> especially as the guardians of those institutions don't want them to
> change?
...
> Individually and collectively, there's a lot we can do. One of
the things is
> to keep thinking about what 'I' and 'we' can do. Fasting, farming,
fiddling,
> and figurin'. And dodging bullets, ideological, chemical and spiritual....
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
I agree. Professional politics is a lifetime career. There�s
all kinds of invisible
tricks built into the system to protect the status quo. If you
were to join the
Democratic Central Committee in your town, you would find that they
are too
conservative to do anything you want to do and they avoid environmentalists
like the plague. They will use you to do their business, but
when you want
to support an environmetal candidate, that is an anathema. Independent
candidates find it impossible to beat the party system. Sure,
I voted for
Ralph Nader, too, but he will never become president.
Local forays into county politics, simple projects like trying to have
an organic
weed control project on a road, run into entrenched individuals on
the Weed
Board who support the ag chemical industry and who will do every kind
of trick in the book, pulling strings invisibly under the surface to
burn you
out, to make you reinvent the wheel all the time. You make a
gain with
one sympathic official and after the next election, or the next Weed
Supervisor appointment, you are still dealing with this same
individual
who is diametrically opposed to what you are trying to do and who now
has
an influential stooge to work through. As I said, politics is a lifetime
career.
Sometimes you get enlightened people in county offices and then you
can fly.
Frank Teuton wrote:
> Allan:
>
> Thank you for forwarding that note from Richard K. Smith. He is spot
> on.Richard K. Moore, it is.
>
> I just finished reading Howard Zinn's book, "A People's History of the
> United States." For all thinking people, it is a MUST READ.
>
> Zinn documents the things Smith talked about. It certainly added fuel
> to my fire. One of the most stark revelations (to me) is that the
> constitution has nothing to do with protecting *my* liberties (esp. as a
> black man). It was written by the wealthy white elite to protect the
> interests of the wealthy white elite. And, of course, its tenets are
> still regularly violated by a court system grown more and more
> conservative and protectionist over the years.Wealthy white male elite. Just keeping the record straight.
>
> The question I'm left with, after reading Zinn's book Smith's words just
> now, is: what can WE - those who can see through the illusion - do
> about all of this? Doing our work is one part of the answer. Telling
> people about what we are doing (and converting some of them) is another
> part. There's more - much more. But what is it???
>
> How do we break through the ignorance - the willful ignorance (Smith's
> references to the Matrix are perfect) - of most people and start
> spreading the truth? And how do we get most folks to accept that truth,
> and to act on it?Ignorance, says my father, is when you don't know any better. Stupidity is
when you do know better, and act as if you didn't.That is a big part of what we are up against. Against stupidity the Gods
themselves contend in vain, or so it is said.
>
> More than that, how can we use this truth to change our institutions -
> especially as the guardians of those institutions don't want them to
> change?There is no simple answer to this question, none at all. Poets and
philosophers, warriors and monks, princes and commoners have wrestled with
it since time immemorial.In the two great North American quasi-democracies, the US constitutional
republic and the Canadian constitutional monarchy, apathetic consumerism
reigns supreme. The ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class, namely,
keep making them rich. And don't rock the boat.A lot of this has been hashed at from a number of different perspectives,
some left, some right, some off the wall. Personally I think a gold and
silver standard is as bogus as inflation and funny money; all money is a
shared illusion that works only as long as people buy into it; you can't eat
gold or silver either. Maybe BD wheat should be the reference point of
value, eh?Six billion people on this planet orb of ours, and some of us have a lot
more say in what happens than others......like Ritchie Havens sang it, 'what
you gonna do about me?'Individually and collectively, there's a lot we can do. One of the things is
to keep thinking about what 'I' and 'we' can do. Fasting, farming, fiddling,
and figurin'. And dodging bullets, ideological, chemical and spiritual....Wasn't Hugh a Green Party activist for a spell?
Frank----was a college radical, still a little d democrat in Her Majesty's
Canada and the separatist soon to be French only province of Quebec....OK,
that last bit is at least slightly exaggerated....but the narrow
nationalists are clinging to power, in spite of the fact that they got fewer
votes than the less narrow nationalists....Best be keepin' on, I reckon....
