Humanifesto #3

"Misinterpretation of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar was the basis for a popular belief that a cataclysm would take place on December 21, 2012. December 21, 2012 was simply the day that the calendar went to the next b'ak'tun, at Long Count 13.0.0.0.0. The date on which the calendar will go to the next piktun (a complete series of 20 b'ak'tuns), at Long Count 1.0.0.0.0.0, will be on October 13, 4772."  Wikipedia 
The next b'ak'tun will be complete in 134 years on 2146 when our great great grandchildren will be elders.

Doing the math: Destiny Kinal


The redistribution of wealth--or rebalancing of abundance--happens best at the local level.  Each planning and action group has to decide for themselves what their area of influence is.  This geography or sphere usually defines itself: local, regional, watershed, or common ground, the "fit" has to be right, with a commonality of mutual identification that makes sense to all those in the group, along a spectrum from those who resist sharing, through those who have more than enough and are willing to share, to those who don't have enough, to those who are barely surviving.

Diggers in the Sixties had Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco as their immediate sphere of influence for action.  Everyone living in the Haight self-identified as a Digger.  In that overripe consumer culture coming out of the Fifties, Diggers found their mission moving food being thrown away as less-than-ideal in the Produce Markets at the docks to the parks adjacent to The Haight. These gratifying actions led easily to free stores, free medical clinics, job banks.  A flat leadership structure was idealized and realized, where leaders had no visibility (except among themselves).  Their hearing--perhaps made keen by political acumen (SDS, YSL, SNCC, Black Panthers, AIM)--was pitch perfect, their ears tuned to what was thought on the streets. Until Time Magazine commodified what was occurring, a melange of people--skewed to the young but including older politicos and beatniks, across socioeconomic and racial divides--converged to experience and invent the countercultural.

Perhaps too much is made of the fact that this was all bathed in the friendly light of psychedelics until the harder drugs of speed and heroin made inroads.  it was going to take quite a lot, it turns out, to unplug all the wiring of the industrial revolution  and the economic polarization that began to occur with the loss of common lands and the guilds, and the rise of pernicious entitled capitalism.

The U.S Civil War put paid to any decent alternatives that we had evolved as an agricultural craftspeople.  The real experiment in counterculturalism began in the later Sixties when people moved out of the cities into the countryside, organizing themselves in small clusters, or common points of reference flung across the country, usually around at-scale watersheds, to invent what came next.

Fast forward to the turn of the Millennium and--only recently--a new Mayan calendar cycle.  Pernicious capitalism has become toxic globalization, though this western value of limitless profit has always been toxic to indigenous people.

Forget the "precautionary principle," capital only needs to show the potential size of a market to get the green light on any number of destructive products, masquerading as necessary and desirable social contributions, from GMO's, to drones, to smart fabrics, to petroleum-based poisons, to continuous war, to interplanetary mining operations.  The exploitation of resources--including indigenous people and the minerals resting in the soil of their reservations--make anything and anyone fair game.

Luckily, countercultural principles are still operating in their yeasty semi-invisible way at the local, regional, food and fibershed grassroots level.

Take a group here in the East Bay across from San Francisco.  Planting Justice has trained themselves in permaculture, adapting ancient principles of gardening and growing food that are not very labor intensive once the structures are set in place.   Permaculturists bring fertile "food forests" and the commons back into our lives.  Planting Justice charges reasonable rates to plan and plant food forest in yards to people who can afford it, then use that money to teach inner-city kids how to plan, plant and maintain food forests in schools, social clubs, and community gardens.

Of course the Bay Area has been blessed with the vision of Alice Waters, the grandmere of the paradigm-tipping la nouvelle cuisine and more recently Edible School Yards. A scant decade after Alice's contributions of influence, capital, and hands-on involvement, every school in the greater Bay Area has both a school garden and a cooking curriculum.

Like articulating our ancient relationship to our watershed which defines us as a culture (Berg, Dasmann, House et al), bioregionalism spread quickly across the country and now across the world.  Alice Waters' rehydration of local seasonal food, simply prepared, and her message that spawned the Edible School Yard movement is sweeping our continent even in areas not blessed with California's twelve month growing season.

Now watch it happen with Fibersheds.  Taking back our millennial relationships to fiber, to cloth ourselves in a non-toxic way, Fibershed (Burgess, Kahn et al) is spreading across North America. 

When these movements meet those where the ancient strongholds of "homelands that feed and clothe us" are still indigenous, what will happen?  It's pleasurable to imagine an overflowing of spontaneous joy and celebration as indigenous populations from Lithuania to Ulan Bator, from Senegal to Lake Titicaca, find fellowship with us in resisting the forces of globalization that mean to unravel their cultures, "same as it ever was," since 1492 and before.

Back to Planting Justice and young people who resonate to their Robin-Hood ways to rebalance resources, shifting from those willing to share their abundance to the needy--how Diggerish!

Within the loose population of the now-aging Diggers, a movement has caught fire to redistribute resources among the group (in size anywhere from a couple hundred individuals, to associated groups numbering perhaps a thousand, and on out in circles of correspondence.)  Called Diggerbread, this group proposes to do at a small scale what is being increasingly called for in the larger population.

The redistribution of wealth is not a sly infiltration.  The term has brought Republican ire down on our seated president Barack Obama.  Capitalists everywhere, those feathering their lofty nests at the expense of an underclass and middle class, are reacting as one would expect a sleeping citizen to react when wakened by the cry of "Fire!  Fire!"

Softening the terms to "rebalancing abundance" removes the whiff of Marxist revolution from the necessary process.  Diggerbread willingly aggregates both cash and other resources from those who self-identify as having enough, to those in the community who don't have enough, a sharp, pointed, snowballing condition as one ages in poverty.

Among the loosely-defined DIgger population, somewhat atomized over the last thirty years of diaspora as everyone spread out to apply our core values in as many milieu, a lack of regard for money or material comforts too often has resulted in individuals finding themselves isolated and living off the threadbare social safety net: social security, no dental care, Medicare A but not B for hospitalization, perhaps food stamps.

In particular, men and women who have been called to lead large social changes in restoration, indigenous rights, quality of universal education, inner city regeneration, and a host of anti's: globalization, GMOS, nuclear
energy, for instance, have found themselves at the other end of dazzling careers, with books, accomplishments and awards aplenty, but no pension to make their elder years secure. Simply having been salaried for serving as an executive director, field project manager or social entrepreneur in the last quarter of the 20th century in many fields of social change was a mark of distinction.  Enough of a distinction to make your contribution, make a difference in your field, raised principled children and see one's life work flow into a society that values you in your elder years, yes?  Not necessarily so.

Hence Diggerbread.

It's my observation that while talent, brains and intellect are evenly distributed in the population--particularly in a population like the United State whose rich store of genetic material from all over the world, calls to those who myopically see only opportunity when they contemplate immigration--the laws of karma or chance (call fortune what you will,) are unevenly distributed.

I fell in love with a song-and-dance man who happened to be a radiologist. Others inherited family wealth or education.  Still others, with extremely fortunate blends of gifts and character traits, made careers that paid out
handsomely. Often women, particularly single women with children, made careers out of necessity.

Take away my doctor husband and I wouldn't have been able to write my novels without also having to teach.  I feel my novels are important examinations of what values and practices we left behind as a society in that "vast cemetery of forgetting" (MIlan Kundera.)  Take away my doctor husband and I wouldn't have been able to practice my community organizing skills learned in Johnson's War on Poverty and SDS' initiatives to stop the War in Vietnam and bring our soldiers home. I have applied these skills for the last thirty years in the poor rural area we live in on the NY/PA border.  Take away my doctor husband and I would be trying to live on less than $1000/month in social security, might become a burden on my daughters as my health deteriorated, given the capitalist-imposed fraying safety net for the poor, widowed, orphaned, returning vet, and undereducated and underemployed of all stripes. 

People say: give yourself more credit!  But life has a way of pulling us along on its tides, surprising us when we are marooned on the shores of being elder in a society that doesn't value its elders.

Oh yes, I likely would have found a way.  I have my education, the broadening experience of travel, my core values from radicalization in the early Sixties, fermented in a nutritious brew in the counterculture, values too strong to be coopted by my decade of making a living and building a resume while a single mom.

Diggerbread calls upon us to magnetize around those values which we have been practicing and refining all our adult lives.  We are proposing a Third Act for those of us who forged our common values in our youth as a First Act, who went out into the world and applied them in broader contexts as a Second Act.

For many, whose names we honor, the mere act of recognizing the immensity of what we had set ourselves "counter" to, required some pain relief to go on.  Deaths from overdoses of heroin in particular claimed many of our best and brightest, while the War in Vietnam and drive-by shootings in the inner city and wholesale incarceration claimed more. Alcoholism and despair on pitifully poor reservations, the privations of the elders reduced to witnessing the wholesale destruction of their sons and daughters...I could go on and on.

We have come through that Second Act in which we had to fight the Enemy toe-to-toe.  We have come out on the other side, with casualties.  We have to honor our dead, our wounded.  We have to work on restoring the health and wellbeing of those who have paid an unjust bill for their contributions in the Second Act.  (Treyvon's mother!) 

And then we have the privilege of contemplating what is left for our Third Act as our children and their children gather themselves for the next fifteen years, in which time, scientists say, the fate of our homelands, our planet, will have been decided.

We have time to rebalance resources, to take care of each other.

If the Mayans are among the ancient timekeepers we can trust because of their timepiece's duration, we are at the beginning of another b'ak'tun of 134 years.  Next piktun (20 b'ak'tun) will occur on October 13, 4772, by Long Calendar accounting, 2760 years into the future.  Are we capable of demonstrating that we can plan eight generations out like the indigenous peoples of this continent urge?

Neither we nor our children will be alive at the end of the next b'ak'tun in 2146.  But our great grandchildren will be, just as we are here as spokespersons for our great grandparents who struggled through the years of the Civil War and early Petroleum Age.

Calendars imply the possibility of improvement, of moving social change forward to the new dream that Thomas Berry has urged us to articulate.

In the next fifteen years, the potential energy of our coming together again, may have generated an evolved set of living principles as powerful as "free", as potent as watershed and fibershed ar proving to be as units of organizing.  We have to give ourselves permission to generate fresh philosophies for action in our perilous times, building on the old ones from the First Act...but not using the old ones as creeds to bind us from considering actions we experimented with and refined in the Second Act.  We are the products of both our First Acts and our Second Acts. 

Pharaoh!  (Our own hierophants living in our brains and our histories of ourselves, our critics, our fearful selves, our reptilian brains.)
Set us free!-- to discover the next thing, to become that thing and model it for the larger culture. 

The next fifteen years may be all we elders have of productive contribution to society in our own limited lifetimes.  Let's spend that largesse together, freely, without stint, without cropping our own momentum. Do we trust ourselves enough to continue forward together?

Humanifesto #2

Autumn equinox 2009

My grandson Rowan is weeping.
I wonder: Am I too late to this wake?

We’re not going to make it, I suddenly realize.
My grandson, nine years old and a nature buff, recently spent a half day weeping over a similar realization.

My optimism vanished about a week ago when I opened my mail from Reserve America, our booking agent to State and National Parks, and found a coupon for buying DEET.

To protect myself from bug bites when I am in the wilderness.

Our booking agent representing me, selling us passes to nature, our rivers, our forests--Oh drop the drama, Destiny!—are pimping heavy chemicals for Dow, Monsanto, whichever one it is...

No one’s going to read a rant, Destiny, so shape up. What purpose is it going to serve for you to fall into unredeemable depression? Unless I want to be preaching to the choir, I had better explain.

DEET goes into the environment and rips at the web of life with both hands.

DEET goes into my body and the bodies of those
near and dear to me—that grandson who had the veils torn
from his eyes at 9—and lives in our flesh. HFEN (Health Funders Environmental Network) reports over 125 chemicals in our flesh that don’t belong there, carcinogens from flame retardants to derivatives of plastic products.
The miracles of chemistry are killing us.

(Is that a rant? Depends on what you know.)

Our government requires that all mattresses sold in the US
be sprayed with flame retardant, a powerful proven carcinogen
that is one of the major chemicals found in our bodies.
Plastics derivatives have also colonized our flesh. Pthalates to soften teething rings, nipples and rubber duckies, along with estrogen mimickers in our shampoo, bubble bath and beauty products, not only poison our flesh but have also reduced the sperm count of our grandsons and sons by half compared
to that of our grandfathers. They’ve counted. This is fact.
Do the research yourself. This is the age of Google.

The cynicism of the ehemical companies dazzles. Then depresses.
How do we stop them?

A male moth works his way upwind on the trail of his ancient prerogative, his obligation to his species, following molecules of scent pumped out by his female, the very definition of species. He encounters instead a molecule of DEET, subsidized (pimped!) by our State and National Parks booking agent.

Several years ago I visited one of our continent’s fabled wilderness area, Algonquin Park in Canada. The night sky spectacle is still playing, above the Canadian wilderness, though I haven’t seen it this way since childhood, innumerable stars of every magnitude, a sky blazing with activity. No queen’s diadem comes close. On this night, packs of wolves howled to each other from proximate hills. Flocks of loons called, in haunting counterpoint.

My (then) sister-in-law, a sentimental woman, brought a bag of nuts to attract the local rodent population, perhaps to eat out of her hand. It began to dawn on me slowly. The blueberries that covered the island were ripe...and untouched. No little creatures came out to play with Snow White. Our chemical-based way of life had destroyed all life on the island, so remote we had to portage twice to reach it.

My nephew, an expert fisherman, couldn’t even get a nibble. Acid rain?

When I pointed this out, family members hypothesized: that perhaps a wolf had crossed the ice this winter and eaten all the small creatures. Perhaps a wolf did.

The theories about where our frogs have gone, what has flattened our honeybee populations have finally given way to a simple fact, everything else, being downstream, is a side effect:
We are poisoning the frogs and bees. And ourselves.

The chemical companies are winning, my friends.
Today I am feeling a bit more optimisitic. Call it denial. Tomorrow I will say the chemical companies have won.
While we have made our little gestures to save ourselves and save the other species and the planet, the profit imperatives of the chemical companies are winning the day.
My weeping grandson has the ill fortune to understand.
We have lost.

Those straight lines along fencelines the chemical companies have taught our farmers and ranchers to spray with herbicide? —nice straight lines marking our roadside with blasted dead plants? Lodging in the flesh of the sprayer, the animals, the farm workers, the farmer’s family, neighbors...

Chemical companies have convinced our food producers to lace their products with chemicals to gain benefits they desire like shelflife and for those qualities market researchers have found we consumers desire: chewiness, seedlessness, At what cost those seedless watermelons?

The chemical companies have convinced our highway departments that a blasted verge along our highways is necessary to our way of life.

This spring, during the recession and before the pump of government revitalization dollars back into our “infrastructure,” (the highway departments being the ones with ready-to-build projects, “green jobs,”) wildflowers bloomed along our highways again. The cost of keeping an army of poison sprayers and mowers gave way to allowing the meadows of wildflowers to present their annual procession of beauty and aliveness, the web of life with honeybees and moths and little mammals... (oh can it, Destiny! Nobody listens to these poetic flights anymore.)

Nobody listens anymore, perhaps because there is no silence left to listen in.

In New York State, the lands bordering our local interstate (an oxymoron,) I-86 as well as I-90, presented highway travelers with the glories of the seasons again, an annual procession of wildflowers hosting the honeybees, yes the web of life, get on with it, pleasing the eye at least while we rushed by at 70 mph, spraying noise and pollutants into the air. And yet resilient nature still stands up to the assault of the combustion engine. It’s the slow death versus the fast death.

Bring in the poisons, the all-out assault, results we can see.

Once stimulus money flowed to the state highways department, the I-90 barbers, butchers and sprayers of poison returned to business as usual. The ribbon of life lining I-90 this summer
has been reduced to blackened stubble. I-86, more provincial, has to wait in line apparently. The return of the mowing and spraying schedule on the Southern Tier Expressway around Olean and Bath has made only a small dent in nature’s profusion. Only a few counties--more fortunate than others--have been empowered to reduce meadow to stubble.

Hey it’s just my job, lady.

The tiny townships can flex their muscles again, spraying whatever it is Dow and Monsanto are pushing onto our rural roadsides in ditches that drain into our rivers and lodge—firmly—in our flesh and in our childrens’ flesh.

Name names, Destiny! Old River Road along the Chemung River in both Chemung and Tioga Counties, NY, lined with withered browned blasted plant life. And what of the fish, the bees and moths,the small mammals and reptiles?

This early summer, in California, what did I find walking out at the tip of Pt. Reyes National Seashore, out past the heritage dairies, past thousands of acres of organic pasture, the yellow lupine in
full bloom, filling the air with its honeyed scent? In two hours, hiking over five miles lined with wild flowering shrubs, I saw one honeybee. One.

Even my friends and family make excuses: You don’t know what you’re seeing. It was the rains. The drought. Leave it to the experts.

Denial.

Go on, give them faces, name another of the places where death is being sown. On Cole Road, outside of Northeast PA, I watched Eden Roc Farms spray their nice straight fencelines. The local golfcourse. All good wellmeaning people. Blameless. Brainwashed by Dow. Poisoning their families’ and my flesh.

Down the road in Findley Lake, Mina Township, my brother’s esplanade of fifty Scotch pines, planted forty years ago, dying from “an environmental insult” (Chautauqua County Soil and Water District’s verdict.) Like salting the roads. Like spraying the roadside verge with poison. Along a road that was dirt until a decade ago. Thirteen of them dead and the rest going, a full assault now underway on their weakened state by fungi and borers, bringing down what has already been reaped.

I found purslane to harvest for my salads along the road in rural Mina Township. Two weeks later when I came back for another handful, they had been blasted, along with everything else growing in the ditch. The landowner, my neighbor, threatened by my foraging a handful of salad in the roadside ditch proximate to his acreage? The township doing due diligence against weeds on a tiny strip whose destruction started there and ended 100 yards along?

I’m ready to become an eco-terrorist.
Here, George Bush had it right with his wacky pronunciation: terre-ists. Terra for earth. Where I live, terra firma. Isn’t being an eco-terre-ist better than being terminally depressed?

Won’t my grandson feel better when his own children are weeping (...that they will never see a frog, that lightening bugs have winked out, that the apple tree doesn’t bear apples anymore, the honeybees gone...) to know that his parents and grandparents marched into WalMart and Walgreen’s and Safeway and confiscated the DEET, the plastic nookies and nipples and hauled them where, Destiny? (You’re ranting again.)

Into the landfill?
Into the ocean?
Into a sealed lead container in each of our basements? Into a hole in the backyard?
To the toxic recycling centers...who put it where?

How can we wake up from this nightmare of the petroleum age and its lethal byproducts?
Did the discovery of oil unleash viral capitalism?
Or are they coincident?

The vision! The products! Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce: The Modern Age!
Too many of us still labor under the illusion that our world, our personal space, is inviolate at the borders of our skin, that nothing enters or escapes that we don’t allow.
My own husband, whose skin reacts savagely to insect bites, buys and uses DEET which I throw away as quickly as he buys it. He sniffs at the plant-based Buzz-Off I buy.

If my husband doesn’t get it, how can I expect anyone to get it?

What you do effects me, I want to scream. Scrap PC correctness. It’s just getting in the way, making divisions between hipsters, tree huggers, rednecks, loggers, the suits. We’re all in denial.

What is the appropriate response to my grandson’s tears, to the certainty of his children’s tears?
In the face of rampant cancers?

Terminal depression? Terminal militancy? Terminal, my little voice whispers to me.

What are you going to do?

Like Rowan, I weep.

I’m getting ready to get arrested for this, just to get your attention.

Why this is personal to me I have multiple chemical sensitivities. The canary in our mine,
I suffer disproportionately from proximity to pesticides, solvents, burning plastics.

When the burgeoning chemical industry got going, I was a child. The adults who cared for me inflicted all the miraculous products of the era upon me: nose drops, Exlax, hair permanents. No modern kitchen could be without aluminum cookware.

Caracinogens had not even entered the common parlance. Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in September of 1962. My mother regularly sprayed the patio before dinner with Raid. My father died of cancer at age 46; my mother at 60. Our oldest brother, the family’s “certified” poison sprayer, at 60. My sister and her husband went to school in Niagra Falls, close by Love Canal. Three of their four children were born with life-threatening anomalies.

What is mysterious here is why we don’t get it, yet.
And when we do get it, why we continue to put up with it.

Yes, the chemicals industry is a multiheaded hydra, with a highly profitable franchise in every aspect of our lives.
I once infiltrated the food, beverage and consumer goods industries with enlightened self-interest, to support my children as a single mom, and to see how the chemicals industry had wound itself into our consumer products. Perhaps, I naively imagined, to defuse it.

Expect my report on my years in the food industry soon, to join the reports of others describing it, with the goal of unraveling the deadly investment both the chemical industry and the multinational corporations have in our food system. Perhaps we can pursue a goal of returning to a relationship with our food that has only lapsed in the past fifty to one hundred years.

That’s what I think most days. Is it denial? Because other days, I think only that they have won. Is this a reality I can live with? Can you?

Humanifesto

is an occasional publication
produced to influence the way you think, my dear friends, family and neighbors.

Please enter into a dialog with me.

Humanifesto #1

Autumn equinox, 2008 A Humanifesto

To those of my friends and family who are still undecided about this US Presidential election of 2008.

I believe that your vote in this election will determine the future of this country and the planet.

What is coming up is not just a vote between two political parties but between two distinct ways-of-life that currently divide our country into two warring halves, not unlike the time just before our Civil War nearly 150 years ago, or the time of our Revolutionary War in which 1/3 of the population was for the rule of King George, 1/3 for the risks of freedom and independence, and 1/3 undecided. Sound familiar?

I’ll typify the two ways-of-life with these phrases: the “I’ve got mine and I’m going to defend my right to get more” way-of-life (the way we HAVE been conducting ourselves) and the “evolving into being more human way-of-life and encouraging others” way of life.

The “I’ve got mine” way-of-life has proven in the last eight years that it doesn’t work in our time and in this place. The “free hand of capitalism”—with its unregulated greed and corruption, often set up by the earlier Dem/Rep administrations, e.g. Clinton and Reagan—has resulted in a host of plagues: from the drill-drill-drill like there’s no tomorrow philosophy, to the American-the- Global-Bully philosophy, to the “benefit the most wealthy and the corporations and it will trickle down to the people” philosophy.

The planet and our people aren’t going to be able to suffer any more of this. Systems—ecosystems (including water and air, inalienable human rights), financial systems,. housing, public health (cancer clusters from toxins)--are already collapsing.

Many of you have heard me say that perhaps it will be best if the global financial systems collapses, if the petroleum-based transportation systems become unaffordable, if our chemical-based food systems collapse. Then we’ll be forced to live off the land again, in communities that are at a human scale, within walking, bicycling. and donkey-cart distance.

We might have a shot at becoming natives in our home watersheds. If we return to local rule, will we become cooperating communities or will we guard the boundaries of our property with shotguns? Will we hoard or will we give our excess production to the weaker members of our communities, the elderly, the children, the disabled?

I can imagine downsides to this scenario. A collapse of our global economy could aggravate our fearfulness, lack of compassion and stifle our collective vision. The attendant suffering that would accompany a worldwide collapse of the industrial way-of-life would be gruesome both to witness and experience.

The corporate-government cabal (particularly the greedy, “I have mine...and I have yours!” way-of-life, runamok capitalism) may be even freer to pursue their dreams of empire and conquest, mining resources and conducting warfare and intimidation from satellites and outer space.

I know this lies behind the fear many have of gun control. If a totalitarian government takes over this country and the planet, how will we defend ourselves if we don’t have an armed local militia? In our country’s past, we have faced this serious concern, often with disastrous results (local posses after the Civil War, for instance.)

What’s the possibility we could have a totalitarian government in our lifetime? Frankly, I believe this to be one of the grave possibilities at stake from the consequences of this election. Once significant time passes, and this window of closes, as our freedoms are eroded in the name of national security, the military and corporate interests will continue to consolidate their power. This scenario— freedom fighters in the countryside and a totalitarian government in control—as sci-fi as it seems today, could become reality in the near-term future. For now, we still have a chance to turn back the forces that consolidate power to themselves, a chance to return power to the people. There are those who think this assessment is too optimistic, that we, a manipulated and fearful population, have already lost our freedom. Many credible scientists think that we are already living on a planet that is dying, slowly but surely.

I suspect that many who are against gun control are those who may want to defend themselves from their neighbors, if the going gets tough. THIS is what I am calling the way-of-life that must pass if we are to move on: the fear of each other, of our neighbors. The “I’ve got mine” and the need to defend it at any cost way-of-life will kill us all. The fear they have fed us feeds paranoia. Is it too late to imagine peace, as John Lennon suggested?

The alternate way-of-life being proposed, that I will call a more human way-of- life, holds a lot of unknowns, much as the Jews freed from Pharaoh faced the

uncertainty of a free life in the desert compared to the certainty of being fed and housed while enslaved. To me, it’s understandable that a good half of the country are fearful of an unknown future, preferring a status quo that harms them to the uncertainty of freedom. Of choice.

I have to ask: would it be possible to have some compassion for each other rather than villain-izing each other? We are all one family.

In the 2000 election, I was among those who said there was too little difference between Republics and Democrats. I voted Green Party for Nader, putting the election of Al Gore at risk.

Eight years ago, the political process appeared to me to corrupt those involved absolutely. During the 2000 campaign, where was the Al Gore who rose up after he lost the election to make us aware of the accelerating pace of climate change? If he had been elected president, would that Al Gore, champion of our planet, have been able to surface? Not if his conduct during the campaign speaks to the fetters the political process puts on candidates in the presidential race and after, on the presidency. I and others felt it was time to get a measure of those who thought outside of the party lines, a growing minority.

I justified the riskiness of my vote for Nader this way: a Bush presidency might snap citizens out of their apathy and feelings of helplessness and despair. That for ordinary people to witness what Bush and Rove and Cheney would do with a free hand might move things along in the direction of reform.

Who knew? In retrospect, I don’t think I could be that coldblooded again. Independent sources estimate that one million Iraqi men, women and children have died. These Iraqis, plus our own dead and maimed—all mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, sons and daughters—are human casualties from a war launched on deliberate lies (no WMD, a red herring), fear (fanning the fires after 9/11), and yes, greed (hegemony over the oil fields.)

The evidence is there: they had this planned well before 9/11, back in the administration of Bush I. All they need to do what they want is the slimmest pretext.

And so while important differences may have existed between Dems and Reps as they were in 2000, those differences are falling apart. The differences that divide us now as a country run really deep between two ways-of-life, two visions of the future.

I’ve typified the two ways-of-life with these phrases: the “I’ve got mine and I’m going to defend my right to get more” way-of-life (the way we HAVE been conducting ourselves) and the “evolving into being more human way-of-life and encouraging others” way of life. (Yes, scary and uncertain.) I stand behind my assertion that the two political parties don’t mean what they used to anymore.

The Reps’ charge that Dems only want to tax and spend is laughable after the last eight years. The entire cost of this mismanaged war in Iraq has been funded on money we’ve borrowed from China and other countries. Where is the cost of the bailout of Wall Street coming from?—from us, the taxpayers we are told, to the tune of twice the cost of the war in Iraq. How do I define a mismanaged war?— not enough body armor, poorly equipped vehicles, gross corruption among the corporations/mercenaries in Iraq, poor VA services supporting returning vets and their families, repeated mandated tours of duty.

The Reps’ charge that Dems favor Big Government would be laughable if I were that cynical. Bush and his cronies have consolidated power in the presidency to the point that he could declare a state of national emergency and suspend all our rights if they were able to engineer another 9/11 before the election. I am holding my breath until after the election is decided, praying that they do not take this route to consolidate power in their empire/regime. They have set up the legal precedent for it, which we have allowed.

How do I define a mismanaged economy? No/little regulation on corporations and financial institutions, a “mortgage crisis” in which they say millions of Americans will and are losing their homes, A dollar not worth much and staggering debt. (Put Bush on the dollar, someone quipped.) We WILL be paying this bill and our children and their children, for Wall’s Street’s failure (greed) and the cost of Iraq. And not just in dollars.

We’ve got deeper shared values than the traditional divide between the two political parties: children, rivers, forests, clean air and water...the list goes on.

I don’t want to hear another Dem or Rep debate the value of hunting and fishing. We may be depending on those skills to eat and hope that the environmental rapists (“I’ve got mine...and yours!”) have left us with enough clean water and deep forest for games and fisheries to be responsibly managed to give us some protein.

I don’t want to hear another Dem or Rep debate the best way to keep our current food systems going, one that—thro NAFTA and globalization—has destroyed other local food cultures around the world with our subsidized commodities being dumped into local economies with no court of appeal. In the World Court at the Hague, “free trade rules!”

Is there anyone out there who still trusts the free hand of capitalism (and yes, I tar Clinton and Bush with the same brush) after recent displays of the clumsiness of that free hand, from eroding our labor rights including gainful employment with wages, reasonable vacation and benefit...to the destruction of local economies both in America and around the world?

The veil is off, revealing the corruption of the chemicals’ (petroleum) industry in its insidious infiltration of our food systems. Consumer protections that European countries provide to their citizens have been eroded by a bought USDA. (Where else but in the land of the free hand of capitalism could consumer protection testing be funded by the companies that produce the products being tested? And tested by our universities!)

Our childrens’ flesh holds over 100 types of chemicals that don’t belong there, including flame retardants (all mattresses sold in this country must be coated with this carcinogen,) as well as various plastic derivatives and estrogen mimickers like BPA and phthalates, found in baby bottles, rubber duckies and shampoos. Where is our outrage?

We have to take responsibility from bringing this to a halt now before it is too late. In the last 150 years, both communism and capitalism have shown themselves to be, in their pure undiluted state, failed experiments, with terrible costs to humanity and the planet.

Haven’t our brains grown subtle enough to envision some mix of the two, along with some wisdom from those who were/are native on each continent and watershed, to make a commitment to peace, to compassion, to enlightened self- and-other interest, to producing enough to take care of the physically weakest among us, children, disabled and elderly? These are the ones who have built and will build our past, our present and our future. (Have you seen the estimates of disabled coming home from Iraq?)

Isn’t it time we grew away from our terrible experiments with primitive technologies, from our two-party political system masquerading as democracy...to exporting our petroleum-based culture via corporate giants like Monsanto and Rand and Cargill...to allowing our food, water and air to be compromised, sold off to profit the short-sighted “I’ve got mine...and I’ve got yours!”

Isn’t it time we grew up as humans, time to throw off the unregulated greed of capitalism and the totalitarian excesses of fascism and communism? Are you still willing to forfeit your rights in order to be “taken care of?” Are we awake enough now to believe that can participate in our government, whether local or national, by voting, by staying informed, by integrating our political life into our daily life, by letting those we’ve elected know what we want—without fear?

We have breezed uncomfortably close to letting (what Eisenhower warned against) “the military-industrial complex” take over. We have this opportunity to vote for becoming more human, for evolving with harmony into the life of this planet and the other beings who live here.

I understand that we have had fear spoon fed to us. It has served our rulers well. They have grown fat off our fear.

I appreciate that letting go of the way-of-life that has made the gears of our culture turn for the past 150 years or more is frightening.

Can we move away from our petroleum-dependency, to technologies based on local weather and climate and the untapped renewable resources given to us there? Yes we can.

Can we move way from being the Big Stick on the planet, to reinvest in our own country, to invest in our children’s education, our aging infrastructure, our vast forests and waterways? Can we do this without becoming isolationists, without seeing all resources as exploitable, as our God-given right? Can we move away from dominating the planet, as we dominated women and people of color? Can we study the web of life and take our place in it with respect, with responsibility? Yes we can and you know we can!

They say we have allies in the spirit world, that an opportune time has come to evolve again. And we must.

If we are going to be conservative, let’s conserve our forests and streams. Let’s revitalize and empower local government. (Gender parity on boards!) Let’s conserve the health of our farmlands.

If we’re going to be responsible investors, let’s be like our Native American forebearers and invest in the next eight generations. (Look at what the “I’ve got mine...and I’ve got yours!” way-of-life has left for the generations to come.)

If we’re going to be risk-takers, let’s step away from this old way-of-life together- -the industrial model of domination, the petroleum era, the unbridled capitalism, totalitarianism, imperialism and war—to a future that is unknowable, yes, and a little frightening, together.

Let’s move together with peace and harmony and compassion for our fellow man. This is the only great experiment that is left for us to choose: to see if we can choose to evolve to become more human.

I deliver this humanifesto as a matriot. A matriot is someone who cares for the health, education, and wellbeing of every person in her/his country...and the world. (Google poet Fran Adler who coined the term.) Thanks to Barack Obama for insisting that one can disagree with the current government and love one’s country .

With great love and faith in our humanity, Destiny Kinal