I'm failing to understand

[Ulysses]

For the greater part, many of us harbor some desire for a better state of life and society.
But when is it comes to expressing the desire in any meaningful manner, voices always seem to rise towards the violence many believe must first occur. Our intimate communities and prisons are filled with individuals who've embraced the philosophy of "Take what you believe is rightfully yours". I am not trying to say that there are not too many wrongly enslaved under the guise of being "correctionally institutionalized", because there are too many locked up and isolated.

What I am demanding is we do not express hope in any pragmatic fashion. We kowtow and raise fists in hopes that the powers that be heed our calls and respond with better treatment.

I fail to see the global community much differently from the microcosms of the school systems and churches that I was brought up in, in this one important regard: We demand that people to think for us. We seek people that are more articulate, learned, savvy and affluent to do our bidding, hoping that our material sacrifices and constant pleas obligates them to serve "our" causes. While we spend our valued time idolizing entertainments intended to do little more than exploit the one commodity all wealthy old men desire most: Time! Like me, many people will claim to be exceptional and excluded from the accusation of being a willing sheepish member of the flock. Some will even assert that they are predators. The Border Collie is a predator and in the flock's natural state the Border Collie has no purpose. However the wolf and puma serve a valuable purpose.

Most people of the world have become more like Thompson's Gazelle to the Cheetah, or more so like flies to Pitcher Plants.

While others concoct fictions and will others to labor to make things in those fictions real commodities, actively following the rules of gods with dominion over creation. Idea, word, manifest, proliferate, subdue. We have actively, intentionally, willfully, arrogantly forfeit our individual and collective freedom so that we may be able to damn the actions of others. Plainly stating that those with power do not act in our best interests and therefore we are helpless unless we take up arms to wage war.

I say that is complete nonsense!
We can invent, we can invest in invention, we can replicate and we can make commodity of what we replicate. Turn off the games and melodramas! divert some time and attention from studying the emotional intricacies of conflicts, hardships and atrocities and direct that energy towards learning and documenting the processes of bringing to fruition what will be and should be made available to serve the needs of the people you claim to have love for.

I want at least one of these made available for public transportation in 500 hundred urban communities and ready to serve the needs of people in isolated regions, when disaster strikes, before I turn fifty. Aeroscraft

And on a smaller, more individually affordable and educational level
I'm thinking wind turbines to generate electricity.

then we can move on to more esoteric subject matter

The biggest problem that adults face today is forgetfulness
Most have simply forgotten what joy and happiness are and have no tolerance for others expressing the experience of it.

Then again, that sounds a bit sexist, doesn't it?

[Rayfield A. Waller]

Ulysses;

I followed all of your pop up and links and read it all. I was shocked by the trail you have put down here leading to a direct acceptance of the truth of the idea you are addressing--that we can produce what we need for ourselves, or at least produce a large percentage of it, and thus assert our independence from the ruling classes and the social system of capitalist consumption we always shout against and threaten to attack, chanting for war, fighting, violence, rebellion, death, bloodshed, conflict, and a new regime same as the old regime, built from violence.

It is your idea of 'consumer ideology' as I call it, which you have written about several times: your radical and startling idea of dealing with the implications of what and how we consume, that consumption is the real measure of our freedom or our slavery. I do think that this is a radical idea, and that it undercuts and leaps past all previous revolutionary (violent) alternatives to domination; embracing your vision, we would be putting the war lovers and the gun fetishists essentially out of business, by if taking up your challenge to help ourselves, feed our selves, save ourselves:


"I was surprised but it's pretty easy to make your own energy. There are several new step-by-step manuals that walk you through the process quickly.

You don't have to be some sort of engineer or even very handy (I sure am not!) to get your first wind turbine up and working. It can usually be done over a weekend and total costs including materials can be under $200. I checked around and this would cost over $5,000 if I used a local contractor.

So, my friend and I went on to buy 8 more different online courses on "Do it Yourself" wind and solar energy systems. I wish I could say all of the courses were helpful and easy to follow.... but they weren't! In fact, several of them were CRAP (excuse my 'French'). But there were 2 that stood out as far above the rest.

I can say with COMPLETE CONFIDENCE that there are no other guides available (as of March 2009) that are as good as the 2 below."


This idea that I can BUILD MY OWN WIND TURBINES from wood, plastic, coffee cans, etc., and make my own energy is a transformative one in terms of expanding my consciousness. All we are ever taught is that we are at the mercy of the ruling class, the system, and the social structure, that we cannot do anything for ourselves. The mis-education of our young is part of that process of manufacturing future helplessness, a future in which a whole population will be like ignorant cattle. But WE in OUR generation WERE educated, and yet we too, are blind to our own freedom unless somebody teaches us that we don't have to obey the rulers; we outnumber them.

The NATIONALIST versions of this are NOT ENOUGH, because that is simply the idea of self sufficiency--which feeds on the pre existing idea of nation an country. The extreme versions of this nationalism led to the failure of certain cultural nationalist Black organizations in the 70's, such as The Republik of New Afrika, and other groups who eventually degenerated into para military gangs, or else became repressive, authoritarian, sexist, and even reactionary in terms of caste and hierarchy, conformaty, and elitism. In short, nationalism, as Marx and as CLR James charged, ultimately ends up recreating what it was originally struggling against.

No, the power of what you have been saying is in its universalism and its unitarianism (rather than nationalism). The whole human race can be self determining not in opposition to other human beings, other groups, other countries, other castes, and the like, but in opposition to a structure of consumption and of alienation from production. The means of production can be seen not as existing beyond our reach and control ('ownership' as Marx would say) but as existing right here within each of us. This transcends race, nation, gender, and caste; it transcends ideology, and becomes a litmus test for all ideologies: who is ready and able to go to New Orleans or to Miami, or to Fiji, or to Japan, or Sudan, to save human beings who need us when they need us? Do we realize that we need not wait for the UN or the USA or the WTO to do it--that we can do it ourselves?

That is, if I am reading you right.

You HAVE to write a book about this, Man, and teach large numbers of people about your ideas.

R A Waller

[Ulysses]

Yep! You're on point!

I don't believe you can legislate the heart.
And I know that most working class and poor racists feel just as displaced and abused as the people they direct their anger on to.

I'm not sure if my publishing a book in the near future, would be of great benefit to the people I would like most to direct information towards. However, I am planning to publish three really over sized newsletter titles on 18 x 24 broadsheets and establish an online video production & broadcasting facility.

Here's my logic:

Online video is cheap to produce and deliver

video, pictures, bullet points, story teasers, sound bites, shiny things and steatopygia catch public attention and can lead people to valuable information and points of discussion, if you're willing to use "The Devils" tricks of the trade. I don't want to fight the people I want to help. I know that they expect to have their person exploited, but not their talents. It's amazing to me that women shaped like Saartjie Baartman are the new Buddhas (fat plastic iconic good luck symbols of prosperity and happiness collecting dust in corners of overheated rented tract houses, not Siddhattha Gotama), their mantra "Mo'!" and their mandalas, car rims. I don't want to exert the effort to change their list of desired things, before making the things to be desired available.

I intend to encourage people to produce media service products that compete with common urban (Black & poor thinking) belief systems about the authority of information utility monopolies.
[A curriculum that teaches and reinforces those learned skills would be a great help] Yes Sir! I just signified.
I plan to get a lot of the educational content from websites like Wikiversity and instructables, because they're pretty much free and universally accessible.

There are massive gaping holes in our communities' media networks and performance venues, (which further justifies many people's excuses for not trying to learn). We don't even have Public Access Cable Television studios in Detroit. People from trailer parks and slums, literate or not, tend not travel far from the places they were raised, seek information that's not packaged in non entertaining formats or is directly related to peer to peer mating rituals (non socially escalating), but people will invest a little more energy into learning, if it feeds their ambition.

You know, I dig Henry Louis Gates Jr. for Encarta and the work he's been doing on PBS and 'Councilor West' in "The Matrix". Even more so after reading some notes about his recent media career and how things like CD album collaborations and appearing on Bill Maher's show is upsetting the academic foundation of America's universities.

I feel a need to place people like yourself in front of a camera, in a living room, or kitchen like setting with local entertainers, celebrities, designers, decorators, writers and exceptional beneficiaries of the labor of professionals who are vested in their communities to address, formatted discussions, that fit nicely between entertainment and instructional segments.

I'd like to help prepare and send people who wouldn't normally have the change to experience and report on things like to places like Mac McDonald's vineyard , Trifle's Confectioner , American Harvest at Schoolcraft College
Global Wind Systems Google's Ann Arbor Office, maybe the Bettermade factory, Rafel's spice shop, Cost Plus, the Detroit Zoo. You know, field trips. Then mix that material with dance, fashion, DYI and talk shows that will be produced in the studio.


I've amassed enough equipment to start tomorrow. Now I'm working on assembling a team and acquiring a suitable space.

The image and text journals will lead interested parties to the web, the web videos will lead people to the question of, "How can I get in on this", the answer will lead people to learn.

This is one of the most encouraging exchanges I've had in a while
Thanks

[Rayfield A. Waller]

Makes sense--makes a LOT of sense. Indeed, people do not tend to seek information through non-entertainment formats, and of course, a wise teacher knows to approach those he/she would teach, on foot, at their level, and not hover above them in a helicopter dropping books.

I'm trying to unlearn, I'm trying.

Councilor West (Cornel) is profound, both inside and outside of the movie, but I think you remnd me of Councilor Hamaan, who asks questions of Neo that startle one into thinking about things differently--a Toaist process of becoming alive and awake to the interdependence of the world (the interdependence of humans and machines).

You constantly remind me, Ulysses, that the world does not need more answers, but that we now need to ask new questions.

Ray