Jack Burns Lives!

Fayetteville, Arkansas, take note. Something good is happening in your community, and I bet most of you didn’t even know it. Yeah, you’ve had Ozark Mountain Foods, one of the most successful food cooperatives in the country for some time. Yeah, you’ve had a farmers market downtown. You have several local bakeries producing their own bread. Yes, you’ve had the venerable Dickson Street Shop stuffed full of great used books for fair prices. But now it’s even better.

Fayetteville is the home of a new gathering spot and eatery, Smiling Jack’s. It’s a locally owned, community gathering place featuring live, local music, a robust menu and service with a smile. There’s a big deck where you can sit and bask in the sun, enjoy a spinach salad with fresh strawberry’s or one of my favorites, a grilled cheese sandwich with basil and tomato. Yum, yum!

According to the manager I spoke with, most of the food, probably close to seventy percent, is locally produced and organic, so Jack’s offers the best of both worlds: a locally owned establishment featuring locally produced food. A retail-farming partnership that not only creates economic opportunity but provides a needed service to the community. And it’s even in a refurbished, existing building in the center of the city.

How ’bout them apples?

Two items not locally produced but deeply appreciated were the New Belgium and Sierra Nevada beers. As I sat on the deck under a brilliant blue sky enjoying a seasonal New Belgium brew called Sunshine, the two man ensemble played Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song.” Hard to beat that combination….

And all of this in a region known for being the headquarters of Wal-Mart and Tyson Foods, the latter being one of the biggest and cruelest polluters on the planet.

Folks, this is how we resist the dominant cultural trend. Instead of giving our money to chains that are driven solely by profit and have no real interest in our communities, we support the local guy. Instead of chemically enhanced foods shipped with the help of a non-sustainable resource, we take a more sustainable approach and buy locally produced organics. Instead of building new buildings we recycle existing ones. In doing so, we support one another. We create solidarity and establish a sustainable, egalitarian society in parallel to the existing, non-sustainable, hierarchical one.

I believe there are endless opportunities like this for the clever and the driven. We need more Smiling Jack’s. We need more bike shops. Open computer repair shop that’s employee owned. More food cooperatives. Bakeries. Booksellers. Doctors, if you’re fed up with insurance and government, let’s create employee owned clinics, even medical cooperatives with Internists, OB-GYN’s, Radiologists, Gastroenterologists and other specialists under one roof. There’s a way, if you’re willing to make less money, but in return, drop the administrative headaches.

Smiling Jack’s was full of people both days I stopped by. Conversely, our society is full of opportunities for similar endeavors. But we must seize the opportunity, turn our backs on the status quo and create a new society. It’s my belief that we can create a completely parallel society to the existing one, or even a society within a society. One that features point of use, sustainable energy. Locally produced, organic food. Alternative schools. Jobs and retail that’s close enough to home so people can walk and bike.

This is also a way we can stop the advancement of capital.

This is the new Western Frontier. Full opportunity, but also full of challenges. It won’t be easy. But the only way to build a truly egalitarian, sustainable society is for each one of us to step and take it upon ourselves to create the essential piece parts.

It can be done, and as it’s often said “Build it, and they will come.”

photo credit: timloco (the man)

Edward Abbey has been called a lot of things. Curmudgeon, communist, asshole. And nature writer, the one term he probably loathed. Ed’s writing about his forays into the wilds were secondary to another, more important, theme. The one that really drove him and occupied his thoughts: The human condition and the effect of man on the environment.

Ed correctly stated that the “techno-military-industrial system and its overreaching oligarchy” was the real enemy of the planet. The growth machine, gobbling up resources and laying waste to wilderness, whether it be an industrial plant, a damn dam or grazing upon public lands. In his eyes, they were all the same.

The solution he proposed was to dismantle centralization, to decentralize, because “centralization is what sustains oligarchy.” He envisioned a world (with far fewer humans) where individuals assume responsibility and the where the community is directed by consensus. Real, grass-roots democracy, where an armed citizenry policed itself.

He envisioned a world where geopolitical boundaries no longer exist and where the concept of wealth is based on the health of the bioregion (he would have said regions defined by watersheds, which is essentially the same thing).

Anarchist communism.

As Ed saw it, this was a rational response to a dangerous, collapsing world. He believed an eventual collapse was probably certain, but the solution was not something that could easily be constructed overnight. Ed felt it would take a long time, certainly way beyond the end of his life, for this to evolve. For the “collective sense of responsibility” to evolve that’s necessary to sustain autonomous communities founded on the principle of mutual aid.

So, what to do in the interim? As I see it, the only worthwhile effort is to practice and establish egalitarianism, altruism and sustainability, to the greatest degree possible, in our homes and in our communities. It’s the best, perhaps the only way, to directly and effectively resist.

I experience great frustration when attempting to come up with an effective plan where results can be measured. Readily seen. And not a day goes by where I fail to ponder a strategy. A way I can battle the powers dedicated to accumulation of wealth through the destruction of the land. To be more than a speed bump in the road to progress. I want to be a gaping hole in the road.

My children are grown and on their way, so I have to devote whatever remaining energy I have to something other than wandering around in the wilderness. There must be something more. A method of decentralized resistance beyond what we’ve already discussed. Something we’ve missed.

Abbey believed that violence is justified in the defense of one’s home. Sabotage, that is, or the dismantling of the tools of terrorism. I’m interested in how this, sabotage of the machine, might possibly be accomplished legally, and without violence, by using a new tactic. A new way to combat the system without breaking the law and risking imprisonment. Is it possible to eliminate or cripple capital, or restrict access to capital, so developers and politicos will have a hard time using it as a tool for destruction?

Hit ‘em where it hurts. In the wallet.

I find it incredibly satisfying to beat the bastards. To outsmart ‘em. To watch ‘em squeal like pigs while they’re losing money, facing foreclosure and selling off assets.

How to kill capital. Something that will lead more of ‘em to bankruptcy and cripple their ability. That’s the question, and I think I have an idea.

This essay was written as a required assignment for parents in my son’s high school Honors English class. The assignment was to write a letter, poem or essay about your thoughts as a parent and/or your goals for your child. A reflection upon their upcoming graduation. I hope I get an “A.”

__________

It really seems quiet amazing that my youngest child, perhaps my most precocious offspring, is preparing to graduate from high school and move onward to the next phase of life. The last of three, all well on their way to their adult endeavors. This realization is just cause for reflection, reflection on all three of their lives. On the plans, hopes and dreams we had for each, and how they’ve progressed to date.

How’d we do as parents, and why did we encourage certain paths and not others. Were these good choices, and how have things worked out?

No, I’m not going to bore you or make you suffer through a personal replay of their lives or some drawn-out pontification on parenting. Who has time for that? What I will share are our ideas on education and why we, as parents, didn’t embrace a “status quo” path of development for our children. And furthermore, why I believe we need a radically different approach to education, especially in light of current events and what I believe to be a very uncertain future for not only our children, but for all life on earth.

Most children don’t simply “move on” to various phases in life. My experience suggests they’re prodded and cajoled, herded along like farm stock along the pressure packed conveyor belt of life. From compulsory elementary and secondary education to higher education, in the hope they’ll become gainfully employed subservient minions, tax paying consuming sycophants waving the flag. Red, white and blue Bible believing capitalists marching onward. Saving souls and opening markets and passing on the big lie that growth capitalism is our raison d’être.

It’s an assembly line of monoculture, and it’s having devastating effects.

Some of us, however, are (as my friend Hayduke often says) speed bumps in the road to so-called “progress.” We raise our children to question everything, since only through questioning and testing does anything earn its legitimacy. We stand against hierarchy and the notion that institutions should be trusted. We carefully lead our children, providing sufficient information for them to make their own informed decisions about everything from faith to politics.

We lead by example and resist the notion that children are like cattle, little tax write offs that need to be forced into subservient compliance, often with stern discipline and threats. Because everyone knows where the cattle end up. And for children in America, the slaughterhouse is, in my opinion, an unimaginative life of wage slavery working in meaningless jobs for extractive, toxic corporations. Corporations that have hijacked our government and laid waste to the environment.

So, as parents, we’ve encouraged our children to be thinkers. Students of the classics. The liberal arts. To be historians, writers and painters. To embrace music, literature, art and diversity. And perhaps most importantly, to be catalysts for change in a society that’s in desperate straits.

Edward Abbey once said “The idea of wilderness needs no defense; it only needs more defenders.” I’d expand that idea to say that the ideas of equality, egalitarianism, altruism and peace need no defense. They too need only more defenders.

I think that’s been our ultimate goal as parents. To not only insure that our children are happy, healthy and well prepared for the challenges of life, but to be willing to take up any of the multiple causes in need of more defenders.

Activism can of course be accomplished in many ways. Via direct action or protest but also via the law, art, music and writing. How many people have found inspiration in John Lennon’s Imagine? In the poetry and essays of Gary Snyder? Or from a teacher that encouraged his or her students to think deeply and critically about things. To go beyond the basics of simple memorization and understand the deeper meaning in Keats’ Ode to A Nightingale.

It’s more than a sonnet. It’s a worldview that places exceptional value on the natural world and all living things.

As we enter 2008, human civilization is pushing the limits. The toxic and co-dependent relationship between industrial capitalism and militarism is not only unsustainable, it’s threatening nearly every life form on the planet. Perhaps cockroaches, a brilliant example of evolutionary biology, are immune, but almost everything else seems hopelessly caught in the vortex of human excess and destruction. The graduating students of 2008 are entering a scary place. It’s a violent, self-absorbed world facing the triple threat of Peak Oil, global climate change and shrinking aquifers. Peak Oil means much more than oil for cars, by the way. Everything in our society is propped up by oil. Pharmaceuticals, construction materials and most importantly, food. Our burgeoning world population depends on industrialized agriculture for food, which is dependent on a non-renewable resource, fossil fuel. You don’t need a college degree to quickly conclude our entire society is therefore dependent upon a non-renewable resource and frankly, in deep dung.

Technologists falsely believe some new silver bullet will save us, but they’re sadly misinformed. Even a cursory examination of the facts, including some pretty simple energy analysis reveals that nothing can cost effectively and efficiently replace fossil fuel as an energy source. We’ve strained our natural resources, including water, to the limit. It’s sink or swim for humans, meaning, we have to relearn how to live in harmony with the planet or cease to live. It’s really very, very simple.

Education is the only answer, since it’s ignorance that got us in this mess. To successfully turn the tide, if such a thing is even possible at this point, we need thinkers with broad based educations. We need fewer MBA’s and more biologists, anthropologists, geologists and researchers that can apply these skills in activism and toward the construction of a more equitable and sustainable society.

We need poets, novelists, thespians, musicians and artists to make life more palatable while we’re trying to figure everything out.

Want to run a business? Open a bike shop. It will be a good investment once gas tops $7.00 per gallon. Start a food cooperative. Develop point-of-use technologies for energy. Become an organic farmer.

And of course we need teachers that challenge our children to think. To embrace diversity of life and to be catalysts for change. To challenge the status quo and resist the anthropocentric notion that the planet is our personal playground, and that nature is something that must be conquered.

Like the Taoist, we need to learn how to flow with life, not against it. It’s a required, base level of understanding we must possess in order to build a sustainable society.

I hope my children are part of a peaceful revolution. To take a place on the front line and be willing to fight for the voiceless and the downtrodden. To help us craft a sustainable, egalitarian society where the measure of a person is how much they give, not how much they possess.

It’s the only war worth fighting.

We have art so that we shall not die of reality ~ Nietzsche