The Malaise of Activism

Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.
Henry David Thoreau
I was recently asked to join a network of peace and justice groups that would also put some emphasis on environmental issues. Choosing a name for this network is going into the third of fourth week. That's been the focus while all around us the world burns, children starve and peace and justice becomes more of an illusion than ever.

By nature I’ve been a skeptic since I was a little older than 18 stuck out in a rice paddy with an M-16 and a lot of fear. The skepticism gained from that experience permeates much of my life today. Watching the endless attempt to name a group of activists makes me wonder how responsive we can be on matters of greater importance.

Activist groups, political groups and groups intended to make things better too often get caught up in bickering, nit-picking and divisive personal agenda at the expense of intended goals and actions to make a better planet and social condition.
I personally don’t care what name is chosen, how it enters into a PSA, PDA, Blueberry or Blackberry, how it appears on a business card or trips off the end of the tongue.

I find myself part of far too many groups that I can’t give enough attention and don’t need addition of another unless it is truly remarkable enough to bring concentrated focus to issues I find of greatest importance.

The current situation we face on this planet seems to require urgency in my opinion. Urgency in my nursing parlance means necessity for immediate and hurried action. In truth, I would triage this planet as in critical /emergent condition. I can’t move groups or organizations to do things with any amount of haste or urgency. That doesn’t seem to be the nature of groups.

So, I’ve come to the conclusion my first priority is that of an individual seeking to resist the evil that is always present. That resistance often takes place in situations where I can help another individual with whatever experience or training I may have. As a combat veteran it sometimes means helping another veteran of another war or a family member. One of the proudest accomplishments of my many years of activism was joining with Katrina survivors to march from Mobile to New Orleans to highlight the disrespect and neglect of the elite, rich and powerful that run this government. Before that just helping other veterans in relief efforts in New Orleans from a staging area in Covington, LA was a powerful experience.

In both experiences I felt like I do when I plant seeds in my garden and see those seeds turn into corn, tomatoes and eggplants. Planting seeds of human caring toward other people from other communities is even more powerful. The return is the planted seeds in my life that will grow toward making me a more caring person. The experiences also made me impatient and frustrated with groups getting caught up in minutiae and differences at the cost of taking the urgent actions needed.

There is a group of people here in Colorado that came together to form Colorado Coalition for Justice and Peace (CCJP). For a brief few years the caring people of this coalition joined together to work for the common and moral good of stopping the wars. They worked to show the connections between the costs of the wars and the costs to the American people in daily life ranging from schools to costs of living. They came together to form human bonds of brother and sisterhood by actually meeting each other in person. As the wars continued to grind on the discouragement eroded the numbers of the coalition until today it seems to be only a group name without the group.

What happened on the local level happened on the national level. Groups once considered radical have become platforms for the Democratic Party. Groups claiming to be the proletariat actually turn off many of the working class with elitist philosophy and rhetoric. Their impatience to truly organize at a grassroots level and their threats of stupidly retaliating against well armed para-military forces guarding the DNC either place others in harm’s way or close the door to others contemplating an appearance to voice their own dissatisfaction.

Stan Goff, a fellow veteran and eloquent writer, talks about the anti-war movement in a recent essay on his blog The Feral Scholar. In the essay, On Commanding-In-Chief, Stan says,

“The “antiwar movement” has always been more an anti-Bush movement and an anti-defeat movement (nudged along by competing leftist cadres without their own popular bases); and it has shown no ability to employ anything except 60s-70s tactics and techniques, even though the ruling class has long ago adapted to them.”

Like I said, I am a skeptic. I have agreed with Stan from the first time he and I crossed paths. Activists profess to want a movement but I can only see a movement strong enough to challenge the power of this government we are said to be in control of by truly organizing at a grassroots ….from bottom to top ….level.
From the same essay, Stan wisely says,

“Obama will be the next chief executive of the American state - a state by, for, and of the business class. That’s the job description. That business class depends on the larger economy which is materially dependent on massive and unceasing throughputs of fossil hydrocarbons. That same economy has been overrun by rentier capitalists who have driven the global economy over a cliff.

Competitors are on the horizon, China, Russia, India, Brazil… but mostly Western Europe. The war is one central drama in a multiply-determined crisis that also includes immanent food shortages, water famines, radical climate shifts, and the general decay of inter-class stability.

Obama did not inherit Bush’s war, except in the details. He inherited a business class’s war that was inevitable (though not in its present form).

The United States was going to reposition its international military after the Cold War in any case; the old disposition for “containing” the Soviet Union was obsolete after all. And given the most obvious of considerations, the place to seek permanent and fully operational military bases abroad was in Southwest Asia. That’s where the hydrocarbons are; and when you have the hydrocarbons, you have the competition on a nose ring.

Following through with this is Obama’s job after the election. (We get to participate in the elections for which wealth-selected candidate will be the CEO; but we are not, alas, on the board of directors.)”

I feel the excitement and joy of young people who have thrown their support behind Obama and recall my youthful excitement about another charismatic candidate. JFK also went to Germany and drew huge crowds of people supporting his “new” American government. The betrayal of both JFK and Obama is there is not going to be a “new” form of governing. The special interests of the rich corporate CEO groups and special political action groups such as AIPAC will continue to run the oligarchy posing as democracy and republic.

The word sustain has been used often in the comments about naming the group of question. Unless all groups act with greater urgency I’m afraid planet Earth will not sustain the upcoming changes of the next government of the nation, USA. Economic collapse is at our doorsteps but a darker threat looms closer and closer as our environmental disregard and outright abuse continues unabated. Depleted uranium’s danger is ignored by governments as much as global warming has been ignored by G. W. Bush. And what new form of ecological horror will the next war produce?

While American liberals, progressives and radicals worry about naming groups every thirty or forty seconds a child dies of the effects of poverty in remote third world nations like Sudan or Sierra Leone…or Iraq. While Americans bitch about the high price of gasoline, which is cheaper than in most parts of the world, bombs drop on villages and urban areas to kill the ghosts called terrorists. The collateral damage of dead children and innocent families goes unreported.

I’m a skeptic and no longer worry that my words may offend because trying to nuance or sugar coat the ugly truth wastes time that we don’t really have. Americans, as citizens of this planet, need to quit fooling themselves and start acting to save our planet and our brothers and sisters that co-exist with us on the planet. We’re on life support and the plug could easily be pulled by some macho politician calling for a bomb run or by a passive movement of people that know the problem but fail to act.
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