Jack Burns Lives!

Ok. Enough with all the vitriol and political crap. What good does it do anyway? Most folks have their minds made up and very few people cross the line and change positions. There’s so much negative energy in the United States right now, I think it’s better if I don’t contribute to our further decline.

As my grandmother would say, “If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”

That’s not always good advice, as sometimes we need to shake things up, but right now, it seems prudent.

Anyway, I just picked up an original 1962 Lonely Are The Brave movie poster. It’s massive, 40×60, and will cost a lot more to frame than what I paid for the poster itself. So, the frame can wait.

A prized possession for me, since it’s one of my favorite movies, based on one of my favorite books and by my favorite author. 

In fact, considering all of this political mumbo jumbo filling the airwaves and the blogosphere, I think I’ll just grap some Ed off the shelf, plop down in a chair and treat myself to something worth reading.

And people with cognitive challenges. Like Sarah Palin. 

Someone, anyone, please just wake me up and tell me this is just a bad dream. I keep thinking it is, but I never wake up. Maybe I’m dead and the Christians were right. I’m in hell. 

Palin says God blessed America with oil and gas

“God has so richly blessed this land, not just with the oil and the gas, but with wind and the hydro, the geothermal and the biomass,” Palin said. “We’ll tap into those.”

“She’s a hunter. She opposes abortion. She’s religious,” said John Shirley, 63, of Pittsboro, who cited those issues as among his top concerns. “She reflects a lot of the values we have here in the South.”

Hunting, abortion and Jesus are his top concerns? That, and perhaps making sure we keep the White House white?

It’s all about god, guns and gas folks.

What the hell is “the hydro?” Does she mean water?

I’d love to ask her for a definition of biomass. I’m sure she’d say something like “Yeah, that’s all of it. All of ‘em in one big mass.” 

America, I really don’t know how it could possibly get any worse than this. Have we really fallen this far? Even Barry Goldwater must be turning over in his grave.

I had an interesting exchange with someone on a discussion list this week. I don’t really know this person well, but assume he’s young, probably in his 20′s, highly idealistic, full of energy and ready to storm the Bastille.

There was a time when I was exactly the same way, and on some days, even at the ripe old age of 46, I still feel the same way. But as time passes, testosterone levels decrease and wisdom increases. Or we at least get a better balance of both.

My young conversationalist, Michael, wants to change Washington. Change the world and bring down the ruling juntas. Protect his “shrinking freedoms.” Noble ideas and understandable, but hopelessly doomed to failure. There are multiple reasons, not the least of which is the size and complexity of these centralized systems of dominance. They’re run by people that were willing to do damn near anything to get there, and you can be sure they’ll be damn willing to do anything to remain in power. Even if it means taking a trillion dollars or so from the citizenry and passing it on their friends. All to save us, of course.

And as I’ve stated before, the ability for the citizenry to violently seize power from the state pretty much ended with the invention of the Gatlin Gun. From that point onward, the state had more fire power than the citizenry and if that wasn’t enough, air power certainly sealed the deal.

My advice to Michael was to focus on the things he can change. Himself, his home and his community. We can’t change Washington! It’s never represented the people of this nation and never will. It’s always been there to protect private, propertied interests and to use whatever methods are necessary to extend economy hegemony for a few at the expense of many.

As my friend Hayduke often says “I don’t want better bad system. I want a better new system.” Or something to that effect.

That’s actually a very keen observation, one we should all take a moment to consider. The idea of building a better, new system in parallel to the existing one that resists change and cannot be changed. I don’t care what Obama says.

Hayduke always said democracy begins between the ears and that’s a simple yet profound truth. Once we understand democracy and embrace the concept, we begin to practice it in our homes and neighborhoods. We build self-sufficient, egalitarian communities and then extend these ideas to the bioregion and perhaps even the continent. The concept of “thousands of little communes.”

We can’t dismantle the current, centralized and coercive system, but we can decentralize and build independent systems of self reliance in preparation for its ultimate downfall. And the first step is to stop doing the same old things!

We build greenways, bike lanes, establish neighborhood committees for schools and community gardens. We form cooperatives for food, clothing, energy and services and we build community owned transportation. We do without things that we cannot produce cooperatively or obtain via fair trade with other regions and boycott corporations and businesses that do not treat workers fairly or offer ownership to employees.

We can have laws and rules we decide upon democratically. We can have effective self-defense. We can do all of these things without Washington!

We practice democracy every day in our daily lives. That’s freedom and the only way to insure you keep freedom.

I talk a lot about cooperatives and the importance of cooperatives in our communities. Here are the basic principles of cooperatives. As you read them, think about how many organizations and institutions you’re involved with that embrace these principles:

1. voluntary and open membership
2. democratic member control
3. member economic participation
4. autonomy and independence
5. education, training and information
6. cooperation among cooperatives
7. concern for community

Now, contrast that with the Washington supported financial debacle where a handful of powerful people sitting at the top of a hierarchical system where you’re not even a blip on the radar. I suppose you did have economic participation because you paid the bill! Concern for community? Who really believes that any of these rich muckety-mucks has any concern for their community! Information? Yeah, we got full disclosure on this deal. Just like Iraq.

If you want freedom and change, stop doing what you’re doing. Stop sending these people your money and keep your money in your community. Build economic stability at home.

The other choice is to keep doing what you’re doing and get nowhere.

So we now have angry mobs at McCain rallies shouting non-sense and lies and even booing their candidate when he attempts to say something rational. What’s this country coming to?

I’m alarmed at the level of anger in our society right now. I think it was always there, percolating beneath the surface, but now it’s really starting to ooze outward. We saw some of it with Bush and Clinton, but now it’s really pouring out.

Even if people tone it down at the rallies, the sentiments and feelings will still be there. Hatred, ignorance, rage. People will still be calling Obama a “nigger” and a “terrorist” in their little private cliques. People will rage against “socialism,” without really even understanding it, and wrongly blame “socialists like Obama” for their 401K and real estate losses. We first saw these attacks levied at Hillary Clinton, and while I was not a supporter of hers, I felt the attacks were puerile and in extremely poor taste.

Don’t kid yourself and think it’s not happening. It is happening. It’s like we haven’t moved an inch past Kent State or Birmingham. It’s like we’re going backward, or maybe we never made any progress at all and just thought we did. And the worst part is people are just ignorant, and their ignorance fuels their rage.

The wild-eyed camo-clad, Humvee driving pseudo-militarists have been out there for eight years just chomping at the bit. Now their wives are getting in on the action, an angry brigade of Jesus inspired hockey and soccer moms ready to hurl cupcakes at us.

Obama will win, and eventually they will see that he’s not what they thought he was. They’ll find he’s just another Washington politico working to keep the status quo in place, not a reformer attempting to create a more equitable society. Growth capitalism, militarism, fear mongering and healthcare for those that can afford it.

On a related topic, my friend Hayduke has recently posted some interesting comments on the financial crisis, however, I don’t think he goes far enough in his critique of capitalism. You know, with all of this ridiculous talk about socialists taking over the country, why not put something else out on the table: private property, specifically land ownership.

There are some uncomfortable but undeniable truths about the private ownership of land. It’s not all it’s cracked up to be.

Have I been drinking the red Kool-Aid? No. I’m not a communist, but I do think about things and try to get to the root cause of issues. And when I think about hierarchy, coercion and the current financial crisis and trace all this back to what really makes it possible, I keep coming back to private ownership of land.

Private property contributes to or makes a lot of things possible. The establishment of hierarchy, followed by coercion and the emergence of non-egalitarian systems like growth capitalism. When you own land, especially vast tracts of very expensive land, you hold a lot of power. It’s the most precious commodity anyone can control, and it makes everything else possible.

The United States is perhaps the best example of how private ownership of land contributes to all these issues. Just consider development and the effect of development on ecosystems, and then consider all the other vices made possible by control of land. It’s a valuable resource, our most precious resource, and it has been a vehicle for the establishment of prodigious sums of wealth in our country.

Once upon a time on this continent, we didn’t have such a thing as private land ownership. American Indians found the concept foreign, although they did certainly have territorial boundaries, often protected with violence. But they essentially held land in a “commons” where all people had equal access to the land and its resources, and where no one person or group could misuse the land at the expense of all others.

I’m not advocating Soviet style communism, but I am advocating an eco-anarchistic re-establishment of the commons. I don’t believe people should “lose all their land,” but I do believe in its redistribution and the establishment of a “right to use” lease whereby people can continue to live as they do now, albeit with a few more restrictions. And it would obviously no longer appear on the balance sheet, so yes, billions of dollars of wealth would in fact disappear. If there’s any left after the current crisis….

I honestly don’t know what else to do, and see this as a core problem in our inability to establish a sustainable society. It bothers me, but intellectually, I can’t get past all the problems it causes. I’m firmly in agreement with the American Indian concept of land stewardship and subsistence economies.

You can own your business. Your car, your bike, whatever. Make a fair profit. You just shouldn’t be able to own the land any more than you can own the air or the water ways. Water rights? How ’bout land rights bound by community based and democratically decided upon controls?

The nation would in a sense be a giant commune, where we all worked together for the common good, and the single most precious common resource would be equally shared and cared for by all. This would be made possible by eliminating the single most powerful asset that prevents this from happening and by placing that asset back in the hands of the public trust.

Until this happens, I don’t believe we will ever have an equitable, sustainable society.