I learned it when I was a kid from farmers and cowboys, and barnstorming pilots, and old-time motorcyle jockeys. I learned it from farmers' wives and bootstrapping work-worn, world-worn entrepreneurs. Sometimes it stung to hear it. I was often confused, but I think even back way-then I knew they were demonstrating something critical to me and my future. They taught me to handle a hoe. Dig a furrow. Plant seeds, and then take care and have patience. They said: "Kid, you got a long row to hoe". I've been deeply grateful about the teachings for some years now. I've written doggerel about it over the years. I've tried to pass as much of it - the spirit of it - on to my own children as I could sandwich into all the other things a mother tries to hand down.
So today I remember what I learned, I do some work, then wait and watch.
Some writing I found on-line has been yammering at me for two days. A lengthy piece from the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, entitled: De-Colonizing the Revolutionary Imagination: Values Crisis, the Politics of Reality and why there’s Going to be a Common Sense Revolution in this Generation, by Patrick Reinsborough.
Right now I think one of the most important cosmic and epistemological things to be gleaned from Reinsborough's writing is the understanding that ideas and imagination have been subverted by a rapacious, doom-seeking cultural system, and that because of that, the primary challenge that faces us... me... you... everybody... is the recapturing of our capacity to perceive from our own magnificent sensory systems, because those of us "within" the current "civilization" (my quotes - deliberate), even those of us with a few epiphanies under our belts cannot help but have our reality-sensors colored by all that surrounds us.
A section from the piece that really got me yesterday, what with my getting mouthy about "shopping" and such was this part on Characteristics of the Doomsday Economy (Part 2):
•Corporatization and increasingly centralized control.Are you old enough to remember when residents of the US, formerly called "citizens" suddenly got renamed? We became consumers. I think it happened around 1975, but it might have begun in spades in the media a few years later. I'd love a head's up on that if anyone can find a reference.
• Reliance on coercion (both physical and ideological) to maintain control
• Drive to Commodify all aspects of life.
• Community fragmentation/cultural decay (replacement of lived experience with representation— image based mass culture, television addiction, increasing alienation).
• Elevation of consumerism to the center of public life (consumer monoculture).
• Increased mechanization and blind faith in technology (trend towards cyborgianism).
•Fetishization of speculative/financial wealth.
• Accounting flaws that mask liquidation of ecological and social capital.
• Pathological values/flawed assumptions.
• Undermining of planetary life support systems
Anyway, here's a quote from this section of the piece that has stuck with me since first reading: "Consumerism is the purest drug of the doomsday economy. It epitomizes the pathology— the commodification of life’s staples and the human and cultural systems that have been created to sustain collective life.
Children’s author Dr. Seuss provides a simple eloquent critique of consumerism in his cautionary tale The Lorax when he describes how the forests gets destroyed to make useless disposable objects appropriately called “thneeds”. A slick businessman markets “thneeds” and maximizes production until the forest is entirely destroyed. This is the essence of consumerism— creating artificially high rates of consumption by getting people to believe they need excessive or useless things. Over-consumption (invented in America but now exported around the planet) is the engine that drives the doomsday economy. Bigger. Faster. Newer. More! More! More!"
All the discussion of shopping and the impact of the holidays on the US "economy" really twangs me out. My habit while twanged is to look for something to remind me that much of "civilization" on the Happy Planet is bent beyond reform. I'm an old radical, after all. I find Reinsborough's essay comforting in a radical way. It's important for me to remember that it's not only our dollars that have been colonized over time. And then, after the remembering, I take time to wait and watch... (and read!)
