Pamela's Blog 5

Published on Thursday, May 7, 2009 by Nas2EndWork.org

“Are We Innocent When We Dream?”

by Pamela Satterwhite

It's such a sad old feeling
the fields are soft and green
it's memories that I'm stealing
but you're innocent when you dream
when you dream
you're innocent when you dream
(Tom Waits, “Innocent When You Dream”)

On the table near my bed stands a newspaper article ghetto-laminated with clear plastic packing tape. Given center place is a large photograph of a beautiful little girl from Kiwanja. Complexly-layered emotions pucker her forehead. She looks directly into the camera with an expression of tightly-coiled fury, anger, grief and…deep, deep disillusionment.

The headline reads: “Conflict Makes Congo ‘Worst Place to Be a Child.’”

I seem to be harboring her fury these days. It floods innocuous conversations with my neighbors and communicates itself in confusing ways I’m unable to explain – at least not in the seconds-long sound-bites ‘speech’ is packaged in these days.

Yesterday an older neighbor, clearly unmoved by my explanation that I was planting our little “traffic circle” with tomatoes, zucchinis, melons, corn and strawberries because there are people in our neighborhood who need food, told me that “Lord bless” she had all the food she needed and then tried to “save me” by getting me to come to church with her on Sunday.

The Zapatistas are right. People are asleep, and more so in America than anywhere else. The conditioning runs so deep. Too many of us in America think if we “go to church,” or attend that annual protest, or recycle our bottles and cans, or volunteer at our child’s school, or vote, we can check “good deed done” off the “to-do” list, keep layering our lives with the small comforts allowed us, lay down in our narcotized soul-nullifying pastimes, our soporific consumptions, take pride in our duly-checked check-lists…and rest – rest from concern about the suffering of others ‘not-us,’ or from any unpleasant delving into the muck of lies we’re given for food.

If that were the extent of our complicity it mightn’t be so ugly. But it’s not.
Until we decide to delve, to care, to question our conditioning, we remain passive slaves to the gods of “Obedience,” ever-eager for a few pats on the head from the representatives of ‘Authority’ as recompense for our misplaced allegiance to ‘Power,’ ever-ready to expand our complicity when asked, ever-ready to take the wrong side when the manufactured crises the podrunks create require from us monumental love, judgment, and…“heart,” as Tookie would say.

“Courage” must be systematically cultivated and practiced, for it to be available to us come the wet-ass hour, when we’ll have no choice but to face the moral challenges inspired by “resource disruptions.”

If you’re on the fence, considering who deserves your allegiance, maybe Machiavelli can help. Far from being ancient history, his advice to “Princes” on how to control…us…is religiously adhered to by the pitiful-power-drunk-few (podrunks for short):

It is necessary…to be skilful in simulating and dissembling. But men are so simple, and governed so absolutely by their present needs, that he who wishes to deceive will never fail in finding willing dupes. …It is not essential, then, that a Prince should have all the good qualities which I have enumerated above, but it is most essential that he should seem to have them…Thus, it is well to seem merciful, faithful, humane, religious, and upright, and also to be so; but the mind should remain so balanced that were it needful not to be so, you should be able and know how to change to the contrary…He must therefore keep his mind ready to shift as the winds and tides of Fortune turn, and, as I have already said, he ought not to quit good courses if he can help it, but should know how to follow evil courses if he must…A Prince should therefore be very careful that nothing ever escapes his lips which is not replete with the five qualities above named, so that to see and hear him, one would think him the embodiment of mercy, good faith, integrity, humanity, and religion. And there is no virtue which it is more necessary for him to seem to possess than this last; because men in general judge rather by the eye than by the hand, for every one can see but few can touch. Every one sees what you seem, but few know what you are, and these few dare not oppose themselves to the opinion of the many who have the majesty of the State to back them up….For the vulgar are always taken by appearances and by results, and the world is made up of the vulgar, the few only finding room when the many have no longer ground to stand on. (Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, written in 1513)

“But men are so simple, and governed so absolutely by their present needs, that he who wishes to deceive will never fail in finding willing dupes.”

It’s not really that we’re so simple, what’s more true is that we’re so good-hearted we often find it difficult to believe that the little-boys-who-would-be-kings could behave as malevolently as they in fact do. We’re easily “duped” by the false face of the vampires because we’re not vampires ourselves. We’re like Edmund’s “credulous father” and “foolishly honest” brother:

A credulous father, and a brother noble, whose nature is so far from doing harms that he suspects none; on whose foolish honesty my practices ride easy! I see the business. Let me, if not by birth, have lands by wit: all with me’s meet that I can fashion fit. (Shakespeare’s King Lear, Act I, Scene II)

And if the impact of podrunk adventurism – either in their own or their governments’ suits – around the world was confined to the particular state theaters where they reside, if we, for example, could confine the schemes of American ‘Power’ to America, we’d have awakened by now.

The problem is that we have a global economic system founded on rape, murder and pillage, and the rapacity of our American papier-maché “princes” damages well beyond our particular village, beyond the scope of our, in any case, rose-colored glasses. And the problem is also that we’re encouraged to sleep, to be grateful for all those “cheap” commodities that are not “cheap” but made with the flesh of our brothers and sisters.

It’s easy, so easy, to sleep, to convince ourselves that that narcissistic shortcut straight over our flattened souls – “I-want-it-I-buy-it” – is “the ‘smart’ thing to do.”

“Why question how they got there, those really, really cheap wares? In America we don’t care how the ‘not-us’ who made them fare.” And when we in America refuse to care, to question, to delve into the muck of lies, it’s others who die.

The world cannot afford our “innocence” anymore.

We have to gear this sucker down – consciously – we have to get the U.S. state off the rest of the world’s back while beginning to build our own things – what comes next, the NEW world – our future freedom without bosses.

We can no longer consume teenage girls in China / Indonesia / the Philippines, whole populations in the Congo… in order to have more cell phones or ultra-thin whatevers.

Period.

Whatever we have now that is soaked in the blood of our fellows is enough.
Buckminster Fuller was right when he said that:

It is now possible to give every man, woman and child on Earth a standard of living comparable to that of a modern-day billionaire. This is not an opinion or a hope – it is an engineeringly demonstrable fact. This can be done using only the already proven technology, and with the already mined, refined, and recirculating physical resources.

Our individualism-training – our “Division Work” – must be absolutely rejected, sat on a low shelf, knocked off by the cat, sent rolling to the dust-balls, swept up and tossed into the Abyss of Unmentionables, there to compost into it’s alter-ego, Love. Everything we do, from hence, must come from that place, trite though it sounds.

It is time to tell the podrunks: “your pretensions will be chucked, we are waking up.”

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Pamela's Blog 5

Published on Thursday, May 7, 2009 by Nas2EndWork.org

“Are We Innocent When We Dream?”