Let's not waste this crisis!!!

 Long, long, ago, in a country far, far, away, I seem to recall lending my young daughter my copy of Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals. I may need to ask for it back unless one or more of the strongly worded letters from a Democrat actually has an effect. I'm tired of reading extended statements purporting to describe things like "I study the resistance against the Nazis. Here’s what the US left can learn from it," that seem very short on substantive, relevant, strategies and / or tactics.

sunrise, dawn of a new era

Photo by J. Harrington

There's a range of opinion regarding whether the advice "Never let a crisis go to waste" should be attributed to Saul, Winston Churchill, or someone else. Whoever was the source, I think it's advice we should follow these days and do our best to dismantle the neoliberal, global capitalist economy while also establishing the Rights of Nature all over the Earth. Mother Nature seems to have caught on to the ad tag line "You can pay me now or you can pay me later." Meanwhile, governments and regimes in power now are doing their best to toady up to extractive economy corporate donors so owned (or rented) politicians can continue to scam their constituents. (Remember the Howard Beale line from Network: "'I'm as mad as hell and I'm not gonna take this anymore!'")

We don't want to fix a broken system that needs to be replaced, we want to replace it. Here's some options to consider as you think about what we need next:

• Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy (CASSE)
  
  
• Schumacher Center For New Economics
  
  
•  Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature (GARN)
  
  
• Green Amendments For The Generations

Since I seem to be on a kick of citing old sayings these days, let's also remember this one: "The best defense is a good offense." It fits nicely with Bucky Fuller's observation: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

On the Fifth Day

By Jane Hirshfield

On the fifth day

the scientists who studied the rivers

were forbidden to speak

or to study the rivers.

The scientists who studied the air

were told not to speak of the air,

and the ones who worked for the farmers

were silenced,

and the ones who worked for the bees.

Someone, from deep in the Badlands,

began posting facts.

The facts were told not to speak

and were taken away.

The facts, surprised to be taken, were silent.

Now it was only the rivers

that spoke of the rivers,

and only the wind that spoke of its bees,

while the unpausing factual buds of the fruit trees

continued to move toward their fruit.

The silence spoke loudly of silence,

and the rivers kept speaking

of rivers, of boulders and air.

Bound to gravity, earless and tongueless,

the untested rivers kept speaking.

Bus drivers, shelf stockers,

code writers, machinists, accountants,

lab techs, cellists kept speaking.

They spoke, the fifth day,

of silence.

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