by George Hardebeck
Success has been sold as taking as much as we can, as fast and long as we can, replacing Life’s true green for printed green. Economy, as separate from ecology, is a grand delusion to suit the great addicts seeking
their continual flow of sick fixes – endorphins flying to a rage on Wall Street, promoting their belligerence through ‘mainstream’ corporate 6 Mogul Media, at any cost – 1000’s of species weekly at 100 to 10,000 times the normal extinction rate. 100 times the normal temperature,would place us as more successfully consumed than Venus, while most of us, even in ‘the green movement’, are not talking about this. Why?
Addicts must have more. Wendingo, a term by our Eastern Indigenous, qualifies monsters that must have more until they consume even their own bodies. These Wendigoag at the helm – snake oil salesmen and closet kings, now flushed out from behind the curtain – are waging havoc throughout the realm.
Not so driven, most of the rest of us go along as trained, complicit in our complacency, especially among the loyalist Pax Americana. The Pax Roma were those at the center and top of the economic empire in Rome, who,doing… well enough…would not end the system, while this dis-ease could consume all lives beyond, within reach, as with Pax Britannia. Loyalists to the empire sing our song of independence likeyouth still seeking to hold onto an irresponsible freedom, forgetting our return to inter-dependability,denying how mutual society depends upon responsible freedom -as fur traders learned when marrying into Indigenous cultural elders and hosts, here, bearing our American Revolution, French, Russian and so on.
We began to fall back into the pyramidal scheme about as soon as we thought we were breaking free, blind to the lesser nature of this sick construct. Like the alcoholic family, this dysfunctional system can have it’sheroes, scapegoats, lost children and mascots. Imperialism learned that keeping all compartmentalized in blocks and tiers, could keep us busy at each other’s throats, lest we rise to oust the self-centered bullydom -like the family maturing to put the addict into treatment – to end abuse and all begin recovery.
Our very brains may have grown to be human, some science considers, when expanding linguistics for rallying together to oust bigly apes beating chests on the knoll. The River Dance style of Irish dance seems was made more rigid, as the Brits and Scots protestant loyalists, who scalped and massacred them on the way in, had the native Catholic Irish keep their hands by their sides andfaces forward to not be plotting, and passing notes, if they wanted to restore their suppressed culture. Keeping Irish Catholics tiered lower than Presbyterian Scot loyalists kept the Imperialist’s money world going around, even to the tune of selling nine times the potatoes that they forced the Irish to monocrop, needed for the Irish to survive the infamous famine – another round of genocide.
We’ve seen uprisings like the Bacon Rebellion of the 1600’s on the East coast, quelled by the greed leading elites coughing up some of their spoils to lift the whites to separate them from the blacks a tier – as the Koch’s just supported congress to put repealing Obamacare on hold, realizing loosing some of their pirated booty could keep us pouring the gold down their gullets.Sex, race, color, creed, species, party… any schism – it’s all good, as long as we are divided for conquer.
Movements are in the works for our re-turn, with players like YES Magazine, and The Bioneers connecting our fragmented dots of wellbeing, re-linking Life’s web, connecting the Amazon’s richly Indigenous with Pennsylvania farmers fighting corporate pig farms, aided by the work of Mari Margil and Thomas Linzey of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). When the CELDF of Pennsylvania joined their skills with the wisdom of the Indigenous of the Amazon struggling against big oil, Ecuador’s revised national constitution bore the Community Rights / Rights of Nature Movement, and networks, into a global movement to rejoin
Life’s own revolutions, realigned. Looking into why their not-for-profit firm, with The People of PA, had so little recourse against corporations writing permits granted by the state, CELDF uncovered how an imperial construct was formed as the architectural structure of our federal constitution, for rule by the opulent -by James Madison, with the help of George Washington and friends behind closed doors-much like the failed Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP).
Placing property and commerce at the core and top of this pyramidal construct, corporations and banks, any large estate owners – all agencies of such, joined in as leaders of nation over state, over local community, over The People and all Life. So, CELDF found they could write constitutions to obstruct and dismantle this unjust federal source code, our national DNA that deceptively concocted our new American neo-imperial dream – which is for most a nightmare. Other founders of our constitution, would not ratify it without driving in our Bill of Rights for We The People. Still, without mutual economy, there is no mutual society.
Hundreds of communities using CELDF, nationally and worldwide, now organize to rewrite constitutions, placing peoples, community and nature, above corporations, property and commerce. New Hampshire, Colorado and Oregon are on it. Bolivia changed core laws, after Ecuador. Nepal joined in and brought Rights for Climate into the conversation; India for rights to heritage seed… and so many more. There are great talks and conversations on line for learning more of this transformative movement that seems, in many ways, more powerfully devising the change we all need than the Paris climate talks. We The People 2.0, The Second American Revolution is a film portraying this movement being shown in theaters to homes – as we are sharing locally, with discussion among related groups and individuals.
Even while such work is core, handing us the key and showing us the door, we need to do our homework to envision what we may move into across the threshold. Otherwise, we may be again prodded by violence, and seduced by monetary faux value to fall into another abusive form – while all Life calls us to restorative justice, in reconciliation ecology – Michael Rosenzweig’s term from Win Win Ecology, and in Restoration Economy, which Storm Cunningham’s book of this title shared would be the greatest part of our economy by 2010. A clue to renewing our vision, to reject ‘trickle-down reaganomics’ by those at the ‘top’ of this imperial pyramidal model spun, is realizing how We The People trickle down to our public and commercial servants; as is recognizing that with Life as the source of all we share, economically and trade, that we need to live Life on her terms, meekly again, sharing and caring for all beings – All Our Relations, as her own.
Stay tuned with the Independent Media Center, as we seek to support panel discussion for reforming our natural, mutual economy, realigning in Life’s movement, ongoing – revived in her revolutions.
(George Hardebeck hosts WannaBe Cafe, his radio show at WRFU.net out of the Independent Media Center, where he hosts a table for such conversation on Thursday nights, and another such space with Makerspace on some Wednesdays, as a 12- step group called Earth Anonymous/ACDC-Adult Children of Dysfunctional Culture, to move sharing, listening and discernment into an eco-cultural arts guild to change practices.)