Who Will Be Left to Fight For You?

My friend and I were sitting on the dock by a lake in New Hampshire, watching a neon-crimson sun set and tone the silvery waves pink. Faced with the vista of the place where I've spent a good piece of every summer of my life, I was ranting about climate change with a catch in my voice, with everything right before my eyes reminding me of what I myself may stand to lose thanks to governments' inaction on climate change. Lately I'm especially scornful of the part where world leaders have resolved to become totally fossil-fuel-free by the year 2100, while scientists are informing us that we have 15-17 years in which to curb those emissions--essentially, we must cut off our fossil-fuel addiction by 2030. Beyond that window of time, our planetary survival chances plummet as irreversible tipping points are triggered and runaway global warming takes off.

That gives us approximately a 70-year difference between world leaders' projections and our planet's requirements. A 70-year margin of error is ludicrously large odds to play with, with stakes so high.

In 2030, I will be about 31 years old. Were I to pursue the American dream, I might be settled down with a career and spouse, perhaps thinking about or expecting children. In a world where we have failed to reach our carbon-emissions reduction targets, how many of my generation would dare send forth young lives, would want to bear children on the cusp of a world that is effectively doomed? Will my friends and peers parent a generation that will grow up in a world that their ancestors failed to save, where they will never have even the illusion of a chance? Even now, if I were thirty and considering starting a family, I would be wary of bringing children into a world with so uncertain a future--or of even the chance of one.

Oh certainly, the earth will go on, and as I am middle-class and live fairly comfortably, I could conceivably raise children with a decent modicum of safety, even in 2030. We could huddle in our gated communities and watch the Global South burn and flood, watch the oceans encroach on our shores, watch temperatures and death tolls rise. We could wait in the first world while Bangladesh sees fertile soil impregnated with salt water, while Kiribati and Tuvalu and Nauru sink under the waves, while ever-stronger storms ravage our coasts and droughts desiccate our grasslands. I could watch from my armchair as climate refugees spill over every border, as wars break out over the last dregs of natural resources. I and my futureless children might be okay, for a little while.

But it will catch up with us. If I chose, my thirty-year-old self could battle for a facsimile of normal life, remembering the days when food was easy and plentiful and we did not curse the sun and rain. If I chose, I could get away with denial even as we fail our climate commitments and cross those final tipping points, as we release colossal methane deposits when the tundra melts, as Arctic sheet ice disappears for good, as species vanish like clockwork, every hour a death knell for untold wonders of the natural world.

One day it will be in my backyard. It will be my life in the balance. Perhaps the day when a storm rips through my manicured suburban home, or the day I cannot get the medical supplies I need to treat the chronic illnesses I have. Perhaps climate wars will reach my doorstep, or perhaps food will be too scarce to rely on even in the comfortable padding of the first world.

Perhaps their lives have no bearing on ours now. Perhaps it really doesn't matter to us whether they live and die. But if we do not fight for them now, who will be left to fight for us? Who will be left to fight for you?

That famous poem could now be repurposed, that one that begins, "First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out. Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out. And then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me." Could we not rewrite Martin Niemoller's lines: "First it came for the islanders. Then it came for the global poor. Then it came for the coastal dwellers. And then it came for me..." Like the scourge of Nazism, climate change is a threat that slowly grows to encompass not only the groups that are distant and immaterial to our minds but finally us as well, going unnoticed and unprotested by the majority until we too realized we are in its crosshairs. Though it can be argued that the Nazi ideology was also a human creation, born of the terrific mishandling of post-World War I Europe, but climate change is even more so a direct product of our actions. Yet in the same way, it is an insidious beast, its progression easily masked, not obvious to those not watching.

In fifth grade my interest was snared by the Titanic, and I can tell you how the ship sank because the White Star Line cut corners and how the so-called watertight compartments weren't watertight because the rivets that held the metal sheets together were cooked until they were too hot and turned brittle. The captain ignored warnings from ships who'd already run into trouble, kept the engines at full throttle, and when the Titanic's lookouts finally saw the iceberg and called the alarm, they were too late because no one had even bothered to supply them with binoculars. Now, though the icebergs are still warning us of impending disaster, we'll have melted them all by the time our final undoing comes, so what kill us will be something only the ignored and maligned Cassandras truly foresaw in its entirety. And we're lacking cultural binoculars for the big picture, making it harder to sell the urgency of fighting to a pack of rabid skeptics who won't believe the icebergs are worth their worry until their living rooms are flooded and they can feel the floor of this sinking ship tilting underneath their feet.

This mentality--your problem's not my problem until it's my problem--is another that can be attributed to the dominance of the capitalist ideology. If individual benefit always trumps the collective good and if self-interest is the only motivator that matters, then the idea that our lives are all linked, that what befalls a person in Burkina Faso or Fiji should matter to a person in the United States, is anathema. Protecting the global commons has been made to seem a less logical proposition than exploiting them.

An observation by Rebecca Solnit that struck me was that for a generation raised on TV and a fear of the "wild"--the unclean, the unpackageable, the uncontainable and untamable--environmentalism can hardly be a cause close to our hearts when we have never learned the value of the earth we are losing piece by piece. Our parents tell stories of the way they would play outside for hours as children, would wander in the woods and explore creeks and mountains. But lacking that connection, do we even know what we have at stake? Does my generation have the investment in a land and a world many of us never connected with or learned to appreciate? Sure, that river or that mountain range is beautiful, but it's just a pretty picture. It'll still exist on Google Images and in travel books' glossy photographs. For those of us who didn't grow up with houses by the lake or forest, who didn't have "outside" as the playground that shaped our childhoods, "nature" may just be another cyberscape navigable by proxy if ever we wanted to experience it.

And someday, failing a turnaround of drastic proportions, that virtual-reality proxy of the natural world may indeed be all we have left--for the lucky ones.

Fourth of July

Happy Fourth of July. Or “Happy Unbridled Patriotism Day,” as I’ve coined it.

For the last two Unbridled Patriotism Days, I happened to be in Norway and was able to fully skirt the sudden explosions of red-white-and-blue on every corner. Today, though, I am writing from Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, in which everyone was dutifully decked out to the nines in all patriotic garb (and there I was in my Anti-Flag t-shirt, wondering if anyone would notice…). It is a little alarming how closely US-flag-bodysuits resemble prison jumpsuits, incidentally. The stripes of both represent bars that imprison people, and I wouldn’t want to wear either.

New Hampshire has long been a swing state, colored blue on the Republican-vs.-Democrat map of the States but with fiercely libertarian undercurrents, hence all the don’t-tread-on-me stickers I’ve seen. Hence, also, the customary deluge of candidates New Hampshire experiences when elections roll around--today, I saw Chris Christie and his cheer squad out in force, followed close behind by Marco Rubio’s. I actually shook hands with Rubio, who did not look at me and quickly gravitated towards an older man in military garb. Ben Carson, who did not attend in person, sent to the parade an entire bus--Greyhound-sized, a real travel bus--emblazoned with his name and face, as well as a circling motorcycle handing out Carson paraphernalia. There were also a small Martin O’Malley delegation and several Hillary Clinton signs.

The Fourth of July parade itself trailed to a tired conclusion with a pair of young children holding a Winnipesaukee Republicans banner, looking exhausted or possibly just bored. With this wind-down, many parade-watchers defected to swarm around the real live presidential candidates, done with the seemingly endless procession of antique military hardware and servicemembers, trucks, tractors, bands, local businesses, assorted teams, troops, and clubs of the local kids--including a float from the regional high school, whose express purpose in the parade was to make visible their call for Jimmy Fallon to be the speaker at the class of 2016’s graduation. A half-dozen military floats or contingents passed by too, one with children riding in the back of a pickup truck and wearing beige US Army t-shirts.

This is the New Hampshire I did not glimpse as a child during my summers here--behind the postcard-perfect bay and park and tchotchke stores, this is a state with a certain flavor of American exceptionalism, a worship of the military, a faith in the shiny vision of the country they are glad people die for.  A church here in town bears a sign affirming the US above God: America Bless God, it reads--or commands?--instead of the traditional and perhaps more humble opposite.

Elsewhere were screamed the words United We Stand,  printed on dozens of flag-adorned t-shirts and red-white-and-blue posters. Perhaps we would, I thought, but what about that invigorating statement’s corollary: Divided We Fall?

As the town from which hailed a police chief broadly condemned for his racist remarks about President Obama--the chief was roundly denounced by his local constituents, as well--Wolfeboro ought to be quite aware of the divisions here, the chasms of race and inequality and poverty that undercut not only any facade of unity, but perhaps also the possibility of it, in this starry-eyed striped nation. Another sign on a military float, reminding us All Gave Some, Some Gave All, led me to finish the phrase with Rise Against’s song lyrics from “Survivor Guilt”: all gave some, some gave all/ but for what? I want to know!

For what, indeed? Observing the signs or event postings thanking soldiers for their service, I wondered how that obsequious thanks felt to the ears of the sole parader hoisting a Veterans For Peace flag, if not the rest of the veterans arrayed there. I’ve read quite a bit on some veterans’ deep resentment of the way our culture offers them constant thanks for their service--ostensibly for protecting us--without considering what that cost them and what it continues to cost (i.e. we like to “support our troops” but rarely follow through well when they return home wounded or haunted). Did they give it all so that we could continue to wave these stars and stripes, to swarm smarmy presidential candidates, to feel self-assured and superior and blindly celebratory? Or did they give it all just to be cannon fodder, pieces in a machine that chewed them up, spat them out, and asked for more?

What nation are we, what kind of delusions must we twist our minds into, that ours is a legacy--past, present, and future--of which we can be proud? We are not the land of the free, and I don't believe we are the home of the brave, either, so much as the land of the very, very afraid. 

Earlier this year a girl in my English class gave a speech about patriotism: how to her it doesn’t mean ignoring our bloody, vicious past and burying our current wrongs under a blanket of flags, but that to be patriotic, to love this country, is to recognize and appreciate the potential we have, the good we could do--and then accomplish it.

It was decently convincing. That to be patriotic is to believe in and celebrate not what we are or have been, but what we could be. How we could make the world more fair, more safe, more beautiful, more sustainable, more peaceful. That we could be a country and a generation we could be proud of.

I want to believe we could be better.

I’d like to.

But some days, some places, some moods--all I can see is how far we have left to go, in how very little time.

Watch Greece: Soon-to-be Another Casualty of Neoliberalism?

I turned in a research paper on Venezuela a few weeks ago, and my history teacher took slight issue with my statement that the IMF and World Bank are the agents of implementation for neoliberal restructuring programs. She commented, “Not so much anymore…” and I shrugged and conceded: All right, maybe their era is closing. Maybe the IMF hasn’t got so much wrecking-ball energy anymore. All right.

Now, I’m taking that back, too.

I’ve been trying to understand what has been going down in Greece, but I believe I only squinted at the New York Times articles, saw “left-wing government,” “anti-austerity,” and “protests,” and nodded approvingly. I would have admitted that I wasn’t quite sure what was happening there. It turns out that was an unwise ignorance to choose.

Greece is the latest country to land in the IMF’s neoliberal crosshairs. Recently elected left-wing Syriza government is seeing its campaign promises drift away from reality, backed against a wall by the European Commission and pressure to stay in the Eurozone. The fight has been portrayed as dichotomous in the US media: either Greece can play by Angela Merkel’s austerity rules, or it can withdraw from the Eurozone and go it alone. Only a few days ago, I received some emailed petitions saying there is a third way: Merkel could be pressured into making the terms less harsh for Greece, and it could remain in the Eurozone. That was my first hint that the Greece debacle is something to keep an eye on. It’s not going away, and it’s more momentous than simply a little country in dire economic straits.

Today I learn that the IMF has got its hands all tangled up in this situation, too. That’s a flashing red warning sign, if anything is--the International Monetary Fund, with their glorious legacy of forcing economic restructuring packages down the throats of countries desperate for aid, in debt and disaster? Latin America’s ruthless godfather--or puppeteer? The IMF may not be the hulking steamroller that it was in the closing decades of the twentieth century, dealing toxic “aid” to Bolivia, Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, and many others, but it is far from obsolete, much less innocuous.

It is more than a struggle for a better economy or even different economic bailout methods now taking place in Greece. I should have seen it sooner. This is another revolt against the neoliberal world order--with other potential revolters, Ireland, Spain, Portugal perhaps, watching--and the world had better not look away, nor allow another democracy to succumb to the rapacious appetite of that infamous neoliberal disciple of capital and corporatism, the IMF. And behind the IMF, we cannot forget, stands always the driving fist of the United States.

Given the urgency with which we need change in the global economic system, before it sells off our planet and our future to the highest corporate bidders, Greece’s struggle could be a tipping point--a challenge to the ruling order, a move toward the unraveling of the certain disaster we are headed for, or another failure, another nail in our global coffin.

Read this article, posted at the AFL-CIO blog: it has the gritty details, and an expanded overview of the heavy consequences of this fight.

http://www.aflcio.org/Blog/Global-Action/Economics-as-Religion

Meant to Live?

Today I’m writing from a mindset that springs from being sandwiched between Rebecca Solnit’s powerfully luminescent intro/extrospection and the calamities of the world, such as the fact that the Senate just passed Fast Track for the TPP. After the House tied its own hands in the same way, I was too deep in the clutches of a kind of nihilistic depression to write anything coherent about it. If I could find people to take this to the streets with me, I would like to launch some kind of protest--maybe a United States version of the Zapatistas, using this new trade deal as our catalyst, but recruits are scarce in the highly gentrified, highly privilege-bubbled town I live in. I could always have a solo protest, walk around with signs or some such, I suppose. But for today I am coping through music, which instead prompted this piece of my thoughts.

With Anti-Flag a little too intense and Jackson Browne a little too mellow, I gravitated towards a middle ground--Switchfoot, specifically the song “Meant to Live.” I thought it mournful and political enough to match my bitter mood, and while it didn’t really soothe me, it did get me thinking, especially the following line:

                We want more than this world's got to offer…

The thing about that sentiment is that it’s perfectly logical--from a certain perspective. It implies, firstly, that the events and experiences you will have in your life are on offer from the world--as if you are a passive receiver and the world is simply an omnipotent force doling out what you get or don’t.

For much of the world, that is the story of their lives--the banks and barriers of the paths they can travel were determined by distant forces beyond their control. But for the members of Switchfoot, I doubt many paths have ever been expressly or inherently blocked. So in this case, in this melancholy anthem, “we want more than this world’s got to offer” seems to come from a place of defeatist apathy--criticizing the world at large for not supplying a less difficult and tragedy-stricken planet on which to live out our lives. The problem with this sentiment coming from Switchfoot--and take note: I don’t intend this as a specific critique of the band, merely the sentiment that this line may convey, and that I see all too often--is that projecting this feeling, being trapped and resentful that you can’t achieve all you were meant for, allows the idea that we in the US, in the privileged snow globes of the first world, are unable to fight the misfortunes this cold distant world is meting out to us.

However, the world is not an entity that has in it for you. The world is not offering anything except nature, and it is humans who have taken and ruined and corrupted and claimed that gift. The world has much to offer us, both the land and the resistance and lives of people everywhere who are struggling with trials far greater than those that the members of Switchfoot have likely faced. To assert that you want more than what you’ve been given implies that you are in a place of static underprivilege, that the odds are stacked against you and you have no agency. This sentiment, in an age of endemic apathy among those who still retain the means to do so much with what the world has already given them (if that’s how you want to phrase it) is toxic.

Some of it may be simply an expression of exhaustion with activism and struggling, which I certainly feel. The frustration of finding power structures resistant to our efforts to shake them, the demoralizing sorrow of losing yet another battle in this precarious fight for a precarious future… But the world is not to blame. We were not “meant to live for so much more” than this (I suppose it is arguable that some of this mentality, specifically in the song, hearkens back to Switchfoot being a Christian band, and perhaps the sense of defeat could be interpreted as a wish for God to step in and finish the job we’re sick of?). I wish to hell and back that the fallout of this unstable world were not my generation’s inheritance, and I do feel a sense of loss, that we have lost the chances for an easier life, chances we never had. But the human race has run out of chances for a blithe and easy future, and we can’t spend our time wishing for a different way, feeling entitled in a way that has not even been possible for much of the world.

I am reminded of something I once read in an interview with Noam Chomsky: that when he gives talks in the US, people ask him afterwards “What can we do?” Whereas when he speaks to peasants in Colombia or Kurds in Turkey, they don’t ask what they can do, they tell him what they are already doing. This missing link, this step between awareness or outrage and action, is something the armchair-bound Western world has a serious problem with. We are waiting for someone to tell us what we can do--as if it is we who have expended our capacity for change and now wring our hands at the ends of our ropes.

We may have run out of space for that preferred type of action in the US (I am speaking generally of the middle and upper classes when I reference the US and the West)--that civilized and clean and tidy type. The mentality of activism that so many share here--that we can make a few efforts, sign a few petitions or meet with our legislators or attend a colorful protest, and then go home--is from what springs the sense of frustration that we have done all we can and now blame the world for our failure to see much earthshaking change for the better.

But we have not run out of capacity for meaningful action. We are not nearly at the end of our reservoirs of power for change. Especially in recent years, when it has grown ever more critical, we have only caused ripples on the surface.

We with power cannot sigh and sit back, consigning our rights and our agency to inertia. The destructive power of that inertia--the gathering storm of climate change, the slide towards ever more radical and hateful right-wing ideologies, the perpetuation of the disastrous economic systems that will march us off the plank--will destroy this planet and our species, along with countless thousands of others. I too want more than the dark future we are facing, and more than the wars of our fathers, as Switchfoot mentions a line later. But we in the Western world have not exhausted our struggling capacity and our power, and we cannot bemoan the choices this world offers as painfully limited--yet. Other Switchfoot songs, like “This is Your Life,” carry a far better message--one that demands action. But keep bemoaning, keep feeling that we have had the idyllic life we were “meant to live” precluded, and we may yet end up in that hollow place, as trapped as our apathy already suggests we are, defeated before most of us have even begun the real fight.

We were not necessarily meant to live for anything at all, but if we mean to live, we cannot live like this.

Deconstructing Trade Myths

"Free trade" could bear no more ironic moniker, no matter how many times President Obama claims that new treaties will be good for America and that "nothing is secret.” Trade deals are easy to dismiss as obscure or bureaucratic, but the trickle-down effects will be visceral. The two critical-to-watch trade treaties pending are the Trans-Pacific Partnership, among 12 nations of the Pacific Rim, and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, between Europe and the US. It can seem pointless or futile to fight esoteric trade laws, but at this juncture our apathy will be our death sentence. The TPP/TTIP threaten our entire democracy, but multinational companies and corporatist politicians stand to gain from everything we lose--droves of US jobs, labor rights, banking regulations, environmental protections, internet freedom, affordable pharmaceuticals, food safety inspections, and the semblance of control over our political system.

The TPP and TTIP were written in secret with the help of 600 corporate advisors. No part of them has been released to the public except through WikiLeaks. Congress is currently debating Fast Track legislation for the TPP, which would allow Obama to advance the deal; Congress would be presented with a final form of it for an up-or-down vote, no debate or amendments allowed. Fast Track would tie Congress's hands and leave the fallout of the deals to neoliberal inertia. The Senate has already approved it.

The Obama administration is vociferously promoting these deals, and may yet get their wish to see them fulfilled. On Friday, Congress approved Fast Track (or TPA, Trade Promotional Authority) by a narrow margin, but the entire package is stalled due to a failure to pass the TAA, Trade Adjustment Assistance, which was meant to help workers who would be impacted by the TPP--and funding that aid by cutting Medicare.

TPP and its accompanying components will likely be back up for another round next week, so this fight is far from over. Most Democrats voted against the trade bills, but Obama and the Republicans continue pushing the issue. John Kerry and Ash Carter recently published an article in USA Today, twisting the script to attempt to portray the TPP in the favorable light it does not deserve.

To begin with, Kerry and Carter claim that the "TPP is an indispensable tool for one of the most important projects of our time. Since World War II, U.S. leadership of the global trading system has helped usher in an era of peace and prosperity unparalleled in history. It has brought jobs to our shores, partners to our defense and peace and prosperity to those around the world who have embraced openness, fairness and freedom." While there is no doubt that expanding US influence around the world has been one of this country's "most important projects," that the TPP is a tool to further that cause is less than comforting. US leadership of just about anything has not "usher[ed] in an era of peace and prosperity" in any way visible to most inhabitants of the world.

Rather, since World War II, US leadership of the global trading system has helped entrench neoliberalism, promote the fallacy that the Cold War was "won" with the triumph of capitalism, further stratify the world in terms of the one percent and all the rest, ensure corporate control of industries, livelihoods, and governments, and accelerate a race to the bottom in terms of health, safety, and environmental and working conditions. The peace and prosperity that Kerry and Carter claim responsibility for? Not so apparent.

Additionally, trade deals have historically sucked jobs away from our shores, as lifting trade barriers has consistently led to waves of outsourcing as employers depart for the countries with the cheapest labor. Kerry and Carter did add a qualifier for the "peace and prosperity" they assure us we've been seeing--it has been delivered only "to those around the world who have embraced openness, fairness and freedom." Perhaps the countries whom we have brought to our side--or forcibly restructured to our liking--have been rewarded with that peace and prosperity, though it still seems elusive. Capitalism we have certainly delivered, and all the trappings of neoliberalism, but peace and prosperity are not quite what those seem to accomplish. Rising unemployment and falling wages are the more customary accompaniments when a country has had its trading system pried open and convinced to "embrace openness, fairness, and freedom." Perhaps the "openness" that discussed here is not the same kind referenced in discussions of that other "openness" phenomenon, "transparency."

Kerry and Carter also seem to be laboring under the delusion that continued US leadership in the Asia-Pacific region is what the inhabitants of those countries want (or perhaps what we have judged that they need). US presence there ought not to be looked on as quite so rosy, however: Vietnam, Indonesia, Cambodia, Laos, and the Philippines, at least, should recall well the consequences of excessive US presence in their region. Perhaps a good, novel idea could be allowing the people whose region it is to exercise the leadership of said region. Our trade ambassador-cheerleaders assure us that "in meeting after meeting across the region, we hear calls about the importance of TPP and the desire for more U.S. engagement," but remember that the meetings they were conducting were with government echelons, not the people in the countries whom these trade regulations--or deregulations--would strip even more control from.

They do add that the "TPP would help us promote a global order that reflects our interests and our values," which is probably true. Those interests and values, however, are rarely protected in the public interest or in such a way that they value the lives of the faraway people on the ground who must deal with their ramifications. The "cooperation, accountability and greater respect for human dignity" that Kerry and Carter insist TPP would bring lack historical precedent in the "tradition" that they say the TPP continues. NAFTA certainly did not deliver; nor has any other notable free-trade agreement.

"One of the greatest bulwarks against the spread of violent extremism is to replace poverty with opportunity, and TPP would create economic growth and unlock opportunities for workers and businesses across the region." Yet who locked those opportunities in the first place? Poverty is not a naturally occurring phenomenon, nor is it an unfortunate consequence of lazy backward people who don't know how to work in an industrialized advanced economy. It is a byproduct of the same kind of global economic system that the TPP (and TTIP) would deepen ever further: Kerry and Carter may claim that "the alternative [to the TPP] is a race to the bottom," but that is no alternative. That is precisely the race Congress would be signing us up for by choosing Fast Track/Trade Promotional Authority, let alone the TPP itself.

The other unpleasant side effect Kerry and Carter would attribute to the failure to approve the TPP is that without it, "America's influence abroad" would be "undercut." In the next breath, they invoke the threat of China, who might arise to fill the power vacuum that the lack of TPP would ostensibly create. And so now we come to one of the core reasons these government officials are cheerleading so hard for this deal that is the virtual photographic negative of everything they paint it to be: China. The possible challenger on the horizon, the threat to our hegemony, to our influence abroad, to that most pristine economic record of delivering the "peace and prosperity" they're sure you've been experiencing... Allowing China to gain a handle on trade in its region might, yes, perhaps "reward those quickest to abandon values and compete at any cost." But that path of global trade and policies will not be one for China to blaze alone--we have walked it first, and over and over again. The TPP will be a familiar jaunt down that same road, though the destination could be darker than ever before, given the enormous threat of climate change that Kerry and Carter blithely skip over. They assure us that the TPP will contain stronger environmental regulations than ever before, but that should be neither reassuring nor placating.

From what little we know of the TPP, it is clear that activism of any stripe is on the chopping block, from human rights to the environment. One especially ominous clause is called State-Investor Dispute Settlement: it establishes secret tribunals in which multinational corporations could bring lawsuits against any country’s laws or public safety regulations on the grounds that those laws hinder profits. The implications of such unrestrained power are enormous, inhibiting the struggles for justice of everyone from environmentalists to labor unions to Boycott-Divest-Sanctions activists in Palestine.

The Obama administration, Republicans, and Kerry and Carter, here, insist that the TPP will "revitalize and expand the system that has served us so well." I don't doubt that the system has served them well, but it might do them well to remember that the word "us" extends far beyond the corporate captains of this sinking ship.

We've seen this before. We are choosing to repeat history. Already, under NAFTA (which eliminated a million US workers' jobs as manufacturers departed for the cheapest labor), corporations have sued the US, Canada, and Mexico, claiming that their profits are being hampered by consumer- or environment-protection regulations. The TPP/TTIP would only make cases like these more rampant.

At a point where we need to force serious action against climate change and grant rights to the poor, oppressed, and disenfranchised, the TPP/TTIP are a recipe for disaster. This is no "new-and-improved" trade deal. It's not improved, and it isn't even new--it's the same old toxic medicine, with stakes higher than ever. If ever there were a time for the US to change its foreign and economic policies and begin learning better, urgent lessons from history (and current events), that time is now.

USA Today article:

http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2015/06/08/tpp-tpa-trade-democrats-vote-house-obama-column/28566641/

Political Fantasy Writing vs. Avoidance

    To cope with the onslaught of the world, so to speak, I've learned to start compartmentalizing in terms of what I could do with the shocking or devastating information I learn, how I could use it in a book, whether that quote or that statistic could be incorporated into my latest story. Not "how can I take action and make people aware of this?" or "how can I change this?" but "how could this fit into my novels?"
    This is a problem.
    On Friday I was at a talk on the state of Gaza after the Israeli war last summer, and I was trying so hard not to break down into sobbing the whole time, I was trying to see these pictures and hear these stories with a distant ear, a writer's ear, so that I could channel this devastation and this tragedy at a later moment.
    But this voice in my head nagged me, saying, "their tragedies are not yours to use, to take and bend and put in a book set in a universe that will never exist, with characters who live only in your head."
    Why was I trying to keep this distance, trying not to cry? It wasn't that I wanted to remain unmoved by the accounts of terror and desperation and misery, but that I feared being broken by them. That it was easier to process if I transplanted their stories into my imaginary world.
    But that is not where they are happening. Those collapsed buildings and shattered homes and tortured people, I did not invent them and they will not go away if I tie them neatly into my fantasy stories.
    I like to think that I write fantasy because I can make political commentary subliminally, that I can worm subversive thoughts into people's heads without them realizing what I am actually talking about. But maybe I also write about fantasy worlds because I am afraid to write about the real one. Afraid to co-opt stories that aren't mine, afraid to "get it wrong," afraid to face what is going on here for real, instead of piecing together a fantasy world based on Palestine-Vietnam-Iraq-Chile-whatnot.
    I went to a writing conference where the keynote speaker was Aminatta Forna, an author from Sierra Leone, who spoke of writing about politics and how in the Western world, so many see this as taboo, a borderline that fiction should not cross. Whereas in the rest of the world, almost every book is inherently political, because "politics"--that icky, gritty sphere we like to keep at arm's length--colors every aspect of people's lives in a way that we over here have likely never experienced. We can live in our snow globes and poke things away as we wish. If politics is too messy and unappealing (or, heaven forbid, won't sell well enough), we can just leave it by the wayside.
    I guess in my snow globe, I've been watching the world through the glass--not ignoring, never ignoring, but not interacting. I reach out and snare little pieces of what's swirling around out there, and then spin it into my own story so the snow-globe-bound might start to care about what's out there.
    But that is a limited narrative. And even reading the last paragraph, I notice how US-centric it is--"out there," especially. The people who live "out there" are inherently "not here"--it's othering. Do I write, then, from a divisive standpoint? Also, the ones here, the "snow-globe-bound," tend on the whole to be less bound by any outside forces than anyone else--it is their own fear or ignorance or indifference that keeps them stuck inside. They are not the ones who need the world brought to their doorsteps--it is already there, if they would care to see it.
    If I am employing this language, if I am focusing on little pieces of the world like I'm casting a selective fishing line through it, I am still seeing with snow-globe lenses. I am not representing anyone's story fully, I am bringing nothing to light. I am giving in to the same narrative that says "politics should stay out there, I don't really need to think about it." It is from a very privileged worldview indeed that I can say, "I don't want to think about that too hard because it makes me so desperately sad, so I'm going to put some of it in a story instead and distill it out so I can handle it."
    It makes me sad? I am afraid I will be broken by it? I, who live at such a reserve from all of this "war stuff," as a friend of mine deemed it? I must protect my delicate psyche by averting my metaphorical eyes from it? I can do that--it's been made so easy for me. But how many people can't, don't have that compartmentalizing option, to separate the terrors of the world from the everyday going-ons of their lives, because they are one and the same?
    Transferring those feelings and stories to fantasy also inherently brands them made-up, not real. And isn't that the last thing I want to do--dismiss the suffering around the globe (largely wrought by the US)--but is that what I have been unintentionally doing? Not extremely egregiously, I don't think, since of course the real world influences all stories we write, made-up or not, and there's a line between doing what I meant to do--placing real-world events in a fantasy context to generate new thinking about the world--and avoiding it. Armed with avoidance tactics is not how I want to live in and view the world.
    Some sorts of these thoughts have been germinating in my head since I heard Aminatta Forna give her talk. If I want to write about politics, if I want to crack the snow globes, why must I stick to a hypothetical situation loosely based on catastrophes happening right here and now? If I want to write a story influenced by the US war on Vietnam, why not set the story in Vietnam? Why not write about the Palestinian children in the presentation I saw, rather than pluck up their stories and replant them elsewhere? Can not a story set in its own habitat be more powerful than any distant, distorted reflection?
    Fantasy often need be a vehicle to talk about the real world, but need not be one to avoid that real world. If I am trying to escape it, trying not to feel the intense sorrow and pain and horror of the world by imagining how I could use it in my stories, I am doing no one a good service. Fantasy writing as activism is a powerful thing only so long as it does not keep me from fighting for and with the real people whose lives influenced my writing. And that's what I'm afraid my compartmentalizing of our horror-wracked world has been doing.

On Walking

     This isn't my usual sort of post--not political, not organized or angry or anything, just a scattered account of this restlessness that's gotten worse lately, and turned up in this very strange wandering session last Saturday. I haven't parsed the significance, if there is some, and I don't think myself really the type to delve into philosophical meaning, at least not right now, but I just want to record this, and maybe come back to it sometime.
     So. I'd just gotten off the train after a LGBTQ festival thing, and I was walking home when I took a detour off on a side street that ran past my first elementary school. I realized I was walking very slowly, sort of meandering, but meandering always had this light quality to it, like one was so wrapped up in the day or their thoughts that it just carried them around, buoyed them. I was wandering, which has a foggier, heavier pull to it.
     I started out singing Rise Against songs, because that's what I do when I walk, I sing--but by the time I got to the elementary school I'd moved on to Jackson Browne and Roz Brown. I walked past this little woods path that goes along an aqueduct, and I usually dislike woods and walking, but I deliberated for a few moments and then swerved to walk along the aqueduct. I'd sort of expected it to be enclosed and sheltered and quiet, a little enclave next to a school parking lot on a Saturday, but instead it edged up against people's houses, right into their backyards. I could see kids playing on a trampoline and I could hear a baseball game going on and it wasn't any kind of quiet retreat like I suppose I was looking for. I wasn't planning to sit on a log and think Deep Thoughts, per se, but I just wanted it to be quiet, to be alone.
     I walked up to a baseball diamond and felt very much like the scary punk kid who's always skulking in the background of public parks, the one the parents shield the children from. So I walked back the way I came and just kept going till I got to the library, taking all the back roads so I wouldn't have to decide whether or not to go home, since I really didn't want to go home just then but if opportunity presented I would have to choose, and I'm not so good at that.
     I got it in my mind that I needed to find this book by Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust, which I'd heard of but not felt the need to read before, since walking and wandering had never been something I'd been compelled to do--I mean, I walk to school every day and I've never felt so restless, so in need of someplace to wander, and keep wandering. But the library didn't have the book, so I got out several other Rebecca Solnit books and now am plowing through them. One's called The Field Guide to Getting Lost, and I guess I was a little lost on Saturday, or trying to find a place where I could find things or figure things out, but I couldn't get lost enough maybe. (Though I did wear my combat boots to pieces walking all over my town.) I want to travel desperately, though I think I've probably romanticized it in my head and the world's nowhere safe enough for me to traipse off to all these countries I want to see without some preparation, but I could list handfuls in an instant if you asked me where I want to go--Morocco, Iran, Venezuela, Czech Republic, Ecuador, Kiribati, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Mexico... It goes on.
     I'm always threatening to go run away to Mexico or Canada or planning to drive across the country with my friends once I can drive and can get or rent a car, and now I know why, and what I want to find on that journey. I want to get lost, and I want to become found.