Inauguration Day 2005

Inauguration Day

I did not watch any of the inauguration festivities. I guess I did my mourning in November. It makes me sad though when I thought about all the people who are going to die because this man was elected. I’m threatened because the America this man is fighting for has no place for me. This is not my President. But neither would have Kerry been. Both were Yale Skull and Bones. I am not Yale Skull and Bones.

The evidence I’ve looked at so far supports the belief that Mr. Bush took the Presidency in 2000 through fraudulent means. If he did legitimately get elected this time, the only reason he did is because in 2000 he seized the platform from which to be elected in 2004. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the Democrats let this happen.

My celebration of inauguration day 2005 was to call people about volunteering for the local Board of Elections. My protest is going to be to get off my butt and take back a piece of this country even if its only a tiny one. My hope is that the Republicrats will bring themselves down through arrogance and greed. My fear is that they are going to kill many many more people than they already have before they do.

Today for me was a day of defiance and definate satisfaction, but no joy.

Institution Building

I want an organizational vehicle for the dissemination of the ideas we believe in: democracy, protect and expand civil liberties, participation in the political process, ending economic exploitation, make love not war, universal literacy and education, protect the environment, honoring diversity, ending racism, a woman’s right to choose, learning from people who are different rather than fearing them, equal economic educational and political opportunity, separation of church and state, decentralized media is necessary to a republic, reinvest in our voting and elections infrastructure, etc. I’m looking for a model of an organization where different kinds of people can channel their desire to make the world a better place into coordinated action. I want a place where people educate themselves and each other politically, socially, and culturally. Ideally I’d want a social venue where different kinds of people would mix and provide each other with mental cross pollination. I’m thinking of a family friendly place where people can bring their children to learn values, ideals, and critical thinking. I would love more than I can say to be able to provide a place where people can be a part of a movement without having to give up their capacity for critical thought.

The idea I have is to first build a thriving example of the kind of organization we agree on, and then help other people build their own versions of it. A decentralized structure of people drawn together through a communications network, and shared ideals and goals.

We need to be part of however it is that mass numbers of citizens get educated, active, and organized. If I had my choice the forces to make these changes in American society would be decentralized because otherwise it would be itself dangerous to our goals.

This kind of organization could serve as liberal secularist assemblies that serve much the same function as churches do for the Right. Institutions that help us spread and just as importantly solidify our ideas and way of life. They could be of any size from a handful of people to thousands. They could wind up being part of a network of organizations that grow into one or more new political parties. Members could serve as part time or full time coordinator/educator/advocates. Sharing research and information would be a key aspect of their activities. Political theater, cultural events, lectures, charity, volunteerism, activism of various kinds would be other key activities.

Repression and Oppression

One of the most overlooked contributing causes of political oppression is sexual repression. This is not my idea. Wilhelm Reich, a student of Sigmund Freud wrote whole books about this. Reich was vilified by the Right and Left in Germany during the 1920s and 30s because of his ideas. I am no scholar of Wilhelm Reich, but if what I have read about his ideas are true, his earlier researches brought him to one or two conclusions that I have come to more intuitively.

The basic idea as I understand it is that all human beings have a certain amount of energy in our minds and bodies. This energy is presently unmeasurable. It has been called various things by different cultures. Freud called it libido. The Chinese called it Chi. Our culture calls it life force. We get to use this energy for our emotions, thoughts, and bodily processes. One of the main ways that we express this energy is through sex and orgasmic release. Another main way that we express this energy is through aggression and violent acts. Taboo ridden misinformation and shameful silence about sexuality represses and deforms natural sexual expression. When natural sexual expression is deformed and repressed, that energy goes somewhere else. It becomes physical and mental illness and, most useful to oppressive governments, rage and violence. This is one of the main reasons the Stalins and Hitlers find the people who are willing to staff their wars, purges, and death camps.

There really isn’t anything mysterious about this. The necessity of managing one’s sexual life is commonly acknowledged as being essential to staying a happy and healthy human being. I haven’t seen any studies, but my guess is that happy and healthy human beings are less likely to commit acts of destruction and violence. Speaking for myself, I’ve never been angry at anybody when I’m a postorgasmic glow. And the periods during which I’ve not managed my sexual life to my emotional and physical satisfaction, I am unhappy and irritable and resentful of other people’s happiness.

The 60s slogan "Make love not war" really is make love or war.

The Us/Them Response

If you are a person who believes they are better than many groups of people, you can stop reading here because what follows just won't make sense to you.

Its one of the universals of how human beings are constituted: we all feel that we are part of a group that is better than any other group. The boundaries of your group can be determined by lots of different things. Family is determined by good old genetics, as is race and ethnicity. Nationality is another simple way to identify who you are and are not based on geography. Then there's religion, which allows you to know who you are based on the dogmas and symbols you share with others. There's profession, which allows you to identify with others based on economic activity. There's class which measures who you are mostly by the results of your--and your ancestors'--economic efforts. There's activities such as sports, games, art that afford opportunity to define your group based on what you do during your leisure time.

When you are a member of the group, you will feel instinctively that this group is better than any other. This belief of yours is utterly flimsy and transparently self serving almost every moment you feel it during the entire course of your life. It is based on the need of primates to propagate their genes and it has almost nothing to do with the reasons we tell ourselves our group is better. It is based on the same kind of perspective that we use to persuade ourselves that we are better than the individuals we meet, even members of our own group.

The Us/Them response works beautifully as long as you are just a band of monkeys squabbling over fruit and grubs in a tropical forest. As soon as your band is threatened by an outside foe, you close ranks and act in unison until that enemy is overcome. You know exactly who your enemies are and who your friends are without having to think about it at all. As primates we have extensive emotional, mental and even physical infrastructure that causes us to adopt the Us/Them perspective to a degree that usually matches how threatened we feel. For example at a sporting event where actual threat level is low, we will respond to our opponents with usually good natured teasing. Even then, the Us/Them response often becomes more extreme than the actual threat level. Witness all the incidences of fans rioting. During war, when we come to feel that our actual survival and the survival of our children are at stake, any level of atrocity can easily either be accepted outright or rationalized or denied.

When we do it it is a necessary evil. When they do it it is an atrocity. When we kill them it is a necessity of war. We are good. They are evil. We are human beings. They are monsters. When they kill us it is foul murder. Their leaders are tyrants who are leading a bloodlustng population to slaughter us for criminal and insane reasons. Our leaders are just, wise, and above all able to defend us; equal to the task and we are the aggreived parties in the war, even if it was we who started it. Havn't you all heard the same from individual people about their conflicts with other individuals?

There is no place for this in the repertoire of anybody who is seeking to be more of a human being and less than a monkey. There is no religion, nation, passion, grievance, or mandate that allows for the Us/Them response anymore.

Us/Them is obsolete. We have made it obsolete. The day the first atomic detonation took place it became a deadly atavism because that was the day we started being able to make ourselves extinct if we use it.

If you want to know how someone actually values you, pay very close attention to their Us/Them response. If they clearly believe that they belong to one or more group(s) that are better than one or more groups, they almost certainly believe they are better than you and everybody else they encounter.

Almost every human being I've ever met is completely at the mercy of their Us/Them response. This results in you and I being very easily manipulated by any authority figure who needs to bolster their power.

If you think that you have rooted this out of yourself with less than constant vigilance and analysis of your emotional reactions for many years you are fooling yourself. I'm not sure that people can entirely stop their instinctive Us/Them reactions, but I'm sure we can be aware of them and not let them make our decisions for us.

Small Encounters

Small Encounters

What if it isn’t enough?

I was talking to my Aunt, a lady who I respect and who has paid her dues for sure, about the loss of civil rights we are suffering along with the other things I think I’ve been all to clear about recently.

She got it. She was nodding, if wearily told me, in her turn, that what I was saying was very close to what she was seeing. Then she said to me “I don’t have time for any of this. I’m a parent. I’ve got to raise my kid.”

I thought about this and when I saw her the next day I said: “OK. You’re a parent so you’re busier than I am that’s for sure, so I don’t have anything to say to you. But I have to just ask you something in response to that. And that is: What if it’s not enough? What if, in addition to all that work you’re doing now to see to the immediate needs, concerns, and aspirations of your child you also have to pay attention to the world at large that that child lives in? What if you have to do that and it isn’t fair and you don’t wanna and you have to do it anyway or you are seriously blowing it for your kid. Except that its not so easy to see as if you had, say, not provided them with shoes. But there it is anyway. So: What if it is not enough?

A Simple Phone Call

A friend called me one night in April of 2003 and spoke to me for 40 minutes about the political social and economic crisis this country is in. I’d known this man for 12 years and he’d not called me in the last 5. When we’d discussed politics in the past, his eyes would glaze over and he’d politely wait for me to discuss something interesting.

He called me. He was impassioned, furious, frightened. The Presidential election(sic) of 2000 is how it started for him too.

So when we got off the phone, I sat for a minute or two. I was filled with wonder. “If people like Kevin are getting angry there’s something going on here.” I started talking to other people myself. I started looking online for news and found myself becoming more and more concerned.

That’s why we may very well be able to call the grassroots liberals the organization that was started by a phone call.

Talking To My Friend

I was talking to my friend, the artist from New York City who called me in April of 2003 and got me started on this rampage of do-gooder activism and educating myself and other people and heaven only knows what else. This was the first Sunday after the election and he told me he’d gone out for drinks with a co worker who was a Republican who’d voted (a moment of silence to brace ourselves for the spoken words) for Bush. He wondered at it; as if he’d invited Jack the Ripper; or a fallen angel; or perhaps some mythic beast that no matter how vilified could not be dismissed: child eating monster or not this creature was surely numbered among the powerful since it was its chosen whose steady finger was on the Button.

He recounted to me, honestly surprised and pleased, that they could talk together about the election(?) and even joke about it and even found common ground of various kinds.

Oh, oh it gets us. No matter how educated and sensitive and sophisticated you think you are, that human need to be part of a group that is better than any other is difficult to escape because as a strategy of propagating your genes it certainly doesn’t hurt to passionately believe that the people who bear them are better than others.

My friend is no yahoo. He’s educated, an artist, usually prepared to be open minded, curious about people different than he. And he fell into this Us/Them, Blue/Red, Good/Evil stuff. We all do. I’ve yet to meet anyone who didn’t at least slip into it from time to time.

Sun Tzu For Activists

I think that it's important to have a theoretical framework with which to make your strategic and tactical decisions. I am no expert on strategy, but ever since first reading Sun Tzu's Art of War I've been fascinated by the rational and relentlessly effective methods of organizing your efforts that he lays out in thirteen tiny chapters.

The translation I love the most is by R. L. Wing who translated the title as The Art of Strategy. I particularly like this emphasis because Sun Tzu did believe that actual warfare is the last resort.

What would people think of starting a study group of Sun Tzu's strategic principils with activism and creating change in mind? I have found it valuable to organize and prioritize my own efforts using this stuff. It might be fun as well as useful for us collectively to make this one of the things we use to make our decisions about our collective efforts.

Studying this stuff is mental martial arts. Would people want to use R. L. Wing's system of splitting the book into 52 short parts, one for each week of the year? Or if somebody has another idea for the scheduling, let everybody know.

What Can I Do?

One of the things that led to me wanting to start this group was that I was having conversations with people both before and after the election. About the erosion of our civil liberties, the war, a president who was chosen by Supreme Court Justices, rampant voter fraud, the concentration of more and more media in fewer hands. And the people I was talking to kept saying at some point: But what can you do?
Well, I thought, maybe they need a list.

Here is as good a list as any I've seen:

Be a drop in a bucket. One of many. No single drop is a flood. The difference you make may be far more than you'll ever know or measure. Find a cause and put your efforts into it. Something that makes you passionate.

Educate yourself. Fifteen minutes to a half hour a day. At least five days a week. For a long time. How long? How long do you want to live in a republic? The rest of your life? A necessary part of educating yourself is learning how the media manipulates all of us, and developing your critical thinking skills. Another part of educating yourself is to then expend the energy to watch listen to or read any media critically. It takes a lot more effort and is a lot more fun than sitting there.

Put your monty where your mouth is. Vote with your dollars. Buy from companies that support the policies, candidates, and values you say you value. Maybe even pay a tiny bit more or walk half a block farther once in a while.

Donate. Give money to organizations who are working towards causes you believe in. The value of even a few dollars is far beyond what you might think it is if you donate to nonprofit organizaions. This is because they can go to institutional funders with your relatively "small" donation and have evidence of community support. Just a thought.

Educate others. Talk to the people you know. This is a very important part of how you make change happen. Educate them and let them educate you. A major part of why you are reading this at all is a phone call from a friend alerting me to some problems he saw our country was not dealing with.

Volunteer. Do it. Get out of your routine. Parents: bring the kids along. Set an example. Choose what you do carefully. You'll be amazed when you find yourself having fun along with the hard work. Beats the heck out of any time I ever spent watching television.

Vote. You don't just have to vote for Democrats and Republicans. You can vote for a third party candidate, you can use the write in vote. You can use jury nullification. You can also vote with emails and letters to representatives, companies, media. You can sign petitions. (To give youserlf that extra incentive to vote click on votergasm.org.)