Unhappy New Year

I have often used the tagline "pleasure, revolt, despair" to describe my personal-political disposition. Entering 2009, my heart is filled with the latter. The Israeli invasion of Gaza, the continued occupation of Iraq, the escalation of the war in Afghanistan, and the war against immigrants, people of color, women, and queers continues to cost thousands of lives. With all the celebration in the U.S. cities over the past year, we have heard so little frustration, strategy, revolt.

May this empire of greed and destruction collapse. May the oppressed be liberated. May 2009 bring down the violence of the United States of America.

Surviving Post-Industrial Collapse

If those who believe that the collapse of civilization is coming are right, and heaven only knows that while I'd love to rain on their parade they may very well be right, we're all going to need some serious survival skills to keep our fabulous lives on course. Aric McBay has put together In the Wake: A Collective Manual-in-progress for Outliving Civilization! From composting toilets to post-civilization condoms, Aric has some practical, fabulous ideas. But learn while you can--these ideas are all online! Aric is also the author of Peak Oil Survival: A Guide to Life After Grid Crash.

The Ethics of Propaganda

Advocates for social and environmental justice are often plagued by questions of efficacy? What works? What will win? What are appropriate means of using media to create social change? The answers to these questions, particularly the last, will influence the future trajectory of mass and local movements. Often the Left willingly acknowledges the coercive nature of the dominant media--its propagandistic impact generated by over one-hundred years of psychology, sociology, and other sciences designed to help people understand, and in a worst case scenario, manipulate human behavior. In doing so, it is left with an ethical question that will shape history for better or worse: should we traffic in coercive media strategies or should we inspire criticality through education, poetry, and non-coercive narrative forms? Should we do both? These are the questions we must answer through our praxis. Our actions will determine whether we win or lose.

A quick example can be found in the sloganeering of the election. "YES WE CAN." These three words offer many enormous hope. People feel that life might be manageable. Those who understand that in many ways after the devestation of Iraq, the environment, the education system, the economy, and ongoing wars against the poor, that the more appropriate slogan might be "Oh no we didn't" or even better "whoops,"the rallying cry of inspiration might be utter crap.

There are those who acknowledge that even if our future is grim in the shadow of post-industrial collapse, global warming, a recession, and the blowback from untold violence the world over, that it is still better to forward a message of hope rather than realism. This, to me, appears politicking, immoral, and ethically unsound.

Coercion is violent. False hope is coercive. It seems to me, hope, these days, is violent.

Many say that the dour Left will never win. Unfortunately, Right or Left, the outcome most people world over face is life with preventable or treateable disease, starvation, bloodshed, and poverty. This is not an accident. This is due to the intentional policies and politics of the U.S. and other Capitalist nations. This is not hopeful. It is apocalyptic, an apocalypse most people live daily.

Will optimism recuse us from Capitalism? Probably not. Is it good propaganda to say things feel hopeless? Certainly not. Are things hopeless? Probably.

Should we admit it?