A lot of people in the USA these days are going broke. It hardly matters if you have a G.E.D. or a Master’s degree. Unemployment is creeping through the populace like a billion-fingered thief. The number of people on food stamps in the USA today is unprecedented, and what’s left of our national safety net after Clinton and Bush took their turns hacking it apart is a threadbare mess with holes in it the size an entire city block can fit through without sucking in its belly.

More people were living in poverty in 2010, according to the census, than in all the time the census has been collecting data. People are dying from untreated dental problems, laws are appearing left and right that penalize the homeless and the poor, prisons are profiting, a dull rage is building, and the bottom line is a lot of people—far too many—are poor and getting poorer.

The kicker is that it won’t be getting better any time soon. The unemployment rate is predicted to continue to grow, well into 2014.

All of this is very bad news, indeed.

THE LAND OF HAND TO MOUTH

It’s an unhappy scene, poverty. And we’re not talking about the presence or absence of one or two niceties. The low, low place that living hand to mouth can bring you is much more complex and all-encompassing than not being able to afford one or two top shelf amenities that might make life a bit more enjoyable when you’re out there grinding away.

For most of my life I’ve been like most of the world, I guess—getting by without a whole lot of money. Sometimes it’s been real bad. Sometimes it’s been average. And sometimes, for a minute, life’s been pretty comfortable. The truth is, though, that those comfortable times have been pretty short lived. And even then, my standard of comparison is one you’d find in a person who grew up in a poor family.

What do I mean by “poor”? I mean at our worst we were homeless and cooking food in a campfire, or living in a house with buckets for toilets. And at our best, we were trying hard to fit into the suburban middle class, but still accepting bags of hand me downs from other families. By poor, I mean the regular presence of bargain brands; I mean the type of life where you grow up always thinking about how much things cost, and how you don’t have enough to do A, B, or C; and mostly, I mean the type of deeply-seeded awareness where poverty is a way of your thinking and acting. I’m not proud of this, and I don’t think it necessarily makes a person deep or interesting. It’s just how I grew up.

Even through all of that, there was the sense that you could escape it. Maybe. One day. Going to bed hungry means you and your little brother would meet up and sneak food from the fridge after everyone else was asleep. But even on nights you couldn’t quell the hunger that was so much deeper than stomach pangs, you imagined that if you were talented enough and motivated enough, you would be plucked out of such fates and arrive in the Land of Where You Have Always Belonged; that there was a golden cot with your name on it, just waiting for you to show your mettle. After all, woven deeply into the American consciousness are a few narratives. One of them is the Rags to Riches myth; essentially the Conservative notion of Bootstrap. The myth that we live in a land of abundant opportunity, and in which no matter what your meager beginnings, if you stick it out, there is gold enough to go around.

I guess we all buy into that in this place. But recent times have put a harsh dent into those kinds of ideas.

THE VERY AVERAGE AND SUDDENLY ELUSIVE LIFE

For a short time in Manhattan, when I was 30 and working in publishing, I was bringing home a very, very average paycheck, but it was a salary. It was not minimum wage. It was not Freelance. It was pretty okay. What helped a lot was that I was living with a woman who was also making a modest salary. Those days of combining our paychecks were the most comfortable of my life. I actually had money every check that I could do something with. Go out, buy clothes, buy gifts, save…live. Absent, finally, was the constant fear and shame and worry and self-loathing that can potentially accompany a lower income lifestyle in such a nation as the USA.

Again, mind you—in the scheme of things, our income was pretty average. A cousin of mine (our families went quite different directions) was making more all by herself and living on the Upper East Side of Manhattan before she was out of her 20s. Yet, that kind of “pretty average” to a lot of people out there is the Good Life. And the number of those people is growing every day.

That’s an important part of what I’m writing here. That must always be considered: the context of our culture. After all, poverty is a relative standard. Relative to what others have, to what is required to do or acquire certain things; relative to how others see poverty; relative to what means there are to live and survive without having lots of currency. And in a nation like the USA—where (increasingly) the rhetoric and value system is one that demonizes the poor; worships the affluent and the always-in-style; and penalizes with a severity that increases directly inversely proportionate to the wealth one commands—it is very hard to be poor.

For the past few years it’s been hard for a lot of people. I’ve been one of them. It’s been hard not only because, well, it’s hard to live in the emotional and practical reality of poverty, but because the idea that you can lift yourself out of it is in danger of extinction. That notion that if you get a degree, or work hard (or both); that if you are talented and ambitious, then it’s only a matter of time before you are  living comfortably—is suffering some heavy blows. When you are a child, you vow to “make it,” and you hold on because you know anything is possible. And then you get into your 20s, or 30s, you rack up some serious student loan debt—if you are lucky enough to go to college—and you work toward that dream.

Time stretches on….and on….and on….and nothing gets better. And what if things get worse?

I’m taking the time to write this post because I think it’s important to keep track of the experience I’ve been having. Not because I think it makes me very special to have been here. It’s just the opposite. It’s an important story because so many of us are living it right now. And the truth is, it’s an uncomfortable piece of writing that’s taken a handful of sittings over the course of a week. It’s a story I’d rather put behind me (but of course!), full of experiences I’d rather forget. (Wouldn’t we all!) It’s a reality you don’t want to sit in a second longer than you are forced to. But we need to be aware of where our fellow human beings are, and what they are feeling. Even if we are lucky enough to be living a different fate. Because our individual moments of good fortune do nothing to affect the fate of millions, or create big enough shifts to change systemic wrongs.

And when you are beset by these wrongs…well, you barely admit to yourself, let alone anyone else. When you’re in the thick of it, you don’t stop too long to marvel at the misery of it. That’s not sensible. You do what you have to do. From moment to moment, and from day to day. That’s what we do, right? That’s all there is to do. You try not to become so weary that you think of giving up as more comfortable than continuing to fight. But mostly, you keep your eyes focused on the next step, and you don’t give yourself time to wallow. You’d become mired.

I feel like I’m at a place where I can take a breath. After a long, thin, period, I’ve found a way to bring income home again. I dare to hope things might change, finally. And yet, I hesitate to tell this tale; to spin out all the moments and feelings and thoughts, and the reality of poverty. Why? Why is that?

THE WORST KEPT SECRET

Because you want to keep poverty a secret. as glaring and obvious is the global wreckage and domestic corrosion of economic inequality and violence, we still want to keep it quiet when it affects us. Which is, of course, very convenient to those who benefit the most from the (global) fallout. When what needs to happen is a great anger arise from the realities of injustice and imbalance so many are living, instead we hush up.

And we hush up for myriad reasons. Men are told that women will write us off if we don’t have cash at the ready. And many will. But that is not limited to women. Sure, there are engrained ideas about what MEN and WOMEN need to bring to the party to be viable mates. And many buy into those. But not all.

No, I think the factors are bigger than that in a capitalist system. Here, poverty feels like a rot. You can see and smell it from down the block. In a capitalist system, we perceive poverty as if infectious. Poverty pulses with a neediness that threatens to absorb your own power. When you are not poor, you will very probably feel confronted by it. Threatened by it. Powerless in the face of it. Without thinking, you back away. And in backing away, further isolate people who are extremely isolated already. All around them is a bustling, shouting, barking, neon cash machine that spins some people in big circles and drives them around like a roller-coaster, while for others, the machine does nothing but pollute the air and water and food supply; keep them up all night; and steal their friends, peace of mind, and children.

So, as much as possible, you  keep your troubles to yourself when you are suffering with lack. They are your troubles, after all! You eat bitter, as the Chinese say. No need to advertise your struggle. You tell yourself you are building character. Or…whatever you have to tell yourself to keep going.

Artists, entrepreneurs, and the self-promoting learn in many places that success! breeds! success! and it’s best not to disclose anything but the good news about your product and your company or your practice. Feed that positive buzz. I have spent a lot of time as a freelance artist, and this was one I grappled with. Social media circles make the conflict clear. These are both your friends and clients (and potential clients). I needed to tell the truth of my situation, but at almost every turn, I was pressured to keep quiet about it. Not by people saying hush…but by my own feelings, and the realities of living in this culture, and the realities of being a self-employed artist. Why would people bring their projects to me if I am going broke? They will look at one artist who is not broke and then, they will look at me, and then, they will think what capitalism has taught them to think: He clearly is no good at what he is doing. They will invest poverty (or wealth) with a moral value. As we all do. There will be no time to consider other factors that might be in play. They will simply walk their business over to the happy, bustling joint. And thus, the problem compounds.

In one of the more revealing moments I had with an artist friend who constantly preached authenticity and never editing who you were as an artist and person when you present yourself to the audience, I was told that this was the reason they never spoke about their own looming and constant money worries: It just wasn’t smart as a business consideration. Which makes sense! A practical sense. I can’t blame them for that, in the end. I personally couldn’t keep so quiet about things so pressing in my life, but then again, I’m a different sort of artist. I happen to be better at telling or showing you what I see and how I feel, than I am at running a storefront.

But that’s how strongly we are indoctrinated with this social rule. We are taught that be you woman or man, businessperson or otherwise, you just don’t let it be known too much when you are struggling with money. It doesn’t make you look able, strong, or cool. It makes you look like a failure (nevermind that at least 15% of the nation is “failing” as well!) You will make others uncomfortable. There’s that sense of jinx or magical vibes to the admonition: By concentrating and admitting the desperateness of the situation, you will perpetuate the momentum of your bad luck, and so shhhhh Fake it Til Ya Make It!

And again, in a nation like the USA, the fault lines and division are very clear. And not much room for gray.

The isolation this pushes you into is painful. When you are down and out, the last thing you need is isolation. You need community. You need help. You need a shoulder, an ear, another human to remind you that you are not contagious, or catastrophic. And that your problems don’t make you a bad person, but that they are part of a larger network of faultlines. And that you are not alone.

A GROWING LACK OF POWER

The notion that you don’t have enough, that you cannot do this or that—whether it is wash the clothes, buy the children new shoes, replace a candle, replace clothes, replace the batteries in a TV remote, or come along when friends go out to the bar or the bowling alley—is a disempowering one. And all in all, that is what being poor equals. A lack of power. A lack of power needed to affect your own destiny.

Sure, the lack is not absolute. You are a human being, even in the USA! You can still wield power. You can fight against the imbalance and the obstacles. You can be ingenious, and motivated, and entrepreneurial. You don’t have to let the baby stick paperclips or her fingers into electric outlets, you can whittle plugs from wood, if you can’t afford to buy them. You can wash clothes by hand with dish detergent. You can substitute water for milk in a recipe, or grow as much of your own food as  you can manage. And you do do many of these things.

What’s harder to do is stop the triggered thoughts that rise in your mind every where you look in your home. Each unpainted patch, each glued cup, every taped up wire or dark lamp whispers to your unconscious mind: broken…no good…expired. And the thoughts accumulate, and become a clamor.

wish i had a…. i can’t fix it…. useless…. this doesn’t work…. used up… insufficient… dying… corroded… waste

CAUGHT IN A GROWING WEB OF ENTROPY

The thorny patch of emotions grows thicker. The feelings and thoughts that are a result of this life situation grow entangled with each other, and in time, you can no longer tell where they end and you begin. You actually forget that they are attached to circumstance; that misery is not, necessarily, life. You forget that these thoughts are not you. Because they do not stay contained, these seedlings of hardship. Insecurity caused by finances bleeds over to the rest of your self-image and emotional experience of life. You are insecure about your cash, and so you are insecure about your ability to keep up your house, or keep the refrigerator full; insecure about your ability to parent your children properly, or about your appearance, or about your ability to respond to any given event that might not be foreseen. This insecurity becomes part of your wardrobe, your eye contact, your body posture, your walk.

An insecurity that persists long enough becomes dread. And dread, anxiety, depression, shame, hopelessness, and anger are lively spirits in the land of Hand To Mouth.

These feelings are often touched on when people write about poverty, or unemployment. Rarely is the aura of entropy discussed. And to be poor means to be run through with the energy of entropy. All around you, everything is fading, failing, breaking, and turning to dust. Entropy is a fact of life, and this is the case always…but when you have disposable cash, you buy off that reality. You replace batteries. You buy a new toothbrush when the old one becomes smushed and worn out. When you break a tooth, you get a crown. You buy new lightbulbs when you need them, instead of juggling lights from room to room. You don’t wrap food in Rite-Aid bags to store them in the fridge, you use plastic wrap so you can see the food. You don’t keep using the same nasty old sponge in the sink; you buy a new one! Your shoes are clean and sharp and stylish, not worn out and floppy and faded. Your clothes, too. When you have regular income, and enough to pay more than rent, every day you put forth energy in the form of physical effort as well as currency and you rejuvenate your environment and you refresh your ability to operate and be mobile and effective in the material world.

But without that money, you see things breaking down right and left. You squeeze remote controls that don’t work. Pull doorknobs that don’t properly turn. Reappearing: a singing toy that sings too low, slow and draggy before stopping altogether. The ever present hand of entropy colors your overall perception of life and self.

Many of these things—utilities shut off, toys that can’t be used anymore, non-working lights—will lead to a discussion with your children that may be painful to you. A conversation that costs yet more energy because of how much effort it takes to repeat it over and over. A conversation that exacts an energetic toll because of how it breaks your heart each time. Maybe you lie to them about what the situation is at one time or another during the day because you don’t want them to also obsess about money or attribute everything painful in life to poverty. On one hand, you are glad that they will not take things for granted and understand that there is a cost to the comforts of life, but you don’t want them to be one like you: A child of lack who grew up with that all-pervading reality. Cheap brands. Knock-offs. Humiliation in school. Bag lunches. Inability to stay quiet on what something cost. Tendency to brag about how much your shoes cost. We can recognize each other, children of poverty. We know the signs. The desperation, the overvaluation of luxury, the ambition to never Be There Again. The ease with which we discuss money, crassly. The anxiety, the inability to save. Mostly, you don’t want your children to grow into adults who are invested with a powerless self-image.

Because no matter what you do, or how you decide to think of it, every way you turn, poverty is not just a lack of power, but a growing lack of power. And it is hard to fight because the power needed to counter poverty is basically an energy exchange in which the rate keeps you at a loss. That is, the time and energy you invest in whittling those socket plugs is going to cost you more than the investment you would have made simply by dropping 1.99 into a cashier’s hand. The wear on your body and peace of mind are not negligible as you scramble to bridge another gap, or pop a finger in a dam, or hold two ends together, or in some other way interject your body into an equation that is constantly crumbling.

A CHAIN REACTION OF LOSS

Poverty is alive, as if a virus. It grows exponentially. Poverty is a chain reaction of loss. There are so many ways to illustrate this. Here’s an obvious one: You don’t have money for a dental checkup, or cleaning. Your dental problems get worse. One day, when chewing, a filling falls out. The last thing you can afford is a trip to the dentist’s, so you do your best to brush that tooth a little more carefully. But of course, decay begins. And spreads. What would have been an easy filling when caught in time, soon turns into a black hole in your tooth that eats away more tooth the longer you don’t get it filled. You avoid it until a pain festers there, and grows more every day until it wracks your brain constantly, and soon you can’t sleep. Now, you either do a root canal with crown ($2000, roughly), or you have the tooth pulled (about $120). The tooth gets pulled, of course. You probably borrowed or hocked something to get even that $120, so there’s a little more debt and stress. And there goes the Kool Aid Smile you’ve been famous for since you were a child. There goes your self image. You smile less, embarrassed of the gaps in your smile. This affects how you interact with others. Which affects all those dealings and their outcome in some way. This little hole that crept into your tooth, too, creeps into your life. And grows.

Your glasses are broken. You don’t replace them. You can’t! You tape them together. You avoid wearing them. You can’t see. You stop talking to people who pass by on the street because you cannot see them without your glasses. Or your wear your contacts for far too long and cause irritation and infection to your eyes. You run out of saline too fast, so you store two contact lenses on one side of the holder, decreasing the effectiveness of the sterilizing solution. Sometimes you can’t afford saline/sterilizer at all, and you won’t wear the geeked out glasses with the tape on one side so you stroll down the street, nearly blind, keeping your eyes to the ground. Not smiling too wide, either! Remember.

Like bubbles of mercury on the ground—like that clamor of thoughts that your home life sends to you every day—these conditions begin to cluster and add to one another.

You wear things as many times as you can before they smell to cut down on costs of washing the clothes. You no longer buy the brands that are the most environmentally sound, or non-toxic. You do your best, but inevitably, your shampoos and soaps and deodorants simply become what you can afford. So your conscious will and personality and desires are less and less motivating your actions and you are becoming One Who Survives. Gone are the days of the shampoo in the cool bottle that smells so heavenly you feel better just putting in your hair. Gone is that little good feeling that you walked around with for hours simply for using something that made you feel good. Gone are the sharp razors; hello store brand. Gone is the full fridge, gone are the desserts.

And, unbidden—even if not in your own home—the day becomes, yet, a thread of thoughts and instances in which you Don’t Have Enough. Those thoughts drag behind them bags weighted with shame; with fear; with worry and insecurity; with anger. Being full of those feelings all the time erodes your health. (Which costs more money.) And being full of those thoughts and feelings take up your time, too. Those take energy. This week, two tall cups of coffee are needed each morning, instead of the one!

And what about something as simple and reliable as coffee in the morning? Even coffee is a luxury, despite your addiction. It’s actually very expensive. Of course you buy the cheap stuff. And in a rare pinch, maybe you use grounds twice. Maybe you cover up your cup when it grows cold and put it in the fridge for tomorrow. Maybe you run out of sugar and just drink it black, no sugar. Maybe you do all those things. The days when you could saunter over to the bakery and buy an Americano with two extra shots for a $3.00 coffee seems very distant. And extravagant as hell!

All these subtractions and detours build on themselves. You feel out of breath with the hustle, because when you are poor, the hustle never ends. The need to be creative and enterprising never ends. The need to Make Do never ends. The feelings that you are a loser are ever-present. You know it’s a losing game, and you know it’s a crooked one. But who wants to lose, even at a crooked game?

PERVERSE PENALTIES…AND ANGER

It’s no wonder you end up feeling so exhausted. Perversely, a life of poverty is a life in which you need to run even faster. Because being low on cash marks you. It marks you like a tiny rodent scrambling under the hot desert sun, and the birds of prey sure do come. Late fees, disconnection fees, early cancellation fees, overdraft fees, bounced checks, low balance fees, higher interest rates, poorer terms for the poor…there is a network of vampiric thorns in place designed to trip up, puncture, and suck the life from those who cannot afford to stay sufficiently solvent. You know it. You are very aware of it. You grew resentful. You grow afraid of what the next penalty will be. It’s only a matter of time. You grow afraid, even, of the mail. You avoid it. You don’t empty the mailbox for a week straight. What do you care? There will only be more news about how much you owe. A recipe of penalty. Another mouthful of dread.

There is always this pushing upon you. This force pushing down upon  you. It is entropy. Resisting it is painful, and gets harder the less money you have. Somehow, you believe in yourself. It’s a rough patch. the whole nation is suffering. And then you think Well…most of us. There are those who are not.

Some may handle poverty better than I describe it here. Poverty will not feel the same in different cultures, perhaps. And there is a difference between living on a meager income, and being both broke and unemployed. So there is a continuum, no doubt. I am not pretending to know the minds of millions of people, and ultimately, I speak only from my own experience.

In my experience, it is inevitable that living in these conditions long enough, an anger will grow in you. An anger that in this whole dumb lottery of power and chance, you drew the bad card. Not because you deserve it, but because that’s the luck of the damn draw. The well-coiffed sons of privilege laughing as they duck to get into their Porsches or slide into their Senatorial seats are not inherently more worthy souls, or righteous beings. No matter what the movies and advertisements try to tell us. At best, they got lucky by birth or other circumstance. At worst, they were blessed by an institutional corruption that favors them. In any case, why should they get top notch dental care, a car at 16, and a full, nutritious menu every day of the week? Why should they never know a night in jail? Why should they get bailed out of every scrape and set back on the path of good fortune, while you end up running yourself ragged and broke over ten bucks? Why should there be such different worlds, and some born to hardship from the start? What makes them so special as to be given such carefree lives? Why shouldn’t your worries also be theirs?

The anger pervades, pollutes, poisons you. Poisons your heart. You push it away and try to talk yourself back to the generous soul that you know yourself to be. You are careful not to cultivate self-pity. You read your books that help breathe spirituality back into your life. You meditate. You focus on the good. But…you still live in the U.S.A. And you’re not 22 anymore, where it’s easy to frame things romantically. You “should” have it all figured out by now. You “should” be comfortable. You “should” have an IRA and savings, and a new-ish car, and be spending money. You should have some security for tomorrow.

And despite your best efforts, the bitterness grows. The Mr. Hyde within grows. He is, in fact, fed by hunger. And before long, you have a hard time feeling good for other peoples’ good fortune. You live in a vicious competitive environment, and you are losing out. Each tip or wobble of the personal coffers signifies your own moral worth and competence as a human being. It’s no wonder your emotions run high; it’s no wonder you feel worn out. And you feel disappointed in yourself, as well. Even for having such thoughts and feelings. You know you are kinder than your emotions are revealing. But maybe you are not. And you wonder. It’s very easy to call yourself kind when you have a full belly. Let the resources run dry for too long and you may find yourself to be quite another sort of person. Either way, you can’t help it. You feel cornered by circumstance and you snarl like an animal with its leg in a trap. You need out, that’s all. You can’t think and you just need a goddamn break, already.

Sometimes the only break you will get comes in the form of escape. Liquor is a handy one. After all, liquor can be the poor man’s friend, deity, and medicine all in one. A reliable tonic for when you can’t afford to treat physical ailments, or when your mind grows weary from racing, fretting, or fearing. Just wash the worry away at the end of a day. Get back to a simple, relaxed state where you don’t care about money, and where you feel no pain. Of course, you are lucky if you can afford the bottom shelf stuff. It’s about $10. It bites a little harder and is a bit rougher on the body than the good stuff. But you get used to it pretty fast.

I AM VITAL, STRONG, AND REEK OF POTENTIAL. I AM THE CAPTAIN OF TIME.

The flip side to that feeling of entropy that surrounds you when you don’t have money to throw around at even the essentials, is a feeling of power and vitality and possibility when you have reliable and disposable income. Yup, when you have a pocketful of plastic or cash, and a good amount more in the bank, the horizon lays out before you like she’s your starry-eyed bride. You can be part of society at any juncture you desire. You might glide over here and buy a new shirt. (They’ll let you handle them because you look well-dressed already.) You might stop at the corner and scoop up some Shwarma. You might have a laugh with the flower vendor as you choose an arrangement with which to surprise a friend—all on the spur of the moment. You might see a movie. You might buy a slice. Who knows what you’ll decide to do! At any node in this culture you can plug in. You have that power. You can collect. You can browse. You can nibble. You can gift. You can fund. You can donate. You can bargain. You can walk away. You don’t need to rush. Time moves slower for you when you are solvent.

It’s true! When you are always lacking cash, you end up stressed out. About deadlines, schedules, closing times, bank holidays, end of the month, first of the month, bus schedules. You are very aware of time. And it is not your friend. Penalties await. Last chances await. Bounced checks await. Overdrafted accounts await. Shutoff notices await. And you better stay sharp on all of it.

When money is not a worry, it’s as if the whole world slows down. It literally feels that way—that the world is turning slower. You don’t need to try and drink the milk before it goes bad…or to make it last longer than natural. Because buying a new container is not an issue. You don’t need to run like mad for the bus stop. You can call a cab. You don’t need to beg a friend for a ride to the electric company before five p.m. because you’ve already paid your bill! In fact, you paid it as soon as it arrived instead of racing against a shut-off notice. You don’t need to rush for much of anything. You can wander and muse. Because your life is not a constant battle to stay alive. Because having money means having leisure time.

And just as with cash you feel empowered, belonging, and able to tap into the society machine at will; when you are broke you feel like an outcast. You don’t belong. You are a criminal. A potential drain. At no point in the chain of societal nodes can you take command. At no point can you enter. At no point can you negotiate anything, unless it is by the good graces of another. You best not loiter. You will be okay if your clothes are new, and the lighter skinned you are, generally. But if you are walking in a circle at the mall, but not holding a Subway sandwich bag or a Pizza Hut cup, and are wearing ragged clothes, and especially if you are brown—then you are an arrest or police harassment waiting to happen.

TWISTED OUT OF SHAPE

Do you note the narrow focus of this writing? How it all becomes about your own self, your own mind, your own body, your own future? Even reading through it feels like being stuffed into a hole all alone with your rancid mind. And that’s what these situations do to a person. That’s part of that isolation. And the survival instinct, which is running on overdrive. There’s nothing more selfish than the instinct to survive, after all. And living in that place for too long can make you grabby, and make you mean. And it can make you ugly. These fears and feelings distort a person. I’ve seen it up close in the faces of people in my life; people stressed out about gas every day, or about their kids’ clothes. People who are living with all the feelings and stressors that I’ve written about here. People who are kind and beautiful souls, but after years of living this way, those qualities become harder to see…because poverty can twist you out of shape like that.

It needn’t be that way, of course. There are  many shapes a culture can take. And a wiser society would be built more compassionately. A wiser nation would not view poverty or unemployment as a personal failure, but as a societal one. A kinder nation would have, as a reflex, a more communal spirit in which we looked out for each other. In the USA it is very hard to be poor and/or unemployed. How do you get your food if you do not buy it from the store? In some cases, people have tried gardening as a solution, and the city turns around and outlaws yard gardens. A city often will outlaw panhandling, or giving food away, or paying other peoples’ parking tickets. Our culture is not arranged in a way that people can easily help each other, or provide for themselves outside of the rigid, narrow, selfish, and tyrannical capitalist path. There is a sick and ugly network of mechanisms in place in this country to both shame you for being poor, as well as to keep you from escaping your situation. This is why going broke in a place like the USA can lead an otherwise rational and balanced soul to such desperation.

A HUNGRY MAN IS AN ANGRY MAN

Poverty engenders a feeling of powerlessness in you beyond what some might imagine. It’s like that insecurity I wrote about earlier. That feeling of powerlessness doesn’t stay contained to one area. It grows in you when you are not earning enough money, or can’t find employment and can easily metastasize into you feeling and acting generally powerless, and thinking of yourself as powerless. You don’t even see it happening. And one day you look at your thinking or actions and say “How did this happen? I am not this person. I don’t think of myself as ineffectual and unable to change things!” But it sneaks up on you, living in that mental and physical aura and environment every day.

And all the emotions that poverty breeds do this; carry over into areas where they are destructive and possibly consuming. And you forget what it is like to view things differently. And you feel there is no salvation for you. You can easily begin to burn inside with the injustice that is all around you, the injustice that is reaching into your home and snatching teeth from your head; the injustice that is mocking your manhood, and degrading your personhood, and is causing your children pain. And it doesn’t take too much of this, or too long of this, to bring you to the point where you feel you are ready to blow. Because being poor doesn’t mean you are stupid. And it doesn’t mean you can’t see what’s going on. And what’s going on is that everything is failing, divided unfairly, and for you and yours is pain—while for others, its pure pleasure.

It’s important to remember that when we are talking about a “divide,” we are not talking about how one person has a BMW with leather interior and the next person has a beat up 1990 Chevy. The divide is much more meaningful and dangerous than that. We are talking about a divide in overall peace of mind. A divide in the feelings of self-worth that some have and some lack. A divide between ideas like “I belong here and there is hope and good times ahead for me” versus “I am tolled and harrassed at every turn and I can’t rest and there is no way out for me.” A divide between “I want this society and system to work out and I’ll do what I can to perpetuate its success” and “It will be best for everyone if this thing topples and all those who benefit from its standing scream on the way down.” We should not underestimate the volatile nature of a public—or even one person—who feels s/he has nothing left to lose; that the deck is stacked beyond righting; that nobody is listening, and nothing will change. In fact, the roots of enmity against the United States from abroad, I would venture, is in large part caused by this dynamic. Many who suffer outside our borders and live in squalor and in pain see so many Americans living obliviously in great comfort and know it to be unfair, and further, know the situation to be exploitive. I do not see the terrorism this breeds as so very different than other violent domestic reactions to economic violence. I’ve lived for a while now at what felt like the edge of everything. It’s a maddening place.

I think it was about two years ago when I heard of a man in a city nearby (Portland?) who went on a violent rampage that was explained by his losing his job, and by the pressures of the economy. At the time, I responded in a way that I see now as disappointingly smug, and not just a little nâïve: I wrote that he obviously had other issues if losing his job caused him to become violent in such a jarring way. Now, that may be true. But on the other hand, as I hope this writing has helped illustrate, in my opinion and experience, prolonged poverty and unemployment are big enough factors in and of themselves to destabilize a person. You don’t really need much more than that to send you off the edge. And the fact that despite my upbringing, I could have been oblivious to that simply because I had regular income at the time is just as worrisome as the idea that the conditions that pushed that man toward destruction are common today, and only growing more ubiquitous.

Take a society; blend ignorance of the comfortable with desperation of the poor, and you have a dangerous mix. And in times like this, ignorance thrives. I’ve not even touched on other important factors related to this recession/depression. For example, the fact that if you’re not white, you are being hit even harder by this economic downturn. Or what it feels like to have a name that you know will decrease your chances of getting an interview just by the nature of your ethnicity, all while hearing increasingly more scapegoating by other destitute people who are blaming their troubles on people with names or skin like you. In a time when those of us struggling ought be united in our plight, wizened demons of racism and division rear their ugly heads and keep us squabbling and at each others’ throats.

NO MORE WAR ON THE POOR

A photo of the Wall Street protests going on right now.

It is very much in the interest of society that we not let economic inequality continue as it has. The momentum of today’s class war on the poor has accelerated to a dangerous fervor. This war, and all the forms it takes, is, of course, an accepted part of the American Dream; it’s values seeded deeply in all of our ideas of what wealth means and what poverty means. It is a long-running war. But any student of history knows that the pitch of a war can pivot on the smallest happening. Winter might strike early. The crops might rot. The supply lines might be interrupted. The troops might get dysentery. The villagers might have more to fight for than a worn out cadre of mercenary soldiers. An unforeseen geographical or meteorological aberration can upset everything. And then, the tide shifts with barely a moment’s notice, and woe to those caught unprepared.

Warren Buffet has a sense of this, and that is why he is one of the rich people in this nation who has spoken up about the inequality. That is why he has recently advocated for people in his income bracket to pay a fair share in taxes. I doubt very much that this statement is purely motivated by altruism. Not to be ungenerous to him; I still very much appreciate and credit him for saying what is true and obvious, and what is easier to forget when you are very comfortable. I do think he comes from a good place, too.

But I have no doubt that he sees the writing on the wall. It’s there for anyone who cares to look around today. The proles will put up with a whole lot. A whole hell of a lot. But they have limits, make no mistake. If you leave people with no way out of Hell, they will tunnel. Even if all they have are their own fingers. Put everything beautiful on one side of a wall, and they will tunnel. Lock up all the resources in one building and reinforce the walls with steel that reached fifty feet underground—but don’t forget that you have to pay someone to make the key to lock it, pay someone to empty the garbages, and pay someone to come read your meter. Those people will not be in your income bracket. And the tricks of division will not work forever, or on all people. Warren Buffet has made a simple calculation and would rather pay some more taxes than fear his janitor, his maid, his mailman, his lawnboy, his locksmith, his pizza delivery person, and every other blue collar or unemployed person in his path.

The real people who are scared are the power elite. Of course, they’re trying to make you scared and us scared. But I can tell you, having been a reporter for the New York Times, that on the inside they’re very, very frightened. They do not want movements like this to grow, and they understand on some level — whether it’s subconscious or, in other cases, even overt — that the criminal class in this country has seized power.”

—Journalist Chris Hedges

But he should fear them. And all those who would run an endless array of tricks to keep the poor from escaping their lot should fear us. And all those who would enact laws to further game this crooked system should fear us. And the politicians who collude with their wealthy benefactors should fear us. And all those who would make the mistake of thinking the poor are their own private milk sack to be forever squashed and kneaded should fear us. And all those who would stay quiet and inactive in the face of this class war, believing they can drop enough coin into security systems and gates and guard dogs to keep us at bay will come to regret such errors of judgment.

They keep us as far away as they can, don’t they?  They do it with high rents, and loitering laws, and unwritten dress codes, and police, and expensive price tags on meals that cost a week’s pay for most of us. It’s easy for them to keep squeezing the yoke around the necks of people who never can answer back; people who are too busy trying to make rent to be effective activists or in some other way address the injustice that is crushing them. It presents no moral quandary to kill people slowly and by degrees when they are an abstract concept to you. And the poor remain abstract to rich because the media refuses to tell the truth of things, as the media exists as fairy-tales for the rich. And they don’t want to bother their beautiful minds with such icky details. The news blackout of the recent protests at Wall Street insure they won’t have to.

But what if the poor and exploited were to begin showing up everywhere? What if there were no place an Uppercrustian could go without seeing signs of our anger? What if we began leaving our mark…and with it, a strong phrase adopted as our calling card? Something like No More War on the Poor? What if the 1-Percenters began seeing this phrase everywhere they turned? What if it were spraypainted on every Mercedes? What if this phrase were spray-painted on the pretty black asphalt driveways of every congress member’s driveway? What if cards with No More War on the Poor scrawled on them turned up in the dry-cleaning of every Senator? What if that dry-cleaning had poison ivy in it, too? Or bleach? What if their Mercedes began coming back with scratches down the side instead of a wax job? What if their landscaper watered their prize rose bushes with weedkiller instead of water? What if  they could never pinpoint where the ongoing action was coming from…because it was coming from everywhere?

Nobody in the world, nobody in history has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.”

—Assata Shakur

It would be a voice they could not escape. There would not need to be any organization or central group. It would be a project that millions could undertake. People wouldn’t need to devote ten hours a week in a week already jam packed with duties and exhaustion. A note here, an action there. Wait for opportunity to show itself and then speak in that voice that speaks for us all. And what if a million people were spreading this message? What if ten million were? What if the newspapers had no choice, eventually, but to begin covering the strange flurry of messaging that was showing up on napkins in restaurants, and car doors, and driveways, and in flower deliveries and grocery bags? What if the right people began seeing the many, many disaffected and suffering humans they previously never had to stare at? What if they began feeling cornered and surrounded? What if we remembered that we do surround them?

Perhaps bit by bit, changes would happen. Think of it as a haunting. Or think of it as advertising! Advertising works, you know. If there is no way to turn away from the Coca Cola ad, you will eventually come to memorize it. And whether you like it or not, it will work on you. What if the rich and the crooked were to be haunted by the anger of millions? There would be no formal advocacy group or official that politicians or billionaires could bury under or buy off with good PR, or kickback. There would be no weaseling away from action. Action is all that would alleviate the million-pronged assault. Better conditions for people. Change angry, hungry people who need a way to vent against the injustice into people happy with life because justice is alive and well and affecting them for the better.

It would be one thing if the poorest of us could leave it all up to those who benefit from ignoring their plight. But that would make no sense. Collective anger needs to give voice to the conscience that too many powerful people lack today. Perhaps this particular imagining of a nationwide project—a faceless but inescapable voice—is not the answer. I don’t claim to have an answer. But I know one needs to be found. I know today’s so-called solutions are getting us nowhere. After all, this is not really about an acute crisis, but a long-term pattern and a systemic imbalance. And this systemic imbalance will remain, even after the last of the protestors on Wall Street have gone home.

There is a power differential in play in our nation that is killing most of us. And we need to take some of that power back. It is not only possible for us to do that, it is the only way out.

YESTERDAY’S SICK WARMONGERING SCION OF AMERICA, George W. Bush, once appeared on television and sternly scolded the People for taking television too seriously.

That is, this pampered rich boy who had every thing stolen for him in his life, swaggered up on his pulpit and berated the entire nation, warning us not to have too many emotions and thoughts due to all the televised news about death in Iraq; about suicide bombings in Iraq; about the Empire spasms that lashed out taking lives, maiming babies, weeping spent uranium. “The explosions on your TV.”

And I think that little irony there says it all about today’s media, about today’s “News” channels. We are supposed to take them seriously, even as they tell us not to do so. An inverted knot of suppressed and sublimated emotion and mangled thought process is how they’d have us. A busted open container they can pour poison into. But before that, like a vampire, suck up the energies and spirit of so many, and from all sides of the political spectrum. Inside this beast’s festering jaws are clenched a fabricated world brightly and wretchedly illuminated as if by 100,000 limbs set alight by white phosphorus.

Inside that box, the Iraq disaster is done with. Inside that box, it makes sense to keep bleeding billions into the Afghanistan sands. Inside that box, no important questions matter. Inside that box, your own heart and mind can’t fit. What would (does) our world look like outside of that box?

Today’s Right wing is not worth listening to any more than it makes sense to stick your arm into a spinning garbage disposal. What of those those who watch these hell-hearted plasticmen and seethe? Or mock them on a blog? Or debunk TV arguments every day of the year? A massive amount of energy and time is spent doing this. It’s sort of weird. Who do they watch for? Not for me. Some will claim it is a service. Do they do it for you? They deplete their own energies, and accomplish what? What is accomplished each day by doing this?

In truth, I’m sure it is a service for a few. Is it the most valuable service? Perhaps not. What of pooling all that time, pooling any monies, and creating a new station. Or perhaps a new network via radios. Yes, radio. This tool that many more people can use, and even carry mobile. A tool that many of lesser means can broadcast with, no less.

And to do what? Simply reporting the state of the world as it truly is. Sowing the airwaves with hope, with positivity, with history lessons. With plans, with campaigns, with community. Completely tuning out the false narrative as you would tune out  a sick individual on a corner, ranting about death, devils, and disaster. Would you follow that person around, reinterpreting all their madness for the crowd? Would you shout side by side and call it a service?

This motion is not so much popular, though. The shape of thought that would completely swerve away and build something new in the place of something unsightly, unsafe, or unsound. Is that a revolutionary act? It is, by definition. Reform seeks to take something broken and reshape it. Redundancy says do it over and over even when it does nothing much. Revolution says that Thing is not worth reshaping, nor is it worth your energies and time. Revolutionary thought says you have the power and means and ability to make something new, in place of the old. But today’s Left is not revolutionary, of course.

Lately I hear a lot about how while so many are misguidedly blaming ALL muslims for 9/11, it was only a small cadre of radical extremist muslims who attacked us on 9/11.

Is that true?

Do you even know–as a person–who attacked us on 9/11? I don’t. How am I to know? How are we to know? I still have the newspaper where some foggy screen caps of a Fake Osama Bin Laden were shown supposedly crowing about the WTC attacks. For a tape that would be the hardest evidence in USA possession of who made the biggest hit on our country in its entire history, it faded out of existence very fast, eh? But then, I already said it’s fake.

Do you know it was the Taliban? Really? Why? Because your TV told you? Because the lying, corrupt government told you? That same government that was making deals with the Taliban in August of 2001? The same government that has been trying to sink its derricks into Central Asian oil fields for years? Why? Because they claimed 19 passports floated out of the completely exploded plane down onto the street and somehow stuck out in all that clutter, debris, ash, and litter?

What evidence do we have that the WTC were taken down by the people our government claims? What evidence personally? What trials brought to light the guilty? What process made this clear? What oracle pronounced this truth? The very same TV that our own government’s head of state told us not to take seriously? What forces forbade you to question this? The Right, and yes, the Left, too. From Bill Maher to DailyKos—earnest questions about this catastrophe that changed everything in our nation, from law to war to monies spent in congress, to school lessons—were verboten. Despite the shabbiest case ever built against any major crime. And those who insisted we examine it were demonized by those same Liberal forces, as we are today. Just as it has been the Liberals overwhelmingly leading the charge to sneer at those of us who still believe in protest, rallies, and boycotts.

That is your (Professional) Left.

Obviously, in 2010, what is ancient is again new. The empire is well into its recycling phase. We see conquer and divide. Hucksters and snake oil salesmen. Blatant class war. PSYOPS and a host of control mechanisms to provide a manufactured reality that keeps the People scattered, confused, scared, angry, and mostly, full of fake information. We were attacked and traumatized a decade ago, lied to about it by those who are supposed to protect us and be of us, and this rending of the truth helped destroy us as a confident and sane people.

We tried again to hope and believe in truth when Obama was elected, but as much as some “progressives” still cling to their ideology and party, it’s clear on a gut level that we were had and that the strongest forces in our nation today are those of war, greed, and deception.

And now, nobody believes in much of anything anymore as a result. And we are fast unraveling. Truth means nothing and TV pays it not even the tribute of a gesture. Racism is part of everyday speech, political campaigns, and dialogue. Hate groups are hand in hand with government. White supremacists roam the border and carry badges and guns, too. Laws that let police be even more racist in their operations than before are being launched left and right.

Even those who fight every day to maintain belief know, in their belly, that the game is rotten to the core. This is driving us mad, it is wrecking national sanity. Or causing people to simply turn away.

It’s not just because Obama is black that the nation is flipping out. It’s also because all the illusions of national identity and ideology that we were given as children have fallen apart. Now naked power rules, and shows itself in gross class war and cooked up news shows, court rulings, and police actions that make clear who will be okay tomorrow, and who will not. Those of us with little money or position understand we will soon be living in mildewed tents on the outskirts, while those with money or power will continue to enjoy tax breaks, ballrooms, and well-buttered toast smothered with imported jams.

Dreams of justice and fairness have been toppled.

Once that sinks in fully, things will become very ugly indeed. But many of us are in denial, in shock, or yet to see the final foundation buckling. Still listening to the siren song of TV.

Were there someone or some ones capable of organizing even a fraction of us—they’d need lots of money, and yet not to be beholden to the ideology of the Right—we might have a chance against our enemies. Our enemies are greed and disinformation. And a state out of control. It is those same illusions given us as children. It is the inertia that shoves us cliffward. It is the voice of the Television. It is today’s Liberal brain, brain like a slave, stooped over with the load of delusion, but weary and with no place to go to get away from it. The Left is a zombie holding a flag, with all its sly use of the Right’s most drastic weapons, with its reinforcing at key moments, what harms the People, with no real plan or courage to enact something better, something revolutionary. At every juncture where the Left might make a real stand and make a difference, it suddenly caves in. Just when the People might again hope or benefit. But it must. Because, you see, even the “left” politicians on the national stage know the deal. They hold no hope for justice or truth, either. But LIBERAL is their brand and they are stuck with it.

The GOP? The GOP is but the blood-flecked ID expanding like a rogue universe of wicked cells, the diseased and disintegrating lobe of the human condition. The freaked out, frantic, midnight acid-head mind that whips and coils like a half-smashed snake in the sand.

I’m not better than anyone else in all of this. I soothe myself with TV, too. I dive deeply into illusion. I simply happen to turn to it for storytelling, for movies. Otherwise, I’ll be out in nature. Give me the sun, the wind, the water, and the touch of someone close to me. And give me stories. Stories of clear-eyed humans, of paths lined with golden wheat that sways in the sun, trod by brave souls undertaking important journeys. Give me stories of unpolluted hearts, and simple, wise, and humble humans. Give me stories of the past, of over there, of a day faraway. A day when this looming tower of babbling bullshit has finally collapsed and lain itself upon the ground to bake and bleach under an aging sun, before long to be but a skeleton for tomorrow’s mountains.

THE POLITICAL WORLD IS A WHIRL OF CHAOS. And change. And resistance to currents of change. It smells like thunderstorm.

When I was a young teen living in upstate new york and surrounded by wilderness on my parent’s land (we were caretakers of the property, of many properties, always moving, never owning), I would walk through the fields of overgrown grass, parting the slender stalks, moving toward storms that rolled through the valley. Slowly and with quickened pulse, I’d wade forward into thickening electricity, despite any warnings dully rising in my mind (Never walk into the fields during a lightning storm!)

Feeling spectacularly small and alive under the churning violet, blackening sky-soup. Platinum and cast-iron etched moments…I can see and smell and hear them still: trees moaning and bending as the wind blows harder. Layers of sodden clouds leaking, and then fully unleashing distress onto our cornfields. Rain smacking down on my forehead…I’d squint but not turn back. Swollen streams bordered the cornfields, full with the water now. Glinting platinum corners flaring into the sky.

Moving toward this chaotic beauty, I felt I was walking to meet with God. Mother nature uncloaked and untamed for a dangerous and delightful moment: roused, angry, splitting sky and spitting throaty growls that shook the earth all about me.

These moments fraught with danger tore away my typical caul of youthful indifference—itself a guarded spiritual defense against the ennui and hostility and pettiness of the everyday society I found all around me. Nature is risen. Watching lightning spear and splinter the dusk. And neither of us is pretending tonight…let us shatter this pretense that settles around us like plaster-cast sunny-weather dream state.

These dangerous storms I was warned against felt like magic in the middle of the day. Yes, like a threat. But also like a New Cleansing opportunity. Like reality.

—

Erika said it a couple weeks ago. Talking about that chaos “when the classroom bells break.” And why did we love that as children? Because we weren’t excited by what was going on, breathing too much dust, sensing the futility and inanity in so many of our schooltime activities. The non-reality and ineffectiveness and irrelevance of so much of what was going on, and what we knew would go on from period to period to period from September until June. Parents tell themselves it is all so useful. And children know how to behave and do what they are told. Perhaps not to all, but to many of us the unspoken, not-needed to be spoken was that the years predicted of our schooling ahead was a sentence, a spell of years from which there would be no escape. And class room bells breaking were like little summer mornings dropped down like depth charges into the solidity of an oppressive schedule.

In terms of the political and volatile world today, I actually am excited by what’s happening. I’m not happy about the danger and the threat, of course—not happy about the harm that will directly come about, that is playing out. But I am happy to see the gross wrongs that so many have accepted as bedrock reality now being exposed and challenged in a large, or vocal way. We have the chance finally for some real conversations on higher, more visible layers of society than where they normally flourish.

There are a few things in place in the world (that will undoubtedly be with us as long as we have a world) that have angered me since I was young. But…beyond “angered.” Certain realities that play out in people and in relationships and in the world. When I began to see, as a young teen, that there was inequality and exploitation and greed and emptiness and mostly bullshit&hypocrisy ALL about me…it was very confusing. I didn’t understand why people wanted a world that way. It was Wrong. Why did it go on? Why did nobody care enough to stop these things? Why did I want to grow “up” and “into” this world where adults tried to tell me That This is Just The Way Things Are ????

Did you have a time like this? Where you told it was a phase of your adolescence? Was it? Is it?

I suppose one could look back now and say I was in an Existential Adolescent Phase. We label things and think we are done with them, though. I shrink back from that tendency, always have. I can call a gun a “feroxa” and it can still kill someone. I can call a “seed” a “protein sheath/husk protecting the genetic material within” but it can still grow when I shove it in soil. No matter what we label my thoughts at that time, in this language, in the framing of our culture—I was seeing something real. I was seeing injustice, and I was seeing the excusing of that injustice, and I was seeing hypocrisy. And it hurt my heart.

Honestly, I had given up on many things. Sometimes giving up on something (however you define this) is a very healthy thing.

But now…this BlackPrez dynamic has shifted things about. Obviously, Obama is in a very hard place. Simply for Presidenting While Black, his life is in danger. Imagine if he tried to be half as radical as his fearful opposers pretend? They’d have to recall half the troops just to guard him.

But aside from the systemic resistance to his changing anything, he is of course not very radical-minded. It’sjust not part of his (apparent) makeup. Obama is a huge cultural shift and it’s important and no way do I regret my vote. But I have to admit that while he physically represents a massive change, that does not mean he can enact lots of radical changes. Just what he has done is a lot. Even simply Presidenting While Black is shaking the foundations of this nation, and threats against him have risen like 400% and the USSS agents are being told to work longer, and that no more men are available to protect the POTUS from what I’ve read online. So in all reality, what more could he do? I mean, yes. He could do it anyway. He’d go down a hero. Instead of an icon used in the name of Imperialist war and a nation with massively institutionally entrenched racism. But that, too, is perhaps a bit harsh and cannot hope to contain all that he is, has done, and means to us. When the wind is whipping your eyes, it can be hard to make out the horizon.

This storm is unfolding as it will, and we are yet to see how it will end. The electricity feels threatening at times and it is. But here is a chance, now, finally to talk about the things we need to talk about. Which means the chance to make real change.

It is not just The Reality of Obama forcing these discussions. Such as the class divide always justified in this nation. Or the rich ruling class. The for-profit health racket. Racism. Wars of imperialism. The prison-industrial complex. It is all these things, and the feeling that they all approach to become an integrated part of the political dialogue. And this is due to so many things, just as a storm is a confluence of different temperatures and winds and factors which influence how hard or how long the rain falls. One part is the Reality of Obama, one part is how reporting and national dialogue is being taken back by the People, from institutions and unreliable liaisons and mouthpieces.

And it is the blatant non-representation we see that we have in these bought politicians. They continue to take money from all interests at their own danger, and at the peril of the nation’s wholeness. Because if the Left AND the Right feel you are bought and not representing the People…who is left to have your back? And vote for you? And believe in the system? Continue to take payola in place of doing your true work, and you bring on destruction of integrity, writ large. So as you go, so goes the nation. But these politicians are used to being able to get away with fakeness and hypocrisy and paid favors. Do they realize times have changed?

Now the conversations are no longer restricted to bitter rants on a street corner, or in huddles on the stairs of the college library or in loud, smoky parties or cloistered areas of the Nets, but on the main stage. And the proliferation of New Media does help in that it bridges these “small” conversations and the “big” ones in the MSM.

The major voices on the media will do its utmost to nurture and host those conversations honestly or doom us a possible step up in societal evolution. Yet I think there is no way around having them, and these conversations will separate the dying from the living, the lost from the struggling upward.

It makes me very interested in politics right now. Real conversations are coming to the fore, ones I’ve longed to have for over…25 years.

What will be left standing when the storm passes? Will the sun shine down upon our happy faces, or upon a quiet, razed countryside…peaceful, but empty?

I think this is up to us. But I wonder how many know we are making the decision every day….

MUCHAS GRACIAS to the (five ultra-cool) readers who came together with sticks and farm animals to help me fend off the invading Comcastadors! Also big thanks to the people who just emailed words of comfort.

Since we are back stylin online in the full nine and divested of our messy stress vest, let’s do a roundup just to get things back in motion.

But first real quick I’d like to say that I always love working this way. I do not, of course, mean getting anxious and having utilities turned off. And yes, of course I feel good to deal with the immediate problem.

But on top of that, I’m not joking when I wrote that text below on this page, near the tamale photo: “It’s the new US culture” about barter or back and forthing between friends, rather than relying on soulless systems that end up funneling money into exploitative third parties. (Touched on it here, too.) These liaisons keeping humans from power. Banks, National colluding impersonal credit systems, corporations, Agricultural system, Priests. All liaisons that have us believe we need them to even do certain things at all.

Versus situations like the Tanda. Where we just do it between us.

It won’t be the new US way. We already see what happens when the larger amount of us need things to be fairer to us and less fair to the massive corporate golems who skulk about our national and global affairs, yanking this and squashing that at will. A new way won’t usher itself in through law. We see who controls the legislative process.

But I love when I see us bringing it there just by doing. Community gardens, community credit, community barter. (More community “policing” and maybe we’d need to call those stun-gun wielding maniacs into our neighborhood and homes less. And by “policing” I mean looking out for kids around us, and for women getting beat up in their living situations and such.)

The people who helped me get through the moment here are people I also do things for in turn. Or would. Which is why I keep it in mind when, like Prerna wrote, good situations or orgs or people are getting started, or need a hand at the moment. Because it comes back to you.

So muchas gracias. I’m still going to need to try and raise some cash for the Netroots Nation trip, so I’ll make a graphic and pop that in under each post. But the immediate crisis is past.

Today is a writing day, so let me just highlight some news I found interesting and then get on my way…

[One link removed since this morning, as I added the wrong URL and can't find original.]

• Remember Brad Will? They are still trying to cover up his murder.

• Mobs and Right wing pundits who use the holocaust in conjunction with violence and violent energy leveled by the Corporate state and trying to shut down conversations crucial to the process of a health plan that would help the People? This is like the Anus of Fascism blinking at itself in a mirror and seeing God.

• I hope the White House doesn’t get TOO cozy with the Latino vote. Stuff like this will affect you, bro.

• Like so many cultures…when we come here, we begin to die...

• …unless we think of new ways forward. Vacillating, extended, shivering with dream…

• Workers at a steel plant in Mexico owned by ArcelorMittal, the world’s largest steelmaker, went on strike today. And that’s what I love about Mexicanos. We know how to use the force of our people. Boycott and strike are long time Latin American traditions. Recognize.

• Obama visits Mexico to talk immigration and drug war. Nations are now bickering in border tongue. Mexico still lying about the ocean of human rights abuses that their military and police engage in. US breaking laws contained in NAFTA that would help Mexico do a little better financially. Walls and papers still the order of the day. They are gonna skirt around NAFTA a lil bit but how close are they allowed to get to the truth? When will we connect the last dot as a People and when we do, how do we act to protect ourselves under the rule of such massive and well funded thugs? The business interests that control US and MX law=>The law that then calls out armies and ICE squads to fence in, jail, or kill the People suffering under those business interests.

————

Peace out for now! Hope you’ve having a great day….

(a glimpse of a larger piece of art soon to be unveiled)

THERE IS A REACTIONARY NATURE inherent to the Internet dialogues, to the symbiotic nature between the many different kinds of writing. This reactionary process is necessary, and “good” as well as “bad,” as I see it. But at all times, it tends to have a current that moves you along rapidly.

Everyone once in a while I slow down and sit with myself to ask questions about the shape and function of the “us” that comes together out here.

Who are we out here? What are we doing? What way forward?

I’ve been asking myself questions along these lines since I began participating in the amazing new organism of collective conversation that the Internet makes possible.  Do they do any good? That is not, I’m sure, the point. The point is feeling out the fringes of a path forward, the point is simply to keep moving. And sometimes in moving forward, wander.

These posts do not promise any hard conclusions, just questions. Chances, are, too that it will be too long for a quick read. So please feel free to take a break at any spot to chew things over, and come back later when you’ve time. Maybe you’ll have some thoughts to share in the comments, then. Be open. Bring a cup of coffee, yerba mate, or tea.

CONTAINERS AND STICKERS AND A FRAGRANT FIRE AISLE

Lately there arises a tension between “Journalists” and “bloggers” having to do with traffic, mostly motivated by sinking revenues on the part of news organizations. It also has to do with who are “real” journalists, sometimes.

But what is the real core of the conflict? How real is this tension and how manufactured? Moreover, how important the conflict? How distracting? How that people so rather similarly vested become pitted against one another? Are we similarly vested? If so, what is the overlap?

I suppose there is a tiny bit of journalism in my own history. Or let me just say I at least got a taste through the stint I had with MTV News (Street Team 08). Hm. I at least own a copy of the AP style guide, although I rarely consult it. I write a weekly column for an independent news outfit. But “journalist” is never really how I see myself.

Whatever the label, I do think of myself as one of many today who makes it a regular business and practice to join in the effort to find truth between us, and in our society and in using words that address current happenings. I do take that seriously enough to take great effort with my words to be truthful and/or shaped in ways I feel may bring about, or help bring about, that end. Maybe I’m more of a general writer, or an “artist,” or a thinker (Bullshit Artist), commentator, I don’t know. The one thing I do know is that getting hung up over labels/titles seems a senseless use of time. Right?

Two different groups of people thinking and writing and talking with great energy about the challenges facing us all. Searching for a way out, a way through it. Trying our damndest to distill truth out of it all. But we cleave our numbers in two with words and then fight over whose survival matters more.

For me there aren’t little cubbyholes with all the different identities – intellectual, racial, sexual. It’s more like a fine membrane – sort of like a river, an identity is sort of like a river. It’s one and it’s flowing and it’s a process. By giving different names to different parts of a single mountain range or different parts of the river, we are doing that entity a disservice.

—Gloria E. Anzaldúa

A label for this kind of writing, thinking—I didn’t need one when I began doing it. And since (at least) the age of 14 when I sat in math class surreptitiously penning empassioned narratives on current events—papers not required by school but written purely from a personal need (I remember one day being so blown away that the Shuttle crew had exploded and we were all sitting in class and not talking about what it meant when it had instantly hurled me into an existential abyss of awe and hurt)—I’ve been doing this.

It is a joy to connect with the society manifested through the computer and the Internet, and find that there are many of us out here doing this new thing; this sifting through the gems and the trash and the bones and the rocks that teem at the foundations of our shared dwelling and along the shores of our freshwater springs.

I first met you all in 2001, in May of 2001 when I joined the online dialogues, though not in this blog. I was living in NYC, and when September dropped out of the sky later in the year, it was this global community I began talking to. I launched into high alarm and was ready to make war and was not considering soliciting outside opinions.

As time went on, through reading you, and talking with you about it (and sometimes fighting over it), I learned to absorb and integrate the many different points of view. Ones not necessarily Made in the USA, or at least not as loudly trumpeted. You attached roots to my thinking that span the world and feed on many waters and my vision has expanded as a result.

But my feet are here. My hands are here. I remain invested and interested in probing the cracks that wind through these cornerstones, the chasms rippling through the charcoaled stacks of our culture’s weakened concrete, reaching my fingers into hidden grottos to rinse under rivulets of errant rain and touch up on smooth shoots of greenery, seeking a better way. Inhaling the sunsoaked rays and sweet air that blows up out of new passages—pushing forward there. And finding new soil. And planting. And living in harmony with nature and what she brings.

YOU ARE JUST A PART OF ME

The standing system perpetuates its most corrosive elements quite easily and seemingly without our help—although we give it much. Even in interested  and continual observation lies the danger of getting caught up in the stream of symptomology and the surety of a joined reality.

Do you ever feel we are not even having the right conversations? Or that words don’t mean at all to some of us what they mean to others? As if a person comes running in a house screaming “The house is on fire, grow some mint!” And then another person in the room replies “No, we need to grow some Alfalfa!” And then a fight breaks out over alfalfa or mint. And then a third person says “This is unwise!!! Let’s do the radical thing and grow onions!!!”

The accepted modes of thought reinforce themselves and the standing order. What, then?

When grass is squashed under a board in the yard, it blanches, but it strikes out wildly toward light. it grows itself in new shapes. and it will find the day again. We need, sometimes, to think obstinately and passionately in a parallel non-symmetry, to be come  backward or sideways, or in someway find a new Way.

Are we helping things with all of this? What is being protected? Maintained? Are these areas in which I invest my energy worth the cost? Who is looking out for the return while we are busy worrying about food? Or finding it? Or while we are busy with an angry moment? Who is planning for the Winter? What will the Winter look like? Are we in Winter now? If so, how to prepare for Spring?

Watching the hulking machinery of government and the machinations of the global managers acting in these times, and the conversation that bellows and bounces about the airwaves and online as of late has me convinced we are spending too much time giving our energy to entities that would drain us until we die. And all the while, lie. And stuck to our IV tap, we stare, hypnotized.

Nor is it enough to keep our eyes on the national prize. It seems to me that the equations are egregiously incomplete without an eye cast over the world, entire. It’s only when you add up US actions domestically with US actions internationally with other nations’ concurrent actions and reactions and the history that ties all of us together that a bigger picture begins to emerge. I’ve been motivated to do this by the learning I did in late 2001.

Also, a broader view has been a natural outgrowth of exploring my lineage. In finding out who I am, and what has led me here. Wanting to understand the people in my history and in my bloodline who had to find a way to live, free from long knives and shattered crystal, free from fallow fields, times of war and barbed wire. And who found their way here, who struck out to come here. People who traveled across oceans and fields and war theaters to reach the U.S. of A.

Because the future depends on the breaking down of paradigms, it depends on straddling of two or more cultures.

—Gloria E. Anzaldúa

And if only it were so simple as following dreams.

Here, today, in the land of opportunity and dreams and yet in front of us reveal themselves some unreliable or hostile actors. The White House is ultimately steered by bankers unconcerned with ‘constituents’ or ‘ethics’ or ‘humanity.’ The legislation that comes out of the White House is accordingly written. ”No taxation without representation” was a quote quite pertinent to the American Revolution. But do we really have representation now? No. “We” do not. Forget about domestic matters, Big Business calls even the international shots. It is clear that our massive media structures would in large part see many of us sicken and die. They simply don’t care about us. This is tyranny, perhaps of a subtler kind than proposed in our nation’s oldest documents, but nonetheless it is. Under layers of illusion.

I don’t intend to say that all is hopeless, nor that effort is futile. If I felt that way, I wouldn’t even bother writing here. Nor do I think outright revolt is needed. At least not by the typically understood definition of the word. I do think many tiny revolts are needed. From thought, mostly. Revolt from thought that binds and blinds and dumbly comforts and maintains.

When the People begin to learn the politics of the globe, the truth beyond their nationalized propaganda, their own government deems them increasingly Radicalized; a growing threat. Alberto Gonzales and Michael Chertoff have both confessed that they fear the Internet’s “radicalizing” nature, but that’s false. What is feared by the oligarchs is our gaining unfiltered information from other nations. They fear us talking to the Iranians in the street, or the Mexicans behind the “border,” or the Chinese, or the Venezualans, or Iraqis because they worry that we may—and by “we” I mean the people of many nations, the governed—may realize that we have more in common than not, that our strength is inexorable once organized, and that a very small elite is yoking us like beasts so that they can kick back and put they feet up on some plushy, leather seats.

Well, that’s how it is. That is the way of the world.

It’s been so as long as I’ve been alive. But just look them all now. Look at the lack of restraint. Look at how clear the lines. Artifice is nearly completely discarded because we all—us as well as them, if life could ever be so clearly dichotomized as I pretend with such a statement—are laboring under the illusion that things are, in fact, hopeless. That there is nothing to be done about it all.

But honestly, I don’t think that is true. I have a sudden and unreasonable hope that we can institute behavior that is incompatible with the larger and more destructive behaviors of our culture as well as cast off the illusion that makes so many give up before they might have a chance to start.

What behaviors do I maintain, in thought and action, that keep me rooted in one place? Or moving too slow or in the wrong direction? What tiny revolt is needed in my own life?

To be honest, there are very real challenges to our making real progress. One is that our own government worries more about putting punitive and deadly measures into place than it does in taking care of the People’s needs. Need a better example than the current pushback against a universal and humane health care plan?

Our own government fears peace as well as People Power. Containment areas. Protest permits. Arrests for showing up en masse, or just rubber bullets and tear gas on a crowd. Tasers, Tasers, Tasers, portable torture and terrorism. (Are you terrified to speak your mind to a cop now? You should be.) Borderwalls come in more sizes than 50 ft, or Virtual. They come in a conceptual flavor too. They attempt many walls around our thoughts, many fences cramming in the potential for possibility so that we never even consider what we can change. They give us TV shows into which we can fall and dream of freedom, drag it with us through a day, sweet scents in our minds, our hands on the levers and we keep working them.

The Eco-Terrorism charge is is a growing trend, I’d bet you. I see some of this up close where I live. DHS and the USA, too, fears those who care about the earth because that conflicts with the monied interests who care more about exploiting the earth’s resources than they do the Earth or her people. They put laws into effect that determine you are a “Ecoterrorist” if you do this, and they make those laws so that they can lock you up for the rest of your life. This is all in the name of businesses that would be hurt if their vampiric practices were halted across the board. I’ve reported on Ian Van Ornum, and the story took a while to unravel, but I should do a follow-up video. I learned that the reason the law came down so heavy on this kid was because DHS was in the area concerned with “EcoTerrorism.” There is a history here of activists

What are the well-monied elite factions prepared for? For increased war. For our suffering. They have no plans on changing their actions. But they are ready for us to react. They will put us down if we do, or we do too passionately. They will NOT, however, ease up on all the policies and actions around the world that engender more and more resistance. They simply prepare to find, control, contain, or kill the resistance to policies that do more for them than the greater WE.

Power never takes a back step – only in the face of more power.

—Malcolm X.

I see this in the US when our government invests more and more money and technology in crowd control weapons and surveillance of its own people and enacts more laws that controls our information gathering as well as our right to affect the government by use of civil disobedience, etc; I see it in Mexico, who under Felipe Calderón (and with the US’s great delight and help) is bringing violence to bear on social ills, and with the result of scores of horrendous human rights violations and over 12,000 dead in three years and no sign of a solution except a tired, wrongheaded, bloody Drug War model that continues to be shoved at fluctuating social symptoms. As the US does on the other side of the “fence.” The US’s border culture—which now riffs and zags across the entire country in the form of ICE—persecutes those belonging to the global South as it uses them for labor, as it drains their economic power and self-sustainability through treaties, and the answer proposed is a wall. “To keep us safe.” National Security.

This vampiric shape of dominance and hegemony is naught but pain, fence, concrete barricade, and bombs. We have to assume that the global managers are not stupid nor silly. The choices to keep hoarding wealth, to continue with State-sanctioned violence, and to refuse the treat the greater masses of people kindly are just that: Choices. Reasoned choices.

The insurance companies, themselves, are not the ultimate problem. Nor is Wall Street, the Corrections Corporation of America, the Pentagon, or Congress. Yet, all these things at their weakest, share an ailment.

There remains, eternally running rampant in the petri dish of the human soul, a virus of greed and powerlust and blindness that has bloomed brightly in the minds and hearts of the most powerful, and in a practical sense, makes them the enemy of the People’s better interests. This is most likely the nature of their pursuits, timeless, and I don’t see a cure for them. Especially when you look up, and around. At the past, at other nations, at the general work that is wrought by those we give our money, trust, and time to. At the age-old and unwavering patterns. At the monolithic and entrenched structures that feed and feed on our society. The agriculture business. The banking business. The criminal justice/corrections business. The media/entertainment business.

We cannot rely on these structures. Nor should we. As is said over and over, in the thick of all that is pressing—moral, economic, spiritual, social crises—our media is wrapped up primarily in incestuous, banal nonsense. The entire print/web/news industry seems for the most part more worried about bloggers stealing from their paychecks than they are in saving anything valuable in our culture or our world.

TAKE A SECOND.

I think the reactionary nature of what we do out here is good in the sense that it can help facilitate a few things: correct the deadthought that is blasted from the nationalized bullhorn; find ways to help those being harmed; organize around what is going on now. Be present so that if a timely move is needed, a timely move can be made.

But I think weaknesses are inherent to the shape and pace, too, in that reaction to faulty thought often presupposes a validity of the initial thought in/by/with its response. And in many ways today we need a new way, a new thought, a new reaction. Sometimes space and time is needed from a Thing in order to understand all the effects of that Thing upon your mind and being, and thus what the relation is, and then thus, what the desired relation is. And sometimes, again, one does not even wish to share the reality offered.

A counterstance locks one into a duel of oppressor and oppressed; locked in mortal combat like the cop and the criminal, both are reduced to a common denominator of violence.

—Gloria E. Anzaldúa

Common denominator of violence, as well as shared focus.

Can we use the reactionary nature of the medium and social shape in a better way that we do? Can we substitute new reactions?

IS DREAMING OF/MAKING REAL CHANGE ONLY FOR THE YOUNG?

It may be expected to some degree, that I would underline certain things—Imperialism, Government control and abuse, surveillance, people power. After all, I am a child of a radical era in the US, having been born in 1969 and to a household of subversive types! However, I also see that that household assimilated itself pretty well into the culture, given a few decades. This may be, in part, because I am speaking of the “white” half of my family, and once the age barrier fell and they found income and cooled down a bit, they integrated comfortably with the overall cultural and social setup. I don’t know, and certain presumptions about others can be unfair to rest upon. Maybe I, too, will have less complaints with the system when I feel it is kinder to me, as well. And yet, I look out upon my fellow human beings and have a hard time stepping away from their suffering as it is tied to so much injustice and wrongness. And that causes distress within me, to see these things.

Either way, these people who (in part) raised me are not so subversive anymore (though I am sure they are hardly common types). They are as comfortable as you might imagine middle class people with integrity can get. The shape of thier dissatisfaction and conversations and actions produced nothing in and of itself (unless you count any effects upon me…and yes, I’d say that has to count). So I do not automatically prescribe similar forms of protest nor resistance, nor necessarily either of those things in the currently held definitions of the words.

Yet we do have to do something, don’t we?

Is there a window of time for radical movement and drastic action and then a window of time for growing things? A window of time for rest? One for teaching?

Which ways of making change are most important today?

I have friends in other nations who urge me to leave. Leave the US. And maybe that is the answer for me. But what about the US? What about the response that the global population should have to the very often maleficent deeds of the global managers?

What do we do to register our own truth?

Do we organize to bring all the homeless tent shelters springing up (and this will happen more and more) to rich residential neighborhoods? Do we stop buying supermarket food and band together for community gardens? Do we remove our money from the banks? Do we paste up signs all over the front of the Stock Market, little bloody dollar bills stuck to every glass window with red paint and crazy-glue? All of these?

All is not hopeless. We have far too many bodies and hearts and energy that we can access for us ever to think that.

But voting won’t do it. Letters to the editor won’t do it. Blogging won’t do it. All these things can be a part of the new way. I’m not saying it’s an either/or situation.

At the same time, is it really about what each person, what one person, can do? We often (and I’ve definitely been guilty of this) reduce these issues to ones of individual consumption or non-consumption or change. This feels a noble and right response. And it is, when it remains in the ideological and more abstracted range. Do what is right, live the right way. You remove your own contributions to harm, and you act toward good. And if we all did this, the problem would be solved. But will we all do this? Ever? Have you ever seen everyone do any one thing together?

Even were I to make my life as non-harmful as possible, or walk around Visualizing Peace every moment of the day, my doing so will not also equal my neighbor doing the same. As Derrick Jensen pointed out recently, (and linked above), “Shorter showers” won’t bring about Al Gore’s utopia.

On the other hand, enough wires braided to a thickness of one inch in diameter is still much stronger than a single wire of one inch diameter. And while one helium balloon in your hand won’t lift you off the earth, enough will.

IT IS NOT ABOUT GETTING THERE. YET. OR IS IT?

We will die before we see the world the way it should be. That is a fact.

In the meantime, we can aim. We can begin to move in the right directions, if we can’t get there. Aiming, in fact, is being there.

I wrote of actions incompatible with the sustenance of harmful structures and processes. I keep coming back to one of the biggest changes in my life, when I think about this. One of the few that remains unchanged. It is my putting cigarettes down over six years ago, probably a few more than that by now. I don’t count the years so much anymore.

I won’t take you through the entire cigarette tale. I started messing with them at 9 or 10, but didn’t begin really getting into them until 14. By my 30s, smoking had begun to become incompatible with life. I started to smoke my after-meal cigarette before I was even done eating. Not that I’m any Pavarotti, but I couldn’t sing as well anymore, my lung capacity as well as tonal quality was suffering. I would run out of breath during, ah, intimate physical endeavors.

It was the singing and that last mentioned fact that really did it for me. I wrapped the non-cigarette desire around a Dream I’d Always Had, and joined the local dojang (Tae Kwon Do school) on the first day I had zero cigarettes.

The increased exercise, joy, self-esteem of training passionately in martial arts was wholly incompatible with my smoking lifestyle. I did not “fight” smoking. I veered into a new direction totally.

I wrote of a virus of greed and blindness above. We need a new virus. We need not to jam needle after needle into our arm testing new virus-killers. You cannot kill a virus. We need a virus of positivity and kindness and fierce love reserved for the Real. We need to set it free, cheeks flushed red, hands glowing gold. We need to build, evoke, create actions and thoughts and structures that perpetuate themselves and reward people with results, with positivity, and with a joy that is incompatible to feeding the current structures and shapes.

I want to find what those are. I want to engage in those actions. I want to find new ways to see and be. I don’t want to get too comfortable in a bed of radioactive velvet. While I don’t want to bring violence to fight the greater violences (except if I walk across a human abusing another human, perhaps), I want to bring violence to the thought structures in my mind (and yours) that empower stasis or blindness.

While I have no answers, I am and have been thinking on it. I’m asking you to begin thinking too.

What can we do to undermine destructive practices in the world? To break our minds out of a dull and comfortable pattern of reaction that moves us very little if at all? What should we grow now to prepare for tomorrow? What should we teach our children, assuming we wanted them to see the world as it is, not as it should be? What should we pull the plug on?

It would be so easy to kick back and get in a rut of apathy, or even one of concern but well-lined with justified anger. Anger is not a low-temp fuel, a kerosene for a constantly-burning space heater. You’ll poison the air with soot that way. Anger is a a high-octane fuel that should be ignited when a swift or large movement is needed. And that is needed.

But so is careful thought, and actions taken up with no hesitancy, and much love.

NAGUALITY

When I found the brown blogosphere in 2006, 2007, I was all about learning and reinforcing Xicanismo. The old-tyme readers will remember those questions. And it was all about mi cultura. Much of what I missed out on in my youth. I read books on Mexican history, and sociological ones on Chicanos and the culture of Mexican Americans, the history of los Pachucos and studied Frida and Diego and Porfirio Díaz and so on. And so on. I still am. And I love knowing about, learning about all this. Getting in touch with the history of my people as well as indigenous philosophies/lifestyles and even later finding how much was projected gloss or glitz, and seeing how the important parts carry through today, and then—letting that settle…It is very important. It goes on. This, I think is something people need to do on their own. We become very dangerous when we think we belong only to ourselves and to a current moment, which is by necessity tied to a self-justifying upward climb. Such a detached existence knows nothing of another, of obligation, of interconnectedness, of what to fight or what to feed. Such an eye turns back upon itself with dissonance.

If you know your history
then you know where you’re coming from
Then, you don’t have to ask me
who the hell do I think I am
- Robert Nesta Marley

But like a vine will do, this understanding and study brought me to new areas. And so I embarked on the business and practice (still employed) of attacking, questioning, dismantling, confronting, replacing—whatever it takes—various types of thinking in my mind. I do it with efficiency and dispatch, leaning on other trainings to add force and vision (such as my study/education/experience with CBT—Cognitive Behavioral Training—in field of psychology). This is something we can do that is incompatible with much messaging out there which harms. In fact, I’d say this is seminal work. First work. But it, too, should not be named and dissected. This has been going on all of my life.

You note a few quotes in this post by Gloria Anzaldúa, whom I found by way of knowing women of color activists like cripchick and bfp. Gloria Anzaldúa is one of many great thinkers and writers that help to liberate the mind. On feminism, on mestizaje, on power and change. This is one place you can find the term Nagualismo.

I’ve done a lot of thinking and some writing about shifting identities, changing identities. I call it “shapeshifting”, as in nagualismo – a type of Mexican indigenous shamanism where a person becomes an animal, becomes a different person.

—Gloria Anzaldúa

Another is here. If you read online in English-language pages (there are not many on the topic, of course), you will see some others focusing on various aspects of this type of Mexican shamanism. (This page, though hardly offering a coherent understanding overall, stresses the powers inherent in a Nagual to escape and elude enemies and oppressors.) Nagual is about magic, and fluidity, and identity…and a space where there is none. About the power of shapeshifting. This type of idea excites me, as it has long been a part of my mind, heart, body, experience. I’ve written of Tezcatlipoca, who is a protector of Nagualism.

Our natures are not static nor concrete. They never were. That is an illusion we are expected to maintain. It is a reaction to the terror of the void that spurs such early and insistent practice of this idea. But embracing the fluid and undefined nature of the human energy is a powerful form of resistance to many attacks and even social oppression. This part I can not or will not explain further. But I do encourage study and practice—not of the delineated and formal shapes of “Nagualismo” presented online, no. But of the overall idea. Try it out. Try it on. Take the energy you spend fitting into boxes and between lines and within expectations and set it free. See who it lets you be. You may find your strongest oppressor  takes the shape of containers you carry with you.

Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it’s from Neptune.
—Noam Chomsky

Let’s get there. Let’s dare. Let’s think the impossible. Let’s unthink the possible. I may just be grunting and crooning in here, but it feels right. Let’s make strange noises as we dig through the rubble that weighs upon this world and our fellow humans. Let’s undo ourselves and speak a new language, one that at first sounds drastic and alien but very soon becomes the music calling us home.

NATION OF IMMIGRANTS, MEET LAND OF OPPORTUNITY. This is a combination that has sometimes resulted in amazing happenings. Behold the United States of America, itself! Although to tell the true story of “America,” we’d have to talk about a whole lot of exploitation of brown people, wouldn’t we? The kind of stories that are not dwelled upon in high school, what with all the platitudes and paeans to Patriots.

But you know what? We don’t need to go that far back to tell those stories, either. Because exploitation and abuse of brown people is, sadly, The Neverending Story upinhyeah.

Bank of America is accused of exploiting Latino immigrant customers is the title of this chapter:

Gabby Ornelas, a former teller at the giant Bank of America Corp Ornelas was instructed to use her Spanish language skills and Latina heritage to sign up customers for as many kinds of banking services as possible, she said — services that led to lucrative fees for the bank and financial entanglement for many customers.

“We were coached every day to push multiple checking accounts, credit cards and debit cards even when the customer didn’t understand how to use them,” said Ornelas, who lives in Landover Hills, Md., a town with a large immigrant population and a per-capita income of less than $19,000.

In one case, she described a Central American mother of three who came back to see her at the bank, distressed about $300 in overdraft fees incurred after Ornelas persuaded the woman to open a second checking account.

Ornelas and eight of her colleagues leveled the accusations in recent interviews. They are being backed in their whistle-blowing by the Service Employees International Union, which is trying to organize BofA, the nation’s largest bank.

Bank of America officials flatly rejected the allegations, saying their policies are legal, adhere to industry standards and are helpful to customers, including immigrants seeking a toehold in the United States.

Yeah, a toehold, all right. That’s what they’re giving immigrants. They are giving them a blue sky, and deed on a cliff. Oh, and a toehold. Bank of America. Say it again. Bank of AMÉRICA.

Ornelas and three other former BofA tellers, all Latina women, said they and their co-workers were repeatedly instructed to seek potential new Spanish-speaking customers outside the bank. Some were instructed to go to embassies where recent emigres often wait in queue for visa and passport services.

—Bank of America is accused of exploiting Latino immigrant customers

Stay classy, elitist structures of exploitation and greed.

(Title of post taken from Bob Marley song Babylon System)

THOSE WITH MORE MONEY AND POWER THAN MOST fight to retain the right to ignore borders when it comes to moving monies or goods to their own financial advantage, or opening bank accounts to evade taxes, or opening sweat shops and hiring populations that will work for substandard wages, or dropping bombs or firing bullets into bodies not like theirs, or dumping nuclear waste, or committing rape and torture to evade laws in the land of the torturer.

But when the people in general start to move about to try and escape the vacuums and pressure zones that open up suddenly and make life a suffering thing as a result of all these behaviors? The Global attitude suddenly constricts violently. And borders are seen as safeguards of civilization. And civiliation—the people—are actually seen as dangerous.

The people—civilization—of course, are not allowed to hop borders to better their situation. The poorer folk, the rabble, the great unwashed masses, the labor force, the buying force, the engines of this society, who work and toil in stores, factories, fields, farms or worse yet who just starve and wish for something different—we are to remain behind fences, ocean-moats, and walls. For national security.

The [Australian] Federal Government has warned the nation to brace for more illegal boat arrivals, describing the surge as a “threat” which must be stopped.  …

Senator Evans blamed increased armed conflict in northern Asia for people taking to leaky – and increasingly deadly – boats to try to reach Australia and seek asylum, The Sunday Telegraph reports. …

Senator Evans’ warning follows the death of three people and injuries to a further 47 on a sinking refugee boat last week after it had been doused in petrol and set alight off Ashmore Reef, 600km from Broome. …

—Prepare for another wave of boat arrivals, says Immigration Minister Chris Evans

Hard to blame “armed conflict” as Armed Conflict doesn’t have a mind nor mouth nor bank account but easier than pointing at the powerful people who initiate or allow or sustain or benefit from that armed conflict—that might get tricky. The conversation we have about these things generally veers away from that end of it.

When we talk of Iraq, we talk of soldier bodybags and sometimes even of vague death counts that spiral up past one million. We talk of of Civil War Brinks, we talk of whether or not we should have used phosphorous to sear the flesh off them, we talk of Whether Or Not They Desire A Strongman, we talk of how Saddam Gassed His People, and we talk of whether or not we should build bases there…even when we dare talk of removing our soldiers (won’t happen) we don’t so much talk about the massive humanitarian crisis involving the actual Iraqi refugees who are fleeing this hell we opened up over there. We hear the TV sneer and sizzle threats of more bombs and war when it is rumored that Iraq’s next door neighbors may be aiding them. You see, that is another illegal use of a border. Iraq’s border is for us to run troops and supply lines and bullets and body armor over. Not for Iranian people to aid our targets. Not for people to escape over, either. Like the concrete barriers we have erected in Baghdad, people are to remain in their little reservations while BigBoys divide all the goods.

It is estimated that there are at least 1.5 million Iraqis in Syria today. I believe it. Walking down the streets of Damascus, you can hear the Iraqi accent everywhere. There are areas like Geramana and Qudsiya that are packed full of Iraqi refugees. Syrians are few and far between in these areas. Even the public schools in the areas are full of Iraqi children. A cousin of mine is now attending a school in Qudsiya and his class is composed of 26 Iraqi children, and 5 Syrian children. It’s beyond belief sometimes. Most of the families have nothing to live on beyond their savings which are quickly being depleted with rent and the costs of living.

Within a month of our being here, we began hearing talk about Syria requiring visas from Iraqis, like most other countries. Apparently, our esteemed puppets in power met with Syrian and Jordanian authorities and decided they wanted to take away the last two safe havens remaining for Iraqis- Damascus and Amman. The talk began in late August and was only talk until recently- early October. Iraqis entering Syria now need a visa from the Syrian consulate or embassy in the country they are currently in. In the case of Iraqis still in Iraq, it is said that an approval from the Ministry of Interior is also required (which kind of makes it difficult for people running away from militias OF the Ministry of Interior…). Today, there’s talk of a possible fifty dollar visa at the border.
—Baghdad Burning blog

When we speak of Mexico and the people there that have been systematically exploited by larger powers, who watched half their land (including the gold-rich California) become US land, who saw Porfirio Díaz build trains that all ran up to El Norte, but not East to West in their own country, who were told NAFTA would open up the Mexican market to the world but saw their corn rot after it was replaced by cheaper US corn,  who have provided so much of the workforce necessary to build this mighty engine and have since the railroads first were laid down, often responding to Spanish language advertisements US companies pay to broadcast in MX—we talk of “invaders” and “ILLEGALS” and parasites on the system and even voices of popular politicians (and crazy martial artist TV stars) talk of building a huge fence and wall to keep the Mexicans on “their side.” Where they should remain while we keep pillaging the global market and economy and stacking it in our favor.

Just as a wall that keeps the poor away from the rich in our own cities and towns and marks the divide where law enforcement begins caring a whole lot more about property and people, so do the borders operate in our world. This entrenched and justified and bullet-peppered divide is a crime in and of itself. In towns, in cities, in nations, and in the world. All the rest that follows is fallout. And if the conversation omits the destination from where the debris is dumped, we may as well not be talking about it at all.

WE KNEW THAT THERE WOULD BE a faction of people so wed to their own racist thought patterns they would be incapable of dealing with the fact that a non-white person was president of the US.

Unnecessary Nuance Alert: I’m not, of course, talking about those with complaints about Obama in general. I have my own. (And I have to say, just as troubling as those who refuse to see anything negative about Obama or his actions are those who leap all over your junk when you don’t immediately condemn him on every issue, so let’s just try to have a conversation here).

I’m talking about the freakshow. The Palin Crew, the pitchfork bunch. The ones who are enamored of words that imply an ENEMY is WITHIN.

What gets me is that I thought the racists would be honest. I really did! I thought they’d simply be able to say “A black man has no business being president/in power/in White House/on front of bus.” But I guess just as a little knowledge is dangerous, a little bit of self-awareness can be dangerous, too. Steve Martin in one of his early albums used to ask the audience (I had the record as a child but I’m paraphrasing) “Who here took Philosophy in college? [pause] …you can always tell the Philosophy Majors because their hands are … [makes a wavering halfway motion] You remember just enough to f*** your head up for the rest of your life!” And maybe that humor resting on an understanding of intellectual rhetoric directly relates to Marimba Ani’s piece that details the dishonesty inherent in Euro-American culture. As well as what Mai’a said about continuing oppressive behaviors while using better language for it.

Years ago, these people would have felt confident simply voicing their support of a (backward) idea. In certain pockets of the US (and I’ve lived in one or two) people talk this way all the time. But they get out in public, or maybe even to themselves, and they know it doesn’t look good or sound good…they understand they will appear ugly or be thought of that way (or is it even thought out so much?) and so they find new “N” words. Like Muslim. And Socialist. And Fascist. And Marxist. It all means the same thing. It means their world has been turned upside down, and their mind can’t make the leap to mirror it. We expected this. But I hadn’t counted on their own simple cowardice in speaking their feelings. I sort of wonder how dangerous they can get while still not even really understanding what is bothering their own cramped up mind.

I am also impressed by FOX TV. (I just…can’t call it “News” anymore, won’t.) Because let’s be clear: they are fomenting violence. I can’t and won’t make it any simpler or more complex than that. The owners and stockholders of FOX Television are pouring millions and millions of dollars into a mechanism that may as well be a giant finger on a tripwire.

I am personally…amazed that 1) they would dare do this. 2) I would live to see a major television station do this and get away with it. It’s all so blunt. The rich (white) people bugling out to the poor (white) people to come to arms to save their elite empire. 3) I guess I never imagined if that type of class/race war scenario did play out so blatantly that those poor would respond to the call.

Interesting times, indeed.

LET ME RAISE MY COFFEE to Los San Patricios and later, it will be a fine, heavy, sweet, locally brewed Oregon stout. Damn, do they make some fine beers here. Anyway, not much to write today on St. Patrick’s Day. I think I said most of what I have to say (so far) in the post I wrote today, last year. Give it a read.

It pretends to be about Free Market philosophies leading to the starvation of many, but really is about the beauty of solidarity in general, and the Irish in specific, and what they did in the name of Mexico, but more so in the name of freedom.

Happy St. Patty’s Day! ¡Que Vivan Los San Patricios!

THE RICH PEOPLE ON TELEVISION work very hard to convince us that we need to stay poor. They spend tireless hours under hot lights and thick makeup as they play their roles each day. As they spin the drama, and create the impression that we need to keep mowing their lawns and watching their babies and sewing their ties and walking in line. That we like things the way they are, and that it’s a fair place because we have the lottery, American Idol, and the illusion of possible millions one day if we just keep working hard.

And all you really need to do to stay clear on this is remember that every single one of those fools on the set working as an anchor makes so much damn money in a day that you’d be hard pressed to spend it. Unless maybe you got the work on your teeth done that would if you could afford it. I’ve worked in (NYC) TV only a little, but enough to know what kind of salaries these mouthpieces pull, and they are phenomenal. But they are just flunkies for the even bigger rollers, of course. People like Rupert Murdoch (who has been busy rehabilitating his image to the Left after finishing help BushCheney destroy almost everything in the world). And people like him manage, support, and groom the faces on TV and together, they all work hand in hand with the executive and judicial and legislative branches to keep Their World safe.

The Press probably meant something a long time ago. Probably something like what blogs mean now. I do believe that. Which is why we have to be ever vigilant now to guard the integrity of our voices and agendas. The TV Stations and the Papers have been co-opted by greed, by those who profit from a world fueled by greed. And the same fever is now causing so many TV people to lose their minds. Glenn Beck, O’Reilly, putos like Rick Santelli, this dandified jerkoff in the image to the left—all these idiot uppercrusters. The unmitigated stones they have to rant about us, about our fate, to argue so intensely for the system that now threatens to fall upon you and me. And sucking up space in the current cacaphony, they have the nerve to raise their voice to sell us a spot hoisting their tassled seat across town so their nose can be up in the sun while we breathe in their fetid high-class omelette and espresso fart fumes. 

Why would we trust them? They are nothing more than rich brats who see a scary juncture ahead of them, and more importantly, in front of you and me. They see a possibility that the great imbalances that keep them on a sunny crest and so many of us in sodden rooms at the foot of the hill may be whittled away. And they are scared. Terrified. Watch them contort! It’s tremendously educational, though not how they may imagine.

These pendejos were never scared one bit of dropping cluster bombs where children would find them. They were not in the slightest bit scared that entire communities were being drowned in New Orleans and poisoned in the govt trailers given them afterward. They are not scared one bit of our nuclear facilities, still not properly guarded or protected from their imaginary global jihadalicious food fights. They are not scared of floating secret prisons and torture being undertaken in the name of the US.

No. But they are actually freaking the hell out over the idea that their superdestructive hyperadvantages and well-practiced manipulations of the system may be tamped down a bit. I listen to them in this light, and grin.

So flurries of articles are written assuring us that The People support them. That we support the crumbling status quo. They lie about polls. They lie about everything. In their mind, they fight in the service of a holy divide and so every last con job is sanctified. And with the fire of End Days blazing in they ojos, they come on TV in hordes, spitting passionate palabras ’bout the end of time. 

The end of their time. Just add that word in when you listen, if you are unfortunate enough to listen to them or read these modern missives mailed straight from the royal reading room. The end of their time. Measures that finally push back against the disgusting profit motive run amok sans soul or wisdom are not an indicator of the end of anything but perhaps a modicum of serious imbalance. Not the end of your and my world or THE world. They are scared of the end of their world. The world that allows them soft, fluffy cushions for all their well-powdered parts and a high buffshine on their gold accoutrements while at the same time, through labyrinthine mechanisms and legal device, profiting from our being charged ungodly amounts of fees and interest for barely keeping up on payments that don’t even touch the principal. The world that keeps them well stocked with cutting edge sunroofs and skylights, air and water purifiers, top-notch linens and school systems while the rest of us muck about in the polluted water, underfunded schools, and whatever is left over. These well-manicured and well-fed and well-suited scarecrows scream to preserve a way that keeps a doctor by their side and an overcrowded emergency room in town for us. They come on TV and yell and wave their arms about so that they can keep a world in place that insures them a fifty thousand dollar smile while we suffer with broken teeth for want of some medical attention that doesn’t compete with the cost of a small car.

And many listen to them! It’s quite the caper they’ve been pulling over time. It’s time it ended.

What do they fear? More than us funding a collective pool that helps us all (Social Security, College Grants, Universal Health Care, etc), they fear such philosophies taking root in the public square. They fear actual morality becoming part of our American Way. It’s one thing if we all espouse greed and superficiality and big numbers in the bank. After all, then we are at their gate waving signs that glorify them and their lives! Like the hip-hop artists that settle for validation of the only kind ever dangled in front of their eyes, who get paid and then offer soulless rants praising the motions of the system that crush their own kind. When we are but more hungry capitalists believing in this crooked game, these fatcats can just peek their head out the window as they move a hand through their $300 hairdo and smile to see us moving our sweaty bodies around to the beat of their drum. 

We’re All in This Together and Share the Wealth for the Common Health are philosophies that stalk awful close to their gated green gardens and shiny onyx auction-bought carvings. These elites don’t give a shit about the Common anything. Hell, they don’t even believe in borders. They only get on the border issue because they fear the same thing, once again. Too many poor people, or too many people not interested in upholding “the White Christian Power Structure” pollutes this mix only because it might begin to sway the pillars that keep them high above the mob. But look at how they invest, from where comes their monies, and in what places they jet, and where they own houses. What borders restrain or contain them?

We are not even part of the conversation, in reality. We are not in most of the ones that matter. We are to be managed. That’s what all that superblunt talk about what we “watch on our TV screens” and how it should and does influence our thoughts. Bush was very useful in a way. Once we get past the revulsion and clean the puke from the couch cushions, we can sit back and peer into his thought process. Because he was raised on the teat of the stankfoul elite creepshow beast. But never got the silver tongue, see, peeps? This is very useful. Because he spills to us their thinking without the gloss it normally has. Remember him talking about how raising taxes only really hurts the proles? Clearly, I’m borrowing from Orwell for a reason here, but that’s what he said nonetheless. That rich people can afford to hire accountants who keep their money safe.IN other words, our President told us that the most successful in the US understand they have the right to game the system so that we carry their slack.

Instead of refusing to look at the creep because his term in the Oval Office is up, we ought to study the rich punk’s words. Because see, they have a lot to do with the greater problems we suffer now and have suffered behind for years. So we ought to find a way to stop rich people from stacking advantage upon advantage upon advantage when it all means weights on the scales that the rest of us shrink under. Because if that’s really what America is about, what the USA is about? If it’s really all just about getting everything you can stuff in your hands and not getting caught, and not minding who it harms? Well, the proles can play that game too. We might not use accountants, though. But what’s good for the goose is good for the ten wet hens in the caboose, so you choose. Do your philosophies predicate that someone’s gotta lose?

The telescreens work one way only, the conversations are neutered. Even when we discuss such pivotal and worldshaking events such as this economic crisis. We are still not talking honestly. So much dialogue in the service of maintaining so many divisions. And the Dems are afraid. Timid. They need a good strong kick from the left. And then another. What is all this bowing and capitulating and treading soft for the Neoconjobs? Don’t the Dems know the best way to get beat is too come on like a beat dog?

Oh. But that’s reasoning as if those rich people are my neighbor, too. As if they want to run the nation in a way that chips away at their ivory, too. As if what they enjoy every day they want for me and you. 

I’m glad this class warfare is coming out into the open. Because it’s always been here. And the systemic separations between us, the happiness hoarded by means of stolen and siphoned resources, the entrenchment of philosophies that keep our People Power scattered—these things won’t be healed until the problem has manifested in an undeniable and aggressive fashion. I think we can safely say this has happened. So we ought to make sure the right conversations are happening and that our wants and needs are not papered over again with propaganda.

We arrive at many junctures. The Epic Religious Battles rage on and seem to be crowding each other on a global level. The Petroleum Wars are upon us all. Nuestra planeta has had about enough of our abuse, and it’s important to realize and admit that many of these Elites have already been pouring massive dollars into their own disaster contingency plans. That’s why they want to funnel more money to their own banks and convince us that taxes are a burden and not an investment. They are investing, all right. But not in the People. Only in their small clans. That’s why people like the Bushes and Cheneys and Clintons (let’s remember some of Bill’s great deeds on Welfare Reform) are fine if our foundations fall apart in the coming storm. They can afford not only accountants to see them over tax gaps that trip up the rest of us, but vehicles, properties, and possessions that will allow them to filter out, avoid, and step over the toxic mire they and their kind produce daily, the very swamp fluid that threatens eventually to envelop us if we do not do the simple math and shake up the formula.
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UPDATE MARCH 6; Mediamatters says it politely.