Mr. Bageant,
I've just discovered your website and find it very thought provoking and also very distressing at once. You seem to voice the very concerns I am quietly trying to sort out in my own heart. I still feel like a kid at forty years old, and perhaps you'll see me that way, too. But now I am reconsidering everything I once thought was right.
I used to vote straight party Republican. Now I doubt the whole system. I don't want to stop voting, but what to do? I proudly fly the flag every day, yet I have to wonder what it's come to represent. For me, it still feels like patriotism, but why do I also secretly feel a bit of shame? I'm a pretty simple guy. I want to be a school teacher, but I've run out of money for college after two years of study.
I read poetry every day. I ride a bicycle every day. Every day I mourn the loss of a cousin lost and MIA in Laos since 1965, although if you do the math, alas, I never knew him. It seems like it's getting harder and harder to make sense of this world. Particularly if one is acitvely trying to make sense of it all. Anyway, thanks for the lessons, and I'll continue to read. I hope we all sort it out before it's too late. Unfortunately, how will we know when it is too late? Thanks for your time.
Bill
Salt Lake City, Utah
------
Dear Bill:
I have made a practice of not advising people as to what they should do regarding the emerging corpo-totalist state. Hell, what do I know? That being said, all I can do is share what I have learned about personally about taking moral responsibility for ourselves as Americans. Everybody's path is different, I suspect. This is gonna be straight off the head, and I'm gonna have to go all the way around my elbow to get to my thumb, so to speak, so here goes.
My own journey has been a slow and erratic one and I have not come very far, considering my age. But I do know this: Each person must find his or her own path to action because we are all individuals (inside at least, during our most private moments, at which time our moral lives are evaluated or avoided) and all of us engage the world on at least slightly different intellectual, moral, economic and spiritual terms.
But first, there is the matter of courage to be dealt with. And that's a tuff one, my friend, because any courageous move we make will cost us personally and dearly. And if we do the kinds of things that truly make a difference, it usually costs us everything. Imagine what happens when you refuse to pay income taxes to support the war in Iraq -- or even to support government at all -- which I intend to do at some point after I get my wife's finances separated from mine.
In fact, as long as I am telling you my own perceived path, I will add this: One of the main reasons I want to be in Belize, Central America at least half of each year, crappy health and all, is because of its proximity to Latin American movements that are starting to make a real difference globally. I believe change in America will happen after the coming US collapse is more obviously progressed, and the rest of the world increases its courage and defiance of America even further. If my Jewish physicist intellectual friend George Salzman -- who is nearing 80 -- and his babe Nancy can fight for global freedom from American oppression from Oaxaca, then a guy nearing 60 like me can sure as hell do at least as much. If I do everything right I will die broke and publicly reviled by the middle class Americans of my time. It's almost a benchmark for me.
Anyway, we were talking about what happens to folks who openly resist, weren't we? So let us imagine what would happen to anyone who, say, started a free socialistic day care camp for preschoolers, and invited single moms in their workplace, the cleaning woman and the secretary, or even the boss, to enroll their kids for free. Imagine what would happen to the person who smashed government and police cameras aimed at demonstrators or public plazas, as they are all across America now. And imagine what would happen to anyone who did mass mailings of mangled Iraqi children to the families of soldiers in Iraq -- the same ones available on the net which the media refuses to acknowledge and Americans cannot force themselves to look at because they know what it means. Harsh and unpleasant? Rash? Disrespectful? The truth is all those things.
If you openly make a genuine and meaningful move against this system -- unless you are rich, well connected or powerful, in which case you are not very likely to do so -- it will cost you whatever you love most -- home, family, job, friends, reputation. Everything. This empire is built upon extracting money and energy and fear from us as the price of whatever we love most. These days it's done through mortgages, credit card debt, etc. (supports the corporate financial institutions), health fears, employment fears, and increasingly, through access to education. The system controls the middle class through blackmail and fear and the working class through its cadres of middle class professionals, managers and "public servants."
The good news, however, is that outside the system is not the worst place to be; you find a whole new world of freedom and friends you never knew existed. Assuming you can handle the company of free men.
For the less courageous, another way to take action is to refuse to participate in the normal everyday things that contribute to the horror generated by our so-called free market capitalism. Live simply (I'm still trying to beat that motherfucker. Looks like I am just going to have to live in a Third World country to pull it off.) Don't own a car, drive, etc. This is the least rewarding personally because in this nation of excesses one does it more or less alone, without much support unless you join an organization, in which case you run the risk of the self-congratulatory smugness which dominates so many of those organizations. Still, it's worthwhile because there is mutual emotional support in numbers, if not much observable success.
But the most effective and rewarding path is direct action, if you have the guts for it. Put yourself on the gears of the machine, as Jerry Rubi n once advised. Literally physically stop something vital to the empire. Lie down in front of bulldozers alone or with others prepared to do the same thing. Let the media and Limbaugh and Cheney laugh. Take the ultimate risk toward the ultimate goal (which I am personally plotting as we speak.)
Rachel Corrie and Gandhi understood this. They didn't ask what to do. They did what they saw before them as the right thing to do, never asking permission, ready to lose everything including their very lives. We have come to the point where the stakes are that high.
As to flying the flag, I flew one in front of my house until a couple of years ago. Now I have figured out that so-called patriotism in this country is simply rabid nationalism of the worst kind under another name. I love my country deeply but the flag does not stand for those things I love about it. It stands for the opposite and now I know we have been taught flag worship in order to raise armies, etc. If you go to Europe and engage people personally, you will see that they find America's worship of the flag creepy. Too many wars fought under flags have taught them a lesson.
RE: How will we know when it is too late? Too late for what? For the two party system as we have known it to save us? Surely. To redeem ourselves in the eyes of the world and god? Not quite yet.
But with regard to preserving our traditional individual liberty (insofar as we ever really had it, and we did enjoy civil liberty to a greater extent than most of the world for a long time) it's already too late. We've slept too long. Indeed, most of us are still asleep deep within our unquestioning comfort and meaningless but pleasant material diversions.
I'm only one guy with one opinion. Even among my own leftish lot, some people are bound to call it bullshit, or have some academic or theoretical or practical reason why I'm all wet. Maybe I am. But in a nutshell, that's my take on it.
Solidarity,
Joe
