Anarchist Thoughts
So I wrote this rant last night on FB, and I thought I would share it here, along with a question, which I will pose after the rant:
What if we stopped letting others define us by arbitrary things? I was born in the US, but I hate its culture. I think the entire concept of borders and nations and patriotism to be asinine and arbitrary, a make believe that enough people buy into to make it "real." The border of a country doesn't mean anything more profound than the border of a state or of a city. Natural borders exist - a coastline, a mountain range, a river. But imaginary lines drawn up by white, moneyed, powerful men in the early 20th century aren't any more real than their belief in female hysteria or The White Man's Burden. Why do we still give them credence? I have far more in common with poor people, with Pagan people, with animists and environmentalists, with queers and artists and freaks, anarchists and activists, than any assembly of people who happen to live in my vicinity but may be wealthy, conservative, Christian, consumerist straight folk. Those people are not my tribe, even if they live down the block, while people who are my tribe may live thousands of miles away in any direction. But I'm supposed to hold solidarity with the MAGA twatwaffle who wants to destroy my Earth for money and apocalypse, deny me rights, and use The Handmaid's Tale as an instruction manual, because ...I can walk to his house? What do borders mean in a world where values and beliefs and even truths are not agreed upon locally because we're not all meeting in the town square and reading the same news and hearing the same pastor pontificate on Sundays? What do they mean when our foods are imported from all over the world even when there's a farm that produces the exact same thing 30 miles away? What do they mean when our clothes all come from the same sweatshops and our music from the same producers and our books from the same publishers, translated into 30 languages? What do they mean when our jetlag includes lamenting about different international release dates for movies and TV shows? What do they mean when a French TV channel makes a show in English (Versailles) about a French king to "gain a wider audience" because monolingual Americans can't be bothered to read subtitles and that makes a difference in FRANCE? It's the most arbitrary shit! I am defined by who I am and what I believe, not where my mama was when she pushed me out of her vagina. Fuck borders, and fuck nationalism, and fuck "American exceptionalism," and fuck taking pride in shit you didn't do, whether that's a nation or a sports team, none of whom are generally from where they play sports anyway. Why do people take pride in, for example, the Broncos, whilst bitching about non-native Denverites? How many Broncos were born in Colorado? I'mma guess not many. IT MEANS NOTHING. Place meant something when your ancestors had lived there for centuries or millennia; place meant something when your great, great grandfather built the farmhouse you live in and you only had to walk to the graveyard to pay homage to generations of your ancestors. Place meant something when your tribe lived there with you. But it doesn't now, for most of us. So why do we give a rat's ass what some dudes in suits a hundred years ago decided would be advantageous for their land grab?
image from blogspot
So my question is: how many of you have a sense of "place"? I doubt many Americans do - even if you are First Nations, the odds are pretty good the government stole your sacred places from you - but thought maybe in other parts of the world, it still exists, where it wasn't destroyed by enclosure or industrial revolution, though I still think it's probably more rare than not. And if you have it, is it due to your ancestors' rank? Like, do you still live in the ancestral home because your predecessors were wealthy landowners, and didn't need to go to the city looking for work/didn't lose their land in enclosure/weren't starved out by famine or driven out by war? I'm curious if anyone has it, what it feels like, and if you feel a greater tie to the idea of your "nation" (which also may be dependent on how old your nation is)?
That Red Fish your momma always warned you about
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Did you read @mattclarke's post along the lines of borders a while back? It's crazy, really, how much belief we place in the ideas of borders and countries. I gather in America the flag is almost idolised?
I hadn't seen that one before, thank you for linking it! And yeah - the flag is idolized here with a level of religious fervor that the Christian extremists doing it would call "sinful idol worship" if it was Catholic and an image if the virgin Mary.
Thanks for the shoutout :)
I just re-read it. Scary how few of the commenters are still around. Happily it seems to be mostly the statists who come; realise they can't loot anything and are responsible for their own results; and disappear.
I didn't realise you wrote it so long ago until I went searching for it. Still 7 months isn't that long ago. You'd think they'd give it a bit longer than that.
I'm a really infrequent blogger. Once or twice a week, sometimes less.
You don't have to scroll too long to go back 7 months.
It's a shame, some of the bigger names in the ancap-voluntaryist community seem to just post, rather than seek out other content in #anarchy.
If it felt more like a two-way street I'd spend more time there.
Filtering out the resteems on SteemPeak helped make it easier to find. I don't think I'd have ever found it if you posted even just once a day!
I do find that a bit disappointing. They don't often reply to comments either. I get that they are busy on a variety of platforms, but it's still disappointing. I'm glad Larkenrose at least answers direct questions, but some don't even do that.
We need to build that expectation into the culture here. Upvote the post and any excellent responses.
You're enjoying steempeak then?
Still trying to get a handle on it. It's a bit off and on, but that could be just them still ironing out the kinks in the mobile version. It wouldn't let me click on posting yesterday, so I ended up posting from Steemit. I'm going to keep going back and trying it. I might switch between the two for the time being though.
Yeah I've found it a lot more stable on desktop.
I'm thinking I'll keep me eyes open for a killer mobile app.
I haven't heard of Steempeak before!
Great rant!
I have an answer! This is a place holder because I'm going to need another coffee for this one.
Edit: Responsification
As we vibrate ever higher we may begin to desire to reject the past, but it is essential that we reject only interpretations of our past because our past is something that is un-reject-ifiable: It is WE. As popeye says, 'I am what I am'; we are who we are and it has gotten us this far.
Certainly majority rich and enterprising white men secured this nation from the 'dangerously independent' indigenous and other white european interests and forged it together to be a place, a certain place that they felt was charged to have a strong destiny. The history of the country U.S.A. is not a pleasant one but it is indeed an important, exciting, tragic, bloody, enriching, sumptuous, tender, loving, breathing, battling history of humans.
What has been taken has also been given, and the results of today were not obviously given when the project began. A country now that protects certain natural parks and indigenous lands has only reached this point in reaction to the destruction of the very same. The Nicolet National Forest, where we visited just two weeks ago, is not a virgin forest at all, but a response in the 1940's to the clear cutting of the very same area and much of the northern forests in the 1910's.
Much has been lost, what has been returned is much different, but, again quoting from a movie, 'They can never take our Freedom!'. Surely even freedom has been taken but still that divine spark cannot be removed, cannot be dimmed and the fact that you are ranting here today tells me that we haven't lost everything important yet.
I too consider myself, ourselves, to be the royal we, to be Americans from the artic circle to the Falkland Islands, and if one day we leave for the 'old' world I am sure that I will feel ties and connections to my people over there as well. But this brave 'new' world in which we live needs so much work, so much love, so much help that we cannot abandon our duties as stewards of both plant and animal, both physical and spiritual.
And going and growing digital, I have found in you a blogger who, living on another mountain top entirely, interests me with creative activities connecting to the natural world that is the same natural world, the same BioSphere; the same Mother Earth that speaks to me must be, unless I'm crazy, the one that speaks to you. And herein lies the clue!
Though my soul must have walked this way before, this time I see with brand new clarity; we are a tribe, we are a people and we do share the land and the news and the sky. IT MEANS EVERYTHING.
Love and Light, in all things.
Hmm, I need more sleep to read your words again. Place holder! 😁
Responsification (great word)
Care for the Earth as a whole, yes. I guess what I'm trying to get at is that I don't think where my feet tread is "more important" than where your feet tread. My getting to know nature ideas are born of this desire for connection to place that I just don't really have; I want to understand it and come to know it better. I do have one sacred place in this "state," but I only get to go there when my friend is in town from out of state, with a car, and the time and desire to go too: it's hours away and I have no transport. So my quests are more like making small talk with Denver: "Oh, you like these trees, cool, oh, you enjoy a lot of sun, oh, you have this emerald ash borer giving you troubles... " 😉 And I'm trying to encourage others to make that same small talk with where they live.
My family is not from here; I was born in NJ but I'm the only one who was, we're not from there, either. My parents are from NYC, but only one out of four grandparents was born there, too (and her parents are from Germany). Nearly every generation as far back as my family tree goes, somebody is moving from somewhere. The first ancestor born on this side of the globe besides my 100% Mi'kmaq ancestors was my half Mi'kmaq, half French ancestor in 1862 in New Brunswick. We're just not rooted, my family. We're a family tree of nomads but I'm a natural tree; I want to root and stay rooted. But I have nowhere to root, no security to stay, no home to fall back on, nowhere I remember with fond memories I can go to. I have no idea where any relations are buried, if they were buried and not cremated, or where ashes were scattered: except for my cat Deidre, whose ashes I scattered in my sacred place. I'm just as confused by local customs as by "foreign" ones; my body is allergic to pretty much everything around me. I don't belong here. But I don't know where I do belong, if anywhere. But really, not on the open desert prairie. Laura Ingalls I ain't. 😉
Now I see much more clearly!
A nomand looking to root,
wandering far and following suit.
As @lyndsaybowes most beautifully said,
we must take up the mantle where we were led.
As dust is scattered so are we,
our placement is done strategically.
We may not choose our place
but can face it with grace,
we can mark out our space
to taste, as is the case
with painted rocks or decorative lace.
My point is not to say that you are wrong,
but right in your feeling, to follow your song
that's sung, inside of you, deep in your heart
Your spirit is strong, your soul is smart.
A rooted nomad has the burden of travel
you can move around, your roots won't unravel.
You can wander in and admire apple trees,
you can talk to locals about endangered bees,
you can help heal the connection from spirit to mother
And remind us to love her, to love one another.
Bless you!
That was beautiful, thank you. 💚
Some times things like this come out of me. Its usually in a really amazing conversation with awesome people.
That brought water to my eyes...
: )
Phoenix made me do it!
Wow, Phe! That was awesome! I like the quote from Eugene Debs, "I have no country to fight for. My country is the Earth. I am a citizen of the world." There should be no borders. There should be no countries. We don't need to be put in categories and boxes with labels. That is not what humans were meant to be!
I think we'll get there, the more globalised our world becomes, if we don't kill ourselves first. :)
Man is the only animal on the face of the Earth who is bound and determined to destroy himself and the world too!
ROFLMFAO!!! You got one up on me wren. Great rant! I've used that same Eugene Debs quote meme in one of my rants awhile back too. Maybe you would be interested in making a free speech friday rant? I too claim the world as my country and as an activist call myself an American Refugee. FUCK Corporate Fascist America!!!
I'll have to think of one for Free Speech Friday. I generally just rant as the mood strikes me. 😉
Yeah that is kind of how I am but then I remembered Free Speech Friday to help me organize my rants. Who knows, maybe in time I will have a rant for everyday HA HA.
Same here BroSTAR!! I read somewhere once that it's called "Strategic Placement"...that we are scattered like the wind to each affect the needed changes in our own geographical areas. As much as I wish we could have all landed in the same state or province, the evolution of humanity may just depend on our separation...
Thank GOODNESS we at least have the internet to unite our tribes, to share reality. I couldn't imagine what it must have been like to be WOKE in the days before the web...
What a beautiful and positive way to look at it. Or at least as positive as it can get. I'll try to bring this to mind each time I feel like giving up and hiding on an island.
Ooh, I like that strategic placement theory. Vibrational Risk game! LOL
Yeah, minus the web? Gah. I feel isolated and lonely now - no thanks!
Yea, big time no thanks!
Hey have your neighbours left you any new signs lately?
No, I haven't seen any new ones, but I haven't been making any new ones, either. Someone does keep re-arranging all the painted rocks in the courtyard, though. And I think someone claimed my "you rock" rock, because I haven't seen it since. I know the new super claimed a different rock someone painted a sunflower on, because it's on her desk. :)
Awwww YAY!!!!!! Those stories just brighten up my life, I didn't know about your super....!!