The Free View-- weblog of a presidential candidate

Weapons of Mass Dissension / the soup scum theory

A couple days ago I implored readers to get off your asses and make your voice heard in these "outrageous and powerful times". It's not the first time I've made such an appeal (or the second or third time, for that matter) -- and it won't be the last. In fact, I'm ready to go with some more imploring right now.

The times we're living in are really something else. It's like we've been simmering, socio-politically speaking, for the past 30 years-- and on 9-11 the heat got turned up just enough to bring us to a boil. Then we entered into a surreal new playing field, filled with lots of deep emotion, and fear, new rules, and a dangerous frantic urgency.

You know how when you boil a can of soup, there's a frothy foam of flavorings and additives on top? I always try to scoop that stuff off the top after I turn the burner off-- it just looks artificial and unhealthy. Mass-produced pre-made meals have too much flavoring and crap in them in general, and I figure that foam/goo that comes out when you boil it is probably the worst of the worst. Water rejects it, which strikes me as a nutritional warning sign.

That wasn't an off-topic drift -- it was a metaphor.

The artificial goo has risen to the top of our socio-political soup. It's unhealthy for our societal constitution, and it's as obvious and foreign-looking as the foam on the top of my Campbell's Select. It's mostly the oil of politicians combined with the artificial flavoring of corporations and special interests. You can eat it if you want, but all it'll do is jolt your system a bit, then come out the other end.

But what's happening now seems to be a massive effort to scoop, siphon, or otherwise remove the toxic foam on the surface of our national soup. Whether it's people seizing this moment to speak out, people reaching out and forming citizen coalitions of every stripe, bloggers digging and exposing and sharing the truths that aren't on the airwaves and the presses, people baring their all to protest for peace, millions worldwide coming out monthly to rally against the war, John Stewart mock-lunging over his desk on The Daily Show in frustration at the Administration's foreign policy logic, the Pope taking Bush to task on his claim that God would be with us in the war, the human shields, or innovative events like the Funeral for the Bill of Rights -- people are rallying to seize control of this moment, or at least to add their will to the shaping of it.

And to all of you who are engaged in this struggle, who are seizing your chance to shape the world-- good on ya, as the Australians would say.

To those who aren't -- you who are too busy fretting about the horrors to come to get anything done, and you who are fooling yourself into thinking there's no way to stop it or nothing that can be done, and you who are contendedly thinking "I got mine, so no worries", and you who are more focused on empty gratification than empowerment, challenge, change, and having an impact on the world -- I've got something for you to think about. It comes from Utah Phillips, a great storyteller/folk singer/activist/historian who lives near me. (He played a key role in my ending up in Nevada City, but that's a story for another time.) He tells a story on the album Fellow Workers (read about it here, buy it here-- way down the page in both cases), an album of stories about the ealy years of the labor movement accompanied by Ani Di Franco's music.

On one song, he tells the story of the Everett Massacre, a big confrontation back in 1916. A bunch of Wobblies (labor organizers) got arrested as a result of the confrontation. They were all put in a new all-steel jail, and they put together a protest in there wherein they broke the wall of the jail, by jumping and stomping in unison until the reverberations caused a fracture. It's a song about the power of organizing, and passion.

Utah knew Jack Miller, one of the main organizers of the workers in Everett. In the song, Utah tells us what Jack told him. He's big on passing down stories from our elders, and through him I've grown a greater appreciation for the same.

Anyway, Jack said:

(about breaking the jail wall)
"Thus proving, everlastingly, what a union is -- a way to get things done together that you can't get done alone."

He continues:

"You know, we didn't have any intellectual lives. We lived in our emotions -- we were a passionate people. And we were comfortable in our emotions. We made commitments, to struggle, emotionally -- commitments for which there are no words. But those commitments carried us through 50, 60 years of struggle. You show me people who make the same commitments intellectually, and I don't know where they'll be next week."

Utah says, "Kinda stern, isn't it? Well..."

Jack:
"Armed only with our sense of degradation as human beings, we came together, and organized, and changed the condition of our lives."

Utah: "Now this is the hard thing he said:"

Jack: "Why can't you young people, with all you've got, do the same thing?"

Well? You got an answer, all you couch potatoes and apathists?