I know there's a lot in here, but oof, the cattle truck right after McDonald's, that's a tough one. I listened to an interview yesterday where the woman talked about individual choices that we fail to make aligning with our professed values. It's all so true, and yet at the same time I feel like I'm in a small minority of people who even have the luxury to probe into those questions -- like, if my life were like my parents' life when I was growing up, barely able to feed my kids, I would find it hard to put a smidge of energy into the things I angst about giving up like, say, single-use plastic. Or almonds. And yet it's not like giving those things up isn't important. All our dollars perform political acts. But the system bears down on us hard from many different directions.
Oh, absolutely. Every step is a learning process, too. Every time I go by the dump next to the highway, which is a small mountain, I remember that it was a pit when I was in high school. When I get tired and just want to do what's easy, I remember the dump.
I heard a different interview a couple of years ago in which the person said that she didn't buy a family-farmed, local, totally free-range chicken to feed her family because she was under the impression her choice would immediately change the world. She did it because she wanted her dollars to go into supporting a system that she knew would be better for the world. I liked that perspective.
A lot of folks I know — who are not wrong — respond to discussions like this by pointing out that individual choice is a drop in the bucket compared to legislative and cultural change, and that the latter is where we should spend our energy.
I don't disagree that systemic solutions are needed, but I do question just how effective my personal energy is at creating them.
I can vote, I can write letters, I can write literature, I can talk to folks I know. If I was a different sort of person, I could go to rallies or go to capitols or write laws or lobby or whatever. The thing that drives my commitment to systemic change, though, is being prepared with my own body and mind for that change.
In other words: eating vegetarian (or buying that locally- and family-farmed chicken), et cetera.
And this I am also terrible at, so I appreciate reading and discussing our successes and our failures and our attempts. It reminds me why I care. Sometimes it reminds me TO care.
We can't be perfect. Maybe we can't even (in this culture?) be good. And given that, what can we do? Follow our vocations, maybe, as honestly as we can. Chris, Nia, here you both are doing just that. I admire it.
Thank you, Tara. Honestly, I have largely lost faith in legislative and cultural change in my limited remaining lifetime. I don't think there is a single institution or organization I trust, especially on what we call the "Left," given that is where my values would typically align me. Anyone from that arena who makes any statement about where I "should" spend my energy is grandstanding on a deaf ear, if only because I find the Left, at least the part of it anywhere near the mainstream version of it, to be composed largely of cowardly whiners. All I can do is make my own drop-in-the-bucket choices that allow me to live another day without shooting myself; I think that is the best I can do.
Yeah, one of the things that did eventually ease me off of Facebook was a marked uptick in people telling other people how to feel and what to think. No matter how well-intentioned that is or what "end of the political spectrum" it comes from, there's always the father-who-grew-up-under-Stalin voice in my head that says, "This can lead nowhere good."
I really hear you about the Left. I haven't called myself a progressive for years (because I'm pretty disillusioned with the god we've made of the entire idea of Progress), and Liberal encompasses a lot of that cowardly whining you mentioned. I do plenty of that myself, but I try to do better. So I've been stuck with the political label "Leftist" because I believe all people (including non-human people) should have access to a good home, an education (whatever that means), nutritious food, enough money (or maybe we could get beyond money), etc — and in a very large society, the only way to make sure of that is to have a government actually organized by and for the people.
But then I watch us humans do beautiful things on a small scale, and fail utterly to uphold justice and mercy and equity and all the rest of it at the level of the State. Not to say that we COULD not — but we mostly don't. Ever. Where does this leave "the Left?"
Maybe it's a dead concept. The whole Left-Right thing is just...I don't know, tired? Not answering the important questions anymore, maybe. It's not a spectrum anyway, the way we've tended to think of it: as we've seen with the human fallout around covid-19, at some point "Left" and "Right" horseshoe right over on into each other anyway.
Anyone is definitely welcome to argue otherwise. What am I missing here?
I do tend to call myself liberal or say "my politics lean liberal" in conversations where I feel like someone is about to go off on a rant and I want them to at least know the conversation they're getting into, but my view for a long time (maybe it's the Rianne Eisler influence) has been that it's not a spectrum of politics, but a worldview in which you want to control other people's lives, or you don't. And *how* that manifests. A domination vs. partnership paradigm. Most of our politics still operates within the domination paradigm, so any spectrum within that is limited by the paradigm itself.
Thank you for hammering this home, Chris. What I think, when I read your truth, is of the timeless tragedy of living daily with existential PTSD. This is what European invaders have done to indigenous and enslaved people. The progeny of those Europeans have grown up in their sanitized bubbles, (myself included). They/we need constant reminders to set our minds right. Like a smoking, alcohol, or drug habit, the aquisition of the habit is seamlessly easy. Breaking the habit takes real work and minute-by-minute reminders. I hope we are up to rectifying our continued destructiveness.
That last paragraph reminds me of a Chief Earl Old Person quote that made it into a lot of tributes to him earlier this month: "Help one another out. Uplift each other and if you can protect someone, do it." Feels similar to say that if you can stand up for someone, do it. Who else will? You do it so consistently in what you share and I really admire you for it, Chris. It has really influenced how I show up in my own life, and made me more conscious about who I have a responsibility to stand up for even if I know I'm going to come off as prickly. :)
Heard and acknowledged. You're not wrong. The cow and the hamburger -- ouch. Guns -- agree so much! Mascots? Disgusting. Here in CA Gold Country, our high school mascot is the "Miners," aka the 1849ers who genocided the Nisenan, Maidu, Washoe, Konkow et al, and then fucked up the land beyond belief. But tiny change is coming. The mascot name is up for debate now. We managed to flip this very red county blue, even if we didn't dislodge the GOP shit stain that is Rep. Doug LaMalfa (yet). I do think progress is happening. Younger generations won't tolerate the bullshit we thought was normal. It's happening. I can see it. I can't believe I, bleakest half-empty person you ever met, am saying "have faith," but I do have faith in the next generations. They are way smarter than we are, and much less interested in our collective bullshit.
i'm vegan 27 years now. of course, there are many ways i do not will not (cannot?) live up to the kindness i supposedly espouse and learn from my spiritual teachers. for instance i am filled w/rage and hate towards the unvaccinated--who someone has also called the "uneducable"--and who keep this goddam pandemic going. the hamburger animal cruelty crops for meat agri-industry thing is a major part of the cis/white/bullshit culture's brutality, too. years ago, i taught in a small rural high school w/"indians" as their "mascot." supposedly a decade or so ago the school entered a "relationship" w/a tribe to turn this "mascot" name into an opportunity for "learning" about native peoples. the school got to keep the name, despite a state law, due to the tribe's "approval." however, i recently left a facebook group of the school alumni and former teachers because of virulent racist posts and comments related to the "controversy" about the name. clearly the educational "program" has been a failure.
Hi Chris - you not only spoke your truth, but the absolute truth so many white people refuse to acknowledge. I’ve got a few stories about the author of “Counting Coup”, but that’s for a different day. Some Mom’s Demand Action (against gun violence) are reading the Gunfight book. To me, it’s seems like cognitive dissonance, but that’s their choice. There was a thread on Twitter today about movies that are in the white savior genre. So many people were perplexed by that term and genre.
Thank you for the clarity and immediacy of your writing. I am feeling and hearing your words within my almost half-Norwegian DNA on behalf of my great and great great grandfathers and their families who came from Norway in the 1800s to farm in Iowa and Minnesota and have wondered what they knew and didn't know about the land they built their farms on. I can't "not know" who the land belongs to. It's impossible. I ask for courage daily.
Talk about peanut butter sandwiches makes me feel even more related! I appreciate the way in which you bring your living thread of way you have been spun so that others can understand the validation of their identity. I too have discovered much after my mother passed and it makes this part of the journey a different kind of trail of tears. It feels so good to find birds of the same feather!
I know there's a lot in here, but oof, the cattle truck right after McDonald's, that's a tough one. I listened to an interview yesterday where the woman talked about individual choices that we fail to make aligning with our professed values. It's all so true, and yet at the same time I feel like I'm in a small minority of people who even have the luxury to probe into those questions -- like, if my life were like my parents' life when I was growing up, barely able to feed my kids, I would find it hard to put a smidge of energy into the things I angst about giving up like, say, single-use plastic. Or almonds. And yet it's not like giving those things up isn't important. All our dollars perform political acts. But the system bears down on us hard from many different directions.
I think those of use who can give up things and don't make it more difficult for those who really can't. One feeds the other.
Oh, absolutely. Every step is a learning process, too. Every time I go by the dump next to the highway, which is a small mountain, I remember that it was a pit when I was in high school. When I get tired and just want to do what's easy, I remember the dump.
I heard a different interview a couple of years ago in which the person said that she didn't buy a family-farmed, local, totally free-range chicken to feed her family because she was under the impression her choice would immediately change the world. She did it because she wanted her dollars to go into supporting a system that she knew would be better for the world. I liked that perspective.
A lot of folks I know — who are not wrong — respond to discussions like this by pointing out that individual choice is a drop in the bucket compared to legislative and cultural change, and that the latter is where we should spend our energy.
I don't disagree that systemic solutions are needed, but I do question just how effective my personal energy is at creating them.
I can vote, I can write letters, I can write literature, I can talk to folks I know. If I was a different sort of person, I could go to rallies or go to capitols or write laws or lobby or whatever. The thing that drives my commitment to systemic change, though, is being prepared with my own body and mind for that change.
In other words: eating vegetarian (or buying that locally- and family-farmed chicken), et cetera.
And this I am also terrible at, so I appreciate reading and discussing our successes and our failures and our attempts. It reminds me why I care. Sometimes it reminds me TO care.
We can't be perfect. Maybe we can't even (in this culture?) be good. And given that, what can we do? Follow our vocations, maybe, as honestly as we can. Chris, Nia, here you both are doing just that. I admire it.
Thank you, Tara. Honestly, I have largely lost faith in legislative and cultural change in my limited remaining lifetime. I don't think there is a single institution or organization I trust, especially on what we call the "Left," given that is where my values would typically align me. Anyone from that arena who makes any statement about where I "should" spend my energy is grandstanding on a deaf ear, if only because I find the Left, at least the part of it anywhere near the mainstream version of it, to be composed largely of cowardly whiners. All I can do is make my own drop-in-the-bucket choices that allow me to live another day without shooting myself; I think that is the best I can do.
Yeah, one of the things that did eventually ease me off of Facebook was a marked uptick in people telling other people how to feel and what to think. No matter how well-intentioned that is or what "end of the political spectrum" it comes from, there's always the father-who-grew-up-under-Stalin voice in my head that says, "This can lead nowhere good."
I really hear you about the Left. I haven't called myself a progressive for years (because I'm pretty disillusioned with the god we've made of the entire idea of Progress), and Liberal encompasses a lot of that cowardly whining you mentioned. I do plenty of that myself, but I try to do better. So I've been stuck with the political label "Leftist" because I believe all people (including non-human people) should have access to a good home, an education (whatever that means), nutritious food, enough money (or maybe we could get beyond money), etc — and in a very large society, the only way to make sure of that is to have a government actually organized by and for the people.
But then I watch us humans do beautiful things on a small scale, and fail utterly to uphold justice and mercy and equity and all the rest of it at the level of the State. Not to say that we COULD not — but we mostly don't. Ever. Where does this leave "the Left?"
Maybe it's a dead concept. The whole Left-Right thing is just...I don't know, tired? Not answering the important questions anymore, maybe. It's not a spectrum anyway, the way we've tended to think of it: as we've seen with the human fallout around covid-19, at some point "Left" and "Right" horseshoe right over on into each other anyway.
Anyone is definitely welcome to argue otherwise. What am I missing here?
I do tend to call myself liberal or say "my politics lean liberal" in conversations where I feel like someone is about to go off on a rant and I want them to at least know the conversation they're getting into, but my view for a long time (maybe it's the Rianne Eisler influence) has been that it's not a spectrum of politics, but a worldview in which you want to control other people's lives, or you don't. And *how* that manifests. A domination vs. partnership paradigm. Most of our politics still operates within the domination paradigm, so any spectrum within that is limited by the paradigm itself.
Thank you for hammering this home, Chris. What I think, when I read your truth, is of the timeless tragedy of living daily with existential PTSD. This is what European invaders have done to indigenous and enslaved people. The progeny of those Europeans have grown up in their sanitized bubbles, (myself included). They/we need constant reminders to set our minds right. Like a smoking, alcohol, or drug habit, the aquisition of the habit is seamlessly easy. Breaking the habit takes real work and minute-by-minute reminders. I hope we are up to rectifying our continued destructiveness.
Well stated, Linda. Thank you.
I wholeheartedly believe in genetic trauma.
That last paragraph reminds me of a Chief Earl Old Person quote that made it into a lot of tributes to him earlier this month: "Help one another out. Uplift each other and if you can protect someone, do it." Feels similar to say that if you can stand up for someone, do it. Who else will? You do it so consistently in what you share and I really admire you for it, Chris. It has really influenced how I show up in my own life, and made me more conscious about who I have a responsibility to stand up for even if I know I'm going to come off as prickly. :)
Prickly beats prickish every time, Jackie. Just remember that. :)
God damn, man. Stand up straight and speak your mind. I'm here for it.
Thanks, OC.
You got it, FC.
Heard and acknowledged. You're not wrong. The cow and the hamburger -- ouch. Guns -- agree so much! Mascots? Disgusting. Here in CA Gold Country, our high school mascot is the "Miners," aka the 1849ers who genocided the Nisenan, Maidu, Washoe, Konkow et al, and then fucked up the land beyond belief. But tiny change is coming. The mascot name is up for debate now. We managed to flip this very red county blue, even if we didn't dislodge the GOP shit stain that is Rep. Doug LaMalfa (yet). I do think progress is happening. Younger generations won't tolerate the bullshit we thought was normal. It's happening. I can see it. I can't believe I, bleakest half-empty person you ever met, am saying "have faith," but I do have faith in the next generations. They are way smarter than we are, and much less interested in our collective bullshit.
Thank you for the uplift, Julia.
Always grateful that you voice things the way that you do, and that we - a scattered band of fellow outsiders - get to listen in.
Thank you, Clare.
Here’s a relatively simple way to take action. Public comment is being accepted until Oct 29th on the creation of the second house district for MT. Two options are being considered- one of which will virtually guarantee that the new district’s race is not competitive and favors the GOP. Western Native Voice is gathering signatures in favor of the option which will produce a more competitive race, Map #11. You can sign on here- especially if you’re an MT resident. You can also email the redistricting committee directly at redistricting@mt.gov and voice support for Map #11. https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSetXzUNU4jjo6gmdy4pB8RkLKBwRnHPzuvDpmROjsu2jDcMIg/viewform?fbclid=IwAR3S6JlcfhGnRQFyfB-O9yfv475C7_Y1ovKkeknbGbYIldHu09ezAtot2ZY
I signed this yesterday. Thanks for sharing!
i'm vegan 27 years now. of course, there are many ways i do not will not (cannot?) live up to the kindness i supposedly espouse and learn from my spiritual teachers. for instance i am filled w/rage and hate towards the unvaccinated--who someone has also called the "uneducable"--and who keep this goddam pandemic going. the hamburger animal cruelty crops for meat agri-industry thing is a major part of the cis/white/bullshit culture's brutality, too. years ago, i taught in a small rural high school w/"indians" as their "mascot." supposedly a decade or so ago the school entered a "relationship" w/a tribe to turn this "mascot" name into an opportunity for "learning" about native peoples. the school got to keep the name, despite a state law, due to the tribe's "approval." however, i recently left a facebook group of the school alumni and former teachers because of virulent racist posts and comments related to the "controversy" about the name. clearly the educational "program" has been a failure.
And yet we persevere, don't we, Wayne? I'm glad you're here.
I appreciate your work always brother.
Thank you, Maddie.
Hi Chris - you not only spoke your truth, but the absolute truth so many white people refuse to acknowledge. I’ve got a few stories about the author of “Counting Coup”, but that’s for a different day. Some Mom’s Demand Action (against gun violence) are reading the Gunfight book. To me, it’s seems like cognitive dissonance, but that’s their choice. There was a thread on Twitter today about movies that are in the white savior genre. So many people were perplexed by that term and genre.
So many white savior movies. To have not heard of that term before? Oof....
💕 The other comments say it better than I can. I hear you and fight my fight against the system.
Thank you for the clarity and immediacy of your writing. I am feeling and hearing your words within my almost half-Norwegian DNA on behalf of my great and great great grandfathers and their families who came from Norway in the 1800s to farm in Iowa and Minnesota and have wondered what they knew and didn't know about the land they built their farms on. I can't "not know" who the land belongs to. It's impossible. I ask for courage daily.
Courage can be hard to come by sometimes, that is certain.
Talk about peanut butter sandwiches makes me feel even more related! I appreciate the way in which you bring your living thread of way you have been spun so that others can understand the validation of their identity. I too have discovered much after my mother passed and it makes this part of the journey a different kind of trail of tears. It feels so good to find birds of the same feather!
Thanks, Julie.