Hey there-
Some interesting points in this thread. Or is it threads in this web? I
think that it is important to realize that nobody gives you power and,
within reason, nobody can take your power away. Power is something you have
by your very being and living and/or it is something you create in concert
with others around you. But you can opt out of a situation and take your
portion of the synergy away; the total is reduced by more than the amount
of your contribution. For me the parallel is the "rights" -vs- "freedom"
discussion. Rights are something given to you by someone else whereas
freedoms you possess/are possessed by from your very existence. This all
sounds pretty nebulous, but was a real epiphany for me while working on the
papers leading toward my thesis, which I unfortunately never wrote.
The second thing I see about the discussion of the powerlessness of the
individual unless backed up by the masses is that it is not really true.
Throughout history, as I read it, the vast majority of change whether
"positive" or "negative" has been produced by individuals or, at the most,
very small minorities. I think that, in general, 20 or 30% of the populace
is all that is necessary for radical change. The majority of people are
fairly inert when it comes to the broader workings of society. Many because
it is all they can do to get through the demands of their lives right now;
others because the force of inertia is simply too strong. The current is
pulling you toward the cataract and it is too hard to paddle against it for
very long. This is one of my operative theories of life. Life is like a
river. For the most part we have to learn to go with the flow, but not in
an inertial way. We have some control because we can paddle toward what we
think we want. Sometimes we get swept past a fork we think we want to take
and we can try to paddle upstream, but sometimes we have to let it go; or
we can take the risk of portaging overland. This is risky and we have to
travel very lightly because the trees and brush are thick, the bugs are
biting, the day is hot, and we don't know how far it is. Sometimes we get
to the other fork and it disappears underground, heads over a precipice,
rejoins the branch we were just on, is just a dead end, or dries up.
Generally, if we are aware and poised we can get to what we think we want.
Now as far as having to leave the planet, I cannot see that this is
necessary or even desirable. Why should we think that we can run away to
another planet? Who is it that is going to go off into space? Probably
corporations or the military and all they will do is replicate the dominant
paradigm out there. Our grandchildren do not need to be jetsam that we
throw over the side to save ourselves or them. They do not necessarily have
to be flotsam that is left over from our destruction of our lives on earth
either. The earth is pretty good at pruning things/beings that get too far
out of synch with the environment. So are cultures, though at present it
might not seem like it. On a global scale we are the merest of infants;
self-obsessed, prone to temper tantrums, apt to pull the legs of bugs,
cruel, and tribal. And even in the history of humanity, oh what a misnomer,
our current age of greed and avarice is the merest blink of an eye.
Eventually the pendulum will swing in another direction. Our choice is the
way of the dinosaurs or something like pre-agricultural revolution or
something utterly different. But we have some small influence on the
direction of the pendulum and we ought to choose wisely and act.
As I said in an earlier post, the trick is the balance. How to dig through
the dirt of our lives and shine the light of truth and self-examination on
our lives; work to build what we want, or think we want; help educate
others that they have a choice and show them possible alternatives; while
remaining flexible enough to move the mountain realizing that we may decide
we put in the wrong place and have to move it all over again. To top it all
off, how to have the energy and power to do all this while we take care of
the myriad of daily nuisances like taxes, parking tickets, jobs,
government, megacorps(e), war, etc ad infinitum/ad nauseum.
I, myself, am as busy as a beaver in a woodlot.
Namaste',
Guy Clark
"Live like you are going to die tomorrow, but
farm like you will live forever!"
