I wanted to share some thoughts that surged in me as I sat in my Quaker meeting here in Tallahassee, Florida this Easter morning, since I think they may be of interest to others. They began with the thought--one which I have often had--that Jesus was a community organizer. Jesus was also, to my mind and those of many Quakers and Unitarians and Ethical Culturists (faiths I was brought up in) a deep believer in social equality. Statements like "the last shall be first," or "the meek shall inherit the earth"--his Sermon on the Mount--are the basis of a social gospel, particularly powerful in the Caribbean and Latin America, of liberation theology, a socialist and democratic organizing model that is powerfully fused with spiritual humanism.
Jesus was also a very angry person, much of the time, and it is this part of his life and message that often speaks to me, and which I was dwelling on this morning as I stood up to speak, for the first time, in the meeting which I have now been visiting for several years. Because I struggle with my anger, the example of Jesus and his anger is something I often think about, even as I recoil at some of the self-righteous anger that I see from the religious right. If you are a person who tries to understand social injustice, I believe, you are going to be angry much of the time. What do you do with that anger? How do you deal with it productively? Although Jesus was a person committed, a priori, to a kind of pacifism, it was not a middle-class pacifism that meekly begs better behavior from tyrannical power but demands it and fights, ardently and strenuously, for what it knows to be right.
I have been working with small farmers in five countries of the Caribbean, members of an enormous, 200-million member international assemblage called La Via Campesina, proponents of the international human right to "food sovereignty" (FS). One of the important concepts I have identified in examining the FS movement is that the dominant idea in much of the discourse is not "peace," as among activists in many wealthy countries; rather it is the idea of struggle. The idea of struggle, I have come to feel, is quite different from the sometimes poorly understood concept of pacifism in the activist traditions I inherit, and in the churches I have attended. Struggle often means fighting; it means accepting that both deprivation and worse lie ahead. Examine the speeches of great peasant and political fighters against colonialism and racism over the last century and you find this word used repeatedly. It helps, among other things, to prepare the "struggler" for the long haul, for a life in which middle-class peace and quiet is denied. What do the work, lives, commitment, struggle, and sacrifice--not just of leaders but of the hundreds of gifted poor farmers I have met and interviewed, whose names I will have to change to protect them in my research--demand of me?
As an ecologist--a political and agricultural ecologist--I have come to believe that many remedies offered by people in my profession do not suffice. The gifted ecologist and sociologist John Bellamy Foster characterizes the three "mechanical" approaches of mainstream ecology as 1) an offer of "magic bullets," the kind of remedies that aid workers and charities often bring to poor communities; 2) the extension of the market to all aspects of nature (the "costing" of nature, and "green capitalism"), and 3) the creation of "mere islands of preservation," protected areas that--as I come to see it--often separates peasants and poor farmers from their lands and livelihoods. (The creation of our great national park system was in many ways an example of this.) It's no accident that ecology is strongly connected with the notions of "charity" that inform, especially, #s 1 and 3 above, deeply entwined with and dependent on capitalism; many of ecology's "scientific" origins lie in attempts to measure and manage colonial empires, particularly in Africa and the Caribbean.
Over the last five years I have seen 100s of my young colleagues complete their training as ecologist-specialists and go forth to offer magic bullets, convinced that they know or have learned what poor communities they are entering need. Some of them work with great insight. But I have come to believe that such an approach may be a grave mistake. Indeed, as I stooped to plant beans and corn in Riversallee, Grenada with a Via Campesina farmer-member one day last July--the seeds placed together in irregularly shaped mounds, in holes made with our fingers--I knew that much of the produce that she grew would end up spoiling (for lack of markets, timely distribution, etc.) What she needed was not precision agriculture, the better methods my training pointed me toward, but price protections for her products, and to make sure that in future she had any land at all--that it was not sold for tourism or some rich person's tax-protected dwelling. It occurred to me that solidarity, not charity, was what was needed from me for the sugar cane farmers I studied, that I could help them best not through any superior knowledge I held but by contributing what resources I had to their fight.
In fact, as I was learning, rural communities know how to feed themselves, artfully and well. They have been doing it for centuries against extraordinary odds. Cuba's recent largely organic example is celebrated round the world, but I have found that, quietly and without notice, tens of thousands of former slaves and their descendants have been feeding their communities, accomplishing the most critical task of all--surviving--across the Caribbean for 170 years, though the British government and plantation owners strove to keep them enslaved long after legal slavery ended. The "independent" governments that followed have counted on them to keep the populace alive even as they undercut them, opened borders to foreign agribusinesses, agreed to policies that forced them to work as agricultural laborers or leave the countryside. Often--more simply--they have allowed wealthy interests to steal or push them from their land. Most of the world's hungry people live in the countryside; among the crucial take-home messages of my research is that small farmers are already feeding two-thirds of mankind. Unlike corporate food, which sometimes travels thousands of miles before it is consumed, the food they produce is eaten fresh where it is most desperately needed.
Although the wealthy countries' response to the food crisis has been to pressure poor countries to further lower trade barriers, those same lowered barriers have already enabled cheap, often-unhealthy corporate food to flood the markets in Third World countries, driving millions of farmers from business, to despair and often suicide. In India, it is reported that more than 25,000 farmers have committed suicide since 1997 (www.countercurrents.org/glo-shiva050404.htm.) Ecologically and productively-speaking, however, the so-called 'green revolution' of corporate monocrop agriculture is exhausted--not just morally but scientifically, at 98% of productive capacity. Small and peasant-farming, meanwhile, is only at 1/2 to 2/3 of potential productive levels, capable of growth with only a minimum of increased help to small farmers, let alone advanced production knowledge. (On the other hand it is generally very eco-logical.) Peasants, small farmers, and other rural peoples--especially women--require the right to be productive, what the system pretends to demand from all of us--to feed their communities in their own traditional and (also) evolving ways. And enhanced small production in the countryside--rather than minimizing labor--could mean millions of jobs for rural workers (the "comparative advantage" poor countries hold that traditional economics, oddly, tends to scorn).
Now--stay with me for another moment if you will--when Barack Obama was elected I had very high hopes. My wife and I cried on election night; we cried again during the inaugural. But on the night of his election I expressed to my wife my greatest fear--that Obama would become the prisoner of the daily intelligence briefings he was soon to receive, be so cowed by the multitude of dangers set before him by the intelligence "community" (fourth sinister arm of our government) and by our military, which consumes 50% of our taxes, has four hundred-plus military bases worldwide, is the sole biggest polluting entity on earth, and which. . . many people I know, love, and have loved are connected to.
So when I stood up in meeting today I expressed the hope that the community organizer in Barack Obama, that part of his life and work that he shared with Jesus and the poor workers and organizers I have come to admire so--here and abroad--might continue to be asserted in the White House, that we could keep him in our thoughts and keep pushing--fighting--so that he (we) might prevail.
There is one more part of this message, and it connects to the fact that Jesus was an angry guy--an angry community organizer, if you will--and that I have often found myself angry and combative, including when visiting this site. Because it is Easter--and because I am sometimes an ambivalent Christian, though that is my cultural inheritance--I found myself thinking about how the Crucifixion has been the cause of so much "righteous" anger. A lot of people have been killed, starting with the crusades and earlier, with such anger as excuse. It has been hard for many Muslims not to see the military actions that followed 9/11, right down to Obama's renewal of the war in Afghanistan, as falsely justified by such righteous anger, as a kind of holy war. Clearly righteous anger, including my own, can be misused, or backfire, as I believe it has in Iraq.
In the end I didn't have any real new wisdom to bring to this subject when I got up to speak this morning. My hope on this Easter Sunday was only that through Christ's example and contemplation of his life--like the lives of thinker/leaders like Helen Keller, Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, great Dalit leader Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, or the marvelous Dominican peasant leader "Negrita," first Dominican nominated for a Nobel Peace prize--that I, they, we could come to know what we must do in the moment of our heartfelt anger: to talk or remain silent, to struggle or organize further, or--when the time comes--upset the money lenders' tables.