God, it is so early! The sun hasn't hit the Sangre de Christos and I've already done a pot of crappy coffee. I need to shave. I need to eat some toast. I need to scream from the rooftops that's it all going to get better. I need to fill the bird water. But first, I'm going to stop and listen to the coyotes, because they have all the answers.
It’s odd for me, living as I do, in a tiny crack in the adobe of southern New Mexico, to be suddenly thrust into a travel pattern taking me to Vancouver, British Columbia, Orcas Island, Bellingham, Washington, Santa Fe, New Mexico, and vicariously to Decatur, Texas while doing flyovers of Los Angeles, Dallas-Ft. Worth (the Metroplex), Seattle/Tacoma/Bellevue, and the greater Vancouver/North Vancouver/Victoria wallapalooza of contemporary urbanity. The word from 30,000 feet is this: find a life jacket and write your name on it in Magic Marker and don’t let go of it. Ever.
I don’t fly that often, and when I do, I am reminded of the sheer scale of it all. No, those aren’t a million tiny campfires in the valley below, they are mercury vapor lamps towering over empty warehouse parking lots lighting the emptiness of our consumer lives. There are office buildings with the only sign of life being a cleaning lady on the midnight shift with three kids at home struggling to pass the time on a broken Gameboy until Mom comes home at seven, coaxes breakfast from a box, sends them to the bus line, and then she sleeps for three hours until she downs some Folgers and heads off to job Number Two, cleaning the bathrooms at the Design Warehouse for minimum wage, no health care, busted knees and broken veins and calloused hands and all while the SALE signs go up in the linen department on all those towels and blankets of which she can only dream that American Dream of when all those blankets were Made In America with Union Wages and a Hope For Tomorrow that now is only a distant memory or a campaign slogan, or both.
Hello, America. This is your reality calling. It’s time to take a tent downtown.
During this marathon of airport cuisine tasting I managed to talk with a lot of strangers. In Canada, the main question people asked of me was essentially What the fuck? Is it something in the water with you people? And when I tried to explain my country, I ultimately came to the conclusion that maybe it was. Listeria bacteria was killing people across the country. Ridiculous nonsense was pouring out of the mouths of seemingly well educated, well heeled people. It had to be the water. Just had to.
Every day of my travels there was more and more news of people taking to the streets. Madrid, Rome, New York, Boston, San Diego, Los Angeles. Not since the Nuclear Freeze movement had I witnessed such a rising of global human voice bent on their own survival. It was thrilling and despairing and rejoicing all at the same time, and human and miraculous and galvanizing and because of this…because of this, it must be stopped or co-opted or ridiculed or undermined because it cannot and will not be tolerated.
And yet, it has continued to grow.
In Santa Fe, I met Green Party ex-gubernatorial candidate David Bacon and we talked about all this. Our caffeinated conclusion was that the Occupy movement was a Cloud and everyone else was a PC looking for the restart button. The beauty, the sheer invisible beauty of the entire Occupy scenario, was that it was intangible, unwieldy, nebulous, undefined, and as such, uncontrollable and unco-optable. Republicans sneer at it, as is their way. Democrats stand on the sidelines trying to find the front of the parade so that they might take credit for it if it succeeds, or bail in the nick of time if it doesn’t. And it keeps going. And growing. And as it evolves from a threat to an established phenomenon it becomes clear that its success is precisely owed to the fact that it represents NOTHING. That’s right, you heard me. It doesn’t represent ANYTHING because it represents EVERYTHING. It isn’t one grief but all griefs. It’s wage theft and voter ID. It’s rolling back environmental protection. It’s unfair taxation and the War on American workers. It’s busting Unions and harassing teachers, it’s rewarding theft and punishing the poor, it’s a gripe against the Government and a beseeching of same to stand in fairness for ALL THE PEOPLE in the face of rising inequality, it’s sleeping in the parks because there’s no place left, it’s student loans and living at home with out-of-work parents while bomb factories in Los Alamos leap from the drawing board into full bore nightmares.
You name it, we got it. In terms of human survival, one size does fit all. And if you don’t believe me, try an experiment. Get 30 people together and stand in a circle. Take the hand of the person next to you. Oh my God! Look at that. Our hands all fit together. What a miracle of design that we can all somehow, in a moment of majesty and wonder, merge effortlessly into a meaningful whole. We are all so cool! So miraculously cool!
And I weep at the beauty of our becoming.
Hello, America. It’s time to grab that cup of Folgers and take back that wheel our collective shoulders have been ground away by. Our dawn, my lovely friends, my dear and hopeful friends, is full of stars.
Rearnheart
Silver City