Thank you, that really is beautiful. Art and music are so important - such good medicine for my aching heart today. I am also a relatively new Patti Smith fan.😊
Cameron, I love the concept of “micro-resistance.” I know many people that have asked me, “what can I do?” They feel small and overwhelmed. This is a great idea to share. Small acts of resistance and interuption add up. Thank you for your wisdom.
I agree wholeheartedly about micro-resistance. This is where the future worth living emerges! Thank you for highlighting this - and thanks to Cameron for including it in your reflection. I do not despair. Quite to the contrary, I am grounded in the Sacred body of Mother Earth and I my identity is with Jesus - called “Creator Sets Free” in the First Nations Version of the New Testament. Our Creator is at work to set the whole Creation - including us, if we will choose Kin-ship - free from the curse.
Luke Kemp, who has worked at the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, is publishing a book called “Goliath’s Curse” and I recommend that folks familiarize yourselves with his work.
“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others ; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were- cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.
There’s certainly truth in your observation. These are very dangerous times. This move in DC feels more theatrical to me than his action in LA. Frankly, I think he’s trying to distract the news cycle away from the Epstein scandal, a flagging economy and his foreign policy failures. The troubling part to me is that we fall for it every time. 😔
Along this line of thought, the current political establishment - including the Democrats, who take money from the same class and group of donors as the Republicans do - are acclimatizing the public to become submissive authoritarian governance.
Just as Biden handed Gaza to Trump in bloody gift wrap and on a bloody silver platter, the whole political elite is ecocidal and genocidal. The pretense of political freedom is part of the game.
In 1956, W. E. B. Du Bois - one of America’s great scholars and a Black activist - noted that there are not two parties in this country, but one evil party with two names. As a mature scholar and activist, he publicly refused to vote for a presidential candidate. He viewed the political process as a way to suppress democracy rather than to encourage democracy.
So much of the conversation here on Substack is conversation carried out by white people who are very much a part of a political system that has been “inverted totalitarian” and absolutely fascist (corporatist) for many decades.
The dominant narrative is that if we vote a certain party into office, they will fix things and make it better. The reality is that we are committing ecocide and genocide, and the two dominant parties exist to manufacture a political product that increases cultural and political division and increases the intensity intensity of debate within a very narrow range.
Chomsky wrote about this in Manufacturing Consent. The grim reality is that in the USA, the Democrats have a powerful grip on the demographic “identity groups” who depend upon Democrats to protect them.
I have loved ones in my life who are women, people of color, LGBTQ+, poor, or otherwise marginalized - and so I have voted for Democrats simply because they provide some fragile umbrella of protection over some of these people.
But I know that the Build Back Better nonsense will not only ruins the environment in new and more diverse ways, it continues the racialized “long slow violence” of colonization as people around the world are forced out of their lands and villages and into extreme urban poverty just to accommodate the new drilling and mining needed to manufacture the supposedly ”green infrastructure” in the USA.
The people paying the DNC and the RNC know that they are setting the agenda. And the agenda is the same violence and denial that we have observed throughout my lifetime.
Our civilization is well into collapse because it is profoundly corrupt and profoundly cruel.
I do not hear anyone using the word “repent” with regard to the change that we need to both be and see.
Why not?
Preachers and professors lose their jobs when they call for repentance or metanoia or even real enlightenment.
Repentance is not comfortable. Therefore we will not do it.
We have religion that ironically creates what Britt Wray - in her book Generation Dread - calls bubbles on uncare. We select and fetishize our special pet projects, because they are manageable and they make us feel like we are good people and we are also in charge. We are the ones wearing white hats and shiny “White Saviour” badges. But we do not challenge the empire the way that Jesus did and the way that Jesus taught us to do.
We cannot even imagine what that would look like.
Unfortunately, most of us will die in the same old comfortable religion that supports ecocide and genocide - and never even know it.
I talk with young people who know that we are “future eaters”. We have depleted and poisoned the earth - and civil discourse - to the point that the future of the young is almost certainly going to be short and brutal.
Let’s not lose sight of the reality that our theology and actions need to be far more radical than most of us dare to imagine. And our theology and actions are likely to bring us suffering and death, much like Jesus and many of his closest followers experienced.
I wanted to share this with you.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DNOVu04pb_y/?igsh=NjdlN2s5ZjZuYTlt
Cindy, I LOVE this video!!! ChoirChoirChoir is the best. Thank you for sharing. You may see this in an upcoming meditation. 😉
Thank you, that really is beautiful. Art and music are so important - such good medicine for my aching heart today. I am also a relatively new Patti Smith fan.😊
Could be an imperative: 'become the sand in the gears that slows the machinery of harm.'
Cameron, I love the concept of “micro-resistance.” I know many people that have asked me, “what can I do?” They feel small and overwhelmed. This is a great idea to share. Small acts of resistance and interuption add up. Thank you for your wisdom.
I agree wholeheartedly about micro-resistance. This is where the future worth living emerges! Thank you for highlighting this - and thanks to Cameron for including it in your reflection. I do not despair. Quite to the contrary, I am grounded in the Sacred body of Mother Earth and I my identity is with Jesus - called “Creator Sets Free” in the First Nations Version of the New Testament. Our Creator is at work to set the whole Creation - including us, if we will choose Kin-ship - free from the curse.
Luke Kemp, who has worked at the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, is publishing a book called “Goliath’s Curse” and I recommend that folks familiarize yourselves with his work.
Orwell in 1984–on power
“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others ; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were- cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.
Cameron, every time i read “We are in this together.”’ I get stronger. thank you.
But, there is no true resistance because every day Trump and his gang get more emboldened and take away more freedoms!!!
There’s certainly truth in your observation. These are very dangerous times. This move in DC feels more theatrical to me than his action in LA. Frankly, I think he’s trying to distract the news cycle away from the Epstein scandal, a flagging economy and his foreign policy failures. The troubling part to me is that we fall for it every time. 😔
It’s more than theatrics because Miller is and others are directing the puppet. LA started as theatrics.
If America doesn’t wake soon, it will be too late if it’s not already
Along this line of thought, the current political establishment - including the Democrats, who take money from the same class and group of donors as the Republicans do - are acclimatizing the public to become submissive authoritarian governance.
Just as Biden handed Gaza to Trump in bloody gift wrap and on a bloody silver platter, the whole political elite is ecocidal and genocidal. The pretense of political freedom is part of the game.
In 1956, W. E. B. Du Bois - one of America’s great scholars and a Black activist - noted that there are not two parties in this country, but one evil party with two names. As a mature scholar and activist, he publicly refused to vote for a presidential candidate. He viewed the political process as a way to suppress democracy rather than to encourage democracy.
You can read one account of this here:
https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/thabiti-anyabwile/w-e-b-dubois-would-not-vote-in-this-election/
So much of the conversation here on Substack is conversation carried out by white people who are very much a part of a political system that has been “inverted totalitarian” and absolutely fascist (corporatist) for many decades.
The dominant narrative is that if we vote a certain party into office, they will fix things and make it better. The reality is that we are committing ecocide and genocide, and the two dominant parties exist to manufacture a political product that increases cultural and political division and increases the intensity intensity of debate within a very narrow range.
Chomsky wrote about this in Manufacturing Consent. The grim reality is that in the USA, the Democrats have a powerful grip on the demographic “identity groups” who depend upon Democrats to protect them.
I have loved ones in my life who are women, people of color, LGBTQ+, poor, or otherwise marginalized - and so I have voted for Democrats simply because they provide some fragile umbrella of protection over some of these people.
But I know that the Build Back Better nonsense will not only ruins the environment in new and more diverse ways, it continues the racialized “long slow violence” of colonization as people around the world are forced out of their lands and villages and into extreme urban poverty just to accommodate the new drilling and mining needed to manufacture the supposedly ”green infrastructure” in the USA.
The people paying the DNC and the RNC know that they are setting the agenda. And the agenda is the same violence and denial that we have observed throughout my lifetime.
Our civilization is well into collapse because it is profoundly corrupt and profoundly cruel.
I do not hear anyone using the word “repent” with regard to the change that we need to both be and see.
Why not?
Preachers and professors lose their jobs when they call for repentance or metanoia or even real enlightenment.
Repentance is not comfortable. Therefore we will not do it.
We have religion that ironically creates what Britt Wray - in her book Generation Dread - calls bubbles on uncare. We select and fetishize our special pet projects, because they are manageable and they make us feel like we are good people and we are also in charge. We are the ones wearing white hats and shiny “White Saviour” badges. But we do not challenge the empire the way that Jesus did and the way that Jesus taught us to do.
We cannot even imagine what that would look like.
Unfortunately, most of us will die in the same old comfortable religion that supports ecocide and genocide - and never even know it.
I talk with young people who know that we are “future eaters”. We have depleted and poisoned the earth - and civil discourse - to the point that the future of the young is almost certainly going to be short and brutal.
Let’s not lose sight of the reality that our theology and actions need to be far more radical than most of us dare to imagine. And our theology and actions are likely to bring us suffering and death, much like Jesus and many of his closest followers experienced.