Today's well written article: Hello, America? This is Your Wakeup Call by Prescott College's Peace Study Professof Randall Amster is another passionate and intelligent exhortation to the barricades. In it Amster asks, "Shall we live as servile cogs in obeisance to Moloch as we stoke the perverse machines that maintain the apartheid apparatuses of Petropolis?"Like Hedges peice yesteday or some of Monbiot's recent outpourings it is either an eloquent call to rebellion or empty words. Jerry Rubin said, "Politics is how you live your life, not whom you vote for!" Same for rebellion, what you say does the talking, how you live does the walking. Lofty words are great when they lead to setting of lofty goals like the end of capitialism and enviromental equity. Next step, strategies must evolve to accomplish the goal.
Here's where things start to get shaky at ground level because the strategies seen to all call for people to modify their lifestyles, to practice restraint, to want-less and most all of my fellow species ain't buyin it. People will recycle, they'll change to more ethically produced brands, buy less of a gas-guzzler when they get a new car, none of which changes anybody's lifestyle.
Lifestyle is the biggy, if individuals won't or can't change because they're a few Twinkees over the line one situation that might assist consumers to 'just say no' to the plactic crap at the mall: poverty. The impending economic collapse could be an ideal oppurtunity for the want-less meme to slide up the 'cool' ladder. Afterall once a person has enough they don't need 'more'. The simple idea that 'enough is enough' is a viable tactic, it serves the strategy of radically reducing demand for extra crap, which would in turn hobble the capitialists in their endless quest for growth and lessen the sacraficies we make to Moloch.
