Activist Burnout and the GOOD NEWS

Ok, back at the Pink House, having taken Ann Wright to the airport and gotten her opinions on how leaving Iraq is the best thing we can do for them; on Hugo Chavez and how his recent shutdown of opposition TV is bad for his international image; on her choice to become a peace activist after 29 years of military service; and on how Adam Kokesh of IVAW is facing a revocation of his honorable discharge status because of his anti-war activities and disrespect to superior officers, and how PTSD is affecting his actions.

At that comment I also think of Cindy Sheehan, who announced today that she has resigned as the “face” of the Peace Movement, in part because of criticism from the groups and people who should be on her side (my interpretation, not Cindy’s words). Commentary in the Pink House mentioned Cindy also having been affected PTSD—but also, Cindy has organizing and protesting and confronting and speaking truth to power almost nonstop since her son Casey died in Iraq 3 years ago. She has to be burnt out. And this put me in mind of a young man I met yesterday who walked with us and Nick Kimbrell on the last leg of Nick’s journey from Charlottesville to DC in support of bringing the troops home.

Jeff of World Can’t Wait is 19 years old and angry. I accused him of being cynical, but perhaps that was harsh. His anger is certainly justified—when I first got active (back in the Reagan years, which seemed so frightening then but now in retrospect seem like the “kinder, gentler” days) I was angry too. I didn’t see much hope for the future. I was furious about US interventions throughout Central and South America (it would be 10 years before I learnt about Allende in Chile and Lumumba in Zaire) and the fact that despite Roe vs Wade and a clear 2/3rd majority in favor of choice, we were still fighting that battle when there were so many more that needed out attention.

This kind of anger and energy can be good if channeled into positive action. But (with the hindsight of wisdom) I realize that I burnt out being so angry all the time, never allowing the pleasure of enjoying small gains and taking pride in small victories. It was never enough, the voice in my head always said, “Gotta do more, gotta do more”—kind of like the house in D.H. Lawrence’s, “Rockinghorse Winner”: “More money, more money.”

Now, I try to take time to realize and celebrate every victory, even the tiny ones, even the ones that seem so insignificant in the face of so much carnage and horror. The problem is, I often don’t remember to do it until confronted by someone like Jeff, who—no matter what I offered him as a positive step, had a reason why it wasn’t good enough. He’s right. It’s not good enough. It’s never going to be good enough until we have peace and justice for all people—and for the Earth as well. I returned to the US after living most of the last 15 years abroad not because I like living in the US better—I don’t, though there are definitely some wonderful things about this country that I miss when I live abroad; more about that in another missive—but because as a US citizen, even if I’m not living here, what this country does is my responsibility. What this country does reaches almost ever crack and crevice in the world—so not only is there no escaping it, there’s also no forgetting it. In order to live here, be active, and not have regular nervous breakdowns, however, I have to constantly remind myself of the positive changes that have occurred in my lifetime—even, shockingly enough, during the Bush administration. Here are a few:

• When I was 19, if someone told me that in 2007 the two leading candidates for president would be a woman and a black man, I would never have believed them. For the first time in my life, not to mention those of my parents’ and preceding generations’, Dr. King’s dream that people would be judged “not by the color of [their] skin (or their gender) but by the content of [their] character” has been actualized. Of course, that content is still questionable. But the fact that the vast majority of US people have got beyond color and gender is something of a miracle.
  
• The most powerful diplomat in the US government is a black woman. I thought having Madeline Albright as secretary of state was an accomplishment (no matter how much I disagreed with her perspective), but Condoleeza Rice is another miracle. As a feminist and a Southerner, I admire and am proud of her, although I disagree with everything she says and the administration she works for. I don’t believe that it’s better to have a woman in the job if she doesn’t do a good job—but I do believe that it’s fabulous to have women in public positions, in order to show little girls what they can do with their lives, and little boys that it’s OK for women to be powerful.
  
• The next person in line for the presidency after those two war criminals is a woman. If we can get congress to act on what are without a doubt some of the greatest crimes committed by the executive branch of the US government in history, we could even have a woman president.
• There has been a sudden, monumental shift in mainstream attitudes toward the environment and climate change. I had despaired of this ever happening; it’s my primary concern as a progressive because, hey, even if we stop all the wars and eradicate racism, sexism, homophobia, child abuse, poverty and disease, it doesn’t matter if we can’t breathe the air and drink the water or don’t have habitable land. Thank you, [legitimate President] Al Gore, and while I don’t know what kind of president you would’ve been, your work over the last couple of years is invaluable, not just to this country but to the whole world.

• And last but certainly not least, the technological revolution has made activism and organizing on a global scale not only possible, but unavoidable. I love Bob Geldof, and Band Aid and Live Aid were the greatest events of my generation, but I’m really fucked off with him about his snide remarks about Al Gore and Live Earth. This is an essential cause (see above) and, like poverty, it is a moral issue, not a political one. Raising consciousness and giving hope are absolutely imperative in these scary, dark times; and Geldof does the organizers of this event a grave disservice. Imagine what Live Aid could’ve accomplished in 1985 with the Internet? I don’t know all the details of Gore’s plan for Live Earth, but as the “inventor” of the Internet, I’m sure that the Information Superhighway will be packed with travelers for this event.

There are hundreds, thousands, perhaps millions more bits of good news here and there that we can all indulge in from time to time. So at the risk of being called Pollyanna (I have always loved the name, though), I will say before you burn out, indulge in a little good news—remember, even activists cannot live on rage alone!

kk

PS A new book out by one of my heroes, Riane Eisler, is The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economy is a great treatise on the things that are or could be (with just a little help and attention) good news and progress. Author of The Chalice and the Blade, which challenges dominator (some might call “patriarchal”) social structures as the only model, and offers up another possible—and in many places and times existing—structure, the partnership model. The Real Wealth of Nations further analyzes the potential for and current movement toward this more humane, more sustainable, and ultimately only social structure for a viable future.

What are Femifesta?

Femifesta? OK, the reason for the name is not rabid “PC-ness” (b/c that sort of pedantic PC-ness gets on my tits as much as anyone’s). Although I do believe in finding and using gender neutral terms for every possible title—fire-fighter, police officer, post- or mail-carrier, chair or chair person (I prefer facilitator or leader, however, as no person is a chair)—the “man” of manifesto is not from the masculine noun but from the root “manu” meaning by hand. So one of the things this Blog is going to do is define words. I begin with defining what I mean by Femifesta (plural of femifesto, because it is not one, but many ideas that make up my femifesta) …

According to my the Miriam-Webster online dictionary, manifesto means "a written statement declaring publicly the intentions, motives, or views of its issuer". The basis for my creation is, of course, Marx’s Communist Manifesto, which deconstructed many issues of the modern world and its economies, but unfortunately ignored what may be the single most pressing element: ie, unpaid labor of women, which results from the patriarchal value of power as the primary value of society. This is not the “power” of personal empowerment, but rather power over, meaning control through fear and violence, as opposed to value and respect for life, pleasure and happiness. It’s true that the US Declaration of Independence was the first document to recognize “pursuit of happiness” as an inalienable human right—just over 200 years ago, it’s a new concept on an evolutionary stage, one that we really have not had time to get our heads around. A shame, really, considering that biologists believe that the modern dog may have evolved from the wolf in just one (human) generation (“Dogs That Changed the World,” Nature two-part special, PBS, 22 and 29 April, 2007), but nevermind.

In ignoring the unpaid labor of women around the world—and regardless of class, women always do more work than men; of course, women of “upper” or leisure classes do less work relative to women of lower classes or even perhaps men of lower classes. But within their own class, and as a class of their own, women do the vast majority (UN Council on the Status of Women says 2/3 to 3/4) of all the work in the world. That being the larger half of the human population and doing the majority of the work does not translate, in a free-market economy, to owning the majority of the wealth; or in a collective economy, to controlling—or at least leading—the decision-making process, is neither logical nor just. From a supply and demand economics point of view, women supply the majority of necessary labor for the world—from the 1st world to the 4th world—to function. From a centralized economic point of view—from those according to their ability, to those according to their needs—women also have proven much more “able” than men, to multi-task, to provide sustenance, to nurture, to educate, to motivate, to manage, to lead and to cooperate, than men. I do not argue that these traits and abilities are either biological or environmental, only that, as the world exists today, they are generally true.

Consequently, from both production and service point of view, women should be valued more than men as essential to society—even leaving by our ability to reproduce virtually on our own, thanks to artificial means; or even literally, by parthenogenesis, although that has not yet been shown to work for humans.

Of course, we are not. That is because, as Marilyn French argues, the modern, patriarchal world values power over life, control over pleasure. If we as a species—or even as western society, or the nation of the USA—could shift our value system—and it would be a dramatic shift indeed—it would transform the way the world “as we know it.” A male friend of mine, no friend to feminism, once said to me, “If men were to express their real feelings, civilization as we know it would collapse.” Hear hear—let’s do whatever we can to bring about that collapse. As another male—not a personal friend, but a friend to the species and to justice—when asked what he thought of “Western Civilisation”, answered, “I think it would be a good idea” (Mohandas Mahatma Gandhi).

So Femifesta will define the ideals, goals, practices and campaigns that I believe necessary to create a society where “pursuit of happiness” gets as fair a go as any other guiding principle in the modern world. And I am hopeful (although perhaps I too have been brainwashed by too many years of “trickle down” rhetoric) that if Western society can find learn to value pursuit of happiness and pleasure over power and control, that our corresponding release of fear and anxiety will result in a determination, even need, to help the rest of the world achieve the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Nor do I think it can really be a one-sided venture—many, many poor societies in the world have many people who, despite poverty and minimal standards of living, exhibit elements of humanity and nurturing for their fellows quite unknown in Western society. We, who have all the money and “stuff”, have not the compassion of millions in India, China, Indonesia, and small tribes of individuals all over the world whose generosity and openness to Westerners has, in general (except for in a few isolated aberrations), diminished very little despite 500 years of its being devalued, debased, and used as rationalization for genocide throughout the southern hemisphere.