Taking Shorter Showers Doesn't Cut It: Why Personal Change Does Not Equal Political Change

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Taking Shorter Showers Doesn't Cut It: Why Personal Change Does Not Equal Political Change

By Derrick Jensen, Orion Magazine. Posted July 13, 2009.

Are we taking the easy route? Dumpster diving wouldn't have stopped Hitler, and composting wouldn't have ended slavery.

This article was first published in the July/August 2009 issue of Orion Magazine.

Would any sane person think dumpster diving would have stopped Hitler, or that composting would have ended slavery or brought about the eight-hour workday, or that chopping wood and carrying water would have gotten people out of Tsarist prisons, or that dancing naked around a fire would have helped put in place the Voting Rights Act of 1957 or the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Then why now, with all the world at stake, do so many people retreat into these entirely personal “solutions”?

Part of the problem is that we’ve been victims of a campaign of systematic misdirection. Consumer culture and the capitalist mindset have taught us to substitute acts of personal consumption (or enlightenment) for organized political resistance. An Inconvenient Truth helped raise consciousness about global warming. But did you notice that all of the solutions presented had to do with personal consumption—changing light bulbs, inflating tires, driving half as much—and had nothing to do with shifting power away from corporations, or stopping the growth economy that is destroying the planet? Even if every person in the United States did everything the movie suggested, U.S. carbon emissions would fall by only 22 percent. Scientific consensus is that emissions must be reduced by at least 75 percent worldwide.

I've been living a goddam hippie lifestyle for almost 40 years now, and things have only gotten worse. For me personally, and for the planet.

keeps telling those that are being abused: they are wrong so they need to be (continually) punished -- very much like the view of our current government toward U.S. "taxpayers"--just keep paying U.S. so we can keep abusing YOU--with your own $.

:hi:

The Hippies

Hippies, Free Love not Free Interest Rates on 20 Credit Cards, a garden in every field, not a Oil Rig in every backyard. Hippies, you are not of age to know anything about what the Vietnam war did to a generation of so called Hippies.

Who when he served as President of the US Senate, circa 1994, voted down passage of a bill that would have guaranteed a far safer environemnt in terms of persticides and other toxic material.

And that is an inconcenient truth!

The environmental crisis is not likely to be solved by a mass-produced widget. THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE WIDGETIZED!

Delaney Clause. This was part of the Food Drug and Cosmetic Act.

This clause stated that no processed food could contain an additive that :induces cancer in man or animal." This set a zero risk standard for pesticide residue in food.

Sometimes Delaney was enforced, sometimes not. SOme of us imagine that when it was enforced, there were political (ie Big Corporate Interests) in the enforcement. Thus we saw in the 1980's the end of a sweetener known as cyclamates - which was responsible in tests for bladder cancer in rats. For a human to drink the amount of that sweetener to achieve that level of cyclamate,t hey would need to consume some 1,400 bottles of diet soda a day. But back then, with Monsanto about to release its "Nutrasweet, competition needed to be removed, right?

But I digress. So anyway, enter the Democrats under Bill Clinton. Before the Clintons realized how needed the Big Time Large Corporation donations were, they really tried to do the right things. So word got out on the street, while Bill was still campaigning for the Presidency that the Delaney Clause would soon be enforced.

Added to the "street" concern was the fact that the National Resources Defense Council and the state of CA took the Federal Government to court over the non-enforcement of Delaney. The Fed judge hearing the case ruled that Delaney would need to be enforced. (1992)

The Republicans and industry leaders all concurred that they needed an end run around the Clause. This industry pressure paid off, with Rep Thomas BLiley from VA putting together a new piece of legislation called the Food Quality Protection Act.(FQPA) By the time this piece of legislation was put together, The CLinton Administration had put together a WH-backed Bill known as the Pesticide Reform Act. This would have allowed the EPA to go after not only processed food with toxic residues, but even the crops.

In the end all the campaign funding that was put together saw to it that the FQPA was structured such that the Act would negate the provision the CLinton Admin had put together. And somewhere along the line, Gore voted with the Industry People to see that no big Agro firm had to worry their pretty little heads about residue in corps.(I think that Gore was under the sway of A Texas Dem named Charles Stenholm, who depended greatly on Big Agro interests to fund his campaigns.)

as a result of your taking those shorter showers. ;-)

And if it doesn't work, it's your fault for not reading enough labels.

Checkout Goodguide- http://www.goodguide.com/ a site that integrates data on the health, environmental, and social impacts of a half-dozen big-box stores worth of consumer products. It's useful, wonderful, a good idea, don't get me wrong.

But personally, I'd rather have better laws than the best shampoo.

...a miracle of that will spontaneously enlighten enough people to elect Dennis Kucinich, I don't see an avenue open that will allow us to wrest control of our government from the One Political Corporate/MIC Party that now runs it.

It makes sense to apply my efforts at changing as much as I can in my personal environment, because I fear any deep changes to our political system are based on "hope" and no substance.

Maybe if we just send the Democratic Party more money?.......
I should have bought a couple of solar panels instead.

So long as air-blown Monsanto seeds are changing the genetic structure of ancient corn in Oaxaca, the US is dropping massive ordinance over Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq (not to mention mobilizing hundreds of thousands of troops in oil guzzling monstrosities), and Round-Up Ready crop slavery is destroying the soil and seed banks in the US, Latin America, India, and East Asia... not to mention the torture, abuse, slavery, and death leveraged in the name of profit (Chiquita, Shell Nigeria, Chevron, Big Coffee, clothing and textile manufacturers, Halliburton, XE etc....) So long as all this continues, it is an indulgence to think that using a particular product is some sort of politically moral act. Consumerist pseudo-politics doesn't do anything accept shame and blame the increasing numbers of poor and immiserated Americans while letting the political parties and corporations off the hook. It's doesn't do much more than make you "hate" your "stupid" neighbors.

There are major reasons to be hopeful. Last year, a thousand people paid to attend a conference on revolutionary socialist organizing in the US. This year two thousand people paid to attend the same conference which had grown so large that it had to be broken into two conferences. At one of the forums, African-American and Latino male police brutality survivors and LGBT activists began to find their common ground and enthusiastically began to learn about one another's struggles. Active-duty soldiers and vets organized with labor activists about how to work on ending the wars from the inside. Many soldiers start out as young, idealistic people and more than a few are moving to the hard left.

There are many, many people organizing with excellent ideas and serious strategies moving towards large politicized strikes, but you can't accomplish any of it if you snub anti-war military wives who shop at Walmart.

The bad news is that revolutionary change is needed to stop the environmental devastation that is going to transform the globe in a few decades. The good news is that there are organizations working to make it happen. The bad news is that we are in pre-revolutionary times, just coming out of a 30 year period of total reaction and this change will not likely happen soon enough. The idea of waiting until "things get bad enough" is absurd. "Things getting bad" has never been a guarantee for revolutionary change. It's always the courage of the people that defines change. Things have been "bad" for a long time.

There are a lot of things you can do besides change your lightbulbs. If you want to do that, cool. But change will come by organizing with people who have slightly deflated tires, not by a new sham-wow product created by a for-profit lab.

I don't see a lot of help for the Working Class from our current crop of government officials, and most Americans are going to hold on to their cheap, plastic, suburban, crap until the bitter end.
However, there won't be any Wall Street Bankers in the unemployment lines, so thats a good thing.

In 2006, we cashed out, moved to The Woods, and planted a BIG Veggie Garden.
What we can't build, we buy or barter 2nd Hand or Salvage.
We raise chickens, keep Honey Bees, and use very few packaged products.

Our "taxable" income is now near poverty levels, so we won't be paying for any more WAR, Bombs, or Wall Street Bailouts, but we are living well and eating healthy.


Next year, we (my wife & I) WILL have an even smaller carbon footprint,
AND will "consume" even less.

Your knowledge of vegetable gardening and sustainable practices would be helpful in a post-revolutionary society. But everyone in NYC, LA, Houston, and Chicago cannot simultaneously move to the country. Not to mention, that NY and LA are global cities with wealthy Europeans and Asians owning a good chunk of the property. Removing tax dollars from the US will not change the state of the working class one bit let alone stop the war. The result will be more payroll taxes taken from some other working person before the US backs down from imperial interest.

Not everyone has the luxury to become a peasant farmer. There are people taking care of elderly parents, people in college, LGBT people who can't get proper health care outside major urban areas (and sometimes not even then), people with special needs kids, military resisters and their full-time supporters, labor activists living in cities, black families in the South who don't feel comfortable to exposing their children to rural Southern schools and towns, and poor-ass people who can't afford their current apartment rent let alone the money down on a rental house in a rural area where they have no job opportunity.

The vast majority of the people in the US cannot be reasonably asked to get off the grid. Its the grid that's the problem, not the people.

If you are in a special position where you can "reduce your carbon footprint" that's great, but as far as the Iraq-Afpak war goes, to use an analogy, not participating in a gang rape is completely different from stopping it.

:kick:

Walking headlong into a society that is infected with a mass plague of neurosis will not change anything.

If reverting back to a more self sustaining state is what people are doing as a buffer against the true threat of being utterly dependent on the Government, than that is a good first step. The sooner that people reestablish their connection to Nature, the sooner they will be able to see how unnatural our socil system is. As more people learn that the function of life is to be happy given the material available for free in many cases, the social structure which forces unnatural conformity and group membership will weaken.

Dumpster diving in an end is stupid. Dumpster diving that retrieves valuable resources that others don't identify is another.

An eight hour workweek comes about because people just don't want to work any longer than that. They don't care for the job or if they get fired for not toiling under the whip. In many cases, flex time is preferable. It is only in rare cases that man must be forced to work for 8 hours straight, and usually, it is to tend to some sort of machinery, or fill out a ledger in some account.

While you equate conservation with self limited consumption, it is important to see the difference here. If you set out one day to create a home on a new, virgin piece of land, you must provide at least 3 things. Shelter, Water and Waste Removal. 60 years ago, many people would be able to build a house with their own hands. Water was another story, but they could thoretically build a well, or if they were advanced and wealthy, could take advantage of water catchment or a spring. For waste, the entire country depened upon an outhouse, dug by had.

Now, houses are stamped out, using wood from trees that are most probably GMO, because they don't have to tell us, Water comes out of a Pipe in the ground from somewhere, and waste is removed by using the same water.

Too many people are dependent on this system, and are unable to think of the consequences of the water supply disappearing for an extended period, or, what they would do if they could not flush their toilets.

It is not until people learn how to cope without the system that have determined is best for us and their economic interestsn then we are dependent on the Corporation for everything, and will go along with the scheme, all the while supporting the status quo.

Americans need to simplify and identify the key requirement for life and support them. They cannot fritter away their resources and time on widgets, vanity and distraction. They must learn how to think independently, and constantly explore the connections to their end.

True change in regards to Global Warning comes from Corporate policy, which is our Government as well. The Military machine will not allow the Corporation that enables it to be disturbed.