Waking up: freeing ourselves from work

Once, when I was an office worker, a boss sent me to a “training” on how to use a day planner. * Ha, ha – not-funny joke, I thought. The whole exercise, I knew, was just a way for management to change the subject from “overwork” to: “you-just-need-to-be-better-organized. If you can’t clear your desk it’s your fault.”

Of course I went along with the charade (as if I had a choice), deciding to treat it as seriously as the boss treated my workload.

But I found the workshop unexpectedly compelling because it emphasized values as the basis of effective planning. (I’m saying a little prayer here that just using such phrases as “effective planning” won’t transmogrify me into some brisk, horse-blinkered “project manager.”)

Define your values, the trainer said, and then make sure that everything you do, every day, reflects them and moves you toward your ultimate goals. This, we were told, was how to overcome lethargy, inertia, depression, that sense of futility that is the direct consequence of having to always be told what to do. Now, by definition, they could never go to that heart of things, after all, they were set up to serve the system itself; but the technique, I thought, was fundamentally sound. Unless we start to live the future we want – “the future in the present” – we won’t get there.

It’s all about planning, having a plan with clear goals that people can believe in.

It’s time to start talking with each other, sharing what we know, and applying all of our under-utilized creativity, all of our true power, to creating the next social arrangement.

We need spaces where we can gather, to meet and talk – neighborhood anchors at first and then, when we’re stronger, our own communal Great Hall with lands adjoined that provides access to toilets and showers, cooking facilities, and a large communal meeting room, solar power capture and distribution, artists’ studio, flour mills, communal gardens, pasture and farm, a bedroom-car park with charging station – organized by the local community.

Together we can figure out the transition problems. But we have to start, to say “enough,” and turn to each other for the answers to our deep, earth-renewing questions – asking of each other only an agreement to honor the ancestors, the earth, and each other.

Here’s what I will do: meet and greet my neighbors, include my friends, set the day and time for meeting, and then begin.

Hopefully there’ll be enough people around you who will want to come together – share food and stories, and think about the future – that you won’t be forced to venture too far off shore in order to chart a course. But, if you’re awake, you do what you have to.

The handout “Planning the Future We Want,” which you can make copies of from the pages at the end of this book, includes these initial questions, a way to start.

Form a circle, and ask each person to think about and address questions like these:

What is your art (skill, gift, love – that which you do unbidden, without force)? What do you do really? Who are you really?
Have you ever tried to live that art? What happened?
Have you ever thought about only doing your art? If so, what stops you?
If you could start buying the goods you use from someone here, if they were of better quality, and less expensive, would you?
If you could turn to people here for your entertainment – film, spoken word, music, dance – would you? If not, what would stop you?
If you could plan a future where we could all live our wholeness, fully, what would it look like? Don’t you deserve this? Do you want this for your children – or for all children?
What if we started buying from each other, instead of corporations?
What if we devoted our time, attention and allegiance to building the future we deserve, instead of to the job?
What if we went beyond talking about these things and started doing these things? How would we start?

At the end of the meeting I will offer to anyone interested a copy of this book, which is free. You can copy it from the web site at www.nas2endwork.org or request a hard copy by writing to:

The Nascence to End Work Savings Endowment (NEWSE)
P.O. Box 3952
Berkeley, CA 94703
510.420.8054
nas2endwork@gmail.com
www.nas2endwork.org

“Nascence” means “birth.” To birth a movement to end work is the work of the NEW.

We’ve been conditioned to struggle with our frustrations – the challenge of trying to be a full human being, full of life, health, and joy – alone. Now is the time to talk with each other about these difficulties. Simply meeting together and acknowledging that the current social arrangement cannot meet our need to be whole is a huge step forward.

Of course the initial results of our coming together to share information won’t be obviously world-rocking. For example, one person may share with another that it’s that tattered toxic synthetic blanket breaking down and becoming friable that makes her feel that death is imminent, or we’ll learn by comparing notes that plastic-water really is liquid-death.

But I’m not talking exchanging macaroni and cheese recipes here either. I’m talking about sharing those painfully-purchased, often life-saving lessons, like: “never a bridge, always a retainer;” like: “most ‘soaps’ are actually ‘detergents’ that ruin the skin;” like: Pacifica Radio’s KPFA has featured a documentary (excerpts can be heard on their archive) that makes the case for healing cancer with a strict raw food diet, not by chemotherapy; like: there’s a way to handle a crying baby that relieves the parent’s and the baby’s mutual stress; like: rushing a child around and putting the job first does violence to the child, devastates his wholeness.

And we can’t expect evolutionary ideas and projects to slip down every throat like sweet nectar. There will be people who prefer tough draught-tolerant foliage to food in the community truck-patch, who prefer façade to fellowship in our inter-relationships. There will be those who find food ‘messy,’ who are offended by the ‘unsightliness’ of fallen leaves or a dead tomato plant. There will be some who won’t care about hunger in the neighborhood so long as their stomachs are full.

In which case, we’ll let our values, our value-system, be our guide and take such issues to our crew, once we have one. The solutions that gather in good fellowship will be fresh and invigorating. Sometimes just listening to the life-stories of these stalwarts of Tough-Love can lead, ultimately, to an opening. Invisibility is a toxic problem in this sick system, one that can be acknowledged without imbuing it with the power to pull us off-center.

The point is, when you encounter this problem of deep complicity and brainwashing you will already, values in pocket, have thought about and discussed it. It will have occurred to you that when someone is uncaring about pain on the village doorstep, when someone chooses her personal aesthetic over a neighbor’s full belly, there are understandable reasons to explain how she got that way. The individualism conditioning runs deep. It does. You’ll know this and be able to react like the Chicano father (in the Bay Area, some years back) after his infant girl was bludgeoned by a neighbor’s five-year old son; the father said of his baby’s killer: “The child is not well.”

No one was born a misanthrope, so when you encounter one, or two, you’ll know what to do.

To discuss the ideas in this book, to begin seeing reality, is an important first step once you begin to meet.

Convening and sharing food, stories, and information on a regular basis is another, particularly as we are witnessing today a concerted assault upon our access to information itself.

Robert McChesney, being interviewed on KPFA about the demise of one daily newspaper after another, made this very point recently. He noted that there are still many newspapers today – the ones not taken over by big corporate hedge funds – operating in the black.

The corporate takeover of journalism…has devastated journalism…Newspaper publishing until quite recently was an absolute cash-cow because you had local monopolies or duopolies…The papers that have been most devastated [by the current recession] were those owned by these huge corporate hedge funds or corporate groups that took on phenomenal debt and now are just being devastated by the recession…
[The current crisis journalism finds itself in] goes back decades…into the sixties and seventies…There was a sharp cut-back in the number of reporters and in the number of bureaus…long before the Internet and long before this current economic crisis…Part of the reason journalism’s in such a crisis today is that it’s so bad. Most of the journalism is horrendous. It’s a rational thing that young people don’t read our newspapers or watch what’s called news on television… (Robert McChesney, The Morning Show, KPFA Radio [available in its archives], March 23, 2009)

He and co-writer John Nichols elaborate on these points in an article in The Nation:

The place to begin crafting solutions is with the understanding that the economic downturn did not cause the crisis in journalism; nor did the Internet. The economic collapse and Internet have greatly accentuated and accelerated a process that can be traced back to the 1970s, when corporate ownership and consolidation of newspapers took off. It was then that managers began to balance their books and to satisfy the demand from investors for ever-increasing returns by cutting journalists and shutting news bureaus. Go back and read a daily newspaper published in a medium-size American city in the 1960s, and you will be awed by the rich mix of international, national and local news coverage and by the frequency with which "outsiders" – civil rights campaigners, antiwar activists and consumer advocates like Ralph Nader – ended up on the front page. (John Nichols & Robert McChesney, “The Death and Life of Great American Newspapers,” The Nation, [reprinted on CommonDreams.org], March 20, 2009)

Recalling our Machiavelli – and the point made here as this chapter opened, namely that we should ignore what podrunks say and, rather, look around us at the results of their actions – can we think of a reason why the podrunks would not want young people to see journalism as a viable career option?
Just asking the question in the right way answers it, doesn’t it?

What? ‘Power’ doesn’t want more Wayne Madsens or Michael Moores or Watergate exposés, or a whole tribe of people delving into the endless financial and political scandals ‘Power’ is awash in? Whyever not?
What we see is what they intend, as they are very organized…and we must be too.
So, when we form crews, we can transmit real information and interpretation and organization of “the news.”

Once you are gathering regularly and a crew has begun to coalesce it’s important to go a step further and begin imagining what both village and micro-village-level self-sufficiency might look like for your community, taking seriously the motto: each one free one.

Below are some “tactics for beginning to think communally” to consider (mentioned here, returned to in the next section):

A community anchor, someone willing to put her home (temporarily) at the disposal of a movement (and by “community,” I mean the small, micro-village you’re building, your small collection of neighbors and friends.)

A community inventory of skills, services and products.

A process of community healing from the abuse dealt to us all by this system – taking Myles Horton’s advice to share stories and food.

A process of developing a community consciousness that sees the reality of ‘Power’-worship and commits to withdrawing psychically from it.

A community inventory of need: shelter, food, health care, childcare, joy.

A community (short-term) plan for mutual support in beginning to meet those needs.

A longer-term Community Exit Strategy (a CoExiSt) for withdrawing from participation in that which is unworthy of us.

Once, during one of my bouts of out-of-workness, I was half-listening to KPFA (and it should be said that a local Pacifica radio station is a critical resource that every community should use as a replacement for corporate media, which is propaganda, pure and simple.) * There was a man speaking about an original type of building, completely self-sufficient. Hmm, nice, I thought, that’s obviously needed. But a house being one of those pricey items beyond most of our means I didn’t exactly sit up and shout “Excelsior!” At least, not until I heard him say, “once the guys working for me learned how to build their own earthships, I couldn’t get them to work for me anymore.” Then I sat up.

Continue to "The Plan" - Part 7

* One of the “Franklin-Covey” planning seminars.

* If you don’t have a local Pacifica radio station you can listen to one on the Internet – both KPFA and Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! have audio archives and/or transcripts on the Internet.