams up with bombs. How would he make the bomb? The sad truth is, and I think even he would admit this, we don't even know how to think about our place in the world without technology being part of the picture. He's right, though, that it is wrapped up in the problem (which I haven't exactly identified yet). I'm not ready to throw my computer out the window yet.
What does this have to do with my decisions about my own future? I worked in Santa Cruz, California 3 years ago at a camp called Camp Harmon, an Easter Seals camp. Easter Seals is an organization that provides services to people with various types of disabilities. My job as a camp counselor was to, basically, be a good friend to my campers. It came very naturally (not to say it wasn't REALLY HARD!). Although I was, at times, very disheartened by it all, at the end, it was clear to me that that job was better than any I'd had so far. It paid very little, but I'd have done the job even for room and board. This is very, very important, I think.
If I have to be paid to do a job, that means I wouldn't do it if I were free to do something else (free in the fullest sense).
Does this mean I want to be a PT or an OT or something like that? No way. There were many things I wanted to do that I couldn't do while I was there. I couldn't study or make music like I wanted, for starters. This was more of an interpersonal problem than the nature of the job itself (sorry to be so nebulous).
The main thing about Santa Cruz was that I fell in love with the land. Redwood trees, man. Redwood trees. It's corny I know, but I was at home there with them. Really home. Not home like I call this where I sit home; this is home because it's where my blood relatives are. That was home because my heart or spirit or whatever you want to call it was more truly familiar than anywhere else I've ever been. The blackberries, the banana slugs, the streams, the ocean, the mountains, the hot day sun, the cold, cold nights, it was home. it was home.
In picking not what to be, but where to be, a real connection with the land is the best reason of any that I can fathom.
The US dollar is based on debt. More truly it IS debt. Common knowledge says that a growing economy is not only good, we need it. Does the natural world grow every year? Does any other organism on this planet consume more and more every year? No way. The way our economy works, 5% of our money is paper currency, the rest is 0's and 1's on bank owned computers. They Make Money Up Out Of Nothing! If I do that, it's called counterfeiting, and I go to jail for a long time. The end result of this is that somebody loses their house, their car, their livelihood. No matter how hard everyone works, even if everyone works 24 hours a day to try and make it in our present economy, somebody has to lose. It's an arithmetic fact. What's needed is a new currency, a boycott of money as it is now. Santa Cruz happens to be implementing a local currency system right now.
Consider what I am doing right now. I am typing on a computer and posting this document on the internet. The internet is an elite operation, Access to it is completely corporately controlled. We need a new internet, like that proposed by the Netsukuku project. I have downloaded its source and am porting it to my mips-based computer. I can easily imaging an alternative community internet, much like an alternative community currency, able to use the internet but not dependent upon it, freeing people from dependency on corporate controlled access points. It can coexist with the internet until the powers that be have had enough of it, at which point it will be sufficiently interconnected with itself to end its association with the corporate internet entirely.
I have given up on all external musical technology except for pencil and paper. My favorite music is vocal anyway.
Why is it that survival training is primarily the domain of the armed forces? Why do only those who are engaged in violent enterprise have access to knowledge of how to sustain oneself from the earth directly? This is not a question I have the answer to yet, nor am I sure that its premises are correct.
I love my family, but I am no longer at home with them. I am a stranger amongst them. My time spent away at school, ever since I was 15, in the world of ideas, the Athens of America, has seperated me from them. I am not myself around them, and if I try to be, it only brings silence or conflict. To live harmoniously with them, I have to silence myself. These things I've been writing are the things I think about, and I cannot share them with them without starting a fight or seeming like I'm from another planet. I love them, but I have to leave them.
The educational system, from pre-kindergarten to graduate school, is part of the system of violence we live in, perhaps the most deluded part. It has given me much, but it fancies itself free. It is clearly not. It is predicated upon money, first of all; poor people go to community college, where they are most directly trained for employment. Liberal Arts students like me are dangerous, so they must be cloistered, given access to information, encouraged to think abstract thoughts. This is fine until they start to apply their critical faculties to the world outside, or, god forbid, the world they themselves live in vis-a-vis the rest of the world. By the time that such a student progresses to the point that they see the contradictions in the system, the way that the educational system is used to cement the generations into varying classes of employees with varying amounts of privilege, it is too late, they are in debt and habitually dependent upon their cloistered environment.
technology is not evil. violence is. Mother bears use violence to protect violence against their young. Technology can be used to fight violently used technology. Not by "hacktivism", but by building on the riches that we don't know we have. Mesh networks, local currencies, music not predicated upon economic superiority, food not lawns, We can make communities that capitalize on the resources we've been fooled into thinking we don't have, and when the captains of industry and finance see that we are breaking their laws by not depending on them and by using what is already ours, they will probably try and attack, either by force or by cutting such a community off from the rest of the world. At which point, local currencies can become meta-local currencies, local mesh networks can become global mesh networks, and food and music were local to begin with.
It is now more clear.
~later in the evening~
I sat and watched a bit of the political shows with my mom this evening. She stated that she hates the way that, on the debate based shows like Parker-Spitzer, for example, the pundits all talk all over one another. She said she wanted to watch something else, so we did. She chose Housewives of Beverly Hills. I don't like that kind of television, but I sat with her as we tuned in. There were about 8 or so housewives sitting around a dinner table eating. Most of them appeared to have lots of plastic surgery, and they were all wearing tons of makeup and the gaudiest sort of clothing and fashion accessories you can imagine. One of them claimed to be a psychic, so another of them asked to be given a reading there at the table. The psychic claimed that the other lady would have a terrible marriage after her children left the house, having nothing in common with her husband. This sparked an immense war of words in which everyone at the table was involved, all screaming at one another simultaneously. Why my mother enjoys that sort of television and not shows that vaguely have something to do with our lives (not a terrible amount, but at least a little) is not something that I understand.
A moment later, I pulled up, from youtube, a speech being given on the floor of the House by Rep. Alan Grayson. He was explaining how much various conservative commentators make, and how much they stand to save with the Bush tax cuts. Both numbers for each are MUCH MUCH higher than the salary my mom has ever made. My mom got mad; not at the "conservative" pundits, who support the tax cuts but never say how much they stand to profit, but at Alan Grayson!
My mom lost her job recently due to office politics. She Has a mortgage and a car loan from the bank. She has no retirement savings. She is receiving unemployment insurance, which she has paid into all of her life. She is depending on that and her projected tax return to get her through until February, after which she does not know what she is going to do. And here she is, arguing against her own interests, saying that it's moral and correct that she is going through such hard times while these super-rich guys are making out like bandits. She is the hardest working person I know, but to hear her say these things is just too much for me.
I told myself I wasn't going to talk about politics while visiting with her. I told myself that it was possibly the last time I'd see her for a long time, and I wanted to do that in a positive way, have good memories. But that would be a lie. The truth is, my mom is so brainwashed into "the wool that has been pulled over her eyes to blind her from the truth" that she will defend it, even at her own expense, perhaps even unto ruin.
I don't want a memory of a lie. Painful as it may be, I need to remember the truth.
