waking up - freeing ourselves from work

 

Chapter II: The Two Winds (Part 9)

Solidarity is All

 

“And as we watch our dreams dissolve like sugar in dirty dishwater...” ****

 

Solidarity is All

Erich Fromm quote on "Brotherly Love" *

 

…Excuse me.

I’ve just returned from asking the same young man I’ve asked at least three times in two months to please not let his dog pee on my growing things. One dog’s pee is the next dog’s target and pretty soon you got pummeled earth, a urine-stink you could slice backwards, and not a bit of green.

I love green (so long as it’s not a lawn. I hate lawns *).

I planted my block’s traffic circle with melons, tomatoes, and zucchinis so that the children could see, every day, on their way to and from the bus stop, that food comes from the earth and not the fucking Safeway. Planting the traffic circle was a discomfiting exercise, an icebreaker of sorts that revealed the depths of my isolation from my neighbors.

I also planted the traffic circle because earlier this year a young man was shot within feet of it. I thought growing food there might…oh I don’t know what I thought.

This neighborhood is wearing me down. It’s an age thing. My son still has plenty of energy for the notion of community-building.

 

Or maybe it’s not an age thing – maybe it’s just me. As a child I recall putting a red, felt Peanuts banner on my wall that showed Linus, clutching his blanket, with a peeved expression on his face. It said: “I love mankind, it’s people I can’t stand.”

 

I don’t have any illusions that it’s gonna be easy – but we gotta heal this thing. Grandmother is waiting on us, and she is vexed.

Walking is risky and breathing a challenge in the great cities of the looking-glass world. Whoever is not a prisoner of necessity is a prisoner of fear, deprived of sleep by anxiety over the things he lacks or by terror of losing the things he has. The looking-glass world trains us to view our neighbor as a threat, not a promise. It condemns us to solitude and consoles us with chemical drugs and cybernetic friends. We are sentenced to die of hunger, fear, or boredom – that is, if a stray bullet doesn’t do the job first.
Is the freedom to choose among these unfortunate ends the only freedom left to us? The looking-glass school teaches us to suffer reality, not change it; to forget the past, not learn from it; to accept the future, not invent it. (Eduardo Galeano, Upside Down, p. 7-8)

The divisions start with race and radiate out endlessly: folks in houses versus folks in apartments; college youth taking their shot and street youth getting shot; civil ‘servants’ using the phone like a knife-stab in the back; you call about a problem in California and you get Texas, or India; our lesbian homies glare cuz the media declare black folk are prepared to confute their conflux. It’s tempting to throw up ones’ hands and just say, “Fuck it.”

I’ve had enough
I’m sick of seeing and touching
Both sides of things
Sick of being the damn bridge for everybody

Nobody
Can talk to anybody
Without me
Right?

I explain my mother to my father my father to my little sister
My little sister to my brother my brother to the white feminists
The white feminists to the Black church folks the Black church folks
To the ex-hippies the ex-hippies to the Black separatists the
Black separatists to the artists the artists to my friends’ parents…

Then
I’ve got to explain myself
To everybody

I do more translating
Than the Gawdamn U.N.

Forget it
I’m sick of it…
(from Donna Kate Rushin’s “The Bridge Poem” in This Bridge Called my Back)

(It may not be totally apropos, but I love that poem.)

 

Where do we start?

And how?

It seems that if “solidarity is all,” we can hang it up right now, focus on being the bridge to our own power, and send righteous, supportive thoughts to the planet, pump our fists with the words “stay strong girlfriend!” on our lips.

 

A society that sows division, while its people are biologically disposed to connect, puts those bodies of those people in distress.

 

With whom or what do we connect? Who do we give our solidarity to?

We make tentative connections at work, with neighbors, with friends. But these connections are as thin as everything else in this system, pasted together with gruel. They can’t sustain us or be sustained (“come the wet-ass hour”).

Our atomization is so dispiriting, this having to “fight” on all fronts – never knowing if we’re really loved, who’s ‘with us’ and who’s against us…or who cares.

Does anybody care about anybody else anymore?

That is what ultimately saps our strength – makes us totter in our tracks and say “fuck it!” – the fear that we’re all on our own, that nobody cares about us.

Does the government care? (A laughable question.) Patently it does not. Increasingly, in fact, we have to fight the government for the least little benefit out of it.
Do our neighbors care about us? No, they break into our homes, leave their dogs' shit on our common walkways, and ‘turn us in’ to the government for ‘crimes’ that could be resolved with conversations. *
Do our parents care?
Our brothers and sisters?
Our partners or spouses?
Our children?
Sometimes we don’t feel they do either.

We’re like a can kicked forever down the road.

Or a dog passed home to home, trying in each one to construct a pack, only to have it pulled away behind his back. Ultimately, the dog probably realizes there is no pack, just some unknown force bedeviling him.

When a dog puts its’ ‘all’ into the desideratum ‘pack,’ or his dream of one, only to ‘fail,’ it’s a sad thing.

But that’s our generalized reality, the one we eat every day, without complaint.

Maybe we should cry a little for ourselves already. We need a good cry. We deserve it after all this system’s put us through.

All the divisions – by race, class, sexual preference, gender…we’re even divided parent against child, old against young – have left us utterly alone and seriously damaged.

 

So, like in AA, maybe the first step is recognizing the depth of the disease in us. Not in somebody else out there, but in us.

 

But when wage work – and its flip side, street crime – daily boosts our conditioned reinforced isolation, by injecting us with fear and alienation, what good does our self-awareness do?

 

Our inevitable resistance – inevitable because our bodies are geared for intersection, for communion – is pitifully unequal to the massive containment podrunks impose by inserting hierarchy and separation into every social institution.

 

I had a boss once who got nervous every time the black women in the office knotted together in a clump of idle talk. We all noticed, and though we pretended to be amused, I, for one, never understood it.

Young black males, of course, can’t help but know that the country quakes collectively in fear of them, that they are, apparently, the stuff of nightmares. But couldn’t even the most faint-hearted see how completely tame we three women were? I guess every ‘other’ seems innocuous to itself.

 

All the cons operating all at once must all be actively policed, not just passively provided – we must be watched for signs of waking up.

Did those people really think for themselves?
Sound the sirens! Send in the compliance cops!

The state watches.

And we watch each other.

Most of us look at this hyper-attentiveness to what we do with, at first, tolerance, but, the longer we’re subjected to it, growing irritation; and, finally, resignation, when we conclude that the only possible freedom is death.

This isn’t living.

Our mistake, as young people, because we don’t know any better, is to not challenge it in the first place. We aren’t taught that our bodies tell the truth, while the system lies.

 

Podrunks fear goodness, and systematically sow distrust: “what’s your game, what angle are you playing?” Which replicates when we decide to get ourselves an angle, to lie, if only to survive, present the false face of the commodity, and avoid the label ‘chump.’ So we keep selling ourselves and hardening our hearts, and pretending, and then get furious at each other at the blatant phoniness we all project, the duplicity of our neighbors, our co-workers, our friends.

 

And the question never leaves us, as we’re wired for communion: who do we give our solidarity to?

 

Our children (when they’re small) play an interesting role in this regard.

Because they are so unconflicted as to this question, they bear the full weight of this system’s dis-ease. They have to serve all of our psychic needs at once.

They must be scapegoat and superhero, the fount of our failure as well as our raison d'être.

They’re our ‘wonder-glue,’ our ‘all-purpose answer’ to the multiple problems of psychic survival under capitalism, primary among them: our ‘separateness.’

The deepest need of man, then, is the need to overcome his separateness, to leave the prison of his aloneness. The absolute failure to achieve this aim means insanity… (Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving, p. 9)

They absorb our stress…and then hold our hands.

They interject their small, warm bodies between our anomie and the abyss.
Children are the temporary fix for this system’s dysfunction.

 

**** “And as we watch our dreams dissolve like sugar in dirty dishwater...”

And as we watch our dreams dissolve like sugar in dirty dishwater, we can’t help but turn, holding all our unwanted, unutilized power in our hands, to our children’s crystalline goodness, and seek to commandeer, with all the best intentions in the world, the possibilities of our children’s lives – to direct them, to ‘our’ purposes.

We project on them, without saying a word, our wishes for our unrealized lives, apply to their goodness, without saying a word – fettering them with the request that they try, with the traditional courage of children, to comply.

 

We are wired for allegiance, for loyalty, for becoming superheroes in the service of our parents’ silences. We gravitate to the real sticklers: how to make them happy, smile, be whole again? This is also nature in us, we are made to be loyal to our parents, to attend to their unspoken dreams, longings and desires, the ones that ache to exist precisely because they have been so ruthlessly repressed – the deeply felt ones too precious to voice.

 

But there are deeper allegiances – to our sources of power – that supercede loyalty to our parents. Or perhaps these are our parents’ longings restated, taken to a higher power?

* "The most fundamental kind of love..."

The most fundamental kind of love, which underlies all types of love, is brotherly love. By this I mean the sense of responsibility, care respect, knowledge of any other human being, the wish to further his life…Brotherly love is love between equals: but, indeed, even as equals we are not always “equal”; inasmuch as we are human, we are all in need of help. Today I, tomorrow you. But this need of help does not mean that the one is helpless, the other powerful. Helplessness is a transitory condition; the ability to stand and walk on one’s own feet is the permanent and common one.  (Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving, p. 42-4) (Also see: Wading Into The Muck Of State .)
                        
The realm of love, reason and justice exists as a reality only because, and inasmuch as, man has been able to develop these powers in himself throughout the process of his evolution. In this view there is no meaning to life, except the meaning man himself gives to it; man is utterly alone except inasmuch as he helps another. (The Art of Loving, p. 65)

We are made to coalesce – the commons are the reflection of this deeper reality – and it takes a lot of concerted energy to break down that tendency. The good news is that it can never be fully broken down – we tend towards each other. This is how we are at the start.

Free is how you is from the start, an’ when it look different you got to move, just move, an’ when you movin’ say that is a natural freedom make you move. (George Lamming)

We come from the ‘all’ of it, we return to the ‘all’ of it, and in-between we’d like something better than a dance on hot coals. Are we asking for the stars here? I think it’s time to stop settling.

 

We serve a system when we should be serving each other – that’s what our bodies want to do. We thread thoughts on the Internet when we should be threading our allegiances. We coax our children into cages when we should be handing them the keys.

 

We have to confront the depths of our complicity and the depths of our despair.

 

And if it weren’t for my experience in the trades, I’m not sure I would have the faith that we could do either.

 

If we are to reclaim our power to make our own ‘reality,’ we have to trust that we can. But ‘trust’ can’t just be an ‘idea’ in our heads, a figment of our imaginations, a picture of the future. Or rather, we can’t believe in these figments, pictures and ideas unless they enter into our experience.

 

‘Trust’ has to be harbored in our bodies before it can be held firmly in our minds.

 

While all of us ‘know,’ intellectually, that we are all interdependent, that I eat because you labor in the fields, that I light my home because you descend into the mines, this ‘knowing’ is not rooted in inter-relationships in real time.

On a construction site, however, interdependency is up close and in your face. Your work is premised on it. You see the people on whom your life depends. This is a more powerful experience than words can adequately convey. But this experience has allowed me to know, when before I couldn’t, that we can tackle the hardships, the confusion, the challenges and dislocations of the transition that must come, without descending into race wars and street chaos, despite the fact that the podrunks will do all they can to seed destruction and reap their harvest of fear as a permanent state of our being.

 

Large, life-and-death decisions occur all the time on a job site, but what struck me most when I first starting working in construction was the everyday fellowship.

Not to say that the backbiting and rumormongering of office work was altogether absent – unhappy people are everywhere under capitalism – but they were minority influences compared with the fellowship.

I’m a black woman in a racist world, so believe me, if I received its’ warmth, it’s a safe conclusion to say that the fellowship of working communally with one’s hands is a potent force.

My first job-site as an electrical apprentice was a movie theater with high ceilings. There were lots of scissor-lifts on the job for obvious reasons. One journeyman, who took his responsibility to teach and shepherd apprentices very seriously, told me that when he saw one apprentice try to sabotage another one, in order to make himself come off looking better, this journeyman waited until the end of the day and Hilte-shot the offender’s tool bag to the ceiling pan-deck.

Another story: there had been a custom in the electrical trade, by now withered away I’m sure, of dividing the scrap wire called ‘rabbit’ among the newest, greenest apprentices. The most coveted scrap was the big wire, the feeders, maybe an inch in diameter, some of it. On one job, a journeyman told the story of a boss who’d started hoarding the rabbit to send back to the shop. * The guys dealt with him by shorting the measurement for a long pull by twenty feet. Whups! The boss got more rabbit than he wanted that time.

Solidarity is not just a word on a job site. When folks need a hand, you give them a hand. Pretty basic, you’d think. But when I first started out, the solidarity all around me made my own training in selfishness uncomfortably conspicuous. I had to unlearn a lot of total obliviousness to what other people were doing or needing. The ‘me-first’ attitude deeply embedded in capitalist values doesn’t work on a job site. If someone’s loading or unloading material from the man-lift, everybody in the man-lift helps. As one journeyman reminded me, “many hands make the work light.”

 

When you’re part of a group of people that functions like a hive – when you make things together with your hands, when you collectively work uncoerced – you not only see the power of concentrated human thought and action, you feel it in your body. It’s a powerful lesson you never forget, the energy that results.

When people work together in the real world, put their shoulders to the same plow, it builds community, despite…despite differences of race, sex, etc. etc.

 

But until the world is whole, solidarity ekes out a diminished existence on isolated enclaves that are mere placeholders for structurally-constituted wholeness.

 

Realized wholeness requires the freedom to create each day anew.

 

 In listening to our bodies, in working collectively uncoerced, we build solidarity and we create ourselves – our wholeness…and we make culture.

 

This – freedom – is the domain, the essence, of culture.

 

“Progress” is its antithesis.

 

 

 

Continue to "Progress" - Part 1

 

 

© Pamela Satterwhite for Nas2EndWork (the NEW)