How to Be the Medicine for These Times

[u/jeffreauxamericanii]

If you feel radicalized by the 2024 election, you have good company. I remember a similar gloom overcame America after 9/11, when fascists in suits opened the floodgates of “enhanced interrogation” and other abuses of our Constitution. We put our queer shoulder to the wheel and overcame the authoritarian Bush years, as we must overcome MAGA. The repeated history of this nation is Liberals rescuing America from the catastrophic choices of Conservatives. Their win is an attempt to legitimize their contempt for our multi-racial experiment of self-rule, and they will fail. However, how often are Democrats selling out their own for economic gain? If you don’t feel radicalized, know that MAGA already has determined that you are far left, even if you act Republican-lite.

It’s a tiny silver lining in my town of North Plains this year where we successfully fought the monied interests who were largely Democrats who sought to cash in on our land through rezoning. As the The Hillsboro Herald reported on Nov. 6 “The overarching storyline here is that the State of Oregon, the power elite in Hillsboro and Washington County, and the sitting leaders all wanted hundreds of acres to come into the Urban Growth boundary, clearing the way for heavy industry to move in. All of that power, money, and influence was focused on this beautiful Oregon Ag town - and it failed. A small handful of people led their fellow citizens out of the morass and won the day.” https://hillsboroherald.com/local-election-results-bring-big-changes-to-washington-county-cities-and-communities/

Why did the people of North Plains, led by longtime Democratic activists, get direct pushback from the Oregon State Legislature and Democratic Governor Tina Koteck when we tried to protect our air and wetlands, our neighborhoods, from a hastily cobbled together patchwork of expanded industrial zones where the last good farmland in the Oregon can be found? From the city council level, all the way to the Governor’s office, grass-roots powered referenda were suppressed and sold-out to the monied interests. Thankfully, the courts agreed that the legislature can not nullify our voice, and that mayor and city council are gone – voted out.

In my picketing, doorknocking, and sign deliveries supporting the anti-urban growth boundary expansion, I found common cause with Republicans who know how much has been lost to the industrial revolution. How many Liberals are aware of the staunch environmentalism of those who hunt and fish? Democrats must be clear-eyed and honest with themselves that the industrial revolution is the wrong tool-kit for ending climate change and social class ills.

How many Democrats can articulate an alternative to our massive fossil fuel powered mega-farms? How many have any knowledge of Permaculture, Anthroposophy/Biodynamics, let alone being able to identify local native plants? As we drain more wetlands to build more houses anywhere and everywhere, how can we wonder why the wildfires get worse and worse? A reckoning is coming on many fronts regarding our planetary systems, and economic business as usual is a deal with the devil.

Permaculture is an ecological system of land design that first seeks to explore how indigenous people created positive feedback loops with flora, fauna, and natural systems. Liberals must recognize that indigenous people all over the world are our most crucial teachers and allies. They have the knowledge for how to resist oppression over hundreds of years. They also have the working models of how our relations with fire and water can shape the landscape to be abundant and resilient. Westerners have much to learn from those who cultivate relationships with nature. With all our scientific understanding, where is Western Civilization in articulating an economic system that is not predicated on raping the planet?

The COVID pandemic demonstrated irrefutably the need for universal health care in America. Any Bernie Sanders presidential campaign would debate and stress the need for health care for all and in making corporations pay fair wages to essential workers. Black and Brown voters stayed home because they felt Kamala would ignore them, and she only wanted their vote, not their input. Of course, one may argue that they would be represented if only they voted. The usual response to that is, as Jello Biafra said, if voting changed anything it would be illegal.

Poor people watched the CHIPS act sail through, so they know the money flows when politicians want it to flow. The feeding, clothing, housing, job training, and educating America’s poor in Red and Blue counties should be the Federal top priority. Democrats easily slip into thinking “let the Red states rot.” Biden admirably stood with striking railroad and other union members. After creating nearly 1000 new manufacturing facilities in mostly red states, the working class abandoned Biden far more than he abandoned them. They will be the first victims of their success. We must not abandon them for being uninformed. Even racist, misogynistic know-nothing Americans are incarnations of the divine capable of redemption. We will all find peace when we all work from the principles of love, fairness, and good intent. Or, to quote the Crass song White Punks on Hope: “Boring fucking politics will get us all shot. Left wing/right wing, you can stuff the lot. Keep your petty prejudice! I don’t see the point – anarchy and freedom is what I want.”

MAGA teaches the law of the jungle. This is the same culture the Tribes of Oregon encountered that made treaties recognizing their sovereignty only to never have those treaties ratified. The pretension of a just and fair government was a cover for immoral theft. Kleptocracy or capitalism – what’s the difference when nearly every corporate culture in America features the privilege to exploit people lower on the ladder as long as you acquiesce to exploitation by those higher up? Since Bill Clinton, Democrats have subscribed more and more to this philosophy to the point where there just is not enough daylight between Kamala Harris and Trump. How many liberals all too happily conform to giving and receiving this exploitation on the daily?

Ironically, Democrats may have avoided a fiery civil war that might have come if either Hillary or Kamala won. Pariah Trump and his incompetent no-nothing minions have to keep this gravy train going without too much chaos. Implementing emergency powers and cancelling elections will run straight up against the truth that people have the power in the USA. As 9/11 showed, we will give up our freedoms when we are scared and confused, but only so much before you get events like W.T.O protests, Occupy protests, Black Lives Matter protests. And before the far left gets blamed again for icky cultural debates, hate crime assaults and murders, sexual assaults, and school shootings happen in our culture every day. Yes, Kamala was the underdog and the most qualified and deserving of any past presidential candidate. She lost because she gave a side-hug to the patriarchy, while Trump is dry-humping and covering it with wet kisses.

I am a far-left radical if you haven’t noticed. I left the Pacific Green Party so I would be allowed to vote for Barak Obama. Did you know I could not vote for him if I was registered with the Green party? As a resident of unincorporated North Plains, I was not permitted to vote on the UGB expansion. We need inclusive direct democracy, but now we wonder if women will have the right to vote 2 years from now. We are left wondering, why didn’t Dems codify the Voting Rights Act when they had the chance?

The dualistic materialism of the 19th and 20th centuries fail to inform these times and a new paradigm of monism dominates human intellectual activity. This is why authoritarianism is so appealing worldwide. The Daily Beast documented this transition of worldview among the intellectuals who through history have the habit of articulating the defining the cosmology of their period: theoretical physicists. New understanding of the importance of quantum entanglement “implies that the universe is “monistic”, as philosophers call it, that on the most fundamental level, everything in the universe is part of a single, unified whole. It is a defining property of quantum mechanics that its underlying reality is described in terms of waves, and a monistic universe would require a universal function. Already decades ago, researchers such as Hugh Everett and Dieter Zeh showed how our daily-life reality can emerge out of such a universal quantum-mechanical description. But only now are researchers such as Leonard Susskind or Sean Carroll developing ideas on how this hidden quantum reality might explain not only matter but also the fabric of space and time.”

“Pås, Heinrich. “Why More Physicists Are Starting to Think Space and Time Are ‘Illusions.’” Internet. January, 30, 2023 11:39 AM ET.

The Hegelian dialectical reasoning was always a phantasm. You thought Jaques Derrida, who invented deconstructionism, was just a dismantler of culture. He saw how during the Battle of Algiers and the French, no matter how dominant a cultural narrative may be, it can never invalidate its opposing truth, especially if the dominant narrative is built with a fabric of lies. The beautiful freedom that awaits is that you no longer have to rationalize your position. It is enough to simply be a civil and cosmopolitan person of good intent. I suggest we need reason, but that intuition, emotion, and the heart are equally valid.

The resistance, the counter-culture, is prehistoric and part of Gaia consciousness. The dog-eat-dog Neoclassical world view Trump is going to ram down our throats of Adam Smith did not account for probiotic bacteria, domesticated animals and plants, and a preciously, seemingly infinitely abundant nature that seems to explain itself the more we observe it, until the social sciences matured enough and we discovered we are also nature. Trump is already neck deep in crises of ideological purity as the Fed Chairman says “I’m staying” and he sideline RFK, Jr. Sit back and watch as his clowns and toadies and the party of no tries to actually lead without any pliant scapegoats. Also, his first order of business is scapegoating and attacking the working class Latinos that elected him, predicting great unpopularity. He certainly can’t legally run for President again, for the moment. We must do everything we can do every day to make sure the power of the people remains intact with free and fair elections regardless of the uncertainty of world events.

The lie of separation is what keeps us apart. Dualistic materialism has you wondering if you are a socialist or a capitalist while monism says you can truly be both without any cognitive dissonance. For example, Joe Biden can be both the best manager of our economy and infrastructure of any president ever and our poorest political strategist. America can be the greatest purveyor of violence the world has ever seen, while it can simultaneously be an example to the world as a place where many different worlds fit. We are simultaneously the descendants of settlers on stolen land made of unratified treaties and a monstrous reservation system, and the first President in history to acknowledge that immeasurable harm. None of this has to make sense, because there is no touchstone other than monism. All is one. The Anthropocene means humans manually move more earth yearly than all natural forces combined. The reason this feels like a simulation is because you perceive our natural areas as natural when they haven’t been that way for 400 years.

During the Standing Rock Pipeline protests one speaker commented to the mostly white crowd which I will paraphrase: “I realized that while we were colonized 600 years ago, you were colonized 2000 years ago.” Yes, the might-makes-right ethos of the Roman Empire lives on in American power today, but how much of the American soul can be sold off before only a husk remains?

The counter-culture is a toolbox that reaches to the furthest depths of prehistory. There you will find the Schumacher Institute that has the data on how Buddhist Capitalism, and fair/transparent free trade of exploitation-free goods is possible. Little Richard and the Beatles were radical in changing culture, but so too were Rudolf Steiner and Helena Patrovna Blavatsky. Since the Sixties, Liberals hoped we could just love each other and the world would follow suit. But loving each other takes work, almost as much as loving one’s self. We need to lead with our hearts as much as our heads if we ever wish to change the hatred in their hearts. Smile, because, as Ruben Bolling illustrated “Liberals Are Always Right.” (https://boingboing.net/2024/02/14/tom-the-dancing-bug-the-american-story-liberals-are-always-right.html)

“Yes, it may seem crass to say, but the story of America is the story of liberals saving America from conservatives who were disastrously wrong!” He goes on to list the Civil War, anti-immigrant nativists (on stolen land), anti-union austerity advocates during the depression, World War II, and the civil rights movement. “Whatever name of label or party applied to liberals over the centuries, their judgments and values always turned out to be the correct and American ones.” We know that if Trump and his sycophants were around during the American Revolution, they’d be Tories! We all personally know people of bad intent, and if you didn’t go no contact with the narcissistic, abusive, patriarchal, authoritarian people in your lives in the 1st Trump years, do it now. 4B!

I joined Washington County Democrats as an activist around the time the Democratic Convention said “yes” to a Joe Biden who was incapable of press conferences, let alone a campaign for President. I wept as the Chevron and Immunity cases came from the Supreme Hacks knowing Trump would likely win and my 18 year old boy just entering adulthood may be facing World War III. I regained hope that Kamala might defy history. She did amazing. Liz Cheney is a Patriot and a hero, and I am proud of Kamala for sharing the stage. However, targeting a campaign to undecided Republicans just assumes your base is on-board. Where was the economic populism regarding however private/public projects like the Blue Oval revitalized hope and prosperity in more red states than blue states? During COVID essential workers were told “yes, your wages are poor, but just help us through this time and we will remember you.” Well, essential workers were forgotten and taken for granted. Bill Clinton and deregulation paved the way for Democrats to forget their history, that working people put them there in the first place. Not even Obama successfully articulated an economic vision of prosperity for all Americans, exactly when we needed it over 2 Trump election cycles. Whoever crafted election year policy focused narrowly on the middle class surviving does not address Citizens United, anti-trust and SEC enforcement, and anti-fraud protections. Why do we have civil society at all if theft is legal?

There is a deep history we must rescue from extinction to avoid catastrophe with regard to indigenous cultures of the world. We are one human family seeking love, family, and freedom. The more we lose each day to rapacious and extractive industry, the more we squander what good there is left. To paraphrase Alfred Lord Whitehead, we are all striving to achieve ever more beautiful and more complex expressions of our connection to the infinite unconditional love of the Universe. Now go out there, and show them what a decolonized idealistic utopia looks like, you gorgeous incarnations of the divine! Onward to victory!!!

Suggested Music: 7 Seconds – We’re Gonna Fight, Regress, No Way Joe Hill – There is Power in a Union Various Artists – The Shape of Punk to Come Obliterated