Freedom, Love, and Revolt

I was reading a passage by J. Krishnamurti today, and felt it deeply underscored the importance of maintaining a perspective of radical negation towards the values and practices that dominate the globalized, technologized world of today.

He writes:

"Life is very beautiful, it is not this ugly thing that we have made of it; and you can appreciate its richness, its depth, its extraordinary loveliness when you revolt against everything--against organized religion, against tradition, against the present rotten society--so that you as a human being find out what for yourself is true . . . To live is to find out for yourself what is true, and you can do this only when there is freedom, when there is continuous revolution inwardly, within yourself."

It was Nietzsche who wrote that a philosopher must be the "bad conscience of his times." Those of us who strive for a world of spiritual and political freedom must be courageous enough to cultivate a healthy critique of "common sense."

This is why we question the sanity of the larger society.

This is why we doubt the reasoning of those in power.

This is why we challenge all signs of authority, whether spiritual, political, medical, or scientific.

This is why we cringe when some techno-enthusiast touts bio-fuels or some other techno-fix as the great solution to keep our precarious civilization from running itself into the ground.

It is the task of the educator, Krishnamurti argues, to:

"create an atmosphere of freedom so that you can live and find out for yourselves what is true, so that you become intelligent, so that you are able to face the world and understand it, not just conform to it, so that inwardly, deeply, psychologically you are in constant revolt; because it is only those who are in constant revolt that discover what is true, not the man [or woman] who conforms, who follows some tradition."

How does our educational system function today?

I think Krishnamurti's depiction is still accurate, though it is decades old. Little has changed in the era of Industrialism:

"The world is torn by conflicting beliefs, by caste and class distinctions, by separative nationalities, by every form of stupidity and cruelty--and this is the world you are educated to fit into. You are encouraged to fit into the framework of this disastrous society; your parents want you to do that, and you also want to fit in."

We must continue asking questions, the kinds of questions that no one wants asked around a dinner table, among family or friends. We must do this, because to not do this is to cultivate fear, and fear is the absence of love as well as the absence of freedom.

It is by no means a comfortable position to act as "the bad conscience of the times." Unfreedom, a life of dependence--on gadgets, on money, on self-willed delusion--would be far more comfortable.

This is why unfreedom is so heavily celebrated in our culture. This is why we strive for the newest gadgets, the biggest televisions, the roomiest houses, the most luxurious cars. This is why "comfort" and "convenience" are the most celebrated values of modernity.

If the inward revolt is quelled, if the fires are put to rest while we are just old enough to imbibe commercials on TV, what risk remains of a living, outward revolt to those benefiting from our destructive civilization?

This is preemptive war on the spiritual front.

So let us cultivate a little sweet revolt, my friends, a little healthy criticism, a love of danger and taste for discomfort, to keep our lives loving, open, and free.

Urban Armageddon

The city has claimed our minds, and our memories.

Human culture--the arts, music, film, all forms of abstraction and symbolic thought, the modern imagination itself--has been taken captive by the urban landscape, hemmed in by its convenient borders and ruled, ordered lines.

All disaster stories today revolve around an urban apocalypse, one in which countless urban inhabitants suddenly find their lives imperilled by a catastrophe of immense proportions. New York attacked by the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, L.A. ransacked by aliens, Tokyo pummelled by a giant dinosaur from the sea--always we find urban man cast in the role of victim (and notably, this victim comes from the wealthy, first world), starving for food, wandering amid ruins of a "once glorious and bountiful civilization."

This urban fetishism is central to our worldview as civilized human beings. Concrete torn up and overrun by weeds or tidal waves are supposed to instill a tragic fear in us from a very early age, so that we do not doubt the legitimacy and necessity of the civilized enterprise once we have entered adulthood.

In all things, the modern human being must identify first and foremost with the manmade world, must draw sustenance from it, yearn for it, as a leaf yearns for sunlight and a root for rich soil.

The disasters we conceive of in our collective imagination are always disasters of the city, as though there could be no viable future for humanity without an indefinite perpetuation of our towering landscapes of glass, concrete, and steel.

Why do we wish for a new world to be erected upon ruins?
What draws us civilized back,
again and again,
to our domesticated environments,
and away from the bounteous land?

The vast expanse of nature is a torment to us;
we have inherited the unconscious scars of our ancestors,
whose gross ineptitude in eking out a meager subsistence on the European continent plagued them with scarcity and want, and ultimately led them to a lifestyle of warfare and pillage.

Our ancestors, the Greeks, Romans, Indo-Europeans,
the civilized--
found not only subsistence, but abundance,
through conquering those peoples who derived their livelihood from living in concert with the land.

We have inherited their ineptitude,
and thus the thought that this system of entitlement
and minimal duress could somehow,
suddenly be taken from us--
by calamity,
by tidal wave,
by asteroid, earthquake, typhoon,
by flood, drought, dust storm, plague,
by famine, firestorm, invasion, nuclear attack
--acts upon our most hidden,
most unconsious,
and most fundamental
fears as civilized beings.

This explains, to some degree, the recent fascination we see in both the major media and small, urban news outlets with the depressed economy, with peak oil and climate change, among people who are not necessarily concerned with the broader ecological crisis resulting from our culture's (mis)treatment of the natural world.

It is our fear as petroleum dependent creatures wed to a global chain of supply and demand, and not necessarily as creatures in search of a reawakened connection to the natural world, that motivates us.

In the end, what even the most enlightened of us seek is often no more than a perpetuation of this system of privilige, and the attendant comfort we have come to require for survival during our 12,000 year divorce from the land.

Few of us are wild enough to see fecundity in the rubble,
to hear bird song in the silencing of the machine,
to wed ourselves to the tidal wave,
the earthquake,
the tornado and typhoon,
to find joy in the image of cities inundated by water,
human culture buried in the dust,
windows cracking, steel skyscrapers collapsing,
as angry volcanoes blot out the light
of a distant,
merciless sun.

Institutional Inertia and its Antidote

I work for an institution. It is the penance I pay for wanting to exist on this planet. Being human, being vulnerable to the elements, I need shelter. I need food. I have chosen to secure these--as well as a portion to pay off my outstanding student loan debt--by working for a non-profit charter school.

I should amend that. The institution I work for is a registered 501(C)3 non-profit.

The very term "501(c)3" gives me chills.

We have been having meetings these past few days to mark the closing of the school year. We have been discussing several vital topics which get right to the heart of our mission as educators, such as:

1.) What is Education?

2.) What are the values we want to transmit to our student body to ensure their successful growth into secure, free-thinking human beings?

3.) Given that the global economy has entered a phase of terminal decline, if not total collapse, what are the strategies we must take as 21st century educators to revamp the prevailing educational paradigm for a post-oil, post-industrial future?

As you can imagine, it was an invigorating debate.

Discussions centered on the difference between centralized, industrial education--such as is found in large, prison-like high schools and colleges--and place-based education, which makes the land one inhabits an intricate participant in learning, if not the very focal point of learning itself.

There was a moderator to the debate, but he rarely interjected with his own views during discussions; rather, he sat quietly, making notes on the board of interesting ideas and practices that we could implement in the coming year to make our school more coherent in terms of vision, ideals, and approach to the classroom.

Everyone was engaged.

When someone made a poignant remark, people responded.

There was the moment when one teacher suggested finding strategies to make our school less dependent on fossil fuels for field trips and other excursions, and another teacher was quick to add that an all-staff commitment to using less fossil fuels in our personal lives would set an example for our student body.

Everyone agreed. A few teachers waited afterwards organizing carpools.

I had never seen such an outpouring of creative energy in such a formal, fluorescent-lit setting. The School Director encouraged everyone to participate vigorously in the debate and add their own views.

The direction our school takes in the coming years, he said, is something we all help steer. Our thoughts, our vision, our creativity are all crucial to the school's growth and success.

And not success as conventional schooling would have you define it, he added. Success is not what the technocrats in the education establishment call "student achievement," nor is it measured by "test scores"; rather, it is the extent to which our school grows to serve the community and the local landbase, the extent to which we as teachers inspire our students to conceptualize a communal life of resilient food systems and vibrant local culture forged from the ashes of our current alienating way of life.

It was great, really.

I only wish it were true.

The truth is, I have a crippling anxiety about working as a functionary of a multi-level institution. I cringe at the terms of technocracy: "skill-set", "inventory", "buy-in", "student achievement", "funding streams", "institutional viability", et al.

And when sitting in a meeting of reluctant technocrats, of mid-level bureaucrats fulfilling the call of the industrial juggernaut to increase the ranks of young workers, my mind--like most of theirs--completely shuts down.

The Director talks. We listen.

We listen, but only half-heartedly, and rarely are we given an avenue to interject our opinions. Opinions, when they are voiced, are mumbled outside in the hallway on the way to the bathroom:

"This shit sucks, man."

"Why the hell do we have to sit through this?"

"I could shoot myself."

"I'm just glad I have my i-phone."

The modern bureaucratic institution, though compiled of individuals with their own goals and ideals--some of whom are extremely forward-thinking and discontent with the status quo--eventually acquires a life of its own, a life anathema to all spontaneity and open discourse.

We see this with businesses, social services, governments, schools. We see this with international aid institutions, universities, environmental organizations even.

The bureacratic institution easily loses focus on its ostensible goal--in the case of my employer, educating at-risk youth--and settles into working solely to extend its own lifespan, to find new sources of funding, to keep itself afloat. No one dare question the overall goal itself, or how it is best achieved amid the changing circumstances of our current historical era, with its diminishing biodiversity and rapidly increasing human population, its changing climate and decreasing energy supplies.

Creativity is crushed, to the extent that even those with fresh ideas find themselves pitted against entrenched practices and the comfort of those higher up on the hierarchical chain. Most people--if they are human--feel stifled by the air of the institution, by the protocols it follows, the rigid guidelines it imposes on the infinitely dynamic processes of idea-generation and idea-sharing, yet few have words to express it.

Their voices, and the thoughts that give birth to them, have been silenced for too long, crushed out by dull lectures in classrooms through adolescence, by television and movies, video games and mass spectacles and alcohol since then. This is one more instance of boredom to press through before they get to drive home and watch reality TV. Before they get to sit back, relax, and crack open a beer.

And nothing ever changes.

Nothing ever does, they sigh.

The ultimate tragedy of modern institutions is that it is only through standardization that groups of civilized human beings appear to be able to get anything done. Without the hierarchical structure of a bureaucracy, a motley group like ours would function like a chicken with its head cut off. Although everyone I work with seems to resent our director for his dull facilitation of what could otherwise be productive meetings, no one dare challenge his power openly for fear of being censured by the group.

The age-old longing for a slave master over-powers our burgeoning creativity and we submit, willingly, to the logic of subordination.

We present ideas to our director like hesitant bards reciting poems before a magistrate. If his brow twitches, we know we may have gotten through. But in practice, we find his vision is lacking. He sees "funding streams," not potentialities. Nor does he see the futility of fighting to keep an institution afloat within a civilization that is fast approaching ecological calamity. The burdens of driving our institution weighs him down with the practical necessity of fitting our educational paradigm within the over-arching paradigm of industrial-technological civilization, so that he cannot question that civilization, he cannot peer at the roots and see just how rotten they are.

His job--like all of ours should we choose to operate within this extractive economy--depends precisely upon his willingness to not see, to remain oblivious, to keep civilization chugging along into the next quarter, next year, next decade.

Who can even begin to question the proper course of education for our youth without reckoning with the very real global crisis we now face?

The only antidote to this appears to me to be a radical denial of hierarchy, wherever we find it. Meetings may need moderators, but who says these must function as anchors miring us in the mud of practicality? Moderators should be open circuits that help transition ideas from the conceptualization phase to the development phase, not walls into which they fly and collapse dead to the floor.

Moderators need not be directors, either. In fact, the denial of hierarchy is best practiced by having anyone willing to moderate a meeting. All employees can function as moderators, so long as collective agreements are made as to how the meeting should function.

Is this ideal of institutional anarchy achievable? I think that with proper vision an institution can unite itself around a collective mission that draws its power not from "directors," "middle-managers," or "facilitators," but from the creative heart slumbering inside each of its members.

But institutional anarchy will always threaten the bedrock logic of institutionalization, which proclaims that human energies must be standardized, rigid, calculable. It is an oxymoron, but if we were all to come to terms with the very real prospect of ecological and economic collapse within the next decade, it would suddenly become imperative that we start re-thinking all of our paradigms--be they educational, agricultural, political--with or without the support of our leaders.

Education and Its Discontents

The 9 month school year is a vicious torture created by foolish bureaucrats years ago, and yet we stick to it, not questioning.

Think about the human soul,
Think about the seasons,
How in summer the soul blossoms,
how you walk for hours,
play for hours,
run for hours,
travel, journey, traipse,
without wondering about the time.

And then in the fall, we enter our
school rooms, black dungeons,
we join the others who've had
their own peculiar journeys.

We don't discuss anything about our lives, our feelings, those infinitely minuscule developments and diversions that our soul has taken in the time passed. We walk into a room, and we sit.

And we look out the window. And outside the sky turns greyer.
The sun leaves us, slowly, and the earth grows cold.
And inside, we keep ignoring everything, as the vibrancy and life of the summer seems farther and farther away.

School is a terrible, terrible thing.
For those who hate it, it's painful, it brings terror, nausea, fear, dread.
There are those who have felt the dread before, and those who have not.
Those who know the terror of Sunday evenings when the light turns a melancholic blue... The belly aches, the rush to finish homework, the agony to "get ready" for bed.

The sun goes down, and slowly, silently, all Play exits the world.

We lose that Play more and more as we age.

"Time to go inside!"
"Time to sit down!"
"Time to watch a movie!"
"Time to read!"
"Time to bed!"

Something in us rebels against that soporific Siren, wooing us to sleep. But the schoolmasters charter us to go to the schoolhouse and sit, as our youths die with the dying of each summer, the dying of each day.

Imagine the child of any creature, the youth of any age, being put into a stockade while the hormones and visions of immaturity still rage within their fevered blood--what would come of them?

The child of the bear, in chains,
The child of the wolf, in a lunch room,
The child of the deer, set before a TV screen,

Imagine the sadness of bears and wolves and deer swept each morning inside just such a cage,
for it is a cage,
and we are wild creatures domesticated,
raised in nets and kept on display,
we are names on a ledger,
budget dollars on a page,
we are a source of revenue for the State,
we keep the politicians in power,
and keep the mega machine of Progress chugging along,

Imagine a beast so blind as to will its own servility,
Imagine a beast so afraid that having the world open to it, rushes back inside its cage,
Imagine a beast watching the sun in the shadows it makes through the blinds,
Imagine a beast that eats cereal shipped in by a truck, a beast that devours whatever calorie source it can get its teeth into,
a beast that can't outrun the weakest of its own kind.

Imagine an animal that NO LONGER RUNS.

That says, to its youngest, liveliest: "NO RUNNING."

Inside, you must not run.
Inside, you must sit down.
Inside, you must stay put.
Inside, you must fold your legs, and wait.

It is a sad thing that having engineered such a cruel, unjust system, that crushes the will of the wildest and robs them of their fangs, that we then sacrifice the best of our reformers to working within this tottering, deceitful facade. We seem to lack the creativity to cast the whole thing to the devil and let a new education rise from its ashes. We seem afraid to simply open the doors to our cage and . . . walk free. There's something about the boundlessness of the "Real World" that frightens us, even our teachers. Even the brightest, strongest of us would rather have our teeth pulled and refitted by the State than risk getting a cavity. The cruelest of us would rather be declawed. We're worried about what we might do to ourselves, or what might be done to us--we haven't the courage of real criminals who simply do as the moment demands of them.

The cage is safe. The meals come on time. The rent is always due at the 4th of the month, and the gas and water soon after. We PAY for our portion of the ecological debt. We get money and give it out to get our portion of the future Mid-Western desert, our taste of the dwindling Ogalalla. We've got to eat, don't we? Who can argue with that? We've got to have our car, right?

How early we take on this identity as civilized, caged creatures, creatures raised for cities, for conversations, for computers, like hogs in a feedlot. Shoot 'em out, fatten 'em up, and throw them on the platter for the mechanical death droids of progress. Shoot us full of antibiotics and send us out into the "real world." Put us behind the wheel of a car so we can get a "real job." Get us away from nature, away from experience, away from every other, away from ourselves. Put me in a tiny box, plug me full of downloaded (or pirated) music, and make me feel groovy.

Get a load of this future. It feels good, doesn't it? This is what we set our students up for, and the 9 month calendar assures us of this. Any growth had during the summer is washed out in the first few weeks of government food. The abstraction from nature continues, accelerates, and we shed off any of those claws, fangs, horns, those dreams, talents, aspirations, that may have germinated over the summer months. We chug them through the winter, when the days are shortest, the nights longest, and the perils greatest.

In the winter, the soul really can lose itself. Christmas comes and the year opens--family, presents, friends--and school is out. Resolutions are made, things begin to come together again as the scars of the fall semester begin to heal--and then it re-begins. The masquerade. The death dance. And it plugs on and on and on and on, until June.

June! Pretty soon, the countdown for summer vacation BEGINS.

Do you see the irony? All hope, joy, peace, patience, endurance, fortitude, grace, fullness, begins with the thought of that summer sun, of the moment school is over and we can re-emerge into the light, when that new dawn of the post-adolescence period is over and we can run freely-- but not to college! No, no more of the torture! We instill in our wildest a hatred of learning, because learning is most dangerous for them! If they were to truly grow into consciousness of THEMSELVES it would be our undoing! We would all run for the hills! If their voices ever spoke truly, truthfully, if purpose ever ruled their tongue... WOW!

What would be left to the guards manning the fortresses of futurity? How could they withstand the assault? A tidal wave of energy would bust the banks of every river, every avenue, street, channel, canyon... There would be no end to the wrath, and beyond the wrath, renewal. A gigantic tide shifting under the forces of intergalactic energy... Moon, Sun, Earth aligned, human hearts aligned, shaken, but now aligned. That great last moment of greatest friction when the new order almost locks into place, that great moment of greatest upheaval, of challenge, of cruelty, of confusion, which precedes any great coming together, any reunion-- that is where we now stand.

7 days until the end of School! Forever!

(Forever?)

Back from the Brink

In the book, Night by Elie Wiesel, the opening scene describes an old Kabbalist, Moishe the Beadle, who disappears for months after boarding a train car bound for an unknown destination.

I find Moishe's predicament similar to mine. Although I have not boarded a train to a death camp, nor have I witnessed horror first-hand, I identify with the way he is treated once he escapes from a mass grave and makes his way back to his main village.

Moishe wanders through the village, shouting: "Jews, listen to me! That's all I ask of you. No money! No pity! Just listen to me!"

His message was one of danger and despair, and Wiesel notes how Moishe's enthusiasm led to people calling him mad. Who could be so enthusiastic in such normal times as the early 1940s? Everything was still going on with regularity. The sun still rose and set at the appointed hour, children still played in the streets. And now, this old man appears, warning them of impending doom . . .

He had to be mad, right?

If only the Jews of the small town of Sighet had listened. If only they had, for one moment, let the perilous import of Moishe's declarations penetrate their bubbles of contentment.

As a friend commented on my last post, Moishe's message wasn't "hopeful enough." He didn't pander to the innate sense of optimism and fear of the unknown. He had just returned from the brink of death, and witnessed a scene of senseless annihilation. He was no longer living anymore, he says. Something in him had died.

It is difficult--nay, downright impossible--for those burdened with an awareness of imminent peril to make their message palatable.

So we smile, and we wave, and we hum a happy song . . .

Coping With Collapse

People who are close to me have often commented that I have a penchant for "being gloomy." I have always seen this as simply having an excess of consciousness--I can't enjoy anything that this modern world has to offer, without remarking on the diminishing resource base that provided it, or the third-world workers that were enslaved to make it.

Well, despite finding my observations annoying, no one ever thought to ask me how I deal with this excessive knowledge of the destructive nature of modern civilization.

Until the other day.

I think people like to silence us "gloomers" because we bring to mind certain things people would rather remain ignorant of. Believe me, I know first-hand that considering the absolutely irreversible trends of our culture--its total disregard for the integrity of natural systems and of the human soul--can lead to a bleak outlook on life. The globe is desperately overpopulated and we are nearing a breaking point in terms of how much we can take from the natural world to convert into economic gain. Even our history, which we once liked to look back on as the "glory days" of intrepid American individualism, has over the years revealed itself to be filled with errors, oversights, assumptions, and downright petty ignorance.

But I don't rant about this stuff because my goal is to knock people off of their high-horse of "Progress with a capital P." It's because I feel in the very depths of my soul that coming to grips with the imminent peril facing us all is useful, necessary, and the only means we have of finding a path to the other side of modernity--to that vast and open plateau of spiritual fortitude, communal grace, and environmental sustainability.

How do I cope with the grief that my knowledge of the approaching end of industrial civilization entails? How do we, as a common humanity, face this dread that gnaws at us in our loneliest hours that something with our current way of occupying this continent is not right? That it began in bloody conquest of a pristine land from native hands, and that it will end in a bloody mess as the mountains are levelled, the prairies desertified, and the aquifers extinguished in one last consumptive burst of self-gratification? What keeps me moving along, keeps me hopeful, joyous even, content to face the approaching tsunami head-on?

I answered the questioner that it has only been through digging deeper, asking more questions, seeking a more perfect portrait of our failures as a species and as a civilization that has given me any sense of stability. It's weird, but when reality starts to crack around you, the only salvation left is to shatter it to smithereens. So, microwaving plastic containers--something I used to frequently do--releases carcinogenic particles into my food? Well, what else is going to kill me? How many industrial pollutants are there out there? It becomes a sort of morbid fascination with the dark side of modernity, as nearly as fascinating as the techno-enthusiasts of the 1950s must have found their predictions of a future infinitely more comfortable and infinitely more serene.

We must turn our minds, our hearts, our very souls into wellsprings of destruction, we must cut through the ecclesiastical shrouds of tradition, hope, superstition, and "optimism" that keep the death dance of civilization chugging along, if we hope to keep ourselves intact in the next century. We must transform ourselves into incarnate natural disasters, into walking hurricanes and singing tsunamis, into talking tornadoes and earthquakes of song. If disaster is on the horizon, if famine, plague, and privation creep up behind us as we sleep, then let us confront this scarcity head-on and not shy away from the terrors of the unknown.

The fact is that collapse is happening already. It has been for quite sometime. Cuba is already "beyond oil." As I write this, there are community gardens in Africa built by squatters who steal their water from the government and live their lives off the grid. There are places where the aquifers have already run dry. There are homes that have been broken for generations, communities that have been ruptured for decades, and whole nations that have been hotbeds of unrest since the beginning of history.

The human spirit lives on, it perseveres, it steels itself in the midst of deprivation--indeed, it knows itself best when material comforts are furthest from it, and I have no doubt that a new awakening lies hidden, like a meaty kernel, inside this coming century which reveals only a forbidding guise to us right now.

I keep going on because I have a shovel, and I have soil, and I have students, and I am digging in. I keep going because I have found a little ecological niche for me to attempt to repair and restore the scars left in the wake of our European civilization. I keep going, because it is noble to keep going, it is noble to be without fear, it is noble to seek to heal our great rupture from the natural world. The wound is some 10,000 years old, and it is still growing, as surely as the Pacific Ocean is still widening the gulf between Asia and the Americas. But a great, cosmological wound, such has been inflicted upon all of us by massified schools, massified communities, massified churches, and massified consumption, needs a whole host of healers who are capable of digging in.

Friendship: A Renewable Resource

As the economic crisis in our country and across the world deepens, I find myself trying to find personal connections between what I hear in the news and what's going on in my friends and family members lives. I woke up this morning to the voice of Carl Levin, the Democratic Senator from Michigan, pleading for the bailout of the Big Three automakers. He said if the bailout didn't go through, our country would find itself confronting a crisis of a magnitude not seen since the Great Depression.

What a thought to wake up to, eh?

Well the reality appears to be as true as it is daunting. Big companies like Yahoo and Sony are announcing big layoffs. Even NPR, which was broadcasting the news of the new job cuts, announced its own job cuts, due to a lack of corporate contributions. The mass of capital that once flooded this country is drying up, like the water in the Ogallala Aquifer. The pain of the crisis is trickling down with a rapidity to make any Reaganite reach for his rosary.

But what's in store for me, I wondered, and for those I love?

On a whim, I called an old friend tonight. She is a single mother of two beautiful daughters. I asked her how she's doing.

"Well, not too good," she said. "Actually, I'm probably in the worst financial straits I've been in for as long as I can remember."

She told me about the struggle to find enough money to pay for the apartment, the car, and food to feed her family. And now, on top of all that, Christmas is on the way--that means more work at work, and more money needed to meet more expenses.

"We just put our Christmas tree up yesterday, and the girls were excited, but it didn't feel like Christmas," she said. "We bought a plastic tree last year, and it just doesn't have that smell of the holidays, you know?"

I asked her about her job. She's a butcher at a major chain organic supermarket.

"I spend my days surrounded by testosterone and blood," she laughed.

But really, when it came down to it, things weren't all that funny.

"The corporation is coming up with a lot of new, pointless slogans. Now they're all about 'Creating Value for the Customer,' or some such bullshit. They had a pep talk meeting a few nights ago--it lasted until 11 pm and I had to be at work at 5 am the next morning--about increasing sales for the holidays. It's all they really care about. And you know what? Not a one of them could do the job that I do. They walk around, pointing out things--Like this one guy, a big Regional Supervisor, told me I didn't have enough turkey breasts in our cold case, and I said, 'I'm a little busy now, could you grab it for me?' and he just shrugged his shoulders at me and walked off."

She paused.

"I guess that's just the hierarchical nature of things."

For years both she and I have talked about the dead-end our civilization is headed towards. With the bleak headlines rolling in day after day, our predictions (or premonitions) are increasingly proven true. I asked her if she's thought about what it will take to weather the crash, and whether or not she was readying herself as it advanced.

"Well, I know on one level I hate the company that I work for now, but if the shit ever hit the fan, I know that if I killed an animal I would know how to skin it, gut it, and cut it up. If it came down to it, I'd at least have that skill, and that's valuable. But I got into a big argument with a friend of mine the other day about this very same thing."

"What did you say?" I asked.

"Well, we were arguing about what would happen if suddenly America was cut off from this system of global trade--if we couldn't count on shipping in all these things cheaply from other countries. His main argument was that North America is such a great big continent, that there is no way we couldn't produce everything we need to live."

"And what did you say to that?"

"I said that, sure, I agreed with him on the one hand--North America is a massive chunk of land, and we can grow just about anything. But take, for instance, oil. Our farmers have been growing crops with oil--"

"--Tractors, fertilizers, pesticides," I said.

"And shipping," she added, and continued, "for so long, that not even our farmers could probably even grow food without oil. Not to mention basic manufacturing. We're pretty defenseless on that front."

"And then," I said, "your friend fails to ask what exactly he means when he says, 'America will survive.' By 'America,' does he mean the bankers and investors--the moneyed classes--who are quite content as things are? Those who will continue to have the money which will permit them to employ a young, creative single-mother at a grocery store cutting flank steak for the meager price of 12 dollars an hour so that they can take home $5,000 a week? Is this a system that we're all really crossing our fingers for to survive?"

"Exactly," she said. "There are so many questions that most people aren't willing to ask. There's always been this voice in the back of my head that told me not to buy into everything completely, to have a way out. I mean, yeah, let's face it: I hate my job. Not that I don't like doing the work I do, but I hate who I do it for, and the conditions I do it in. But I have to feed my children, right?"

I didn't ask her about her daughters, knowing that conversation could open up whole new vistas neither of us were ready to confront. But her comments verified a suspicion I've had for some years now about the industrial economy here in America, how it works, what drives it at the individual level. Most people hate their jobs, to some degree--or at least the conditions under which they feel compelled to do it. But the necessity of supporting themselves or their families--the necessity of survival--makes wage-slavery an acceptable, if inwardly begrudged, choice, perhaps the only one open to us at this "high stage" of "civilized development."

My gloomy reflections aside, it felt good to talk to someone who stands outside this unfolding drama of collapse and sees the intricate mechanisms driving it--the abundant energy (oil), the fiercely enforced hierarchy (capital), and the total dependence of modern America on globalism to survive (technology).

Hanging up with her, I thought to myself: "We are nothing without our friends. And if things continue to get worse, I would be blessed to have companions like her--and like so many others--on my side. Like-minded, like-hearted, ready to confront the trials of our generation head on . . ."

She could gut a deer for me any day.