End of the lie

SUBHEAD: I am the child of a culture driven by a tendency toward destruction, as is everyone I know and love.

 By Aleigha on 15 July 2011 for Nature Bats Last -  
(http://guymcpherson.com/2011/07/end-of-the-lie)

 
Image above: Teen anime character lies under a tree. From (http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/295/suzumiyaharuhinoyuutsues8.jpg).

“… and I can’t take it anymore, Aleigha. That’s why I’m leaving. I’m taking what I can carry on my back and my wife and I’m leaving.”

I think this is the first time he’s addressed me by name. There’s a sense of urgency in his voice that I’ve never heard there before; the weariness and loneliness of a big dreamer. My name suddenly sounds important — heroic even. Full of potential. The name of a hero in an epic novel or history book. Important. Powerful.

Shit.

This is one of those moments isn’t it? The kind that will define you. That shows you how your life could look, if you would dare grow the ovaries to chase something else. One of the moments you can’t back down from.

Mike goes on. He’s really serious. He’s leaving his teaching career to become an organic gardener. He talks about peak oil, WWOOFing, his wife, couch surfing, anthropocentrism and freedom. This is one of those moments. And even though he only talks about how these things have impacted his life, I know that soon, I’ll be as crazy as he is. This is my first lesson in what is said best in a book called Endgame: “You can have the greatest excuse in the world, or you can have the world.” The man in front of me has chosen the former. And me? I’m getting awfully tired of excuses.

This is the first time in my life where a lifestyle in union with the earth seems like a realistic possibility. It is not, however, the first time I’ve considered such a life.

I’ve been a little strange my entire life. To use my father’s words, (and what better way to describe oneself than with the words of thine own creator?) I’ve always a bit of a “hippie.” Not that I was out protesting against big oil at the age of three, but there are dozens of tiny memories of me, hinting at the far left ideologist I would become. Watching Captain Planet, a show about Gaia the environmental super hero and eco-terrorists fighting against companies polluting the planet. Day dreaming of being an anthropologist — although I didn’t know the word yet — taken in by the tribe she was studying.

My first crush and I discussing the horrors of animal abuse during free time in our second grade classroom. My third-grade teacher telling our class that oil was a fossil fuel, explaining that it means that it will eventually run out. Being hopelessly confused about my church being on the side against gay marriage when I was no older than eight or nine. I didn’t talk about these little moments, nor did I bother to explore them too deeply. They were just thoughts, a small part of me no more significant than my love for Disney shows.

And then came high school. Second semester of freshmen year, I would meet Mr. Lance Huffman. He was teaching my Advanced Freshman English class, had an excellent speaking voice and loved to use it. I thought he was the smartest person in the world. He talked about social justice, white privilege, Columbine, the Holocaust, the singularity, and he even occasionally talked about English. Above all things, he taught me to question everything. I never spoke in his class, honestly I found his wisdom a bit intimidating, but he changed me for the better. Put the passing thoughts of my childhood on a more direct course.

Sophomore year I joined our campus’s unity program. My thoughts on the first meeting were literally “I hope they talk about the stuff Huffman used to rant about.” They did. I was still quiet, observing, but I loved every moment.

The club I was in was responsible for a camp called Unitown. It was literally indescribable. I was forced to confront the world as what it was: Terrible and wonderful and complicated. I allowed the movement of social justice to swallow me whole. I met some of the most amazing people I ever have during those few days.

One was a speaker named Calvin Terrell, the camp director who would touch my heart in a way no one else has ever come close to. Sabre, a person who would force me to get over the few bits of remaining Homophobia. But the two that are most relevant to this essay are Mike (we called the teachers by their first names at camp) and Yordano.

So we find ourselves again in our hook. I am a fifteen-year-old questioning my belief in a Christian god — or at least pretending to question my belief in a Christian god. I go to the one adult I know who is an atheist and ask his opinion on the matter –or rather look to him to tell me that it is okay to use my mind in matters of faith. We talk, and somehow reach the topic of Mike’s future. Mike’s got to go home for the day: exit Sliwa.

Enter Yordano. I share with him Mike’s plans, and we relish in the glorious dream of freedom. Over the past year and some months, this young man has become one of the most important in my life. My anam cara, a soul friend capable of awakening the fullness and wonder within me. Mike may have handed me the map to the Rabbit Hole, but Yordano holds me up in Wonderland. Helping me explore this new world as vicariously as a child. Keeping me from imploding on the days where I find my core to be a vacuum, sucking in all of the world pain and certain doom until it begins to suck at my own edges.

The summer between sophomore and junior year and into junior year, I begin to read more than I ever have in my life. Quinn mostly. Ishmael, My Ishmael, The Story of B. Some less radical books on religion, and my first love, social justice. Eventually, after months of pestering from Mike and resistance from me I make my way up to Derrick Jensen. The Culture of Make Believe and Endgame, Volume I.

I find myself in a bit of a slump. The world is a dark and scary place. Our culture is toxic. My family is uninterested in what I have to say on the matter and the only person who’s on my level is two hundred miles away. I’m back in Huffman’s class — I talk now — and I have Mike to combat the feeling of isolation. It helps but it’s not enough.

If I do not find direction soon, I will self destruct. So I look harder than I ever have before and stumble upon something wonderful: Bali’s Green School. I cry at the beauty of the idea, and decide that this is the path I want to take. Until then, college, WWOOFing and a normal teaching career, until I can get away joining the staff in Bali, or somewhere else, at a school for children raised to live in communion with the earth.

It’s a wonderful dream.

But still, I struggle. I am the child of a culture driven by a tendency toward destruction, as is everyone I know and love. I try hating it. I try loving it. I try escaping it. Nothing works. For now, I am stuck here. Here, in this paradox of soft new cloths on a baby, and the enslavement of young women for the sake of affordability. Here in the place between promise of the open road, and the threat of a world inhabitable for my children. Here between the gas tank and the gun.

Paradox.

I love my life. I hate the way I’m living it.

I lay beneath a tree. I do not know its name, so I cannot share it with you. I can tell you though that it is magnificent. I listen as the wind rustles through the leaves. A very beautiful man once told me that this means the tree was whispering.

“Do not deny me, Cousin” I can almost hear. Cousin, if you go back far enough we share a great grandparent somewhere, a simpler plant that would later evolve in one direction toward treedom and animal life in another. “Use me as needed, shelter, paper, company, but do not deny me. Do not deny my right to live upon this earth beside you, Cousin.”

I feel a crawling on my feet. Apparently I am close to some ants. I see this as my cue to stop bothering them. I flick the few that have begun to crawl on me off, remove my sandals and run. Barefoot. Feeling the earth beneath me and wishing it were an accidental clearing rather than a golf course. For now though, it’ll have to do.

I love my life. It’s time to start living better.

• Aleigha is a high-school student by day and radical dreamer by night.
.

The Obama Way

SUBHEAD: If Obama’s presidency succeeds, it will be a testament to what ideology tempered by institutionalism can accomplish. Image above: Cartoon about Obama's character by Tom Tomorrow in This Modern World. From http://www.thismodernworld.com

By Ross Douthat on 26 December 2009 in the New York Times - (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/26/opinion/26douthat.html)

Every presidency is the subject of competing caricatures. But almost a year into his first term, there’s something particularly elusive about Barack Obama’s political identity. He’s a bipartisan bridge-builder — unless he’s a polarizing ideologue. He’s a crypto-Marxist radical — except when he’s a pawn of corporate interests. He’s a post-American utopian — or else he’s a willing tool of the national security state.

The press has churned out a new theory every week, comparing Obama to John F. Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt, to George H. W. Bush and Jimmy Carter — to every 20th-century chief executive, it often seems, save poor, dull Gerald Ford. But none of the analogies have stuck. We’re well into the Obama era, but neither his allies nor his enemies can quite get a fix on exactly what our 44th president really represents.

Obama baffles observers, I suspect, because he’s an ideologue and a pragmatist all at once. He’s a doctrinaire liberal who’s always willing to cut a deal and grab for half the loaf. He has the policy preferences of a progressive blogger, but the governing style of a seasoned Beltway wheeler-dealer.

This is a puzzling combination, for many, because we expect our politicians’ principles to align more neatly with their approach to governing. Our deal-making Machiavels are supposed to be self-conscious “centrists” (think Ben Nelson or Arlen Specter). Our ideological liberals and conservatives are supposed to be more concerned with being right than with being ruthlessly effective.

It’s also puzzling because Obama promised exactly the opposite approach while running for the presidency. He campaigned as a postpartisan healer who would change the cynical ways of Washington — as a foe of both back-room deals and ideology-as-usual. But he’s governed as a conventional liberal who believes in the existing system, knows how to work it and accepts the limitations it imposes on him.

In hindsight, the most prescient sentence penned during the presidential campaign belongs to Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker. “Perhaps the greatest misconception about Barack Obama,” he wrote in July 2008, “is that he is some sort of anti-establishment revolutionary. Rather, every stage of his political career has been marked by an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions rather than tear them down or replace them.”

Both right and left have had trouble processing Obama’s institutionalism. Conservatives have exaggerated his liberal instincts into radicalism, ignoring the fact that a president who takes advice from Lawrence Summers and Robert Gates probably isn’t a closet Marxist-Leninist. The left has been frustrated, again and again, by the gulf between Obama’s professed principles and the compromises that he’s willing to accept, and some liberals have become convinced that he isn’t one of them at all.

They’re wrong. Absent political constraints, Obama would probably side with the liberal line on almost every issue. It’s just that he’s more acutely conscious of the limits of his powers and less willing to start fights that he might lose than many supporters would prefer. In this regard, he most resembles Ronald Reagan and Edward Kennedy. Both were highly ideological politicians who trained themselves to work within the system. Both preferred cutting deals to walking away from the negotiating table.

The upside of this approach is obvious: It gets things done. Between the stimulus package, the pending health care bill and a new raft of financial regulations, Obama will soon be able to claim more major legislative accomplishments than any Democrat since Lyndon Johnson.

The downside, though, is that sometimes what gets done isn’t worth doing. The assumption that a compromised victory is better than no victory at all can produce phony achievements — like last week’s “global agreement” on climate change — and bloated, ugly legislation. And using cynical means to progressive ends (think of the pork-laden stimulus bill or the frantic vote-buying that preceded this week’s Senate health care votes) tends to confirm independent voters’ worst fears about liberal government: that it’s a racket rigged to benefit privileged insiders and a corrupt marketplace floated by our tax dollars.

At the same time, Obama doesn’t enjoy the kind of deep credibility with his base that both Reagan and Kennedy spent decades building. When Kennedy told liberals that a given compromise was the best they could get, they believed him. Whether the issue is health care or Afghanistan, Obama’s word doesn’t carry the same weight.

This leaves him walking a fine line. If Obama’s presidency succeeds, it will be a testament to what ideology tempered by institutionalism can accomplish. But his political approach leaves him in constant danger of losing center and left alike — of being dismissed by independents as another tax-and-spender, and disdained by liberals as a sellout.