Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Public Health. What is that, really? It’s not just the services of research institutions, public education, medical professionals, hospitals, equipment, medicines, emergency rooms, insurance and such. It’s a healthy public. The question arising now is: What can we do, as a society, to support a healthy public?
If we really care about the health of people and planet, we should think twice before we decide to spend money on accelerating this destructive trajectory. While it is essential that jobs are maintained and undue hardship is avoided, propping up the status quo is not the only option available.
There are many proposals for radical economies from progressive economists, activists and think tanks. Artists are increasingly joining these debates with speculative proposals and unconventional methodologies.
All together, these techniques add up to an effective, inexpensive, low-impact garden-starting regime. There’s room for improvement, of course, which just keeps my life from getting boring.
Whether the Sanders campaign seizes this opportunity, or an alternate framework for collective action arises, a mass movement response to the coronavirus pandemic cannot come too soon. For our own sake, and that of our society as a whole, let us help the drive toward solidarity emerge.
Yet, as I said, I am not feeling that helpless form of resignation. You shouldn’t either. And if you’re looking for some inspiration and have some free time in quarantine, pick up a book I hadn’t read in 2008 called A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster by Rebecca Solnit. In it, she details the astounding things people do to help each other in times of extreme distress.
This condition of wondering is still absolutely intact in us. It is. Amongst the loaded shopping trolleys of Walmart and Tesco, the fluorescent tech hubs, flicker-screens and finger-beckoning apps, it’s still there. This raw, imaginative, holy thing.
There’s an audacity to it, but it’s what we’ve always done.
This specific Calenda was dedicated to the protection of the guardians of native corn, to defenders of ecological diversity, and to those protecting indigenous lands. The Calenda, a Native Corn Colloquium, and an indigenous corn performance by the All Species Project and the Mermejita Circus of Mazunte, Oaxaca, was a collaborative effort of seed and climate activists in February of 2020.
As the coronavirus spreads anxiety and panic across the globe, people are finding ways to share information and support each other.
Citing the “collective solidarity” of friends and family in China and Hong Kong who have been affected by the coronavirus, a Seattle group has formed an online community to coordinate resources and provide support to those most vulnerable to the infection.
Essentially, coping requires that we attend to the things about being human that never change, and which we share with other people, even if they take different cultural expressions: temporality, death, sociality, language, pain, joy, suffering, doubt, anxiety, rejection, loss, uncertainty, sexuality, fun, creativity, imagination, curiosity, love, inventiveness, the capacity to express ourselves.
Workers should be in charge. People who have their life on the line should make the decisions. Because those that have their livelihood on the line are more likely to make decisions that would benefit the company as well as themselves because the decisions that are made impact them and beyond.
We will continue dreaming to protect our forest. We are the earth, the water, the air. We are the forest itself. And for her, we will continue to fight and unite until the end, with lots of love, and lots of rebellion.
