It is the

sufferings and insecurities

of our lives that, although painful and distressing,

teach us not to cling to the impermanent things of this world.

Not even the greatest master could teach us so well.

We should honor and respect them,

not shun their company.

T’ao-Shan

Slowly, then all at once

Whatever else

one thinks of how we live

these days, it’s hard to not see it

as temporary, historically anomalous,

a peculiar blip in human experience. I’ve spent

my whole life riding around in cars, never questioning

whether the makings of tomorrow’s supper would be there waiting

on the supermarket shelves, never doubting when I entered a room that the

lights would go on at the flick of a switch, never worrying about my

personal safety. And now hardly a moment goes by when I

don’t feel tremors of massive change in these things,

as though all life’s comforts and structural

certainties rested on a groaning

fault line.

…Everything

we know about it seems

to indicate that human beings happily

go along with the program — whatever the program is —

until all of a sudden they can’t, and then they don’t. It’s like the

quote oft-repeated these days (because it’s so apt for these times) by surly

old Ernest Hemingway about how the man in a story went broke: slowly, and then

all at once. In the background of last week’s reassuring torpor, one ominous little

signal flashed perhaps dimly in all that sunshine: the price of oil broke above

$81-a-barrel. Of course in that range it becomes impossible for the staggering

monster of our so-called “consumer” economy to enter the much-wished-for

nirvana of “recovery” — where the orgies of spending on houses and

cars and electronic entertainment machines will resume like

the force of nature it is presumed to be. Over $80-a-barrel

and we’re in the zone where what’s left of this economy

cracks and crumbles a little bit more each day,

lurching forward to that moment when

something life-changing occurs

all at once.

James Howard Kunstler

Humans can be a source of love, learning, cooperation, and assistance

…in more

unequal societies, these

problems aren’t higher by ten or

twenty percent. There are perhaps eight

times the number of teenage births per capita,

ten times the homicide rate, three times the rate of

mental illness. Huge differences…We show that these

problems aren’t affected by rich countries getting still richer.

There are problems that we think of as problems of poverty because

they’re in the poorest areas of society, but a country like the U.S. can be

twice as rich as Greece, Portugal, or Israel—the poorer of the rich, developed

countries we look at—and the problems are no better even though Americans

are able to buy twice as much of everything as the poorer developed

societies. That doesn’t make any difference; it’s only the gaps

between us that matter now. And that’s really quite

a striking thing to learn about ourselves

and the effects of the social

structure on us.

…Let me

tell you what I think

is perhaps at the very bottom

of all this. If you think of almost any

animal species, there is a huge potential for

conflict amongst members of the same species,

because they have all the same needs. They eat the

same food stuffs, they need the same nesting sites, they

value the same feeding grounds or territories, they compete

for sexual partners. It was that recognition in human populations

that made the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century

say that human beings, without a sovereign power to keep the peace, would

war against each other and have “nasty, brutish, and short” lives. Amongst

monkeys, inequality takes the form of dominance hierarchies, based on

power and coercion and privileged access to resources: “I get it first

because I’m stronger, and I don’t care if you’re hungry.”

Human hierarchies are similar—it’s why power,

status, and wealth all go together at the top

and why powerlessness, hunger, and

poverty go together at

the bottom.

But human

beings also have the

opposite potential. We can be

the best source of love and learning

and cooperation and assistance of every kind.

In a sense, Hobbes was wrong about people in a state

of nature. He was right about the potential for conflict, but

people have avoided conflict through food sharing, gift exchange,

and great social equality (for example, in hunter-gatherer societies).

The gift in a sense is a symbol that you and I don’t compete for the necessities

of life. We don’t need to fight each other for them. You feel a sense of indebtedness

and you reciprocate the gift, which anthropologists have suggested is a sort

of basic social contract. That symbolism is still really important:

You invite your friends over, sit around the same table, and

share food, the basic necessity of life. The symbolism

is also there in religious services and communion —

these things are very fundamental,

very deep.

Inequality

is a reflection of how strong

hierarchies are, how much we share or how much

we don’t. It shows us which part of our potential we’re developing.

What game do I play? Have I got to fend for myself? Or have I got to get people

to trust me and cooperate with me? Is my survival dependent on good

relationships? Are you my rival? Are you going to steal from

me? Have I got to keep what I’ve got, defend it?

Or can we share? Human beings

can do both.

Richard Wilkinson

Many people want change enough to make change

While I once

felt like a marginalized

garbage-nut, I now realize I am part

of a massive community of people, all over the

world, who know deep in our hearts that something is

wrong. Our economy is off track. Half the world’s population lives

on less than $2.50 a day, unable to meet basic needs, while a handful of people

amass obscene levels of wealth. Our industries convert the planet’s resources

into wastelands while pumping out toxic chemicals so pervasive

that they are now present in every body, even in those

of newborn infants. And our culture encourages us

to find fulfillment in rampant consumerism

rather than compassion and

connection.

The outpouring

of support has shown me that

many, many people recognize these problems

and want change—enough to actually make that change!

It’s not just a few little pockets of us in eco-hotspots. All around the

world, parents, students, farmers, activists, religious leaders, writers, engineers,

scientists, fisher folk, businesspeople, and many others are standing up, speaking out,

calling for a new kind of economy and culture that serves the planet and its

people, rather than sacrifices these for the economic benefit of the

few. So, in spite of the dire data on the state of the planet,

I find myself more full of hope than ever.

I am not alone. We are

not alone.

Annie Leonard

How to change de worl’

Like social networking, music, internet.

Ergo…

An ounce

of action is worth a ton

of theory.

Friedrich Engels

Raul Malo: You’re Only Lonely

I think if

anybody stays close to their

loneliness they’re always staying close to

the edge. So when I’m by myself, which is a necessity

when you’re a writer, I have to constantly deal with that bleak,

despairing feeling. It’s a funny thing about loneliness. No matter what

you try to do to fill it, you can never fill it. At the end of the day it looks at you

and measures you exactly. We do an awful lot of things—at least, I do—

to try to escape it. But when I can blend and merge with

the loneliness, there’s an extraordinary feeling

of fulfillment nothing else can

compare with.

Jimmy Santiago Baca

photo: Shaun Gladwell

Suzanne Cezanne

The disaster-after-the-disaster-after-the-disaster in Haiti is about to go off, and you can help if you don’t blow past this

beattherain.org

You become a dissident because you are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances

“If we see

the end of this country

it will come from the right and

our failure to provide people with the

basic necessities of life,” said Johnston.

“Revolutions occur when young men see the present

as worse than the unknown future. We are not there. But it

will not take a lot to get there. The politicians running for office

who are denigrating the government, who are saying there are traitors

in Congress, who say we do not need the IRS, this when no government in the

history of the world has existed without a tax enforcement agency, are sowing the

seeds for the destruction of the country. A lot of the people on the right hate the

United States of America. They would say they hate the people they are arrayed

against. But the whole idea of the United States is that we criticize the

government. We remake it to serve our interests. They do not want

that kind of society. They reject, as Aristotle said, the idea that

democracy is to rule and to be ruled in turns. They see a

world where they are right and that is it. If we do not

want to do it their way we should be vanquished.

This is not the idea on which

the United States was

founded.”

It is hard

to see how this can be

prevented. The engines of social

reform are dead. Liberal apologists, who

long ago should have abandoned the Democratic

Party, continue to make pathetic appeals to a tone-deaf

corporate state and Barack Obama while the working and middle

class are ruthlessly stripped of rights, income and jobs. Liberals self-

righteously condemn imperial wars and the looting of the U.S. Treasury by

Wall Street but not the Democrats who are responsible. And the longer the liberal

class dithers and speaks in the bloodless language of policies and programs,

the more hated and irrelevant it becomes. No one has discredited

American liberalism more than liberals themselves. And I do

not hold out any hope for their reform. We have entered

an age in which, as William Butler Yeats wrote,

“the best lack all conviction and the worst

are full of passionate

intensity.”

“If we end

up with violence in the streets

on a large scale, not random riots, but insurrection and

things break down, there will be a coup d’état from

the right,” Johnston said. “We have already

had an economic coup d’état. It will not

take much to go

further.”

How do we resist?

How, if this descent is inevitable,

as I believe it is, do we fight back? Why should

we resist at all? Why not give in to cynicism and despair?

Why not carve out as comfortable a niche as possible within the embrace

of the corporate state and spend our lives attempting to satiate

our private needs? The power elite, including most of

those who graduate from our top universities and

our liberal and intellectual classes, have sold

out for personal comfort.

Why not us?

The French

moral philosopher Albert Camus

argued that we are separated from each other.

Our lives are meaningless. We cannot influence fate.

We will all die and our individual being will be obliterated.

And yet Camus wrote that “one of the only coherent philosophical

positions is revolt. It is a constant confrontation between man

and his obscurity. It is not aspiration, for it is devoid of

hope. That revolt is the certainty of a crushing fate,

without the resignation that ought

to accompany it.”

“A living man

can be enslaved and reduced to

the historic condition of an object,” Camus warned.

“But if he dies in refusing to be enslaved, he

reaffirms the existence of another kind

of human nature which refuses

to be classified as

an object.”

The rebel,

for Camus, stands with

the oppressed—the unemployed workers

being thrust into impoverishment and misery by the

corporate state, the Palestinians in Gaza, the civilians in Iraq and

Afghanistan, the disappeared who are held in our global black sites, the poor

in our inner cities and depressed rural communities, immigrants and

those locked away in our prison system. And to stand with them

does not mean to collaborate with parties, such as the

Democrats, who can mouth the words of justice

while carrying out acts of oppression.

It means open and direct

defiance.

The power

structure and its liberal

apologists dismiss the rebel as

impractical and see the rebel’s outsider

stance as counterproductive. They condemn the

rebel for expressing anger at injustice. The elites and

their apologists call for calm and patience. They use the hypocritical

language of spirituality, compromise, generosity and compassion to argue

that the only alternative is to accept and work with the systems of power. The rebel,

however, is beholden to a moral commitment that makes it impossible to stand

with the power elite. The rebel refuses to be bought off with foundation

grants, invitations to the White House, television appearances, book

contracts, academic appointments or empty rhetoric. The rebel

is not concerned with self-promotion or public opinion. The

rebel knows that, as Augustine wrote, hope has two

beautiful daughters, anger and courage—anger at

the way things are and the courage to see that

they do not remain the way they are.

The rebel is aware that virtue is

not rewarded. The act of

rebellion defines

itself.

“You do

not become a ‘dissident’

just because you decide one day to

take up this most unusual career,” Vaclav

Havel said when he battled the communist regime

in Czechoslovakia. “You are thrown into it by your personal

sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external

circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed

in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work

well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society. … The dissident does

not operate in the realm of genuine power at all. He is not seeking power.

He has no desire for office and does not gather votes. He does not

attempt to charm the public. He offers nothing and promises

nothing. He can offer, if anything, only his own skin—

and he offers it solely because he has no other way

of affirming the truth he stands for. His actions

simply articulate his dignity as

a citizen, regardless of

the cost.”

Chris Hedges

1/f

…the basic

shot structure of the movies,

the way film segments of different lengths

are bundled together from scene to scene, act to act,

has evolved over the years to resemble a rough but recognizably

wave-like pattern called 1/f, or one over frequency — or the more Hollywood

friendly metaphor, pink noise. Pink noise is a characteristic signal profile seated

somewhere between random and rigid, and for utterly mysterious reasons, our world

is ablush with it. Start with a picture of Penélope Cruz, say, or a flamingo on a lawn,

and decompose the picture into a collection of sine waves of various humps,

dives and frequencies. However distinctive the original images, if you

look at the distribution of their underlying frequencies, said

Jeremy M. Wolfe, a vision researcher at Brigham and

Women’s Hospital, “they turn out to have

a one over f characteristic

to them.”

So, too,

for many features of our

natural and artifactual surroundings.

Track the pulsings of a quasar, the beatings of a heart,

the flow of the tides, the bunchings and thinnings of traffic, or the gyrations

of the stock market, and the data points will graph out as pink noise. Much recent

evidence from reaction-time experiments suggests that we think, focus and

refocus our minds, all at the speed of pink. If you’re sitting at a task,

Dr. Cutting said, “sometimes you’re good at it, sometimes your

mind wanders, sometimes you’re fast, sometimes you’re

slow, and the oscillating patterns that

occur are generally

one over f.”

1/f

Exactamente

Get pleasure

out of life, as much as you can.

Nobody ever died from

pleasure.

Sol Hurok

Shaun Gladwell, “Apology to Roadkill”

here