Rain against the machine
I’ve been stewing, but also silencing myself a lot over the past few months. I severed pretty much all ties to social media (I deactivated my Facebook in January), in part because I felt that my being on it wasn’t helping anything. Any time I’ve felt like I had something to say, it also felt like someone else could say it better and would make it more eloquent. I guess you could say that I really sunk into the name of my blog, and realized just how much I don’t know, and that’s made it hard to write, because I’m pretending that something makes sense to me enough that it’s worth committing to type. However, I find it useful sometimes to keep writing, even if it doesn’t make a difference, even if it doesn’t change anything, even if no one reads it, just because it documents how I’m thinking right now, and then I can see how I change over the years. So here are some of the things I’ve been thinking about, and feel free to watch me try to spin a coherent story out of the muddled mess of my mind.
I’m searching for the story that will set us free, that will cause people to leave the caged system we’re trapped in now for actual freedom– where everyone’s worth isn’t tied up to their bank account, where people take care of each other and share because the whole is better off when people work together. I guess I’m a socialist, but I’m more a democratic tribalist? I think systems break down when there are too many people living in the same way. Nature promotes diversity, not monoculture. I think a major problem with the world right now is that there’s a story that success is measured by what people own. I think success needs to be reimagined as community bonds– have you participated in the world around you, have you loved thoroughly, have you brought joy into peoples’ lives, do you have people who will gladly care for you? I love Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem about success:
To laugh often and much;
To win the respect of intelligent people
and the affection of children;
To earn the appreciation of honest critics
and endure the betrayal of false friends;
To appreciate beauty;
To find the best in others;
To leave the world a bit better, whether by
a healthy child, a garden patch
or a redeemed social condition;
To know even one life has breathed
easier because you have lived;
This is to have succeeded.
…I don’t think there are many governments that I can think of that encourage this type of success. GDP is the measure of success for a country, even though things like war and toxic waste cleanup stimulates production while endangering peoples’ lives.
A little-paid-attention-to fact about the beginning of the USA… The founding fathers wrote and imagined a different type of government than any of them had experienced or seen before, and it was more than two years after the revolutionary war ended that they came up with the constitution… Which means, for a few years, the founding fathers tried other types of governing that didn’t work as well as they wanted them to, and they wrote the constitution to address the problems that they wanted to solve. Just because they found something that worked for a while doesn’t mean that they developed a flawless system. It worked if you were part of a specific group of people– I acknowledge that many groups were marginalized, discriminated against, or actively persecuted as a result of the development of the creation of the USA government, like First Nations’ peoples, African-Americans, basically anyone not white-cis-het-anglo-saxon-protestant-male. It doesn’t surprise me that the system of government that was created by a bunch of white guys ended up privileging a bunch of white guys– if it’s hard for people to not otherise people now, in an age of blogs and social media and skype, where people can immediately share their personalized experience of what the world is like, imagine what it was like back then, when communication took weeks and most people were illiterate. My point being that it was hard for these few men to come up with a system that would benefit people that weren’t like them because they may not have understood why such a thing would be desirable (and when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression). I know I’m not the only one searching for a different solution, and I get regularly frustrated by my inability to come up with something different. Not feeling smart enough to sort something out is an unusual feeling for me, but this problem has me utterly stumped. We clearly need a system that addresses the inequality that has stratified the gap between wealthy and poor, but how do we go about making it happen, and what should it look like?
Inaction tends to make me uncomfortable. I find it hard to hear problems without wanting to brainstorm solutions, to find alternate narratives, to look for other perspectives and directions to go in. In counseling, it’s useful because it allows me to hear what’s going on for my clients while simultaneously looking for other ways they could be in the world if they choose to change. In the rest of the world, it can be frustrating, because there are huge problems I want to address that I just don’t have answers to. I don’t know how to solve police violence against young black men and institutionalized racism. I don’t know how to solve inequality or patriarchy. I don’t know how to solve global warming. I believe it’s all tied together, that no one is free unless we’re all free, but how do you get the people with gilded bars to acknowledge that they’re still in cages? Does it even matter to them that they’re not free, if the surroundings are lush enough? Is this desire for “freedom” a result of the American value system I was raised with? If I were North Korean would I still think this way? How do you establish your right to be seen as an individual instead of an Other? I’m not sure that you can– we can’t convince other people of our humanity unless they’re willing to see it. However, I do know that showing up with anger will not, no matter how justified, encourage people who are against you to support you (although it may cause them to fear you). It’s easy to hate a group, it’s harder to hate a person within that group when they are a living, breathing, feeling being in front of you that is practicing compassion. I have never won an argument on the internet– both of us just tend to dig our heels further into our own viewpoints. What has worked when I’ve found disagreement has been engaging someone on a different level than anger, finding common ground and working up from there.
Someone once said “If it’s inaccessible to the poor it’s neither radical nor revolutionary.” The thing I keep on banging up against is capitalism. In being born into our system, one has to make/have money in order to find comfort & support. In a world where people value money, those with the most are rewarded with power, and that power begets more money. I believe one of the myriad reasons why suicide is illegal in many places is because choosing suicide stops a person from further participating in society, and society would rather have you produce and be miserable than the alternative. When money is the end game, anyone who’s on welfare must be persuaded by any means necessary to get back to work so they’re not “robbing the taxpayer”. By the laws of capitalism, people need to be useful, and by useful, I mean productive in a way that maximizes the creation of money. People that make the most money are given the most social capital, and can get away with more, socially and legally. Think about how many people in Silicon Valley do illicit drugs, and get away with it (I think all drugs should be legalized btw, so I’m not upset about them doing drugs, but I do feel upset that the poor are blamed for their drug addictions while the rich are lauded for it). Think about stars that have never gotten penalized for abusing their partners, or bankers who have never even been considered for prison for crashing the world’s economy. To have a bunch of money in this world is to be held to a different standard of morality and lawfulness. Think of all the people who think Trump is a good business person and a good fit for the presidency, even though he has a documented history of screwing over his contractors, and bragged about sexually assaulting women.
I’m a firm believer in Universal Basic Income as an equalizer for the inequality that people face. This would go a long way towards helping people get out of poverty, it would help towards establishing reparations, and supporting basic human rights in all people, and would reaffirm the dignity of all members of society. A universal basic income would allow people to not worry about whether their jobs were going to be replaced by robots or outsourced to other countries, and allow people freedom to pursue their passions instead of needing to work multiple jobs just to make enough money to live.
I’m not sure America could get behind a UBI, given that the country’s moral story seems firmly enmeshed in the Protestant Work Ethic and the idea that people are rich because God loves them, and the poor deserve what they get because it means they’re unworthy sinners who are going to hell. One of the major differences I observe between Australia and America is that I think Americans identify with their job far more: they live to work, and they work very long hours willingly because what they do is the most important part of their identity. They may do other things on the weekends, but they’re proud of how much they work and how efficient they are and how little sleep they get and how they’re killing themselves for a paycheck. Australians, on the other hand, work to live. What they do is important, but it’s more important for them to have passions outside of their job, to surf, to have dinner parties, to paint or write or participate in sports… They don’t often want to work more than 35 hours a week. Americans think they’re lazy… I think they’re smart, and relaxed, and connected to a community. Part of the reason they can work less is that they have a healthcare system that will take care of them if there’s an emergency without bankrupting them. My housemate found out that she had thyroid cancer a few months ago. She was booked into a public hospital and had surgery and a private room to recover in within the month. Her bill? $0. In America? She’d have medical bills for the rest of her life. She’s fine now, and that month is slowly becoming a scar, a daily pill, and a bad memory, instead of “the moment when my life was ruined because I can’t afford anything now”.
And yet Australia seems to have recently bought into The American Dream™ and is slowly trying to privatize many of the things that have allowed Australians to do so well for themselves. The government is trying to raise the cost of higher education and make the students pay off their debt earlier. They’re trying to privatize health care and eliminate centrelink and take funding from mental health services. I hope they stop playing into ideas of American Exceptionalism, and realize that the American Dream is dead in America. Upward mobility there is a joke: the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, the middle class is in decline, and it’s less about who you are than who you know and pure dumb luck of your circumstances that helps you survive. 47% of Americans do not have enough savings to be able to afford a $400 emergency bill. This is why the system must change, and also why it’s so incredibly hard for it to do so. In Australia, there’s much more of a chance of living out the American Dream (presuming you don’t want to own a home in Sydney). If UBI is going to happen anywhere, I think it would pass more easily here than in the USA. Australia would do well to stop looking towards England and America as role models, and would be better served by listening to its own people. There is an opportunity right now for Australia to address its history, and decide on a new way forward. Hopefully this will lead to a better future for all residents of this continent. I’m hopeful.
Your moment of Zen:
Jenna has no idea 
Love reading your thoughts Jen. Thankyou.