Go to work!

I liked this piece by Rebecca Solnit, which doesn't surprise me, because I really liked her book on walking. I had thoughts while I read it, which I sortof want to put together into a complex and elegant post, but am more afraid that if I wait to do that, I won't get to it at all. I think I will blurt! and you, my sophisticated and strikingly good looking readers, will integrate it into a worthy essay. Well done, you.

Similar:
Her piece struck me as a very good companion to this excellent, excellent essay on organizing between professional middle class and working class people. From Ms. Solnit's piece:

Of course dreadlocks and ragged clothes weren’t exactly diplomatic outreach tools either. I spent some of the 1990s with and around activists in the public forests of the West, and a lot of the supposedly most radical had a remarkable knack for going into rural communities and insulting practically everyone with whom they came into contact. It became clear to me that in their eyes the worst crimes of the locals did not involve chainsaws and voting choices but culture and what gets called lifestyle. It was a culture war that got pretty far from who was actually doing what to the Earth and how anyone might stop it.

And from Ms. Leondar-Wright's piece:

In professional-middle-class progressive culture, the axis of the world is mainstream versus alternative. The majority of us were raised in non-progressive families; the exceptions, such as "red diaper babies" and children of hippies, grew up aware of their families' outsider status. We grew up surrounded by expectations that we would maximize our income and status by conforming to PMC lifestyles and career tracks. At some point we made a conscious, life-changing decision to take a different course and to put some of our energy to work for a better world. We each place ourselves in a particular place on the mainstream/alternative continuum, contrasting ourselves with those more and less conventional than ourselves. One thing that virtually all of us PMC activists have in common is that we are proud of living a values-based life. It's our best trait — and leads to some of our most classist traits, such as culture-bound elitism. "More-alternative-than- thou" is not a helpful stance to take in building bridges with anyone, and it's especially unhelpful with people with a lot less social privilege than ourselves.

On farmers:
Heh. Solnit uses country music as a proxy for rural and ag-associated life. She describes liberal scorn for their "racist, reactionary, religiously authoritarian" ways. Yeah. That's one set of associations I've heard. I've also heard glowing paeans to agrarian connections to the earth and their humble, honest stewardship. Whatevers. I'll have you know that I lived and worked with those exotic creatures for two years and made up my own stereotypes.

The only thing I was sure of after two years amongst the sons of western agriculture is that all that work they did showed. Oh man, they were pretty. Really very pretty. All ripply and strong, with such pretty arms and shoulders and slim hips and also nice legs. Um. A very attractive people, those farmers' sons. Going to class was like being in a porn movie, where all the young men were gorgeous and needed the teachings of an experienced older woman, except that it was a terrible horrible sad porn movie, where the music never started and the professor kept lecturing. A childhood of work showed up in other ways; they were better at manipulating physical objects and working in groups than I've ever seen my city peers be. Those were the conclusions I came to after infiltrating the heart of the ag community. Attitudes towards environmentalism and minorities amongst this inscrutable tribe? They varied.

On hippies:
So, like, I know hippies. I lived for years amongst other college kids acting like hippies. I know how annoying some of the mannerisms are. I know. I left my co-op because one day I realized that I could not have one more conversation about whether we should buy bananas. I fully understand how the hippie sanctimony, whether it actually comes from a hippie or whether you're just assigning it to some longhaired target, grates on the soul. But here's the thing. Those hippies? They're fucking right. The reason they grate so is that you know they're right and they remind you of your compromises and since you don't want to look at those, I guess you better vilify the messenger*.

They're right. We should be gentle pacifists. We should care very deeply about the environment; we should be alert to its beauties and hurt by its destruction. We should eat consciously and low on the food chain. There is no harm in bounded recreational drug use and what does it matter how people choose to look and people's bodies are beautiful and we should live close in connected communities. We should even sit around a fire and sit along to a guitar. That way of living feels good and imposes fewer costs on other people.

So I'm tired of the meme that discounts opinions because hippies hold them. Get over that. It is as cheap and dismissive as any attitude discussed in either essay. Sure, small-minded hippies are annoying. Small-minded anyone is annoying and if you're dismissing things out of hand for being hippie-affiliated, that's you.

On the South:
Solnit writes:

So on the one hand we have white people who hate black people. On the other hand we have white people who hate other white people on the grounds that they hate black people. But that latter hatred accuses many wrongfully, and it serves as a convenient coverup for the racism that is all around us. The reason why it matters is because middle-class people despising poor people becomes your basic class war, and the ongoing insults seem to have been at least part of what has weakened the environmental movement in particular and progressive politics in general.

I'm having a real hard time with the South recently. I'm on this reading binge about the South and Jim Crow and Reconstruction and the Civil Rights movement. Honestly, it is very hard for me to not hate historical racist white fucks. It helps a little that they're a hundred years dead, except that, you know, it was pretty bad until pretty recently. Some were murderous and righteous, and a lot of other people thought that was their natural privilege, and if there were good ones they couldn't say much out loud. That is some fucked up bullshit, and I cannot comprehend what could be good enough in a southern heritage to overcome such pervasive viciousness and shame. So I'm trying not to hate, because it is rather pointless for me to get all exercised from a distance at this late date and how does that help anyone's life? And 'cause something something complex and not first-hand and something or other cast the first stone. Except, you know, I'm not really despising anyone for being poor. I'm fucking hating traditional southern racists for thinking their skin color made murder, rape, oppression and soul-killing a perfectly OK thing to do.

Coalitions:
I'm on the fence about environmentalist-resource user coalitions this week. Most days I think they're the only things that can work. Then I read about them falling apart, and I'm not sure they can work either. Someone with the backing of the people should pick winners and losers and the world will readjust to the new drivers and constraints and in only a generation or so, no one will care so much? I dunno.




This seems like enough for you guys to work with. I'll expect your revised and improved versions back by Friday. You can only get full credit if you show your work.







Ms. Leondar-Wright's essay via Spungen at BobVis.
Ms. Solnit's essay via Crooked Timber.


*I don't want to hear it about trust-fund hippie kids. Yeah, it is infuriating that they can use the safety of their middle class lives to tell themselves they are adventuresome. If they're sanctimonious on top of that, that's really frustrating. BUT. Think of it this way. This is what people do when they know they are safe. These kids have felt safe their entire lives and trust the world, and what do they do with that? They choose a lifestyle of openness and gentleness, of connectivity and consciousness. When you know your whole life that you can have what you want, what they want is to be in a tribe and care about nature and spirituality. (Maybe they care about nature and spirituality in an easily accessible way, but as far as cheap philosophies go, it is a kind one.) This is also what impresses me about Burning Man. When privileged people have everything they want, the next thing they want to do is build amazing things for other people (and celebrate and be nude and beautiful). People who have never been scared don't want dominion. They want expressiveness and connection.