A contributor to a blog I follow felt that some presidential policy moves he does not support show that "Trump has failed" and, if even populist Trump was not aligned with his views, he "was done."
Well, that was during the heat wave. Exhaustion was a very natural and logical feeling to have.
A reaction from a stouter heart followed, here:
Can I think of more specific encouragement for, specifically, Glyphosate Awareness people, and, more generally, all who support more individual rights including the right to make our own health-supporting decisions, especially in choosing minimally contaminated food and water? Of course I can!
What follows started as replies to specific comments and questions from people discussing the "I'm done" post. (No link to that post; having been encouraged and taunted by that community, the author concluded that he wasn't trying to leave the country or give up activism altogether, just scaling back his activity to a more balanced and weather-appropriate program, so there's no need to take up any more of his energy.) I've tried to organize them into a logical order. That is why they are late.
I'd like to call out Dave DiGerolamo's post because I think doing so highlights something we do at this web site. We don't dictate or demand. We form alliances with people who are working toward a common goal, even if we and they have other goals that may be different.
Glyphosate Awareness is not and should not be the story of anybody's life. It's important to all people who prefer being healthy to being sick and/or prefer being alive to being dead, whether or not they realize how important it is...but it's not even an ongoing organization. It's not going to become anybody's full-time paid job. We agree that poisoning people for profit is evil and must be stopped.
We want a ban. Secretary Kennedy has done an heroic job of getting people to agree to things voluntarily without a formal ban. That's also good. In the case of poison sprays we may need a formal ban, but it's certainly best to begin by encouraging farmers who sincerely want to raise good food to take their first fearful steps voluntarily, if that can be done.
Technically, a ban on glyphosate will be the official end of Glyphosate Awareness. I've come to feel that, because the corporations have shown such lack of concern about human lives at even a slight risk to profit, we need to be fighting for a ban on all outdoor use of poison sprays. Whether we're fighting for a ban on one specific chemical that harms us personally, or on all outdoor spraying, once we get that ban, we disperse. Whether you have one more idea in common with Bernie Sanders, or with me, or with anyone else who's helped to spread Glyphosate Awareness, or not, is up to you. We are not a cult. We are a diverse group of people who've managed to agree on one thing.
But, in a more general sense, we are all activists. We are all committed, in whatever way we understand it, to doing what we've been called to do to resist evil in this world.
DiGerolamo begins with "civil disobedience." I especially like the examples he gives. Many of the things we're opposing are neither laws nor politicians nor political systems. Evil often operates through peer pressure--specifically, market pressure.
"I just sold my first load of early corn. When do you expect to sell your first load out of that unsprayed, mixed-crop field of yours? You'll never make a profit on that field. Taxes are going to eat you up if you don't start farming the modern way. Plant bioengineered corn that can resist it and then drown your field in pesticides!"
"It's cruel to take the chance of letting children develop natural immunity to measles! Do you want your children to suffer? Do you want them to grow up blind?"
"It's crazy to try to live without a car in this world! It's dangerous, walking in traffic! It's career suicide because people aren't going to hire someone who doesn't have reliable transportation to the job, even if you say that your feet are reliable transportation to a job one mile away. Think of what you're doing to your children..."
Etc. etc. etc. I've only been hearing it for sixty years. I'm not saying I was old enough to understand it for all of those years, but I was certainly hearing it. My parents disobeyed the social mandate to become dependent on motor transportation everywhere. It cost them jobs; it cost them some people's approval. I grew up. I learned how to drive a car. I drove a few cars other people owned. I owned a couple of cars other people drove. Finally I both owned and drove the same car all by myself like a person with no consciousness of the reasons not to join the car culture, for about six weeks. Since then I've disobeyed the social mandate to depend on motor transportation, and I'm likely to walk in situations where my parents would have used a taxi service.
Not that I am nagging anyone else to choose a car-free life. Not that I think motor vehicles are altogether evil. It's our overuse of them that is evil. By walking when it's feasible we can reduce pollution, improve our health, and avoid the kind of local warming that provides the pretext for left-wingnuts to scream about global warming calling for global dictatorship to save the planet.
But everyone feels called to resist evil in this world according to a different set of priorities. This is probably an indicator of what we're best qualified to do. I'd like to try to avoid quarrelling with others in the broader movement about priorities. Some things Robert Malone has said recently have offended people who liked his book. Some people see gene splicing itself as a bigger hazard than "pesticide" spraying. When dropping facts on an anti-vaxxer didn't convince her immediately that glyphosate is more dangerous to the public than vaccines are, I understood the feelings people express. We want to shake or slap the ignorance out of some people. We feel as if they were the enemy. These feelings are not helpful. Balkanization, being divided and conquered, is one of the aspects of evil we need to resist. If we abandon our mutual goal and fight against each other, there's no chance of reaching the goal.
(Why is glyphosate more dangerous to the public than vaccines? I mean the vaccines that everyone can agree have done more harm than good...Still, it's possible to avoid vaccines. It might have cost some people their careers, but we could say no to the jab. It's not possible to avoid glyphosate. If your reactions are disabling, you can give up social eating, give up most of your favorite foods, give up open-air exercise, become a total agoraphobic crank, and still spend a lot of days being sick. This should not be possible, of course. That's what we're fighting against.)
I try to respect everyone's differing priorities, and I'd like to encourage everyone else to do that. People usually have reasons for their priorities. If you live in a place where the climate is naturally hot and you know people who won't survive if it gets hotter, climate is probably your priority, you may even listen to those calling for global dictatorship, and you probably aren't even reading this web site regularly because you think we're insensitive to the dangers of climate change. This kind of thing is annoying but inevitable. We have to work through it, to reach our goals.
So, as someone asked in the comments, who will lead and guide us?
Only the Great Spirit will. Only the Great Spirit can. If we place our faith in a fellow mortal, even if that person never disappoints us, that person is mortal and will grow old and die.
Speaking of which, many of us are already pretty old. This is not all bad. Old people can be fearless. We can say:
If I live another fifty years, I'll still have a long list of things I want to do.
If I die tomorrow, I'll still have had a longer and better life than most humans have ever had.
I am not afraid of Hell.
But where does that leave the young? Sometimes I count how few of the previous generation in my extended family are still alive, and I wring my hands and pray--"God, she's eighty-five years old now, he's ninety--oh please let them stay active for another fifteen years!" This is true even for two cousins I've never met who don't feel rich because they're not in the top one percent of America's richest, but they are in the top five, and it's not inconceivable that they might remember that their mother's wealth came from dividing some land in a way that cost my grandmother money while it made their mother rich, and consider leaving some money to me. Just as fellow celiacs who want to support Celiactivism, the larger and much more pleasant cause that will remain after Glyphosate Awareness is over, they might consider leaving some money to me. I could use the money. I'd still prefer that they remain alive. I hope the young feel the same way about us...but, regardless of how anyone feels, we will not always remain alive. My generation, who identified as "the young" for so long, are becoming "the old."
I don't recommend that the young be publicly identified as leaders in Glyphosate Awareness because the corporations who embody our enemy are so evil. People who are or might become parents of young children should not do things that might deprive those children of parents. I recommend that the young practice leadership skills with their children and in "safer" organizations like neighborhood watch and PTA-type groups.
I don't share, and don't think we should feed attention to, the perception that the young are unfit to survive after the old. It has always seemed to people who've lived long enough to have read all the books in their large personal libraries, and been tested by adventures, and developed craggy faces with interesting scars, and come to understand how many things are of more enduring interest than sex, that the young are uninformed, weak, pasty-faced, hormone-addled blobs of glup. What the young are is young. They will outgrow it. Some people don't seem to have revisited their high school or even college yearbooks lately. Young people I see remind me very much of the ones who were young along with me, back in the day. ("Aaaack!") I don't know that we should slack off in order to make room for them to grow. I think there's still room for them to grow and mature on their own. Still, a little reminiscing about our own experience of being clueless and pasty-faced ought to reduce any distress we feel about leaving the world in the hands of the young. They will mature. Younger generations always have matured, and always will.
The young will, eventually, lead the resistance against evil. Trump won't be here. Kennedy won't be here. We the technorati, the early adopters of privately owned computers, the bloggers and social media networkers, won't be here. They will have to be led by the Great Spirit, just as we do.
In questions like "Who will lead..." I hear the disparity between what might fairly be called a fascist, or at least authoritarian, way of thinking and a more democratic, or American, or biblical, way of thinking. People will have a king if they want one. Some people do. But God's perfect will was that people receive orders directly from God, and not feel a need for kings.
For literal, physical combat, of course, strategies and drills are useful. Strategies for physical combat often do rely on members of a team to lead a multi-person strategic move. "When A sees X happening, A gives the cue to B to..." This web site recognizes a place for combat in this world but this web site is utterly unqualified to organize or even encourage physical that could become violent. We are all about nonviolent strategies that are best implemented by individuals, usually acting as individuals. A March Against Monsanto may be fun for its season but it's when individuals stop buying Monsanto-Bayer and similar products that the corporation has to take notice.
For purposes this web site has anything to do with, therefore, the little personal choices are the important ones. Why organize anti-glyphosate rallies, where we're likely to be deliberately sprayed or worse and where we do the corporations' profits no harm at all, when just not buying things actually hurts the corporations that have poisoned us? Don't buy things made by corporations that also make glyphosate--or other "pesticides."
We should all be raising as much of our own food as we can. How much land we have, and what it will produce, naturally determines how much that is. Corn and beans need a certain amount of sunshine to grow. Chickweed and violets need less. The commercial food industry have taught us that we need the standard commercially grown vegetables that need a lot of sunshine. Corn and beans and tomatoes and suchlike are very good, but if your glyphosate reactions indicate that most of the commercial produce is still marinated in glyphosate or some other chemical that makes you ill, and most of your favorite fruits and vegetables are never going to grow on your property, you may be amazed to discover how nutritious and how tasty chickweed and violets can be. Actually, most of the native "weeds" we pick out of our gardens are nutritious, and taste good, too, when eaten in the right season and quantity.
We do need to keep voting. There may be slots on the ballot where writing in the name of a famous dead person, a cartoon character, or a vegetable makes sense--if it won't get the election done over, at the very least the Lesser Evil will know how many people voted against him. Generally it's good to vote for the least of the available evils, or against the greater ones. Elections have been decided bmuch y one vote in one precinct. Why waste yours?
We need to add talking and writing to voting. We are the technorati. We have to educate the people who didn't form a habit of reading at school. Personal relationships with these people are not always part of communicating with them. We can run for local office, and write letters to local papers, like good traditional activists. Those things boost our signals. So does being a good customer, when we can. So does talking with people at church dinners, or drinking coffee (or beer) with them when we meet them in town. Doing some sort of useful community service is very good, and might become important in an emergency, too.
Everything we do does not have to be serious and goal-oriented. That can be a formula for burnout. When I was doing the Twitter Live Chats, which required much advance reading, quick learning, quick thinking, even in languages I can't properly be said to speak, so each one was a real workout for the brain, I found refreshment in reading, re-posting, and writing the sort of light content I call "the fluff." So did my followers. After a heavy chat we'd head for Twitter pages that specialized in pretty nature photos, cute pets, cartoons, and short light poems. So this web site, now that it's sponsored to do so, features butterfly pictures on Mondays, adorable adoptable pets on Tuesdays, and poems on Fridays. I try (don't always manage) to make time to read the Meow and Messy Mimi blogs daily, the Mirror and Barkley and Poets & Storytellers blogs whenever there's a new post. Refreshment is encouragement, too. If your refreshment consists of painting landscape pictures or piecing beautiful quilt tops or polishing and cutting stones, you're not letting the side down; you're lifting some of us up. "The fluff" is important too; it reminds us of what we're fighting for.
Left-wingnuts call everyone else fascists because that is what they say when they feel frustrated, but are we fascists? Then we should try to avoid talking like them. Historically, fascists liked to classify people as strong or weak, winners or losers, and look for what they saw as strong, winning leaders. Like Mussolini--oh right. If we want to be or to follow better leaders than Mussolini, it may help to reflect on St Paul's meditations in 2 Corinthians. We all have strong and weak points, strong and weak moments, and it may even be true in activism as it is in spirituality, "When I am weak, then I am strong."
Surely the "weakest" thing an activist could do would be to die in an accident mid-struggle...wouldn't it? Yet there are laws in force today that bear the names of people in whose memory they were, more or less, enacted. There are "Amber Alerts" because the previous system failed to save a child called Amber. Martyrs have tremendous posthumous power. Of course people who are clearly willing to be martyrs, but survive, have even more. That is why we have a President Trump and Secretaries Kennedy and Gabbard. Like them or not, everyone can see that they're not afraid of becoming martyrs.
Many people in cyberspace have had the privilege of education that gave us "strong" voices. Oh, we're so privileged. Most of us had a lot of help toward getting our educations. Anyway, other people merely lurk and never post a comment because they don't think they're able to type anything that would be up to our standard. They merely do their blue-collar or pink-collar jobs. I have seen plumbers, mechanics, and hairdressers reach people who wouldn't listen to us overeducated computer nerds and geeks Lurkers can be doing more good than bloggers know. (Of course, some lurkers are also hackers and spammers, but maybe a little information rubs off even on them.)
A couple of local lurkers have come forward to tell me they're dyslexic. (So am I but the kind of dyslexia that runs in my family interferes with speaking more than it does with reading.) When the instructions for something they want to do are written down, they have no trouble, but they don't want to try to read whole books. They used to be called functional illiterates. I call them intelligent people who cope well with physical obstacles to learning. They are called to teach their own audiences. They are old enough to know who those are.
Whoever is reading this...you're only one person. No other person is going to stand with you every time you have to take a stand in life. You may be the only one saying something at a particular place and time, but if what you're saying is true, then you are not alone--the Truth is with you. Deal with the fact of our existential solitude as human beings, and then appreciate the fact that we can connect. We can relay information--by writing letters on paper, or by word of mouth, if the Internet fails. I've looked at the statistics shown on the inside of this web site and thought, as bloggers do for the first few years, "And how many of those twenty-nine readers even vote in Virginia?" Then I've also posted "Print this article to claim a freebie/discount at a sponsor's business" and had tourists come in, all the way from Australia, carrying their printouts. You never know whom you may be reaching.
Some things can be known. For example: real, honest "conservatives" may hold grudges against people who did something to them, but otherwise they're not haters. That "conservatives are racists" routine the Left love is an example of what, in the slang of my youth, we called weaselling--loudly denouncing someone else for doing something by way of distracting attention from the fact that you are doing the same thing, often to a greater degree. (("You shut your blank-blank bleeping foul mouth and stop using that kind of blanking blinking language!") Hating large groups of people is stupid. Most conservatives are not stupid, or at least not all that stupid. I'm still mentally processing Margaret Roberts' research-based bombshell: Timothy McVeigh, who was clearly able to work with people from different backgrounds, made all that noise about his White Supremacism and promoted a novel about people who murder their neighbors apparently just for being Jewish, because he was being paid to make concern about the Waco disaster look bad? It's worth a second look at anyone who posts racist garbage on a "conservative" page.
In theory even White Supremacists have bodies that react badly to glyphosate, so they can benefit from Glyphosate Awareness too, but I personally want nothing to do with anyone who does not appreciate those of The Nephews who are legally Black as much as those who are legally White. In fact hateful remarks about any ethnic group that includes a friend or relative of mine, which includes most of the ethnic groups on Earth, tend to bring out my Inner Mama Bear.
We need to shun hateful or violent people. (We can pity them and pray for them if we like.) We should practice good will toward everyone else. To the extent that it's possible, without compromising ourselves by supporting things we really can't support, it is desirable for activists to make ourselves known for kindness, loyalty, and generosity.
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