Rebecca Solnit: Compassion is Our New Currency

I'm out in Indiana right now, which may be one of the few places that still feels untouched by the Occupy Movement and the other social-justice transformational activism we've seen this year.  As I take time to rest, reflect, and be with family, I'm also getting a chance to catch up on all of those things I bookmarked but didn't get a chance to read when they came out.  This one that I read today is from the amazing and always articulate Rebecca Solnit -- "Compassion is our New Currency."  It's beautiful and powerful, and I just had to share it.

"Perhaps the greatest gift that it and the other movements of 2011 have given us is a sharpening of our perceptions - and our conflicts. So much more is out in the open now, including the greed, the brutality with which entities from the Egyptian army to the Oakland police impose the will of rulers, and most of all the deep generosity of spirit that is behind, within, and around these insurgencies and their activists... One thing couldn’t be clearer: compassion is our new currency."

Happy New Year's and looking forward to sharing more writing and thoughts with you soon,
Riyana

* * * * *
Compassion is Our New Currency: Notes on 2011’s Preoccupied Hearts and Minds 

By Rebecca Solnit

Usually at year’s end, we’re supposed to look back at events just passed -- and forward, in prediction mode, to the year to come. But just look around you! This moment is so extraordinary that it has hardly registered. People in thousands of communities across the United States and elsewhere are living in public, experimenting with direct democracy, calling things by their true names, and obliging the media and politicians to do the same.

The breadth of this movement is one thing, its depth another. It has rejected not just the particulars of our economic system, but the whole set of moral and emotional assumptions on which it’s based. Take the pair shown in a photograph from Occupy Austin in Texas.  The amiable-looking elderly woman is holding a sign whose computer-printed words say, “Money has stolen our vote.” The older man next to her with the baseball cap is holding a sign handwritten on cardboard that states, “We are our brothers’ keeper.”

The photo of the two of them offers just a peek into a single moment in the remarkable period we’re living through and the astonishing movement that’s drawn in… well, if not 99% of us, then a striking enough percentage: everyone from teen pop superstar Miley Cyrus with her Occupy-homage video to Alaska Yup’ik elder Esther Green ice-fishing and holding a sign that says “Yirqa Kuik” in big letters, with the translation -- “occupy the river” -- in little ones below.

The woman with the stolen-votes sign is referring to them. Her companion is talking about us, all of us, and our fundamental principles. His sign comes straight out of Genesis, a denial of what that competitive entrepreneur Cain said to God after foreclosing on his brother Abel’s life. He was not, he claimed, his brother’s keeper; we are not, he insisted, beholden to each other, but separate, isolated, each of us for ourselves.

Think of Cain as the first Social Darwinist and this Occupier in Austin as his opposite, claiming, no, ouroperating system should be love; we are all connected; we must take care of each other. And this movement, he’s saying, is about what the Argentinian uprising that began a decade ago, on December 19, 2001, called politica afectiva, the politics of affection.

If it’s a movement about love, it’s also about the money they so unjustly took, and continue to take, from us -- and about the fact that, right now, money and love are at war with each other. After all, in the American heartland, people are beginning to be imprisoned for debt, while the Occupy movement is arguing for debt forgiveness, renegotiation, and debt jubilees.

Sometimes love, or at least decency, wins.  One morning late last month, 75-year-old Josephine Tolbert, who ran a daycare center from her modest San Francisco home, returned after dropping a child off at school only to find that she and the other children were locked out because she was behind in her mortgage payments. True Compass LLC, who bought her place in a short sale while she thought she was still negotiating with Bank of America, would not allow her back into her home of almost four decades, even to get her medicines or diapers for the children.

We demonstrated at her home and at True Compass’s shabby offices while they hid within, and students from Occupy San Francisco State University demonstrated outside a True Compass-owned restaurant on behalf of this African-American grandmother. Thanks to this solidarity and the media attention it garnered, Tolbert has collected her keys, moved back in, and is renegotiating the terms of her mortgage.

Hundreds of other foreclosure victims are now being defended by local branches of the Occupy movement, from West Oakland to North Minneapolis. As New York writer, filmmaker, and Occupier Astra Taylor puts it,

Not only does the occupation of abandoned foreclosed homes connect the dots between Wall Street and Main Street, it can also lead to swift and tangible victories, something movements desperately need for momentum to be maintained. The banks, it seems, are softer targets than one might expect because so many cases are rife with legal irregularities and outright criminality. With one in five homes facing foreclosure and filings showing no sign of slowing down in the next few years, the number of people touched by the mortgage crisis -- whether because they have lost their homes or because their homes are now underwater -- truly boggles the mind.”

If what’s been happening locally and globally has some of the characteristics of an uprising, then there has never been one quite so pervasive -- from the scientists holding an Occupy sign in Antarctica to Occupy presences in places as far-flung as New Zealand and Australia, São Paulo, Frankfurt, London, Toronto, Los Angeles, and Reykjavik. And don’t forget the tiniest places, either. The other morning at the Oakland docks for the West Coast port shutdown demonstrations, I met three members of Occupy Amador County, a small rural area in California’s Sierra Nevada.  Its largest town, Jackson, has a little over 4,000 inhabitants, which hasn’t stopped it from having regular outdoor Friday evening Occupy meetings.

A little girl in a red parka at the Oakland docks was carrying a sign with a quote from blind-deaf-and-articulate early twentieth-century role model Helen Keller that said, “The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt within the heart.” Why quote Keller at a demonstration focused on labor and economics? The answer is clear enough: because Occupy has some of the emotional resonance of a spiritual, as well as a political, movement.  Like those other upheavals it’s aligned with in Spain, Greece, Iceland (where they’re actually jailing bankers), Britain, Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, Libya, Chile, and most recently Russia, it wants to ask basic questions: What matters? Who matters? Who decides? On what principles?   

Stop for a moment and consider just how unforeseen and unforeseeable all of this was when, on December 17, 2010, Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian vegetable vendor in Sidi Bouzid, an out-of-the-way, impoverished city, immolated himself. He was protesting the dead-end life that the 1% economy run by Tunisia’s autocratic ruler Zine Ben Ali and his corrupt family allotted him, and the police brutality that went with it, two things that have remained front and center ever since. Above all, as his mother has since testified, he was for human dignity, for a world, that is, where the primary system of value is not money.

“Compassion is our new currency,” was the message scrawled on a pizza-box lid at Occupy Wall Street in Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan -- held by a pensive-looking young man in Jeremy Ayers’s great photo portrait.  But what can you buy with compassion?

Quite a lot, it turns out, including a global movement, and even pizza, which can arrive at that movement’s campground as a gift of solidarity.  A few days into Occupy Wall Street’s surprise success, a call for pizza went out and $2,600 in pizzas came in within an hour, just as earlier this year the occupiers of Wisconsin’s state house had been copiously supplied with pizza -- including pies paid for and dispatched by Egyptian revolutionaries.

The Return of the Disappeared

During the 1970s and 1980s dictatorship and death-squad era in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, and Central America, the term “the disappeared” came to cover those who were kidnapped, held in secret, tortured, and then often executed in secret. So many decades later, their fates are often still being deciphered.

In the United States, the disappeared also exist, not thanks to a brutal army or paramilitaries, but to a brutal economy.  When you lose your job, you vanish from the workplace and sooner or later arrive at emptiness in your day, your identity, your wallet, your ability to participate in a commercial society. When you lose your home, you disappear from familiar spaces: the block, the neighborhood, the rolls of homeowners.   Often, you vanish in shame, leaving behind friends and acquaintances.  

At the actions to support some of the 1,500 mostly African-American homeowners being foreclosed upon in southeastern San Francisco, several of them described how they had to overcome a powerful sense of shame simply to speak up, no less defend themselves or join this movement. In the U.S., failure is always supposed to be individual, not systemic, and so it tends to produce a sense of personal devastation that leaves its victims feeling alone and lying low, even though they are among legions of others.  

The people who destroyed our economy through their bottomless greed are, on the other hand, shameless -- as shameless as the CEOs whose compensation shot up 36% in 2010, during this deep and grinding recession. Compassion is definitely not their currency.

The word “occupy” itself speaks powerfully to the American disappeared and the very idea of disappearance.  It speaks to those who have lost their occupation or the home they occupied. In its many meanings, it’s a big tent. It means to fill a space, take possession of it, employ oneself, busy oneself, fill time.  (In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the verb had a meaning so sexual it fell out of common use.)  It describes the state of being present that the Occupy movement’s General Assemblies and tent camps have lived out, a space in which -- as Mohamed Bouazizi might have dreamed it -- the disappeared can reappear with dignity.

Occupy has also created a space in which people of all kinds can coexist, from the homeless to the tenured, from the inner city to the agrarian. Coexisting in public with likeminded strangers and acquaintances is one of the great foundations and experiences of democracy, which is why dictatorships ban gatherings and groups -- and why our First Amendment guarantee of the right of the people peaceably to assemble is being tested more strongly today than in any recent moment in American history. Nearly every Occupy has at its center regular meetings of a General Assembly. These are experiments in direct democracy that have been messy, exasperating and miraculous: arenas in which everyone is invited to be heard, to have a voice, to be a member, to shape the future. Occupy is first of all a conversation among ourselves.

To occupy also means to show up, to be present -- a radically unplugged experience for a digital generation. Today, the term is being applied to any place where one plans to be present, geographically or metaphorically: Occupy Wall Street, occupy the food system, occupy your heart. The ad hoc invention of the people’s mic by the occupiers of Zuccotti Park, which requires everyone to listen, repeat, and amplify what’s being said, has only strengthened this sense of presence. You can’t text or half-listen if your task is to repeat everything, so that everyone hears and understands. You become the keeper of your brother’s or sister’s voice as you repeat their words.

It’s a triumph of the here and now -- and it’s everywhere: the Regents of the University of California are mic-checked, politicians are mic-checked, the Durban Climate Conference in South Africa had occupiers and mic-check moments. Activism had long been in dire need of new modes of doing things, and this year it got them.

A Mouthful of Truth

Before the Occupy movement arrived on the scene, political dialogue and media chatter in this country seemed to be arriving from a warped parallel universe. Tiny government expenditures were denounced, while the vortex sucking our economy dry was rarely addressed; hard-working immigrants were portrayed as deadbeats; people who did nothing were anointed as “job creators”; the trashed economy and massive suffering were overlooked, while politicians jousted over (and pundits pontificated about) the deficit; class war was only called class war when someone other than the ruling class waged it. It’s as though we were trying to navigate Las Vegas with a tattered map of medieval Byzantium -- via, that is, a broken language in which everything and everyone got lost.

Then Occupy arrived and, as if swept by some strange pandemic, a contagious virus of truth-telling, everyone was suddenly obliged to call things by their real names and talk about actual problems. The blather about the deficit was replaced by acknowledgments of grotesque economic inequality. Greed was called greed, and once it had its true name, it became intolerable, as had racism when the Civil Rights Movement named it and made it evident to those who weren’t suffering from it directly. The vast scale of suffering around student debt and tuition hikes, foreclosures, unemployment, wage stagnation, medical costs, and the other afflictions of the normal American suddenly moved to the top of the news, and once exposed to the light, these, too, became intolerable.

If the solutions to the nightmares being named are neither near nor easy, naming things, describing reality with some accuracy, is at least a crucial first step.  Informing ourselves as citizens is another.  Aspects of our not-quite-democracy that were once almost invisible are now on the table for discussion -- and for opposition, notably corporate personhood, the legal status that gives corporations the rights, but not the obligations and vulnerabilities, of citizens. (One oft-repeated Occupier sign says, “I’ll believe corporations are people when Texas puts one to death.”)

The Los Angeles City Council passed a measure calling for an end to corporate personhood, the first big city to join the Move to Amend campaign against corporate personhood and against the 2009 Supreme Court Citizens United ruling that gave corporations unlimited ability to insert their cash in our political campaigns. Occupy actions across the country are planned for January 20th, the second anniversary ofCitizens United. Vermont’s independent Senator Bernie Sanders, who’s been speaking the truth alone for a long time, introduced a constitutional amendment to repeal Citizens United and limit corporate power in the Senate, while Congressman Ted Deutch (D-FL) introduced a similar measure in the House.

Only a few years ago, hardly anyone knew what corporate personhood was.  Now, signs denouncing it are common.  Similarly, at Occupy events, people make it clear that they know about the New Deal-era financial reform measure known as the Glass-Steagall Act, which was partially repealed in 1999, removing the wall between commercial and investment banks; that they know about the proposed financial transfer tax, nicknamed the Robin Hood Tax, that would raise billions with a tiny levy on every financial transaction; that they understand many of the means by which the 1% were enriched and the rest of us robbed.

This represents a striking learning curve. A new language of truth, debate about what actually matters, an informed citizenry: that’s no small thing. But we need more.

We Are the 99.999%

I was myself so caught up in the Occupy movement that I stopped paying my usual attention to the war over the climate -- until I was brought up short by the catastrophic failure of the climate negotiations in Durban, South Africa. There, earlier this month, the most powerful and carbon-polluting countries managed to avoid taking any timely and substantial measures to keep the climate from heating up and the Earth from slipping into unstoppable chaotic change.   

It’s our nature to be more compelled by immediate human suffering than by remote systemic problems. Only this problem isn’t anywhere near as remote as many Americans imagine.  It’s already creating human suffering on a large scale and will create far more. Many of the food crises of the past decade are tied to climate change, and in Africa thousands are dying of climate-related chaos. The floods, fires, storms, and heat waves of the past few years are climate change coming to call earlier than expected in the U.S.  

In the most immediate sense, Occupy may have weakened the climate movement by focusing many of us on the urgent suffering of our brothers, our neighbors, our democracy. In the end, however, it could strengthen that movement with its new tactics, alliances, spirit, and language of truth. After all, why have we been unable to make the major changes required to limit greenhouse gases in the atmosphere? The answer is a word suddenly in wide circulation: greed. Responding adequately to this crisis would benefit every living thing. When it comes to climate change, after all, we are the 99.999%.

But the international .001% who profit immeasurably from the carbon economy -- the oil and coal tycoons, industrialists, and politicians whose strings they pull -- are against this change. For decades, they’ve managed to propagandize many Americans, in and out of government, into climate denial, spreading lies about the science and economics of climate change, and undermining any possible legislation and international negotiations to ameliorate it. And if you think the eviction of elderly homeowners is brutal, think of it as a tiny foreshadowing of the displacement and disappearance of people, communities, nations, species, habitats. Climate change threatens to foreclose on all of us.

The groups working on climate change now, notably 350.org and Tar Sands Action, have done astonishing things already. Most recently, with the help of native Canadians, local activists, and alternative media, they very nearly managed to kill the single scariest and biggest North American threat to the climate: the tar sands pipeline that would go from Canada to Texas. It’s been a remarkable show of organizing power and popular will. Occupy the Climate may need to come next.

Maybe Occupy Wall Street and its thousands of spin-offs have built the foundation for it. But perhaps the greatest gift that it and the other movements of 2011 have given us is a sharpening of our perceptions -- and our conflicts. So much more is out in the open now, including the greed, the brutality with which entities from the Egyptian army to the Oakland police impose the will of rulers, and most of all the deep generosity of spirit that is behind, within, and around these insurgencies and their activists. None of these movements is perfect, and individuals within them are not always the greatest keepers of their brothers and sisters.  But one thing couldn’t be clearer: compassion is our new currency.

Nothing has been more moving to me than this desire, realized imperfectly but repeatedly, to connect across differences, to be a community, to make a better world, to embrace each other. This desire is what lies behind those messy camps, those raucous demonstrations, those cardboard signs and long conversations. Young activists have spoken to me about the extraordinary richness of their experiences at Occupy, and they call it love.

In the spirit of calling things by their true names, let me summon up the description that Ella Baker and Martin Luther King used for the great communities of activists who stood up for civil rights half a century ago: the beloved community. Many who were active then never forgot the deep bonds and deep meaning they found in that struggle. We -- and the word “we” encompasses more of us than ever before -- have found those things, too, and this year we have come close to something unprecedented, a beloved community that circles the globe.

Deepak Chopra meditation at Occupy Wall Street

Thirteen Observations made by Lemony Snicket while watching Occupy Wall Street from a Discreet Distance

1. If you work hard, and become successful, it does not necessarily mean you are successful because you worked hard, just as if you are tall with long hair it doesn’t mean you would be a midget if you were bald.

2. “Fortune” is a word for having a lot of money and for having a lot of luck, but that does not mean the word has two definitions.

3. Money is like a child—rarely unaccompanied. When it disappears, look to those who were supposed to be keeping an eye on it while you were at the grocery store. You might also look for someone who has a lot of extra children sitting around, with long, suspicious explanations for how they got there.

4. People who say money doesn’t matter are like people who say cake doesn’t matter—it’s probably because they’ve already had a few slices.

5. There may not be a reason to share your cake. It is, after all, yours. You probably baked it yourself, in an oven of your own construction with ingredients you harvested yourself. It may be possible to keep your entire cake while explaining to any nearby hungry people just how reasonable you are.

6. Nobody wants to fall into a safety net, because it means the structure in which they’ve been living is in a state of collapse and they have no choice but to tumble downwards. However, it beats the alternative.

7. Someone feeling wronged is like someone feeling thirsty. Don’t tell them they aren’t. Sit with them and have a drink.

8. Don’t ask yourself if something is fair. Ask someone else—a stranger in the street, for example.

9. People gathering in the streets feeling wronged tend to be loud, as it is difficult to make oneself heard on the other side of an impressive edifice.

10. It is not always the job of people shouting outside impressive buildings to solve problems. It is often the job of the people inside, who have paper, pens, desks, and an impressive view.

11. Historically, a story about people inside impressive buildings ignoring or even taunting people standing outside shouting at them turns out to be a story with an unhappy ending.

12. If you have a large crowd shouting outside your building, there might not be room for a safety net if you’re the one tumbling down when it collapses.

13. 99 percent is a very large percentage. For instance, easily 99 percent of people want a roof over their heads, food on their tables, and the occasional slice of cake for dessert. Surely an arrangement can be made with that niggling 1 percent who disagree.

Homecoming & the Shortlist of How to Be Part of the Occupation Without Occupying

I always get a little transition ennui when I first return home from anything intense, as much as I do love to go home.  One of my favorite books is by Robert Housden, 7 Sins for a Life Worth Living, and the sin fin is “The Pleasure of Coming Home.”  

"Surely we owe it to ourselves to make a home, whether on our own or with another, that is a reflection of the best of who we are.  This is home as sanctuary: a reflection less of our budget than of our intimacy with ourselves," he says.  ..."At home in your own skin, it is more likely you will feel at home, not only with your intimate others, but also in the world.  This intimacy is the real heart of a physical home.  Whatever it is that is precious to us -- in my case, the cat, the faded rose armchair, and the cherished Persian rug -- combines to evoke a presence uniquely our own."  

I agree in so many ways: I love my soft blue organic sheets on my inherited, scratched dark wood bed, especially if my kitty cat is curled up on my lap; I love knowing the best place to get a mocha within walking distance; I love passing people that I know on the streets who’s names I also know even before I get within eyesight of the signs. 

But still, coming home from DC was a rough landing for me.  Going on an activist interlude somewhere far away is a lot going on a spiritual retreat on the mountain: it’s so easy to be totally focused there and totally committed to the work at hand, without the distractions of paltry things like doing the laundry and paying the electric bill and the sudden realization that the work you do for a living does not give you nearly as much satisfaction as that which you do from your heart, from a sense of the world changing beneath your feet in all of the ways that you have so much longed for without daring to believe it would ever happen. 

The last couple of days I have spent on a pendulum between being at home, avoiding work and folding the laundry, and at Occupation Oakland, which is a vibrant encampment at what was once called Frank Ogawa plaza (now renamed Oscar Grant Plaza, after the young man killed by Bart Police last year).  When I go to the occupation, I feel alive and on purpose, even though I’m still navigating the organizational structure and trying to figure out what is the best way to invest my time (setting up an herbal apothecary for the wellness area?  Working on facilitation?  Doing workshops through the free school?  There are so many -- too many -- wonderful choices!). 

I’ve slowly shifted away from trying to tackle the practical matters of my home life, which essentially entails staring off into space and then feeling angry at myself later for not getting anything done, and now am using my life at home to ground into my spiritual practice and care for my body, which was hard-hit by too much caffeine, gluten, and not enough exercise in DC.  In fact, I had even stopped taking my herbs and vitamins, which is ridiculous, because it only takes about fifteen seconds a day to do.  Like a woman madly and freshly in love, I threw everything to the wind in order to take up being a revolutionary, and now that the Occupation is starting to feel like more of an established relationship I’m coming to realize that in order for it to be sustainable, I need to come down to earth a little.

Coming down to earth, like with any new relationship, brings with it a little sense of let-down and frustration.  Why can’t I forget rent, forget bills, forget student loan debt, and just live out on the plaza with my comrades and my sexy revolutionary lover?  Well, for one thing, he’s plopped right back into his work routine without so much of a hiccup, and isn’t available for full-time occupation. 

Even so, I could do it, but it would mean major setbacks in many of the goals that I’ve been developing for the last year or longer: my herbal studies, my magical teaching and studies, my poor untended wilting garden, planning our handfasting this summer, my collective household that finally has reached a stable and pleasurable era.  And many of these things are radical and world-changing in their own right.  So, no, it seems like its just not in the cards for me to hang it all up on a coatrack and run off to a life of brightly-colored banners and bullhorns.  Which I’m sure many of you understand, perhaps even more deeply than I, because I’ve read your wistful notes and know how deeply many people want to be involved but simply can’t see how its possible without giving up on the other things that we love in our lives.

So, what is a girl (or boy or they-person) to do?  Well, there’s always facebook and twitter, of course.  There’s petitions and calls – which obviously work, as evidenced by the fact that on Friday when the mayor of New York swore he would shut down Occupy Wall Street -- well, he didn’t, and I highly doubt its because he simply had a change of heart. There’s short shifts of volunteering down at your local occupation and donations from their wishlists.  There’s many things we can do without having to give up our daily schedules and the dreams that we’re trying to personally manifest for ourselves.

But that’s not all, is it?  I can’t help feeling that what many of us who aren’t full-time or even part-time occupying are doing is waiting.  There’s this feeling that if or when this thing gets big enough, we really will throw it all to the four winds and say fuck all and get down there into the streets and not look back because we’re fully invested with heart and soul and choosing to align our lives around hope for a better world and faith in it’s manifestation.  Or perhaps, like many of the current occupiers, our daily lives and all that make them up will finally be so degraded that it actually feels safer and stronger to be there in the streets with our compatriots than the alternatives.

So, here’s the bottom line, good-people: I don’t know what to tell you.  If we don’t all get out there into the streets, it’s not going to get big enough that it makes it safe for us all to be out there in the streets.  And the other things that we’re doing with our lives are important.   There you have it.  It’s a conundrum. 

All I can really say for myself is that I’m going back down to Occupation Oakland today.  While my brain continues to whirl around and around in this tizzy, my body releases its low-grade constant anxiety when I’m there and my heart feels full and warm. 

How to be part of the Occupation without Occupying – The Shortlist

1. Tell Your Story: Much of this beautiful movement is based on personal involvement and personal accounts of the way that the collusion between big-money corporations and the ultra-wealthy and our government has affected us.  Make a sign, head over to your local occupation and hold it up for a couple of hours on the street corner.  Oh, and make sure you talk to the folks around you about their stories, too.  You may be astonished at how many common threads weave throughout our different tales from different walks of life and different parts of the US.
2. Volunteer Your Skills: There are all kinds of skills that are extremely useful to our movements, from medical support, to cooking, art for banners, facilitation of meetings (that’s a biggie!).  Recently I saw a mending workshop at Occupy Oakland where people learned to repair their clothes and tents! So, even if you can’t occupy, take a little time to volunteer the beautiful skills you have cultivated over the years.  Whatever they are, I bet they are a valuable contribution. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TH3kiaJ1-c8&feature=colike
3. Spread the Word: If you see or hear something that touches you, send it along your social networks.  But perhaps beyond that, talk (in person) to people you know about what’s happening.  Start conversations about what it is we’re doing, where it may be going, and how you see it growing and what the challenges are.  So keep doing your facebook posts, tweeting, and talking. 
4. Take Your Money Elsewhere:  Novemeber 5^th is Move Your Money day, where folks around the world will be closing their accounts at major banking institutions that have refused to pay their taxes and have continued to foreclose on people’s homes after being bailed out by the taxpayers, especially Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Chase, and Citibank.  For more information, check out this article. For proof that this is truly a revolutionary act, check out this video and this one -- very powerful stuff.
5. Pressure the Politicians: Letting the politicians and police know that you are watching what’s going on, you care, you vote, and you don’t agree with violent tactics on non-violent protestors is invaluable.  Perhaps especially if you’re not the rabble-rousing type, aka, the choir that activists usually preach to.  The safety of those who are camping and organizing may very well be in your hands.
6. Donate: money, food, medical supplies, etc.  Your local occupation probably has a wishlist, maybe even online.  Check it out and bring what you can.
7. March: many Occupations are organizing marches that folks can attend with little or no risk of arrest (depending on the circumstances, such as whether or not they have a permit).  Marches are often very safe, very visible ways of showing your support – especially if you can get your teacher’s group, workplace, or knitting group to march with you. Again, making it obvious that the 99% really includes many folks who aren’t the usual suspects out there in the streets is so helpful.  Veternarians for VA Benefits!  Yogini’s for peace and prosperity!  This Local PTA supports schools – so get those banks to pay their taxes already! 
8. Send Your Love: either with a smile, with a batch of cupcakes, by lending your massage skills, going down and playing music for an hour, writing a supportive email, prayer, etc… as these occupations continue, I’m witnessing a lot of folks getting burned out – especially folks who can’t sleep at night because of the police coming through and waking them up!  Sending love, in whatever form, is really helpful for keeping our spirits up and dedication strong.

Occu-Pee / Occu-pie

Tonight, as Starhawk, Eddy and I are finishing up planning the last details of the Non-Violence Direct Action Training we're teaching with a local DC organizer, Jason is talking on the phone with local farmers.

For some reason, he's having a hard time getting them to accept the offer of our very nitrogen-rich, urine soaked straw bales.

At this point, they are actually just theoretically urine-soaked straw bales.  Apparently, we don't yet own said straw bales, nor have we rented the truck we'd need to haul them to and from the event.

"Hello?  Oh, hi, my name is Jason and I got your number from so-and-so, who said you might be able to help us... You see, we have these straw bales we'd like to give you for your crops... no, no, they don't have any fire retardant in them... they have urine.  No, not my urine.  I don't know who's.  It's for this thing down at the plaza.  It could be anyone's."

Later, Jason tells us that he can hear the guy on the other end of the line, muffled because his hand is over the receiver, calling to his wife upstairs.  "Get a load of this," he says.  "This guy's calling to give us a bunch of straw soaked in pee."

Jason is shaking his head as he's telling us this, as if it's the weirdest thing in the world that the farmer won't take humanure from the masses.  Starhawk, across the kitchen table with her usual midnight cup of tea in front of her, is positively cackling in delight.  I don't blame her -- I'm laughing so hard that I feel like I might pee right then and there, straw or no.

"I tried calling a bunch of people, but none of them would take it," he says.  "You know, it's the hardest thing in the world out here on the East Coast, trying to get someone to take your pee-straw."

He has this deadpan way of saying these things that occasionally gets me even after all of these years, and poor Eddy is quite often deceived by it.  "You're not in the Bay Area anymore," she says, seemingly earnest.

"I think if I could just finish explaining to them what a valuable resource it is, they'd be overjoyed," he says, still deadpan, no mercy.  "They might even offer to pick it up themselves so we don't have to shlep it all the way down there."

This discussion eventually devolves into a conversation about Home De-poo, where you can drop off your humanure and get paid for it, and the Pagan Cluster's new affinity group Occu-pee, who's mission is to create a place for folks on Freedom Plaza (where the Stop the Machine encampment is) and McPherson Square (where #OccupyKSt is) to relieve themselves in an ecologically beneficial way.

Personally, I'm not all that into Occu-pee, but as the night winds later and later, I find myself getting rather excited about the idea of Occu-pie.  Occu-pie was originally conceived as a way to keep folks who want to put the lid on the Occupy Together actions' recent flood of popular media as folks have become more and more convinced that anything with the word "Occupy" in it is being systematically negated within internet search engines like google and yahoo.  That may or may not be true, but the real treasure in the solution that more savvy and paranoid individuals than I have come up with is the possibility it presents for some serious kitchen-witchery-activism.  I'm imaging a sweet cob oven arrangement at Freedom Plaza that could serve up Occu-pie Pecan, Occu-pie Dutch Apple, and of course, Occu-pie Chocolate Mousse.  If we had Occu-pie Chocolate Mousse (gluten-free Occu-pie, of course), I'd feel pretty darn happy about being there whether or not it was for a good cause.

Soon all four of us are holding our sides laughing, probably keeping up the upstairs roommates who had enough sense to go to bed early.

Given it's the night before the big action, it only makes sense that you'd want to sleep, but as with many Action-eves, I find it hard to feel sleepy.  The giddy, zany laughter and discussion is the only thing I can imagine working for me right now -- it takes the edge off of my nervousness.  There's still so much we don't have planned, and so many dreams still to realize.  Is it really starting tomorrow?  Will our sacred waters purification system work?  Will we have enough pretty altar cloths and prayer flags to create the space we want for healing and ritual and magic?  How many people will come?  What will we do once we get there?

And, of course, will we have a place to pee?

No one can say for sure -- it's all a mystery.  For now, stay tuned.

In love and solidarity,
Riyana

The Holonic Shift Will Not Be Televised - But You Can Glimpse it on YouTube

I woke up to the sound of sirens getting closer, confused, wondering where I was and if they were coming for us.  After a moment of tense listening, the fire engines passed. I realized, as I raised up my groggy head from the thermarest and the cold air of the tent helped clear my head, that I didn’t have any reason to be afraid of sirens.  There have been times, in times past, that there were pre-emptive raids and snatches off of the street.  There have been other actions that were like that, where they came in the middle of the night and rammed the door and came in with weapons drawn.

But those are other days, actions of the past. 

Whatever is sweeping the country right now is different.  There have been no preemptive raids, no tear gas canisters stinging the air with their metallic flashing, no horses with hooves pounding down the road.  Certainly there have been some bad moments.  Overall, though, with the freshness of the crowds and the slightly mystified reactions of the press and US populace, the powers that be seem stunned into inaction.  People have criticized #OccupyWallStreet for not having a clearly defined message, but that may be because the intensity and reach of their message is incomprehensible to many people, even those who in the past thought they were in the know:

We do not want your dirty capitalism, your backroom deals that have stripped us of our homes and jobs, your power-over based purely on a financial system that is essentially a house of cards stacked in favor of those who have always had the power and the money anyway.  We have woken up from the slumber of the American Dream that you used to keep us complacent for so long.  This was an experiment, this thing called Liberal Capitalism, and it has proven a failure for 99% of us – the many to your few.

The entire country seems to be waking up to sirens and full of confusion, just as I did today from my post red-eye nap, hearing the wail getting closer and closer and then just as suddenly seemingly disappearing into nothingness.  And as the threatening keening of those sirens dissipates, in the silence that follows we are finding ourselves with the opportunity and responsibility to ask, “What do we truly desire, and what do we believe in?  What do we stand for?  What is the biggest dream collectively we can envision that will serve the people and the planet, and how can we get there?”

Well, when you’re asking questions like that, it only stands to reason the answers may seem obtuse at first. 

These are the kinds of questions and answers that wind their way down the foggy and mysterious path of the Third Way, or as we witches sometimes call it, the Good Road.  It may not be easy to navigate, but it is the only way to get where we need to go.  We’ve used up the luxury of time available for greed, oil, and wars.  We find ourselves suddenly dedicated to figuring out how to navigate the Third Way because we’re realizing that the other two lead off to certain destruction for humans and planet. 

As my mentor Joanna Macy says, is time for a new level of human consciousness on this planet: the holonic shift.  To Joanna, who for many years studied Living Systems Theory and ecospirituality, the time is ripe for the next evolution of consciousness.  

Consciousness as we know it was born when little particles bonded together to living cells, which then bonded together to become simple organisms, followed by more complex organisms with organs bonded into body systems.  Now, it’s time for us as separate organisms to develop a consciousness where we as individuals can bond together to be able to respond rapidly and effectively to the crisises on our doorstep, which is different than succumbing to mob mentality or fascism.  Like every species and every ecosystem, either we will evolve or we will be lost to the sands of time.  But we have a special opportunity, as well, because we can actively co-create our world and our destiny in this process of evolution.  We just need to be present enough, and brave enough, to do it.  

“It would seem that such a holonic shift is necessary for our survival,” she says in her essay, The Holonic Shift and How to Take Part in It.  “Since Earth's carrying capacity is limited, and since the ecosystems supporting us are threatened with collapse, we must learn to think together in an integrated, synergistic fashion, rather than in fragmented and competitive ways.”

As I’m sitting here in an unfamiliar and yet sweet home in Takoma Park, which is lush and green and swathed in brick and stained glass and quirky 5-way intersections, I feel like I’m on the edge of a precipice into something equally unfamiliar that I’ve been waiting for my whole life.  And that’s okay, because I feel like I at least have a road map.  It's a twelve-step process, and as I think about it, I realize that we've already mastered some of the steps...

The Holonic Shift and How Occupy Wall Street Fits In

By Joanna Macy & Riyana Sweetwater

1. Attune to a common intention. Intention is not a goal or plan you can formulate with precision. It is an open-ended aim: May we meet common needs and collaborate in new ways.

We are occupying everything, in cities and towns with a single voice calling for justice for our stolen homes and retirement funds and hopes.  As the Official Statement from Occupy Wall Street states, “As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power.”

2. Welcome diversity. Self-organization of the whole requires differentiation of the parts. Each one's role in this unfolding journey is unique. 

It is exactly this diversity that the pundits use as fodder for their assertions that the new wave of protests are “disorganized” and “confused,” but that shows more about how stuck they are in old paradigms than about what is going in the streets and the city centers across the nation.  Dan Gainor, who writes for Fox News, claims, “The protest began with no stated goals, no public spokespeople and many of the most ridiculous attendees you could imagine – socialists, Code Pinkers, anarchists and more. (Anarchists are notoriously poor organizers.) Their slogans (they have many) include: ‘We are the 99 percent’ and ‘This is what democracy looks like.’

What folks like Gainor don’t realize is that yes, we have different ideas about how to create the world we want, and different priorities, but this diversity is our strength and not a weakness.  Many of us have born the brunt of greed of wealthy corporations, but in many different ways: some by the criminal destruction of the environment, others loosing their homes, still others fighting for their very lives as they demand safe accessibility to healthcare and healthy food.  Some of us have felt the brunt of the misdeeds of these transnational institutions here in the United States, and some of us have felt it in other nations around the world.  Some of us have been victimized for our skin color, our choices in who we love, our ages, our genders, our political affiliations, and more.  But our diversity is not the “reason we will never win,” as some conservative writers are claiming, hoping to dampen the collective spirit that is rising. 

3. Know that only the whole can repair itself. You cannot "fix" the world, but you can take part in its self-healing. Healing wounded relationships within you and between you is integral to the healing of our world.


Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy Together protests have been criticized again and again for not putting out a specific list of issues of redress or agenda as their ancestors, the Students for a Democratic Society did (the Port Huron Statement), did forty years ago.  

What mainstream conventional political analysts, who seem to have a kind-of middle school crush on the movement-- simultaneous fascination mixed with constant, unremorseful bullying – miss again and again is that the fact that the Occupy actions are not claiming to have all the answers, or an instant fix, is part of their strength and one reason why they are succeeding and might continue to succeed where their worthy predecessors did not.  Combining the open-minded experimentalism that comes from the youth movement and the wisdom of experienced activists who spent years getting beat up and burned out before taking time off to study less ego-driven belief systems like yoga, Buddhism, earth-based spiritual paths, and deep ecology, these groups truly moving out of the American mindset that claims that the only way to get ahead is to use callous rationality to create systems of oppression and dominate those that don’t agree with your ideas.   

4. You are only a small part of a much larger process, like a nerve cell in a neural net. So learn trust. Trust means taking part and taking risks, when you cannot control, or even see, the outcome.

These Occupy actions are springing up across the country, like a web, bound by their common intentions and yet often not having any more connection with their counterparts than a twitter hashtag.  Folks from all walks of life are gathering in large actions, from unions to college students to out-of-work mothers and children.  They are not embroiled in constant debates over strategy or priorities – and again, this is part of their strength, because in moving slowly yet with trust they are able to move out of the false-beliefs that have been cultivated by the powers that be to keep us constantly separate and therefore constantly disempowered.  Of course the actual steps towards creating the new structures and systems do need to happen at some point, and it will mean difficult conversations and choices.  Yet, in spite of knowing that, we can stand up together now – because we know that together, with our many minds and hearts, we will come up with those answers.  Our collective wisdom is stronger and smarter than the cunning of the CEOs who are as ruthless in their attacks on one another as they are in their attacks upon the poor and working classes.

5. Open to flows of information from the larger system. Do not resist painful information about the condition of your world, but understand that the pain you feel for the world springs from interconnectedness, and your willingness to experience it unblocks feedback that is important to the well being of the whole.

For a long time, we in the US have had a cultural blindness to the harms of the worlds, but as the markets have collapsed and the corporations and wealthy watched as our numbers of hungry and unemployed have risen and folks without access to medical care have died, we are waking up to the voices of our allies around the world whose journeys for liberation and equality are bound up with ours.   For a long time, we believed in the American Economic model and basked in the privilege and relative wealth that the ultra-wealthy allowed us, all the while avoiding thinking about what would happen if those people who so eagerly exploited the needs, rights, and lands of others became so powerful that they no longer felt the need to keep us moderately satiated or decided on a different strategy: that of crippling us so deeply that we were willing to take whatever scraps they wanted to toss down.  What they didn’t see coming is that this new strategy has backfired, and our eyes and hearts are open now.  We know that American businesses, when headed by greedy uncaring CEOs who are willing to profit at our expense, are not our true brothers and sisters (not to mention that those businesses are no longer truly American businesses, but international institutions who would rather plunge this country into some of the worst unemployment rates and the largest financial inequity we have ever known).  We are interconnected with the many people around the world who are fighting this same fight: London, Greece, Spain, Egypt are just a few.

6. Speak the truth of your experience of this world. If you have persistent responses to present conditions, assume that they are shared by others. Willing to drop old answers and old roles, give voice to the questions that arise in you.

(more from the "We Are the 99% Project here… )

I'm not claiming that we have mastered the holonic shift just yet -- but as I get ready to try to drift back to sleep, thinking about what tomorrow and the Occupy DC and Stop the Machine Actions may hold, I feel restful and filled with hope.  I want to commit to memory - if not in the exact words, at least the impressions that resonate so deeply in my heart -- the rest of the map that Joanna has laid out for us, which promises so much, if we're willing to go there.  I know that her words may be the best advice there could be in the days to come:

7. Believe no one who claims to have the final answer. Such claims are a sign of ignorance and limited self-interest.

8. Work increasingly in teams or joint projects serving common intentions. Build community through shared tasks and rituals.

9. Be generous with your strengths and skills, they are not your private property. They grow from being shared. They include both your knowing and your unknowing, and the gifts you accept from the ancestors and all beings.

10. Draw forth the strengths of others by your own acknowledgment of them. Never prejudge what a person can contribute, but be ready for surprise and fresh forms of synergy.

11. You do not need to see the results of your work. Your actions have unanticipated and far-reaching effects that are not likely to be visible to you in your lifetime.

12. Putting forth great effort, let there also be serenity in all your doing; for you are held within the web of life, within flows of energy and intelligence far exceeding your own.

In love and solidarity,


Riyana