I am willing to recognize we have differences, but not that there is a line drawn between us so that I cannot participate in your struggles and you cannot comprehend mine.
Yes, there are things someone can only understand if they've been there--but they can understand there is something they cannot understand. They can trace the perimeter of it, read the parameters, find out what they need to do.
I defy the disjunction between an ally and a community member. An ally participates in the struggles of the group, feels hurt when it is hurt, feels joy when it triumphs, carries prejudiced rubbed off by association, relinquishes the privilege of the dominant group to not think about the issue, the inequality, the inequity. Yes, there are gradations of participation, gradations of harm, but there are those within the recognized community itself.
***
Just now I realized I could be a straight cisgendered woman without losing any of myself, any of my freedom to live the lifestyle I want, any of my identity. Such fears used to drive, have driven my second-guessing of the labels I applied to myself--and my latching on to the labels in the first place. I did that with mental illness as well as sexuality and gender, identifying with illness so hard because I was afraid that without the label, my experiences would be invalidated, my inabilities and quirks defined as willful delinquency.
In the high school environment, I felt my sexuality invalidated at every turn. High school and the media invalidate most everyone's sexuality: you're too slutty, you're not sexy, you're a laugh-worthy virgin, you're immoral, you're too young or inexperienced, you're infatuated, you're deficient, you're female, you're male, you look gay, you're uncool...
I heard the biphobic messages. I heard the homophobic messages. I heard the messages about beauty and social status and how confused “girls” are. My father went into denial the moment I came out to him as bisexual at 15. He moved on from there to venom. Others assumed I'd move on, “choose one,” most likely men because, you know, men are just more attractive.
Oftentimes, any sign that I might be more attracted to men, I suppressed with panic--what if I was really the pathetic, sex-starved, confused, femininely weak girl they thought I was? Just making up the bisexuality because I hadn't had the real thing yet. Worse yet, deserving of the dismissal and derision I felt I was treated with.
After high school, I encountered an actual queer community. I protested and attended queer events. I was proud, but again I was afraid--of losing the beliefs and values of the queer community, of being forced by rogue sexual fluidity back into the heterosexual world. I didn't separate heterosexuals from heteronormativity.
Now I have. Two things helped with that: my numerous enriching experiences with straight allies who can be just as queer as the rest of us (if they want to), and my accumulation of broken gender norms. My body hair and my bare face and my variable clothing and my ideas are all mine. My feminism is not contingent upon my queerness. My social liberalism is not contingent on my innate difference. My participation in the struggle of the transgendered and genderqueer people is not contingent on my being one of them.
I am not coming out as a straight woman. I am definitely not straight--but I am guilty of minor attempts to “hide the evidence” of my attraction to and relationships with men, which is crazy and unjust to them. I'll be well-rid of that bias.
As for woman? Still wide-open on that front. I have no innate desire to abandon my identity as a genderqueer, androgyne, slightly-bigendered mostly-agendered person, agenderist, etc, but sometimes I worry that my identity as such is unnecessary and causes more trouble than it's worth--that the identity and the narrative I have in my head about it create the problems the narrative claims they are in response to. That I wouldn't feel weird when people called me “she” or referred to me as female if I hadn't latched onto this label three years ago--in this model of the scenario, mostly in response to the alienation I felt from the misogyny and social isolation I grew up with and partly in an over-enthusiastic show of solidarity. As I attempt to resolve this self-doubt, I might move toward a female identity--but on the other hand, I really don't want to.
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
Anecdote that crushes you with the human spirit #1
Today I overheard a story. I don't know where it was set--an American homeless shelter or a poor country abroad--or what exactly the event was, but it went something like this:
Volunteers had set up several stations to teach kids about something. Science, maybe.
One five-year-old boy studies each of them intently, one arm bent to carry his backpack, his three-year-old brother's hand and backpack grasped in the other. He's in charge of the little brother, and he wants to learn the material to make sure the little one understands it as well, and he has to memorize it to teach to the sister who was too sick to come.
Five years old.
The story-teller, a volunteer from the event, said that this was why, this was why...
And of course ze's right.
Volunteers had set up several stations to teach kids about something. Science, maybe.
One five-year-old boy studies each of them intently, one arm bent to carry his backpack, his three-year-old brother's hand and backpack grasped in the other. He's in charge of the little brother, and he wants to learn the material to make sure the little one understands it as well, and he has to memorize it to teach to the sister who was too sick to come.
Five years old.
The story-teller, a volunteer from the event, said that this was why, this was why...
And of course ze's right.
Monday, January 17, 2011
Urban Nature Writing?
I wasn't looking to get inspired by my homework tonight, considering the queue of remaining assignments, but I did.
On the first day of Intro to Environmental Studies, the professors asked the students to tell the class about their favorite place. I didn't raise my hand: The favorite places were all in the "wilderness" somewhere, and at the time I was severely and pleasantly lost in my webfic addiction. My favorite place is Salt Lake City. This is where I became myself, crawled out of the darkness that was my life in high school, stuck in a box-shaped room in the suburbs with nothing but my computer screen and my hallucinations for guidance.
Oh, and a melodramatic teenage depression.
But no matter that my love for this place arose from my coming of age (and increased through familiarity, of course)--it's still a deep, raw affection, sometimes even a need, a sense of home--"home is where the heart is," but my loved ones live far from where I feel most at home. Home is where the self grows strongest.
My class readings for the day have validated my attachment to an urban setting: two readings discussed urban ecology, urged that we consider cities as ecosystems, not malign them as inferior antitheses of nature; the other reading discussed nature writers.
Nature writers, Trimble claims, listen to their subject, acknowledge it as the authority instead of identifying themselves as experts.
What would it be like to observe Salt Lake in this way?
The cars come first to my mind. They are the loudest, and the most visibly numerous agents in the city. The buildings and roads, more invisible to a human observer, perhaps deserve first mention. The changes in the contours of the earth wrought by construction, like the compacted terrace my house sits on, overlooking 13th East, which corresponds, I've heard, to a fault line.
The animal life. The rodents scurrying in scraps of woods around Emigration Creek on Westminster campus, or in the native plants and imported rocks of a xeriscaped yard. One crawled into my house a week or so ago; I saw it in several places over the course of the day, haven't seen it since. I hope for its sake it didn't fall prey to my roommate's neurotoxin trap, and part of me resents my failure to replace the poison with humane traps. Maybe I will talk to my roommate about that.
Spiders are more common indoor companions, and on the campus, box elder bugs. There must be an astonishing array of smaller life forms that I don't notice.
Invasive and nonnative species fascinate me. They thrive in the urban landscape--does that give them the right to colonize it? A fellow student in class thinks so, that the disturbances of modern human society will lead to a new equilibrium, another step in the course of evolution.
Of course the loss in the meantime may be devastating, the cost too high. I don't know the science to inform this normative question.
The weather, of course, is a major part of our ecosystem. In the past week we went from shining snow cover for several days to warmth and rain scattered with hail today. This effects the transportation patterns of the human and vehicle populations of the city: I was among the few bikers in the hail, although many have adapted to the snow--and even the inversion. I passed a fellow cyclist who wore a breath mask. I think I may adopt this innovation.
The internet itself is an interesting device: I can use it to find the experiences of other cities, geographically arbitrarily far away, with the innovation I'm considering. They can ship me the product if I find out other people consider it useful.
The light--including the light pollution--is among the most striking features of this city. City light on clouds at night. Stars drowned out. Dusky light caught between snow and cloud cover, the in-between world surreally bright and edged in orange-blue.
In Sustainability & Consciousness last semester, we talked about "going out into the woods alone"--and how unbearably lonely the first few days could be. Yet I ghost through the city, often going many days without a meaningful or prolonged conversation. It wears on me, especially when (as today) I've had contact with another person, the contrast showing up the loneliness. Solitude is not a requisite condition for nature writing or observation: some of the famous nature writers traveled with geologists or biologists to give their journeys direction and information. But solitude is a common condition. I wonder if I can turn mine into observation as well.
On the first day of Intro to Environmental Studies, the professors asked the students to tell the class about their favorite place. I didn't raise my hand: The favorite places were all in the "wilderness" somewhere, and at the time I was severely and pleasantly lost in my webfic addiction. My favorite place is Salt Lake City. This is where I became myself, crawled out of the darkness that was my life in high school, stuck in a box-shaped room in the suburbs with nothing but my computer screen and my hallucinations for guidance.
Oh, and a melodramatic teenage depression.
But no matter that my love for this place arose from my coming of age (and increased through familiarity, of course)--it's still a deep, raw affection, sometimes even a need, a sense of home--"home is where the heart is," but my loved ones live far from where I feel most at home. Home is where the self grows strongest.
My class readings for the day have validated my attachment to an urban setting: two readings discussed urban ecology, urged that we consider cities as ecosystems, not malign them as inferior antitheses of nature; the other reading discussed nature writers.
Nature writers, Trimble claims, listen to their subject, acknowledge it as the authority instead of identifying themselves as experts.
What would it be like to observe Salt Lake in this way?
The cars come first to my mind. They are the loudest, and the most visibly numerous agents in the city. The buildings and roads, more invisible to a human observer, perhaps deserve first mention. The changes in the contours of the earth wrought by construction, like the compacted terrace my house sits on, overlooking 13th East, which corresponds, I've heard, to a fault line.
The animal life. The rodents scurrying in scraps of woods around Emigration Creek on Westminster campus, or in the native plants and imported rocks of a xeriscaped yard. One crawled into my house a week or so ago; I saw it in several places over the course of the day, haven't seen it since. I hope for its sake it didn't fall prey to my roommate's neurotoxin trap, and part of me resents my failure to replace the poison with humane traps. Maybe I will talk to my roommate about that.
Spiders are more common indoor companions, and on the campus, box elder bugs. There must be an astonishing array of smaller life forms that I don't notice.
Invasive and nonnative species fascinate me. They thrive in the urban landscape--does that give them the right to colonize it? A fellow student in class thinks so, that the disturbances of modern human society will lead to a new equilibrium, another step in the course of evolution.
Of course the loss in the meantime may be devastating, the cost too high. I don't know the science to inform this normative question.
The weather, of course, is a major part of our ecosystem. In the past week we went from shining snow cover for several days to warmth and rain scattered with hail today. This effects the transportation patterns of the human and vehicle populations of the city: I was among the few bikers in the hail, although many have adapted to the snow--and even the inversion. I passed a fellow cyclist who wore a breath mask. I think I may adopt this innovation.
The internet itself is an interesting device: I can use it to find the experiences of other cities, geographically arbitrarily far away, with the innovation I'm considering. They can ship me the product if I find out other people consider it useful.
The light--including the light pollution--is among the most striking features of this city. City light on clouds at night. Stars drowned out. Dusky light caught between snow and cloud cover, the in-between world surreally bright and edged in orange-blue.
In Sustainability & Consciousness last semester, we talked about "going out into the woods alone"--and how unbearably lonely the first few days could be. Yet I ghost through the city, often going many days without a meaningful or prolonged conversation. It wears on me, especially when (as today) I've had contact with another person, the contrast showing up the loneliness. Solitude is not a requisite condition for nature writing or observation: some of the famous nature writers traveled with geologists or biologists to give their journeys direction and information. But solitude is a common condition. I wonder if I can turn mine into observation as well.
Thursday, November 4, 2010
Middle thoughts on the limitations of the market
When I was in high school, I probably would have told you I was a libertarian, classical liberal, or capitalist. Recently a coworker told me that the reason libertarians don't get many votes is because people don't know what they are; when you explain libertarianism to people, everybody agrees with it.
I think libertarianism is perniciously idealistic. Free markets aren't enough to care for the poor, the disabled, unwanted children, the environment, or public education. It's easy to become disenchanted with governments and their often-destructive policies, but other policies really do promote the public welfare, and the stand-out countries in the world provide public services.
On the other hand, I recognize the power of the market mechanism--when properly applied. For instance, a cap-and-trade system can reduce pollutants or become an unstable, ineffectual financial game. Similarly, a good environment for business combined with universal education can quickly grow an economy.
When I stop and think, I'm also sympathetic to libertarian accusations that non-minimal-government types are wrongly imposing their values on other people. What right do I have to advocate policy against consumerism when it's what so many people choose? (I originally wrote "choose freely," but a choice is always dependent on context--including cultural and institutional necessities that one might hate, not to mention all the forces that guide and warp one's perceptions.)
Of course, I do have a case: Consumerism is causing and will continue to cause suffering and deaths because of its environmental impacts. If stuff was free or close to it, I'd love it. If the costs fell solely on the individuals choosing to participate in the transaction, I'd be fine with it. But instead they fall upon the entire world, especially the least empowered, the poor, the ill, the non-human, and future generations. This knowledge came before and drove my dislike of consumerism, which was only then joined by my own disgust with the shallowness, loneliness, and pointlessness of my American life.
I look forward to learning more about libertarian thinkers' ideas. I think they have a great deal to add to the public discussion and to future policy decisions (if only we could get past the damage conservatives do!). Economic efficiency is good in many contexts, personal liberty in even more.
I don't know anything about the philosophy, but I've gotten the idea that my beliefs tend toward "libertarian socialism". Unfortunately, another thing that I think the libertarians get right most of the time is the value of private property--people are more likely to protect the things they have a stake in or a sense of ownership over, spoil the things they don't.
I enjoy having no sweeping political/economic ideology that I can put a name to. There are certainly many political ideologies I ascribe to, including many I've never noticed, but I have no faith in one system or other that will bring us to utopia. Lack of such faith both strikes me as realistic and relieves me of the emotional friction experienced by someone possessed of answers the mainstream don't ask for.
I think libertarianism is perniciously idealistic. Free markets aren't enough to care for the poor, the disabled, unwanted children, the environment, or public education. It's easy to become disenchanted with governments and their often-destructive policies, but other policies really do promote the public welfare, and the stand-out countries in the world provide public services.
On the other hand, I recognize the power of the market mechanism--when properly applied. For instance, a cap-and-trade system can reduce pollutants or become an unstable, ineffectual financial game. Similarly, a good environment for business combined with universal education can quickly grow an economy.
When I stop and think, I'm also sympathetic to libertarian accusations that non-minimal-government types are wrongly imposing their values on other people. What right do I have to advocate policy against consumerism when it's what so many people choose? (I originally wrote "choose freely," but a choice is always dependent on context--including cultural and institutional necessities that one might hate, not to mention all the forces that guide and warp one's perceptions.)
Of course, I do have a case: Consumerism is causing and will continue to cause suffering and deaths because of its environmental impacts. If stuff was free or close to it, I'd love it. If the costs fell solely on the individuals choosing to participate in the transaction, I'd be fine with it. But instead they fall upon the entire world, especially the least empowered, the poor, the ill, the non-human, and future generations. This knowledge came before and drove my dislike of consumerism, which was only then joined by my own disgust with the shallowness, loneliness, and pointlessness of my American life.
I look forward to learning more about libertarian thinkers' ideas. I think they have a great deal to add to the public discussion and to future policy decisions (if only we could get past the damage conservatives do!). Economic efficiency is good in many contexts, personal liberty in even more.
I don't know anything about the philosophy, but I've gotten the idea that my beliefs tend toward "libertarian socialism". Unfortunately, another thing that I think the libertarians get right most of the time is the value of private property--people are more likely to protect the things they have a stake in or a sense of ownership over, spoil the things they don't.
I enjoy having no sweeping political/economic ideology that I can put a name to. There are certainly many political ideologies I ascribe to, including many I've never noticed, but I have no faith in one system or other that will bring us to utopia. Lack of such faith both strikes me as realistic and relieves me of the emotional friction experienced by someone possessed of answers the mainstream don't ask for.
Possible success paper?
One of the things I am not that great at that I would expect someone of my education level to be better at: Writing papers.
In the past few weeks I've found myself shutting down and acting oddly from the stress of having to write a 10-page paper using high-quality sources for Environmental Politics and Policy. I submitted a last-minute research proposal last Thursday and instantly felt relieved, but I was sick again today from the prospect of meeting with my professor. In addition to the fears I already had about completing the paper, I thought ze would be harsh on my initial effort. Instead, ze gave me a list of sources to look up following a possible focus for my paper: the legislative history of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 and the innovative tradeable sulfur allowances.
This is quite possibly the most positive academic mentoring experience I have ever had. Which, retrospectively, is probably sad, but I'm stoked. Now I think this professor rocks.
I'm telling myself that I now know how to deal with the anxiety: Do the work. I'm so glad I have a direction to go in, and I'll probably be posting my progress and setbacks on this blog.
Crossed fingers. This could be a major breakthrough in my academic career.
In the past few weeks I've found myself shutting down and acting oddly from the stress of having to write a 10-page paper using high-quality sources for Environmental Politics and Policy. I submitted a last-minute research proposal last Thursday and instantly felt relieved, but I was sick again today from the prospect of meeting with my professor. In addition to the fears I already had about completing the paper, I thought ze would be harsh on my initial effort. Instead, ze gave me a list of sources to look up following a possible focus for my paper: the legislative history of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 and the innovative tradeable sulfur allowances.
This is quite possibly the most positive academic mentoring experience I have ever had. Which, retrospectively, is probably sad, but I'm stoked. Now I think this professor rocks.
I'm telling myself that I now know how to deal with the anxiety: Do the work. I'm so glad I have a direction to go in, and I'll probably be posting my progress and setbacks on this blog.
Crossed fingers. This could be a major breakthrough in my academic career.
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Mental Growing Pangs
This summer, I took an intro to ethics class. The sole paper I wrote for that class was on assisted suicide. Since I had been suicidal from depression for many months in the prior year and since the belief that living probably isn't really worth it hadn't gone away (and is still with me in several forms), the arguments against suicide challenged me and opened my eyes.
The death of a college professor who wrote often about suicide, didn't seem depressed, but took zir own life at a certain age--"rational suicide" to avoid the toll of terminal illness--was attributed by some to "rigid thinking," the inability to see or take seriously alternative solutions to a problem or interpretations of reality.
Lately I've found myself metaphorically and literally blinking in confusion at life as my own patterns of "rigid thinking" temporarily subside. I would like to truly be open to new ideas.
I never saw myself as someone who was not able to think outside my preconceived notions before, but in retrospect I have found it very difficult to accept uncertainty or contradictory information or lines of thinking. In high school, I struggled with my own misogyny, and later I struggled to find a new identity after realizing that conservatism wasn't the white-knight ideology I had thought it was.
During my first year of college, I agonized endlessly over my choice to call my gender identity "androgyne"--even though I adopted that label almost as soon as I first considered transgendered people, assimilating new information and new conceptual structures felt threatening, like it invalidated me as a person to realize that other people might disagree with the basis for my self-labeling or choose to see gender in a different way.
After that year, I strangely dropped the label. I still call myself genderqueer occasionally, but I wanted to be seen as a cisgendered person. I didn't change my grooming habits to become gender normative, but I didn't and don't talk much about gender identity, and I also refer to myself in thought and word--honestly--as my biological gender. Not long ago I felt disoriented at the shape of my own body for a week or so, but that's rare.
I still think that, if I have a gender identity, it's definitely not plain cis, but how many standard deviations does that put me away from the average person? Less than one? More than two? I have no way of telling, and that's okay with me. There are cultural conceptual problems with gender, and I have no desire to stake out territory and argue about what's real, what's innate, what's imagined, what's culturally instilled, what's changeable.
Instead, I accept people's concepts of their own experience of gender as valid, and I reject generalizations about "men" or "women" or other gender-related categories. I'm not very vocal about it, but that's probably more related to self-confidence than anything else.
Rigid thinking relates complexly to self-confidence. On the one hand, it can lead to pigheaded brashness. On the other, awareness of that flaw gives me reason to doubt myself, and the rigid thinking itself makes it hard to learn and grow.
This largely explains my current impulse to write more. I think better when I write. I'm more likely to realize when my ideas hold no water, or to follow a promising line of thought further along. It helps me connect with my own past thoughts and experiences instead of floating in vague ideas about myself that don't turn out to be true upon further inspection.
The death of a college professor who wrote often about suicide, didn't seem depressed, but took zir own life at a certain age--"rational suicide" to avoid the toll of terminal illness--was attributed by some to "rigid thinking," the inability to see or take seriously alternative solutions to a problem or interpretations of reality.
Lately I've found myself metaphorically and literally blinking in confusion at life as my own patterns of "rigid thinking" temporarily subside. I would like to truly be open to new ideas.
I never saw myself as someone who was not able to think outside my preconceived notions before, but in retrospect I have found it very difficult to accept uncertainty or contradictory information or lines of thinking. In high school, I struggled with my own misogyny, and later I struggled to find a new identity after realizing that conservatism wasn't the white-knight ideology I had thought it was.
During my first year of college, I agonized endlessly over my choice to call my gender identity "androgyne"--even though I adopted that label almost as soon as I first considered transgendered people, assimilating new information and new conceptual structures felt threatening, like it invalidated me as a person to realize that other people might disagree with the basis for my self-labeling or choose to see gender in a different way.
After that year, I strangely dropped the label. I still call myself genderqueer occasionally, but I wanted to be seen as a cisgendered person. I didn't change my grooming habits to become gender normative, but I didn't and don't talk much about gender identity, and I also refer to myself in thought and word--honestly--as my biological gender. Not long ago I felt disoriented at the shape of my own body for a week or so, but that's rare.
I still think that, if I have a gender identity, it's definitely not plain cis, but how many standard deviations does that put me away from the average person? Less than one? More than two? I have no way of telling, and that's okay with me. There are cultural conceptual problems with gender, and I have no desire to stake out territory and argue about what's real, what's innate, what's imagined, what's culturally instilled, what's changeable.
Instead, I accept people's concepts of their own experience of gender as valid, and I reject generalizations about "men" or "women" or other gender-related categories. I'm not very vocal about it, but that's probably more related to self-confidence than anything else.
Rigid thinking relates complexly to self-confidence. On the one hand, it can lead to pigheaded brashness. On the other, awareness of that flaw gives me reason to doubt myself, and the rigid thinking itself makes it hard to learn and grow.
This largely explains my current impulse to write more. I think better when I write. I'm more likely to realize when my ideas hold no water, or to follow a promising line of thought further along. It helps me connect with my own past thoughts and experiences instead of floating in vague ideas about myself that don't turn out to be true upon further inspection.
Election Day-After
U.S. midterm elections were yesterday. I voted for the first time. In 2008 I wasn't old enough, but I lived on a college campus along with a lot of first-time voters feverish for Obama. Lacking their optimism, I was still willing to go along, happy to see an African-American elected president, happy to see McCain/Palin lose.
But the morning after the elections still sucked, with me wandering down to the student center to see the strained faces of students from California whose marriage rights had just been revoked by their own mean-spirited neighbors.
Today I checked the news to see another string of deaths in Iraq, legacy of America's failed politics, and a defeat for drug decriminalization, promising more wars and unrest in foreign countries, a triumph for private prisons and racial discrimination in the US.
Republicans won the House and significant seats across the country, a frustrating shift to the right to those of us far left of the current government. For me, even more frustrating is the reason: Dissatisfaction with the poor recovery from the economic crisis the current administration inherited.
I don't agree that economic growth is an important goal.
The economy is a means to several ends: Distribution of necessary resources, attainment of things people want, and giving people something to do, among and overlapping with others. Right now, I think the marginal utility of economic growth is significantly less than the marginal cost.
What I'm trying to say is, I'm an environmentalist.
Growth is (a) unsustainable, and (b) incredibly destructive. These two combined mean that the more we produce and consume now, the more we hurt later on. And the more non-humans and poor humans who aren't responsible for this mess also hurt. I find this morally repugnant.
Additionally, I don't think consumption makes us happier. Because we insist on hiring full-time workers for 40 hours a week or else relying on temps who don't get the pay or the benefits they need to live well, we need to keep producing more and more as production becomes less labor-intensive. Ergo we need to convince people they need to buy more and more even after their demand has been met. Is it any surprise that job recovery is slow when we don't actually need 40 hours of labor a week from everyone in the labor pool of this country?
We can grow quality of life without increasing worldwide production or transportation. We could start by setting up a true socialized health care system, but Americans didn't like the idea. We could decrease the work week, but Americans wouldn't like the idea. We could require international firms to comply with fair trade practices before we bought anything from them, but China wouldn't like the idea. We could start pricing carbon emissions, but, yeah, both Americans and free trade types would get into a tizzy about that.
So my beliefs are firmly in the counter-culture, while my life is not. I boycott the products of factory farms, I use a combination of biking, walking, public transit, and carpooling instead of owning a car, but even though those choices greatly reduce my individual environmental footprint, it doesn't seem like enough. And neither choice is primarily for the environment. I want to step away from frivolous consumerism, want to dig into a place and make long-term connections with the community. Yet I feel rootless and shallow in my relationships with place and my fellow humans, more so with the remnants of the environment that spring up between concrete slabs.
I don't know how to reach my goal. My life is inherently unstable at this point in time: I'm a student. I don't know what my employment opportunities will be after I graduate, where I'll live, whether I'll even then have the sense of security in an income able to support my desired lifestyle. But people do it, live in the same town for years or even decades, so perhaps I shouldn't worry so much. Some people even live in the same house, which is what I would want--although really I want to find a fertile plot of land and build on it an energy-efficient abode from recycled and natural materials. I want there to be rodents and birds and spiders and many species of native and cultivated plants.
But I also want a social life with people who accept my radical ideas, and are those two hopes compatible?
Capitalists would tell me that my environmental tendencies are a personal preference. And at this point in the world's mess, maybe they are. Personal changes in consumption aren't going to save us, and there are quite possibly too many people for everyone to live sustainably. More importantly, too many people are wrapped up in ideologies hostile or oblivious to prioritizing the environment. Fighting the environmental battle now seems like a lost cause overall, even though possible future victories are very important bandaids. They will determine which ecological and human communities collapse, how many, how badly, and how soon.
So the environment is, to my knowledge, the most important issue facing the world today. Its recovery is far, far more important than that of the economy.
But the morning after the elections still sucked, with me wandering down to the student center to see the strained faces of students from California whose marriage rights had just been revoked by their own mean-spirited neighbors.
Today I checked the news to see another string of deaths in Iraq, legacy of America's failed politics, and a defeat for drug decriminalization, promising more wars and unrest in foreign countries, a triumph for private prisons and racial discrimination in the US.
Republicans won the House and significant seats across the country, a frustrating shift to the right to those of us far left of the current government. For me, even more frustrating is the reason: Dissatisfaction with the poor recovery from the economic crisis the current administration inherited.
I don't agree that economic growth is an important goal.
The economy is a means to several ends: Distribution of necessary resources, attainment of things people want, and giving people something to do, among and overlapping with others. Right now, I think the marginal utility of economic growth is significantly less than the marginal cost.
What I'm trying to say is, I'm an environmentalist.
Growth is (a) unsustainable, and (b) incredibly destructive. These two combined mean that the more we produce and consume now, the more we hurt later on. And the more non-humans and poor humans who aren't responsible for this mess also hurt. I find this morally repugnant.
Additionally, I don't think consumption makes us happier. Because we insist on hiring full-time workers for 40 hours a week or else relying on temps who don't get the pay or the benefits they need to live well, we need to keep producing more and more as production becomes less labor-intensive. Ergo we need to convince people they need to buy more and more even after their demand has been met. Is it any surprise that job recovery is slow when we don't actually need 40 hours of labor a week from everyone in the labor pool of this country?
We can grow quality of life without increasing worldwide production or transportation. We could start by setting up a true socialized health care system, but Americans didn't like the idea. We could decrease the work week, but Americans wouldn't like the idea. We could require international firms to comply with fair trade practices before we bought anything from them, but China wouldn't like the idea. We could start pricing carbon emissions, but, yeah, both Americans and free trade types would get into a tizzy about that.
So my beliefs are firmly in the counter-culture, while my life is not. I boycott the products of factory farms, I use a combination of biking, walking, public transit, and carpooling instead of owning a car, but even though those choices greatly reduce my individual environmental footprint, it doesn't seem like enough. And neither choice is primarily for the environment. I want to step away from frivolous consumerism, want to dig into a place and make long-term connections with the community. Yet I feel rootless and shallow in my relationships with place and my fellow humans, more so with the remnants of the environment that spring up between concrete slabs.
I don't know how to reach my goal. My life is inherently unstable at this point in time: I'm a student. I don't know what my employment opportunities will be after I graduate, where I'll live, whether I'll even then have the sense of security in an income able to support my desired lifestyle. But people do it, live in the same town for years or even decades, so perhaps I shouldn't worry so much. Some people even live in the same house, which is what I would want--although really I want to find a fertile plot of land and build on it an energy-efficient abode from recycled and natural materials. I want there to be rodents and birds and spiders and many species of native and cultivated plants.
But I also want a social life with people who accept my radical ideas, and are those two hopes compatible?
Capitalists would tell me that my environmental tendencies are a personal preference. And at this point in the world's mess, maybe they are. Personal changes in consumption aren't going to save us, and there are quite possibly too many people for everyone to live sustainably. More importantly, too many people are wrapped up in ideologies hostile or oblivious to prioritizing the environment. Fighting the environmental battle now seems like a lost cause overall, even though possible future victories are very important bandaids. They will determine which ecological and human communities collapse, how many, how badly, and how soon.
So the environment is, to my knowledge, the most important issue facing the world today. Its recovery is far, far more important than that of the economy.
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