Stop Protesting and Start Doing Something

I am starting to get (well, okay let’s face it, I have been) really annoyed with people who are convinced they can change the world with peaceful protests. When I was in college I was in a “peace” group, but we did a lot more than protest. We were more a group that spread the opposing viewpoint’s opinion on major issues (Veterans Against the Iraq War, etc). But now I talk to my friends who are still in college and all they seem to do is plan marches, and march against war, for LGBT rights, and many other things. I am quite frustrated. These are some of the most intelligent people I know, and they are wasting their time walking down streets with signs when they could be doing something that might actually change the world.

GreenPeace can hang all of the banners they want off of the sides of buildings and bridges but if they believe that the hardened heartless CEOs and politicians are going to change their consumer driven goals because of a banner they see, they are sorely mistaken.

The fact that we even “need” an Animal Planet channel is sad in and of itself. If the network thinks they will change things by spreading the word and knowledge about endangered and extinct animals that lived half a country (or even half a block) away from the couch the viewer is sitting on they are wrong.

These silent campaigns are far too easily ignored by both the general public and the leaders of Western civilization. Activists and protestors that go far enough to actually start to change something are promptly silenced and most of the world continues on without even realizing it happened. The news media will cover a business opening (or re-opening) before it will cover the loving soul who is living in the branches of a doomed redwood.

So, what should you do? Well you can continue signing your petitions and making your signs and practicing your chants for your marches, or you can actually change the world. You can join that activist in the tree, and bring a camera along. You can stop the pollution that is constantly streaming into our already quite toxic waterways. You can plant a garden for yourself. You can do all of these things but still it is not enough. It is never going to BE enough when our planet is dying before our eyes. Let me rephrase that, our planet is being murdered before our eyes and we pay less attention than we do to a mid season recap of American Idol.

This world will change all on its own in time, as the oil runs out and the infrastructure crumbles. I, personally, am not willing to wait for it to happen on its own. Humanity may not even be around to see it. 90% of large ocean fish are definitely not going to be around to see it. 23,000 dolphins a year will not be around to see it. The salmon, koala bears, arctic foxes, polar bears, emperor penguins, and clownfish might be gone as well, along with so many other beautiful and intricately necessary species.

So what are you going to do?

Artificial Communities

I was driving to work, per the usual, early this morning when I realized that I see the same group of cars/people at a certain intersection during each commute. There’s the large mail truck that takes the turn too slowly, the biker in all yellow who looks nervously at the cars, the woman in the black coup doing her makeup. As this realization struck me I felt comforted that I held a place in this commuting community. I felt comforted, that is, until I put some more thought into it.

This “community” I’d experienced was an artificial one. Our society is full of such artificial communities and even goes so far as to market them as real ones. As humans it is natural for us to want to belong, to have a network of people that make us feel safe. I live with two roommates I found on Craigslist. I did this partially to save money, but mostly to establish a living community that I’d been missing while living alone. While I do converse with the two women I live with, they barely know me. Compared to the people that live downstairs, however, they know a lot. My downstairs neighbors make us women feel safe. There are there men that we occasionally say hi to on passing. We take comfort in knowing they are there. We feel like they are part of our community, but they aren’t. All that we know about them is that they seem to bike everywhere and listen to music with a lot of bass until around 10:30pm.

"We were born to unite with our fellow men, and to join in community with the human race." -Cicero

Genuine communities don’t seem to exist much anymore, at least not in cities. People can live for years next to one another and never spend more than ten minutes in conversation. This disconnect wasn’t always the case and I’m sure in some smaller communities that it doesn’t exist at all.

I grew up in a small town in Wisconsin. I knew my neighbors, as did my parents, and it wasn’t unheard of to run to one of their houses within a two block radius and ask to borrow something. Be it the cliché cup of sugar or an air compressor or tool of some sort. We all borrowed things to one another without question. I would spend hours playing with the neighborhood children, laughing, having a blast. We varied in age by over five years but we were still the best of friends. But now, over 15 years later, we have all drifted apart. The neighbors my parents would spend hours talking to on back porches have moved away, their houses have been torn down. New houses all from the same mold and builder have taken their place with neighbors they might mumble a hello to in passing.

What destroyed the community? What is the culprit? I could go ahead and blame Western Society without even blinking as I so often do for problems such as this, but I believe it’s necessary to go deeper. It would be naive to say that Western Society wasn’t around 15 years ago when I was busy playing sports with my neighbors. I’m sure that some children still have similar experiences, somewhere, today. What I think it comes down to is understanding Western Culture as a disease. The disease has many stages that slowly progress to total decimation. When I was a child we were in a stage several before the stage we now sit in. Although a community existed then it was still quite watered down compared to communities in the 1800’s, which were watered down compared to communities 200 years before, and so on and so forth.

"There can be no vulnerability without risk; there can be no community without vulnerability; there can be no peace, and ultimately no life, without community." -M. Scott Peck

This society is slowly sweeping away our connections with each other and with the land we live on. We no longer blink when we find out a low income housing complex will be torn down to build condos. We do not borrow sugar from our neighbors, we chain our doors against them. We establish artificial communities in our commutes, online, and in our minds.

Let’s get over this block we’ve created (or had created for us) against meeting and knowing people. Perhaps I’ll go visit my downstairs neighbors today, bring them some cookies and get to know them. It would be a start, at least.

Do we live longer because we have forgotten how?

It seems that bizarre philosophical thoughts always come to me when I should be sleeping. The other night my mind was wondering through random fact after random fact, when it got stuck on one. I started to think about life expectancy and how it has changed over the course of human history. With a few cultural oddities, humans now live longer than they ever have in history (as a whole). I started to wonder why.

I shrugged off the boring scientific answer that has to do with advancements in medicine and other boring, non soul-wrenching facts. I started to bend my mind in order to reach outside of the cultural box we are all placed in at birth. With that bend I started to wonder if there is, perhaps, another reason entirely behind why humans live longer now. I thought that maybe this reason is what stands behind the medical advances, what drives them.

I began to consider quality of life, and the differences between the way we live in modern western society and the ways in which people used to live in nomadic societies—notably many Native American nomadic societies. As often happens, things I have recently read (especially in Derrick Jensen’s A Language Older Than Words) started to play into my take of things. In his book, Jensen discussed how food of all sorts used to be so plentiful that many cultures spent most of their time in leisure activities. With just a bit of conservation and understanding of the environment many Native American tribes could focus on the arts, love, and nature in general instead of constantly worrying about providing for their families.

These people had time to really enjoy and experience life almost every single day. They truly LIVED every year of their lives. That is in stark contrast to the predicament western culture has gotten us into. The wondrous industrial society that so many embrace and essentially bow to makes it impossible for anyone (even people who have removed themselves from it) to truly live life every day.

The rivers that once ran so thick with Salmon that you needed only to lower a bucket into them to get dinner are now dammed, and empty. The few remaining salmon launch themselves fruitlessly at the concrete structures we have built to create ‘clean energy’ and lakes that we in turn, pollute. The fields once so thick with Bison that the ground could not be seen for miles are now empty, dusty, and dry. Those that remain walk penned and domesticated—perhaps wondering where the days of old have gone to.

I think life expectancy is higher today because it needs to be. In order for us to truly live the 30 years that our ancestors lived in 30, we need to live 80. We spend the other 50 wasting our lives in front of computers watching YouTube videos, pretending we are intimately connected to those we only communicate with on FaceBook, commuting, shopping, and wondering why our lives hold no meanings.

If we restored the environment to its former glory, and gave up our consumer driven lifestyles would we not live as long? I of course do not know this, and no one ever can. The environment is too broken, our population too large, for that to be a realistic experiment. Perhaps we should start be fixing what we have broken, and go from there.

I for one miss the days I have never seen. The days when salmon ran nearly solid in the waters and bison shook the ground with their mere numbers.