Rivera Sun's Blog: From the Desk of Rivera Sun, page 24

This Machine Fights Climate Change

This is a photo of my electric hot plate stove. Years ago, when I moved to this house, my friends were working to stop fracking in the nearby county. In solidarity, I turned off our natural gas stove and bought a hot plate, paying a little extra each month for the wind power option available during from our local electric cooperative.

Time rolled onward. Fracking is still a problem. The climate crisis is intensifying. In North Dakota, the Energy Transfer Partnership is using tear gas, rubber bullets, water cannons at freezing temperatures to try to build their billion dollar pipeline under the Missouri River. They are violating the rights of indigenous people, the Standing Rock Sioux, and the human and civil rights of all of the peaceful Water Protectors.

Interestingly, our wind power comes from North Dakota. Our electric coop’s website says:

The association has secured several different sources of “green power.” As a Class A member of Basin Electric Power Cooperative, another consumer-owned generation and transmission cooperative based in Bismarck, N.D., a portion of the energy Tri-State purchases from Basin is derived from that cooperative’s 80 megawatts of wind generation capacity. Tri-State also receives wind energy from Fort Collins, Colo.-based Platte River Power Authority’s wind farm in Medicine Bow, Wyo.

By 2022, local renewable energy groups have a goal of 100% locally produced renewable energy for our coop. In the meantime, my support of wind power is hopefully part of the broad Just Transitions movement that seeks to employ energy workers in increasing numbers in the renewable energy industry instead of in the fossil fuel industry. My hope and my prayer, each time I turn on my stove, is that this choice of mine has a positive impact on the energy workers who are concerned for their jobs and their families.

We can make a Just Transition together. We do not need to see the violence we are witnessing from the Morton County Sheriff’s Department against peaceful Water Protectors. We do not need to escalate the climate crisis any further. If you are in Taos, NM, and on Kit Carson Electric Coop, please consider supporting the wind option and sending a clear message to North Dakotans that we support their transition along with ours. Please contact the Coop to learn more.

Gratitude Like Rain Falling In the Desert

A Message from Rivera Sun

This morning, I rose and stood in my black wool wrap as a gentle desert rain fell on the dry earth. The scent of sagebrush drifted with the low clouds. I reached down and placed my palm on the damp ground. Gratitude is the sensation of rain falling in the desert.

While I slept, angels and bodhisattvas swept through the realms of dreams and wishes. The Community Publishing campaign that we’re running for the newest novel, The Way Between, met its goal just two days into the month-long endeavor. We will continue the campaign, offering the Author’s Edition of the book to excited friends and fans, and opening up the possibilities of dedicating more focused writing time for the whole series that follows this first volume. (If curious, you can find it here.)

To say that I am grateful is an understatement. Behind numbers and dollars is a longer story, one woven with mystical encounters and unusual experiences. In gratitude for the faith and belief of everyone who has supported the new book, I’m going to share some of my personal story that brought me to this day.

I was a shy redheaded child with only one foot in reality. The other was traversing the realms of story, daydreaming and imagining in a continuous stream from dawn until dusk, and then into dreams. While this caused terrible problems in learning multiplication and getting my chores done, it meant that behind the daydreaming, I was growing the sort of rampant imagination that is the bread-and-butter of novelists, the foundation for our work. I wrote my first “novel” in third grade instead of memorizing the times table. If I remember correctly, it had something to do with a baby chicken. My second novel died a painful death on the vagaries of computer disks of the late 1980-90s. I have since learned that the same disks that ate my novel are also running our current nuclear weapons arsenal. Reality is far stranger than anything I could invent.

At nineteen, while spending the summer apprenticed to a pair of blacksmiths (father and son), I spent an afternoon on the granite rocks of the Maine coast, staring at the ocean and wondering what to do with my life. As much as the blacksmiths fascinated me, I could tell hammering iron was not in my stars. Wracked with an existential angst of nineteen-year-old proportions, I glanced down beside me. Wedged in the rocks, carved by the tides, was a piece of driftwood in the perfect shape of a feather quill. The symbol of writers! I picked it up and held it in my hand, awestruck, feeling a bit like King Arthur pulling a sword out the stone. Except, in my case, the pen is mightier than the sword, and it was wordsmithing, not blacksmithing or sword fighting, for which the Universe had just clearly shown me a sign.

I carried this wooden feather quill with me to college (where I was awarded a writing scholarship and proceeded to spend four years studying dance) and then to California. One day, in a fit of mysticism and madness, I flung it into the Pacific Ocean in a ritual of releasing and renunciation. A year later, I kicked myself for that action. Who throws back the sword in the stone? Who rejects such an obviously mystical creation of Earth?

Later, while visiting my family’s farm in Northern Maine, three thousand miles away, I opened up my trunk of old writings and photos. There, sitting on top of the stack was the wooden feather quill. I cannot make up fiction as unbelievable as the reality I have lived. I sat in the cabin, stunned, looking out at the swaying golden grasses of the fields and the glossy darkness of the pine forests.

My parents, in all their infinite wisdom, had raised my siblings and I on the obligatory trips to church at Christmas and Easter. Then they turned us loose into the wilderness of Northern Maine to find our own path toward God or spirituality or whatever connected us to the depths of the unknown mysteries of the world. After teenage years spent drunk with the beauty of the Earth instead of alcohol with highschool friends, I moved to California for a seven-year sojourn of dancing, redwood cathedrals, ocean waves thundering the mystics’ messages in my ears, and countless hours drinking tea in hidden teahouses populated by contemporary Kabirs and tea-drunk Taoist masters and Laughing Buddhas, compassionate Kwan Yins and whirling Shambos. I was steeped in the companionship of the mystics of all traditions, and, by the end of those years, I had a sense of the faith-crossing lineage to which my life belonged.

Here in the desert, I reach down to touch the Earth, the great being-body that has held me through every moment of this journey. My life has been one long series of stepping stone miracles that often emerge as I’m mid-leap into the unknown. Yet, the Universe has been tracking me, catching me, guiding me again and again toward writing. There were times when those miraculous stepping stones rose up suddenly and slammed into me painfully to stop me from going in another direction – such as the bicycle accident that ended my career as a bike messenger and the booming voice that told my dazed mind to “Remember!” Or perhaps it said, “Surrender!” Either message suffices. The Universe had a plan for me. It was time to get off the bicycle and back to work.

Then there was the dream, or rather, one of the many dreams. In it, I was being attacked on all sides by the shadowy demons of the human soul: Hate, Fear, Violence, War, Destruction, Greed, Cruelty, Domination, and so on. I flung my books at them like spinning discs of a strange kung-fu fighter. Whirling, I cut through these delusions one-by-one. At the end, the darkness cleared and in the daylight, I saw that the books had become a foundation of a world that humanity could stand on together.

The stories go on, but from what I have heard, it is not common to have received so many undeniable, mystical, and clear-as-day messages about one’s path in life. It is a great honor and a deep responsibility. It is a charge that cannot be ignored or done in half-hearted ways. I have this one lifetime with the particular alignment of storytelling in my bones and a pencil in hand and a world that desperately needs new stories. I have been honored by the support, faith, and vision of so many people who have continued to keep me on this path.

Today, awed by all of this, I crouch with my hand on the Earth, bowed in reverence and dedication, overcome with a gratitude that sings like rain falling in the desert.

Thank you, Rivera Sun

The Way Between – a new novel from Rivera Sun!

Announcing a new novel from Rivera Sun! The Way Between blends fun, action, adventure, and fantasy while delivering an uplifting message of waging peace and active nonviolence for a new generation of readers. This exciting story is available today through the Community Publishing campaign. Find it here.

Between flight and fight lies a mysterious third path called the Way Between, and young shepherdess and orphan Ari Ara must master it . . . before war destroys everything she loves! She begins training as the apprentice of the great warrior Shulen, and enters a world of warriors and secrets, swords and magic, friendship and mystery. She uncovers forbidden prophecies, searches for the lost heir to two thrones, and chases the elusive forest-dwelling Fanten to unravel their hidden knowledge. Full of twists and turns and surprises, The Way Between is bound to carve out a niche on bookshelves everywhere!

“The Way Between offers the younger generations – and the older ones – the values of peace and nonviolence, anti-bullying, compassion, inclusion and belonging.” – Rivera Sun

You’re invited to be one of the people who publish this book!

Rivera Sun’s novels are published by a community of creative visionaries who work together to bring these great stories into the world. Contribute a small or large amount and join the adventure! Get a copy for yourself, a friend, the kids next door, grandkids, the library or local school. Support the writing process for the sequel or the whole series. Bring the book to your book club or pitch in to share the magic and adventure far and wide. Everyone is welcome. All contributions are received with gratitude and enthusiasm! Here is where to get a copy and/or contribute!

People are saying: 

“For my friends who have young people in their lives, a library in their community and/or are young at heart, The Way Between is a GREAT read (I know because I was honored to be a be a beta reader) and another important book for our times.” 

“For all of my friends with children of various ages, this is the book to read on a cold winter’s night!”



“Thank you so much for this wonderful story! I cried and rejoiced and cried again.”

“I love this book and can’t wait to see the movie … and the prequel and the sequel. It reminds me of the work of Madeleine L’Engle in it’s pace and action and depth. “

Thank you for supporting this book!

Disrupt! Interrupt! The Ground of Resistance is Ours!

Public Domain Image, Creative Commons CCO Support the Commons!

An Essay of The Man From the North

A smoothly functioning society is created and maintained by the people. Children go to school, workers show up at their jobs, shipments are made, groceries and purchases are bought, bills are paid, goods and services are delivered; and so on. In times of justice, when the workings of society are fair, respectful, and uphold the rights and dignity of humanity, then the people have every reason to collectively maintain functional workplaces, schools, roads, social events, and so on.

But in times of injustice, when the government, businesses, courts, and institutions are corrupt and abusive, it is the right and the responsibility of the people to deny power holders the benefit of a seamlessly operational society. Students must walk out of classes. Commuter traffic must be interrupted. Workers must strike. Shoppers must boycott. Widespread nonviolent action in the forms of noncooperation and intervention must be used to withhold the socio-political consent of our day-to-day lives.

Corrupt and abusive power holders view these actions as objectionable and abnormal. They are, however, indications of a robust and sane civil society grasping the source of its political power. The ability to give or withhold our consent or cooperation is the most important and ultimate form of checks-and-balance within our political system. It is the power most-feared by the unjust, the bullies, the crooks, and the abusive, for it is the ordinary, everyday strength of grandmothers and children, mothers and fathers, workers, teachers, and students.

In times such as ours, when rich people control vast monopolies, mass media, and the government, it is how we stand up to their bullying and abuse. When their concentrated control of power does not deliver decent food to our children or put solid roofs over our heads, then it is our right to refuse to give them a well-ordered society. When their domination of our governing system does not offer freedom from persecution and discrimination to every citizen, nor safety from the violence of the state, vigilantes, or others; nor affordable healthcare; nor freedom from the shackles of debt; nor an environment that can sustain and nurture life . . . when such systemic failures run rampant then it is our duty to resist the ruling elite using our ability to maintain or disrupt the functional workings of our world.

The people have no inherent obligation to deliver functional workplaces to wealthy business owners, nor profits from sales of consumer goods. We have no duty to comply with protocols of a governing body controlled by abusive oligarchs. The people do have reason to respect and uphold their fellow citizens, to maintain systems and institutions that protect and benefit the public good, and to cooperate with economic systems that are fair and respectful to workers, suppliers, and consumers alike. We have every reason to grant functional systems to our brothers and sisters wherever those systems improve the well-being of all.

But at times such as these, when our society as a whole serves largely to cripple, impoverish, imprison, and oppress the bulk of the populace, then the people must deeply question whether our normal, orderly days are a source of pride and contentment . . . or whether they are analogous to Christian Germans completing their shopping while the German-Jews were being sent to the gas chambers. Or worse, for in this metaphor, we are both the abused and the pawns of the abuser. We are the Jews who worked for the Nazis, keeping records of gold teeth, glasses, and pocket watches taken from the pockets of the condemned.

Our productive, well-ordered society is maintained by millions of people and can arise in three different ways Currently, it largely manifests as a massive machine of sleepwalking automatons, mindless of the effect of our actions. In times of justice, this society could be a vibrantly alive and beautiful reflection of the mutual respect and prosperity of a nation at peace with itself. In times of injustice, however, such a well-behaved society is shameful, a sign of either our callous disregard for each other, or of our ingrained disempowerment and despair.

The sleeping giant of our populace must awaken. The unconscious must become alert, aware, and empowered. The functionality of our daily world is the ground of our resistance to injustice. We must give or withhold our day-to-day compliance with so-called normality as a form of flexing our political muscles. With this power, we can rein in abuse and reward justice. With this power, we demonstrate the tangible will of the people to the power holders in business and government.

This is true for all political situations from dictatorships to democracies. In our times when so much is controlled by so few, we, the people, must use our socio-political strength to demand justice from the rich and powerful . . . and even more importantly, to wrest back the institutions and systems of power from their stranglehold, to insist on shared power, democracy, and the unraveling of their monopolistic control.

We must each study our daily lives for pivot points of resistance. Every task, chore, job, appointment, errand, item on the shopping list, social obligation . . . everything can become a place of giving or withholding consent when our individual actions are multiplied by the efforts of our fellow citizens. Through these places, our yearning for justice has the potential to become embodied action. We must study our lives for our sources of power. Then we must collectively use it to protect the dignity and well being of all.

______________

The Man From the North is a fictional writer in Rivera Sun’s novel, The Dandelion Insurrectio n. The novel takes place in the near future, in “a time that looms around the corner of today”, when a rising police state controlled by the corporate-political elite have plunged the nation into the grip of a hidden dictatorship. In spite of severe surveillance and repression, the Man From the North’s banned articles circulate through the American populace, reporting on resistance and fomenting nonviolent revolution. This article is one of a series written by The Man From the North, which are not included in the novel, but can be read here .  

Author/Activist Rivera Sun, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is the author of The Dandelion Insurrection, Billionaire Buddha and Steam Drills, Treadmills, and Shooting Stars, the cohost of Love (and Revolution) Radio, and the co-initiator of Live Share Grow: A Movement for the 100%. She is a trainer and social media coordinator for Campaign Nonviolence and Pace e Bene. Sun attended the James Lawson Institute on Strategic Nonviolent Resistance in 2014 and her essays on social justice movements appear in Counterpunch, Truthout and Popular Resistance. www.riverasun.com

The Three Thefts – Essays of the Man From the North

 

When the forces of destruction, hate, bigotry, greed, and violence rise into power, there are three things they steal before they plunder the treasury. Stopping them is where the struggle for life begins.

The first thing they steal is courage. The forces of destruction must snuff out the courage of the people like a candle in a harsh autumn wind. Fear must pervade the nooks and crannies of the heart and mind. Frightened shivers must weaken the spines of the people. It is easy to conquer people who scurry out of danger or hide from fear.

The second theft is hope. To achieve the goals of greed and hatred, the people must be bogged down in the morass of hopelessness and despair. So, they steal our hope, bound and gagged like Demeter’s daughter, and shove it into the underworld of impossibility while the cold winter of hopelessness freezes us in its grip.

The third thing they steal is joy. Sly and clever, they ferret out the small things in which the human heart delights and one-by-one, they rob us of our joy. Where they cannot take the physical sources of our happiness, they sneakily insinuate guilt . . . making us feel guilty for feeling joy in the midst of the world’s madness.

Joy is the place where our resistance must draw a line in the stand and begin to push back. Your joy is a wild and beautiful thing. In the midst of insanity, destruction, violence, greed, it is a force of strength and liberation, love and hope. The leaves falling in autumn, the breathless hush of snow, a cup of tea, a slice of bread, the company of a good friend, the smiles of children, the eyes of someone you love . . . to feel joy in these beauties is a powerful resistance to the tide of destruction. It is the ground of existence and the source of strength for resistance. Draw a line here. Give life to your joys to defy the forces of hate and despair. Lift up your small joys as the motivation to meet hated with love; destruction with creation; greed with generosity; and violence with active, powerful nonviolence.

When your hopes are dashed, bound, gagged, silenced and mocked, go – like Persephone’s mother – into the underworld of despair and rescue them. Bring them back to life like the first buds on the branches in spring. Withstand the hot-cold crosswinds of change, and dare to lift your hopes aloft for everyone to see. If they are knocked down, pick them up. If they are trivialized, resist. Where there is hope, there is life. A world without hope is a world locked in the darkness of midnight that cannot remember the dawn. This is nonsense. Every two-day old baby knows that sunrise is coming. Every child has seen how spring returns after winter. Hope is woven into our existence. It is our treasure. Don’t allow it to be kidnapped from your heart.

As for courage, this is the most important of all. When fear lands on your shoulders like a hunchbacked demon, gripping your neck in the twisted clench of its fingers, suffocating your chest, clouding your eyes . . . fight back. Fling it off, again and again. Wrestle with fear in the darkness until you break free. The heat of that struggle is called courage – the fire in your veins, the flush of life in your muscles, the breath in your chest, the pounding of your heart, as you break free of the clutches of fear.

There is more, too, that we can do in the ground of resistance. We can cultivate clarity, centeredness, and presence. When we lose these qualities, it is easy for us to be thrown off-balance, shoved to the side, pushed down, confused, and defeated. The forces of hate, destruction, violence, and greed are all delighted when we allow our minds to become scattered and ungrounded. We become easy to fight, to trample, and to destroy. So, our resistance must cultivate clarity and focus to give us strength and capacity to wage struggle.

There are also other treasures of the human heart that the forces of destruction try to steal or weaken: love, a sense of injustice, rebelliousness, stubbornness. But, these are tenacious capacities of the human heart. It takes the forces of destruction longer to chisel them out of us. We must draw the line at the three treasures of courage, hope, and joy. With them, we can stand firm in the madness. We can shine light in the darkness of destruction. We can draw upon the wellspring of strength that has nurtured humanity through eons of time. We can enter the struggle prepared with courage, joy, hope, clarity, vision, connection, and love. With these strengths we will succeed.

______________

The Man From the North is a fictional writer in Rivera Sun’s novel, The Dandelion Insurrection. The novel takes place in the near future, in “a time that looms around the corner of today”, when a rising police state controlled by the corporate-political elite have plunged the nation into the grip of a hidden dictatorship. In spite of severe surveillance and repression, the Man From the North’s banned articles circulate through the American populace, reporting on resistance and fomenting nonviolent revolution. This article is one of a series written by The Man From the North, which are not included in the novel, but can be read here.  

Author/Activist Rivera Sun, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is the author of The Dandelion Insurrection, Billionaire Buddha and Steam Drills, Treadmills, and Shooting Stars, the cohost of Love (and Revolution) Radio, and the co-initiator of Live Share Grow: A Movement for the 100%. She is a trainer and social media coordinator for Campaign Nonviolence and Pace e Bene. Sun attended the James Lawson Institute on Strategic Nonviolent Resistance in 2014 and her essays on social justice movements appear in Counterpunch, Truthout and Popular Resistance. www.riverasun.com

 

Know Your Nonviolent History: Icelandic Women’s Strike Oct 24th, 1975

Photo Credit: Icelandic Times

On October 24th, 1975, ninety percent of women in Iceland took “a day off”. Refraining from working, childcare, and household tasks, they brought the nation to a complete standstill (or utter chaos, depending on your perspective) in protest over women’s rights and equality.

One interview about the day reports, “Gudrun Jonsdottir still remembers what she was wearing on October 24, 1975. She was 21, just married with a young child, and was not going to cook, clean, and was definitely not going to work. Nor were my mother, my friends’ mothers, the shop assistants in the supermarket, the teachers – in short an estimated 90% of women in Iceland. A neighbour, the mother of three boisterous boys, left her family to fend for themselves at 8am and did not return until late in the evening. Remarkably, although Icelandic society was almost brought to a standstill that fine day, its women had never felt so alive, so purposeful and so determined.”

The United Nations had proclaimed 1975 a Women’s Year, and a committee from the major women’s organizations in Iceland had been set up to organize events. A radical women’s movement called the Red Stockings suggested, “Why don’t we just all go on strike?” The idea was agreed to after the word “strike” was replaced with “a day off” to make the concept more popular with women throughout the country, and to make it harder for employers (who could fire women going on strike) to deny them “a day off”.

In the capitol city, 25,000 women gathered in a mass demonstration (Iceland’s total population was only 220,000). The men were barely coping as the rest of the women refused to work or care for children. Some employers bought sweets and gathered pencils and papers for the large numbers of children who were brought to work that day by their fathers. Sausages – which were the equivalent of take-out pizza in those days – sold out in supermarkets.

Global Nonviolent Action Database says, “There was no telephone service. Newspapers were not printed because all the typesetters were women. Theaters shut down because actresses refused to work. Schools closed, or operated at limited capacity, because the majority of teachers were female. Airline flights were cancelled because flight attendants did not work that day. Bank executives had to work as tellers to keep the banks open because the female tellers had taken the day off.”

By the following year, Iceland’s parliament had passed a law guaranteeing equal rights to women and men.

________________

Author/Activist Rivera Sun, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is the author of The Dandelion Insurrection, Billionaire Buddha and Steam Drills, Treadmills, and Shooting Stars, the cohost of Love (and Revolution) Radio, and the co-initiator of Live Share Grow: A Movement for the 100%. She is a trainer and social media coordinator for Campaign Nonviolence and Pace e Bene. Sun attended the James Lawson Institute on Strategic Nonviolent Resistance in 2014 and her essays on social justice movements appear in Counterpunch, Truthout and Popular Resistance. www.riverasun.com

 

 

 

Old Toads and Millennial Votes

I am an old millennial, one who just barely squeezes into the age category.  I graduated high school in 2000. My first presidential election was Bush vs. Gore – a rigged election with widespread allegations of electoral voting machine manipulation and a dubiously-legal intervention of the Supreme Court to stop the pivotal Florida vote count, followed by the Democrat’s spineless concession to the decision.

I am part of a generation who has lived, formatively, through the experiences of the Princeton oligarchy study that demonstrated unequivocally that rich people get what they want from Congress, while the rest of us get ignored. I’ve seen, year after year, political pandering to the wealthy and mega-corporations while regular Americans have been pummeled by cruel and unusual economic policies pushed through Congress via the stratagems described by Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine.

I lived through the tumultuous protests of the 1990s-2000s against corporate power, globalization, and neoliberal policies. I’ve been waiting my whole life – all 34 years – for Congress or the White House to do something real about the obvious threat of climate change. Solar panels and wind energy have been viable – but politically unpalatable to oil and gas funded politicians – since I was in diapers. I watched the snow in my home in Northern Maine dwindle from power line high drifts to small patches of white. My fellow millennials in other areas of the country have grown up bucketing gray water to plants, limiting showers, being evacuated from catastrophic forest fires or by disastrous 100-year floods crashing down every 5-10 years.

Millennials are largely non-religious and, therefore, do not believe that the record-breaking temperatures of global warming are sent by a wrathful God . . . we’re well-aware that the fossil fuel companies are under investigation and facing lawsuits for funding decades of climate-denying pseudo-science to cover up the fact that their industry is intentionally killing our planet. Some of us were hoping our first car would be electric, but unfortunately the gasoline companies squashed that idea – which was just as well, since we can’t afford a new car due to the high levels of student debt we’re carrying. We can’t afford to settle down and start families, for that matter.

I was raised to believe in multiculturalism and the beauty of diversity, which is good, since 45 percent of my fellow millennials are non-white. To be honest, however, mass incarceration, racist over-policing and police brutality, economic injustice, the War on Drugs, unequal funding of public schools, and racial-economic segregation of society are making it challenging to have meaningful relationships across color lines. We’re learning to build friendships by showing up as allies in social justice movements working for change – which is profoundly important, but a far cry from the world of raising our kids as friends, working as colleagues and playing soccer together on the weekends. That rosy dream was dashed when we grew up and inherited a grossly unjust society stratified along racial and economic inequities.

The only equality left in the nation is in the NSA’s mass surveillance operations, which spies on everyone equally.  However, even the equally applied violation of our  4th amendment right to protection from unwarranted search descends into injustice and discrimination when a data-sorting filter is applied based on your racial, ethnic, religion affiliations, or political beliefs — not by connection to a probable cause of danger or harm to others.

As an old millennial, I’m not a dewy-eyed, corporatized, naive college student. I’m 34, informed, active, organized, and irascible. I’m ornery, rightfully outraged, and cynically disillusioned at the two-party duopoly. The two dominant parties are courting my vote like a thick-headed douchebag who just wants to get laid. They don’t want to get to know me. They assume they know what I’m thinking.  They don’t ask about my hopes, dreams, and visions.  They just want to screw my young vote and dump me on November 9th.

My apologies for the strong, but truthful description of my relationship to the two-party system. I can almost hear the mad scramble of excuses starting in everyone’s minds. But, if people truly cared about millennials, they’d sit down and ask what we’re thinking.

I’m thinking it’s time for nonviolent revolution. (And, I’m thinking the NSA just put me on their watchlist.) I’m thinking about the 50+ nonviolent revolutions that have occurred around the world in my lifetime. They’ve been twice as successful as their violent counterparts. I’m thinking about the bloated US military budget, and wondering if we could cut the nukes, fund nonviolence, and still have enough left over to end student debt for the next generation.

I’m thinking about the laundry list of other crucial issues that the two parties are oblivious to or intentionally ignoring: living wages, ending mass incarceration, stopping police brutality and the surveillance state, building renewable energy, the dire need for a real strategy to address climate change; the logic of the universal, single-payer healthcare system; taxing the rich and stopping the gravy-train for the one percent so the rest of us can rise out of poverty. I’m thinking about what the Princeton oligarchy study demonstrated about my statistical probability of having any political representation for these issues (an ironically precise 0.0 percent likelihood, in case anyone is wondering).

I’m thinking that I’m just one of 75.4 million millennials and that readers shouldn’t assume that I’m speaking for everyone my age.  Because we don’t do that; that’s so last century. If the two parties want the millennial vote, they’re going to have to stop telling us what’s good for us, and start taking the time to listen to millions of us articulating our hopes, fears, ideas, dreams, solutions, and strategies.  Then they’re going to have to do the impossible and act in very big, real, and scary (to them) ways. Revolutionary ways . . . because to my old millennial eyes, the clock has been ticking on these issues for three decades – all my life – and the frogs aren’t in hot water – they’re either dead or they’ve long since hopped out. According to the statistics, my fellow millennials and I have been hopping out of the establishment’s simmering pots for ages now, ditching religions, political parties, and social organizations.  And the old toads are croaking at us to come on in, the water’s fine, get involved in the old way of business-as-usual.  And when we refuse to boil ourselves alive, they call us apolitical or apathetic, ungrateful and self-absorbed.

We may have been born into the age of the Internet, but we also all studied ecosystems in elementary school. Caring for the planet isn’t for tree-hugging hippies, it’s a no-brainer for a reasonably intelligent human being. Some of us don’t look at the two major presidential candidates and see Woman In Pants Suit and Orange-Haired Man (arguably space creature).  We see the cliff’s edge of extinction, poverty, endless war, mass incarceration, corporate coups, and shackles of unbearable debt. Charming.

Trump and Hillary are fighting over the steering wheel like two-party parents who should really just hurry up and get divorced. Meanwhile, they’re both yelling at us to get in the backseat of the car . . . but the GPS on the automated corporate-oligarchic political machine is programmed for the cliff’s edge of extinction.  Pardon me for the cold feet, but that’s not my idea of a family vacation. Hillary’s claiming natural gas is our transition fuel, but neglects to mention that the exhaust pipe’s still connected the inside of the car and serves only to slowly asphyxiate our rational thoughts while we hurtling over the edge of disaster. Trump and Hillary have packed the trunk full of nukes, border walls, war and more war, prisons, pipelines, and unsatisfying gig-economy sandwiches.

And they can’t figure out why we won’t get in the car.

Newsflash to the Parents: we’re not kids anymore.  We’re adults. The millennials are roughly ages 18 to 34. We have our own drivers’ licenses. We can drive, but to be honest, we’d rather walk. Or bike. Or take public mass transit. Anything but get into your car.

So, thanks, but no thanks. Deprogram your GPS’d agenda. If we don’t show up at your elections, it’s not that we’re apolitical or apathetic.  It’s that your vehicle sucks. It’s broken, corrupt, controlled by greed and headed for disaster. It’s spewing exhaust and killing the planet.  It’s packed with your cronies.

We’re walking.

More and more, millennials are on the move. You can find us in social movements for change, organizing, boycotting, blockading, building new systems, standing up to injustice. Come find us. Come listen. Come check out our vision for the future. Come take a look at our solutions, strategies, suggestions. Old millennials like me have been active for more than a decade, engaged in the struggle. We’re smart. We’re savvy.  We’ve been working for years to protect our planet and communities. We’re trying to save our lives . . . and yours.

 

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Author/Activist Rivera Sun, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is the author of The Dandelion Insurrection, Billionaire Buddha and Steam Drills, Treadmills, and Shooting Stars, the cohost of Love (and Revolution) Radio, and the co-initiator of Live Share Grow: A Movement for the 100%. She is a trainer and social media coordinator for Campaign Nonviolence and Pace e Bene. Sun attended the James Lawson Institute on Strategic Nonviolent Resistance in 2014 and her essays on social justice movements appear in Counterpunch, Truthout and Popular Resistance. www.riverasun.com

Health, Safety, Toxicity . . . and Elections

Public Domain Image

Caring for the health and safety of our children and families is common ground where Americans on the left and the right meet. Yet, during this election cycle, few candidates seem willing to talk about the health and safety risks caused by toxic industries. Instead, the false split between environment and jobs is used to divide people . . . and to allow major corporations to continue to poison our children.

But after a month of horror stories – pipeline ruptures in Louisiana, Texas, and the breaking news of North Dakota‘s largest oil spill in state history; plus a deadly gas explosion in Maryland and the evacuation of residents because of massive lead poisoning in East Chicago, Indiana – liberals and libertarians alike should be questioning their assumptions about the role our government does – or should – play in regulating industry.

Liberals need a sharp wake-up call about the realities of the corporate-oligarchic government (Big Gov, as the conservatives and libertarians like to call it). Rather than fulfilling the ideals of a powerful body that protects the health and safety of the people, the corporate-political collusion manages to bend, break, and manipulate every law on the books to increase their profits at the expense of our safety. If government is supposed to protect us, it’s failing its duties.

Libertarians need to drop their fantasies of a deregulated state, and instead, do some soul-searching to come up with a reasonable explanation for how our children will be kept safe from these powerful industries that have demonstrated over and over their willingness to poison our children for the sake of their profits.

As for our “family values conservatives,” the question to ponder is: if you love your families so much, why, for God’s sake, do you allow your political candidates to neglect the health and safety of your children by refusing to support higher standards of air and water quality controls? Why do you allow them to thwart attempts to introduce legislation to protect the land, rivers, and oceans that your children’s food comes from? Why do you disregard the need for basic health and safety regulations on toxic industries?

In this year’s election cycle, there has been a notable silence about the health and safety risks caused by industries like oil, gas, coal, mining, and manufacturing.  Why?  Because politicians can get away with caring more about the profits of their corporate sponsors than the wellbeing of your children. They’ve been allowed to parrot the false claim that “what’s good for business is good for everyone.” (Which is obviously not true for the lead-poisoned residents of East Chicago, Indiana.) We’ve allowed the politicians to dupe us into believing that jobs are the silver-bullet solution to all of our social woes. Plenty of jobs do not poison and pollute. Those that do are not worthy work.

There is no job on Earth that justifies the poisoning of our children. There is no amount of money that we can gain from jobs that can pay the price of our children’s lost health. There are no jobs that are worth the cost of the ever-increasing amount of United States soil and water that is contaminated with toxins. We have 1322 Superfund sites, and numerous other toxic locations. The Yellowstone River, the Kalamazoo River in Michigan, the Animas and San Juan Rivers in New Mexico, the Dan River in North Carolina, the Elk River in West Virginia have all been heavily contaminated in recent years. How much more of this assault can the health of our people and our land sustain?

We need our politicians to stop ignoring or glossing over these concerns. Left and right should stand united on this issue. The health of our nation’s children must be put before profits. The sanctity and vitality of our air, land, and water that keeps us alive comes before the interests of rich and powerful individuals. Our politicians must take a stand now, not during the next election cycle. Now, before it is too late. Now, before one more child is poisoned.

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Author/Activist Rivera Sun, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is the author of The Dandelion Insurrection, Billionaire Buddha and Steam Drills, Treadmills, and Shooting Stars, the cohost of Love (and Revolution) Radio, and the co-initiator of Live Share Grow: A Movement for the 100%. She is a trainer and social media coordinator for Campaign Nonviolence and Pace e Bene. Sun attended the James Lawson Institute on Strategic Nonviolent Resistance in 2014 and her essays on social justice movements appear in Counterpunch, Truthout and Popular Resistance. www.riverasun.com

Sing the Body Politic, Electric

Recently, I traveled by train across the US in a swaying, creeping journey that took me through the backyards and forgotten corners of our country. Here, you see the America that doesn’t make it into the slogans of presidential campaigns. These back alleys are not evoked by the statistics and demographical jargon politicians use to describe this country.

When the presidential candidates refer to “Americans” – a nation of 320 million souls – we are left flailing in a void of description. Corporate logos come to mind faster than the faces of our fellow citizens. There is no “average” American in a nation as diverse as ours. The politicians travel in private jets and stomp on campaign trails as celebrity figures; they do not slip through the private sorrows and hidden miseries of this country, anonymously and silently bearing witness to the suffering, dreams, hopes, and fears of the populace.

As I ride the train, I watch my nation pass, poignant and poetic. In the side yard of a desert town, a man and his son – descendants of Spanish colonists – fix the electric fence of a cattle pen. In the mountains, a sunburned Boy Scout troop clambers down off the trail of a summer backpacking expedition.  On the rattling train, Amish families ride between communities, wearing starched hats and white sneakers, carrying unique dialects and quiet babies. In Colorado, an African-American trucker climbs aboard huffing thank the lord as if only by grace did he make it through this day. These are the faces of my fellow Americans, each unique, each beautiful, each a repository of suffering and grace. I pass a lonely, battered sailboat tilting to the side in a working class backyard; spare time and waterways both lie dried-up, cracked with drought.

Whole lives fall into the cracks of politicians’ ambiguous generalizations.  The homeless are swept out of the national conversation as callously as the police who scatter homeless encampments from the cities. Betrayed by political elites who bailed out banks instead of homeowners, broken dreams are flung away like the old mattresses that litter the flashflood-muddied creek beds.  Desolate closed-down main streets stretch across the Midwest while corporate box stores blaze florescent at the far ends of town. Small business owners and the middle class can be added to the endangered species list along with the bison, cougar, and grey wolf.

Meanwhile, under bright lights on sanitized, heavily guarded platforms, candidates lift their hands in victory gestures and squawk platitudes to bolster the flagging confidence of a disenchanted American public.

Forgive me, but it is difficult to place my trust in candidates who cannot recall the faces that I see: the toothless, weeping lines of poverty; the screaming children; the weary parents. The slumped figures in beat-up cars rattling to a stop at crossroads in a cloud of their own exhaust. The wail of pain that is a prison – concertina wire and sharp lights, slits of windows too small for a hand to squeeze through, rifles glinting out of guard towers, our humanity locked inside.  I cannot have confidence in a candidate for president who cannot invoke the brokenness of our souls.

For there is deep sorrow raining across America. There is despair like a storm cloud hanging black over the plains. Hopelessness parches the hearts of our people. Fear stalks the concrete jungles. Gritted-teeth anxiety shudders in the chests of our debt-shackled youth. Traveling this country, listening, watching, my heart cries out for the impossible: I do not want untrustworthy rhetoric and campaign promises from rich people. I want a poet to articulate the painful truths raging in us all.

I want a modern-day Walt Whitman to sing our body politic electric. I want a glorious six-foot Maya Angelou to awaken the mourning and yearning hiding in our souls. I want a Gary Snyder to hum an irreverent hymn of the broken American heart.  I want to hear from the poets, the ones who will speak our names, those who will cry over the lives shot dead in our streets. I want a poet to remember whom we are, to recall the painful past, to struggle through the present, to hold out the beacon toward our future. I want a poet to speak across our airwaves, a human shattered by compassion, committed to our fractured nation. I want a poet to believe in us again, so that we may climb out of the pit of our self-hatred, so that we might find our way to love.

I want our nation to listen to a poet who dares to unchoke love from bellowing patriotism. One who will resuscitate the word with the sharp rib-cracking pressure of truth, so that the gasp of the future may rush into our lungs, that we might breathe together and survive our broken hearts.

And perhaps, even more, I want a public of poets. For decades, we – left and right – have projected our screaming need for change onto candidates attempting to use presidents and political figures as a proxy for our inability to face the hidden misery and beauty of the people that we are. We follow our candidates around on screens, and forget to bear witness to one another. We slap each other in our sorrow; we attack each other’s bleeding souls. I want us to turn our eyes to one another, so that we may see the poetry of our aching existences. So that we might voice our hidden yearnings, so that we might lament our losses, so that we may be truthful, messy, and sincere; so that we might sing our body, electric, our populace, our fractured people. We are a nation of resounding difference, diverse, incredible, and waiting to be sung whole.

 

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Author/Activist Rivera Sun, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is the author of The Dandelion Insurrection, Billionaire Buddha and Steam Drills, Treadmills, and Shooting Stars, the cohost of Love (and Revolution) Radio, and the co-initiator of Live Share Grow: A Movement for the 100%. She is a trainer and social media coordinator for Campaign Nonviolence and Pace e Bene. Sun attended the James Lawson Institute on Strategic Nonviolent Resistance in 2014 and her essays on social justice movements appear in Counterpunch, Truthout and Popular Resistance. www.riverasun.com

Swarming: How the Movement of Movements Rolls

Swarming starlings over Rome.

by Rivera Sun, author of The Dandelion Insurrection

The word you’re looking for is swarming. The people are rising, resisting, changing, growing, evolving . . . and as they do, they’re swarming like bees or birds in the hundreds, thousands, millions. They’re coming together to stop pipelines, then dispersing and reassembling in a different configuration to speak up and say that Black Lives Matter. They stream off in a thousand directions and then reappear at the gates of Monsanto to protest GMOs. They fly together for LGBTQ rights; they veer off and then show up for peace and ending wars.

We are the Movement of Movements . . . and this is how we roll. We are hundreds of movements and thousands of campaigns, groups, and organizations. We are millions of individuals. We are both protest activists and community builders. We build new systems and launch constructive programs. We blockade, boycott, and strike. Nonviolent actions are the tools we use; creative resistance is our hallmark. We show up, again and again, seeing the all the issues are connected, and that our movements are interconnected as well.

Swarming is a vitally important concept to know in order to perceive how the Movement of Movements operates. Without this understanding in mind, it’s easy to miss the forest for the trees, and it’s easy to miss the Movement of Movements amidst the hundreds of actions. Each time one of the campaigns breaks through the corporatized media, or flares up in protest in a visible and dramatic way, it’s common for people to think of that event in isolation, as a singular occurrence coming out of nowhere. But the foundation of today is the long history of the past, and the culture of resistance, persistence, and active nonviolence that has been taught from one generation to the next.  There are people in the Movement of Movements who are as old as Grace Lee Boggs, who died just a few years ago at the age of 100; and there are people in the Movement of Movements who are as young as the children yet-to-come, the ones we carry in our hearts, the possibility of the future that motivates us into action.

We are here, there, and everywhere. We are swarming the edifices of empire and domination, corruption, racism, sexism, destruction, war, injustice, oppression, and greed. The US military has spent decades and millions of dollars trying to use the principles of swarming in its operations, but it is the Movement of Movements that is beginning to actualize swarming’s hidden potential. We are many; they are few.  This basic equation underscores why the Movement of Movements actualizes swarming principles so well. There are millions of us. We are networked in complex patterns of hard-to-codify (and hard to suppress) interconnected systems.

But even within the Movement of Movements, we would be stronger if we saw what we, ourselves, are doing.  Swarming is such an overlooked, underutilized, essential understanding for the complex field of our overlapping movements, that I even wrote about it in my popular novel, The Dandelion Insurrection, to try to seed greater awareness of the potential of our strength in this regard.

The Dandelion Insurrection used the example of the murmurations of starlings or swallows to convey the idea of swarming. This real-life example is one of nature’s most intriguing uses of collective nonviolent action.  When a hawk attacks the nests of the small birds, they rise up together and use a swarming effect called a murmuration to drive the hawk away without suffering harm to themselves or causing harm to the hawk.  Like us, the birds are small in comparison to the power of their opposition.  And like the Movement of Movements, they use their greater numbers and organized, strategic action to hold back the dangerous attacks of a predator.

Brilliant . . . and highly applicable to our situation There are 320 million US citizens. As the saying goes, they can’t stop all of us. In the Dandelion Insurrection, the characters reframe their perception of the struggle (as we could also do) from the feeling of being lonely heroes facing a massive dragon of a hidden corporate dictatorship to seeing that:

“We’re not resisting them . . . they’re resisting us!  They may be an absurdly powerful group, but they’re tiny compared to the forces of the Dandelion Insurrection.  We’re not a handful of radicals. We’re all of Life itself! We are the ivy crawling up the buildings, the moss breaking down the bricks, and the dandelions shooting up in the sidewalks. We’re as vast as the planet and as microscopic as infectious disease.” – from The Dandelion Insurrection

In the Movement of Movements, we, too, are the ivy scaling the bricks, the dandelions shooting up through the cracks, and the birds swarming the hawk. And, we could get better at this. We could become wildly skillful at swarming and self-organizing and acting strategically.

As we race into action for racial justice, climate justice, water protection, peace, trade justice, economic justice, pro-democracy struggles, and so much more; the question posed to all of us is how do we stop running around like chickens with our heads cut off. How do we start flying like smart, aware, and active starlings in this beautiful, massive murmuration of the Movement of Movements?

First, we have to embrace the complexity. The movements are profuse, abundant, fertile, overwhelming, wild, unpredictable, busy, and prolific. That’s life, folks. That’s what a complex living system of change emerging naturally with the challenges of the times looks like in action.   That’s what millions of people, thousands of actions, and hundreds of movements organizing in a non-hierarchical, self-organizing swarm looks like. It ought to be intimately familiar to humanity by now, since these kinds of living systems are the basis of all life on Earth. However, millenniums of dominator culture with violently enforced ideologies of separation have left us believing that we must fear, tame, and try to control this wildly complex system of change.

The first step in fomenting an awake and aware, strategic and skillful Movement of Movements is to help each other surrender to being a part of – not in charge of – this complex, living systems of nonviolent movements for change. We need to learn to watch the flow of the Movement of Movements like sages observing the Tao, looking for the wise and strategic ways to show up and support the pivot points of change. We have to listen for those little voices in our heads that freak out over the seemingly unorganized chaos of it all. Does it drive you crazy that there’s not “one great leader” commanding this massive army?  Check! There’s that dominator ideology showing up again – it’s what got us into this mess, so let’s let it go and try something more effective. Do you keep insisting that, “we have to unite everybody under one umbrella, or get them all working for one platform”? There it is again.  Get quiet for a moment and listen to what the people in the Movement of Movements are saying.  We’re not speaking in one voice, or reciting one script together. We’re singing, in chorus, in harmony, in many parts, for many things. Our message is complex and multi-layered.  We have complex goals and objectives. That’s okay.   We’re up against a massive systemic crisis. There are no silver bullet solutions.

We’re evolving toward something new and different, and – like any ecosystem in a process of change – we’re making millions of shifts and choices. The birds are growing longer feathers; the fish are bumping up against the shore and sprouting legs; the plants are putting down deeper roots; the wooly mammoths are shedding fur and their hides are turning grey. Every person and strand of the Movement of Movements is making one of these essential ecosystems shifts as we evolve together.  Every part of the whole has a role to play . . . and we don’t need to “unite” because we’re already interconnected, overlapping and adapting to one another as we change.  Trust us. We’ve got this like the Earth has got evolution.  Since the dawn of humanity’s existence, we’ve been doing this.  It’s only in the past couple thousand years that some of us have forgotten what this process is all about.

Perhaps the most hopeful sign that humanity might survive its current existential crisis is the emergence of this powerful Movement of Movements.  And, if we can stop fighting our nature, and learn to nurture our complexity, grow our collaborative strategies, and foster our ability to swarm in wise and beautiful ways, then we stand a chance of creating the massive systemic change that we need.

Here are a few steps each one of us can take toward that potential:

Learn to fly. Like the starlings or swallows, if we want to swarm or murmurate, we need to stretch our wings a little. Study nonviolent action, strategy, and organizing.


Practice. Don’t wait for a hawk to arrive to see if they hatchlings can fly. Get into the sky. Start a local action group. Train together. And then organize solidarity actions with what’s going on in the Movement of Movements.


Get connected. Learn to see the Movement of Movements by following movement news. Join some email lists for groups that are using nonviolent action to address social justice issues. Subscribe to alternative journals, such as Popular Resistance’s Daily Digest, which is a great source of information about what’s going on in the movements.


Understand your role. We’re not always the lead bird in the flock. Notice what role you play in each strand of the Movement of Movements. Are you a supporter, donor, follower, organizers, uplifter, trainer, or one of the many leaders in this leaderful Movement of Movements. Each role is essential to the success of the whole. Honor them. Share the roles. Do your best in each capacity.


See the swarm. Perceiving the fluid motions of a swarming living system of change requires training our eyes and minds to see it. Follow the movement news and look for how the movements overlap, connect, support, and advance one another collectively.  Notice when you start thinking of protests or actions as isolated incidences. Challenge that perception, and replace it with an understanding of how swarming works. Observe how people, groups, and organizations in the Movement of Movements gather, disperse, and reassemble as we work on the interconnected issues.


Spread the idea of the Movement of Movements. Awareness is powerful. When we know what we’re doing, we can grow even more skillful at doing it. Share these ideas of the Movement of Movements with your friends and colleagues, talk about it. Explore how the movements overlap and interconnect. Discuss how the concepts of swarming can become guiding principles for how you show up or move into action in these times.

Remember, if the presence of a powerful, swarming Movement of Movements is the saving grace of humanity on this planet . . . then helping to nurture a wise, strategic and self-aware living system of change is one of the most important actions you can do today to help us all in these times.

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Author/Activist Rivera Sun, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is the author of The Dandelion Insurrection, Billionaire Buddha and Steam Drills, Treadmills, and Shooting Stars, the cohost of Love (and Revolution) Radio, and the co-initiator of Live Share Grow: A Movement for the 100%. She is a trainer and social media coordinator for Campaign Nonviolence and Pace e Bene. Sun attended the James Lawson Institute on Strategic Nonviolent Resistance in 2014 and her essays on social justice movements appear in Counterpunch, Truthout and Popular Resistance. www.riverasun.com