I seem to recall hearing quite often when I was younger that people get more conservative as they age. As I look toward turning 50 at the end of this year, I'm realizing this is not so for me. I've been on a long trajectory of becoming more and more radical.
Just a Monday morning thought. But, I was thinking about why. I mean, given my family background and some of my education, I should practically be a far right-winger. So, why I do keep more radical? I've gone from nominally recognizing that I was liberal to seeing that everything this culture is founded on needs to be rejected.
My father came from wealth. He was a staunch fiscal conservative. A nihilist, really, but he firmly believed that the money he inherited he had 'earned' and that no one had a right to take a penny of it, much less deny him the opportunity to increase that money's value through investment. The number one reason he voted Democrat for the one and only time in his life: his investment portfolio lost half of its value under Bush. He also believed that anyone who hadn't managed to get rich was just lazy or stupid about money.
He wasn't totally ruthless. He came from old money and he did talk to me about how he found excessive wealth problematic. I was shocked when, just a few years before his death, he agreed with me that if there were people starving and homeless and with health care needs, it was obscene for other people to making too much money. He felt that no one should earn more than $500,000 per year. (Listen, that was radical thinking for him!)
Meanwhile, my mother is from a very conservative family in Oklahoma. Not from wealth. Quite the opposite. Religious conservatives. When I went to visit, she would have Glenn Beck books on her coffee table. My maternal grandmother didn't think anyone should read any books other than the Bible. (A big reason my mother left home at 18.) I've lived all over the country and few places outside. I've traveled fairly extensively outside the country - though it's been a while. Its an understatement to say that its a tad uncomfortable for me to spend too much time with my socially conservative extended family. I love them. They've always been good to me. Truth be told, when issues they might have had very far-right stances on politically enter the family-fold, they don't let their political views get in the way of loving and supporting family members. When my cousin's daughter was comfortably hanging out with her lesbian partner in my uncle's living room, I was relieved to see that they were in the fold. It would seem that tribal ties are stronger than political ones. That is, close to home, love wins out. So, even though they know I have a very different way of walking through life, they will always embrace me and love me. I will do the same for them.
So, I have both brands of conservatism running through my veins. Additionally, I'm a business school graduate. I earned my MBA summa cum laude. That would suggest that I was a capitalist. That I would embrace the profiteering model and capitalist economics.
I went to business school in order to boost my resumé. Yet, I ended up rejecting everything I learned there.
I'm still not sure why.
I found the basic principles of finance to make no sense. The premise of perpetual growth seemed unsustainable and too much like addiction. Doing anything to make money for you and yours, even if it wasn't healthy for other people or the planet seemed immoral.
I was scowled at mightily for asking the owner of most of the local Dunkin Donuts franchises how many donuts he ate every day. He responded, "I don't eat donuts, they're not healthy for you." To which I retorted, "But, you feel okay getting rich off of convincing other people to put that stuff in their bodies?" I had been rude.
And there's the thing that runs through my life: when I've spoken my truth, I've been told that I'm rude. My father lived by the "if you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything at all" creed. I used to ask him what the point of a justice system was then? I mean, you can't process a crime if you can't point out bad things that people do.
Systems where harm comes to some or most so that a few might prosper require us to be polite, a euphemism for 'silent'. No one is supposed to have a conscience. You're certainly not supposed to evoke it. No one who is prominent in a group or has any power is supposed to feel uncomfortable. It's socially unacceptable to make them feel so.
I've always been borderline socially unacceptable in that way. That is, I don't accept the social norms when I see injustice or harm. I tried for a while just going my way. I guess I wanted to see if I could fit in. But fitting in meant not fitting into my own skin. So, I gave up.
Still, its a long way from speaking my mind to realizing I think everything needs to come down. And in the last 20 years, as I've aged, that's where I've come. I've opened my mind to rethinking the definition of 'violence'. No, I don't think its violent to inflict a monetary cost on an institution or business which has gained it's wealth or prominence through participating in systems of oppression. If our government isn't willing to regulate them so they do no harm or tax them so they pay their share of the social costs of their gains, then causing them expenses from property damage is sort of a social tax, isn't it? You've made so many so miserable with so little power to do anything about it, you must pay a price. Its not really justice. And its not really the price that needs to be paid. Its symbolic. Its a statement that the people do have some power. That we can exact a price.
I'm not at the point of participating in anything like this myself. I'm not even advocating it. But, as I near 50, I've come from a place where, years ago, I would have been shocked to hear someone talk this way to where I can see how people have this view. I can see how important property destruction can be in a revolution. I simply can't get out of my mind how everyone in the US cheered as they saw videos of the Hussein statue being pulled down in Baghdad. That was property destruction. Or how critical it was to the Egyptian revolution when they burned down the headquarters of the ruling political party. People around the world knew that things were getting real there when that happened.
No one here condemned either of those acts.
Truth be told, the US is the nest of military equipment production. If our political activities reach a point to which the powers-that-be truly feel threatened, they will turn that equipment on us. The threat of force is exponentially greater here than anywhere on the planet. The only chance of redistributing power will be figuring out how to disable that equipment. Computer viruses, faulty parts in construction... who knows? But, yes, it will require property destruction.
It won't be me. I don't have the skills or the physical ability to do any such thing. I don't believe it will happen any time soon, either. I would hope it wouldn't be necessary. We've yet to see any kind of real power shifts happen in the world without it, but maybe, just maybe....
The question I'm asking as I get older is why we value property so much. I mean, we value it over people. We will punish someone for breaking a window, but not for breaking people's backs. We will condemn someone for hacking into a computer, but not for hacking the environment. This concept of ownership of property, which extends to thinking of people as property - blatantly through slavery and more covertly through employer-ship - throws off our moral compass. The older I get, the more I reject the very notion of ownership.
If you shed the notion of ownership, you have to think of the earth's resources in a different way. We all know that "you can't take it with you." So, really anything you have control over is really just stewardship, anyway. Ownership implies 'mine, mine, mine.' Stewardship implies something different. Yes, one could say one is stewarding it for one's heirs. But, even the idea of that is ownership. 'My family' includes a possessive pronoun. What if we got rid of possessive pronouns?
What if no one owned anything or anyone? If instead we were all stewards of everything for the sake of everyone, wouldn't our world be so different? We would all decide together if the activity of a business was beneficial or harmful. We would all decide whether anyone deserved stewardship over parts of the earth. There would be no privacy when it came to how we were treating each other and what we were doing with the earth's resources.
Everything we are surrounded by now is the result of private decisions, based on the concept of ownership. Behind the walls of all those buildings, people are perpetrating harms to the entire planet. They look out their windows and think of the world as "theirs" to be plundered in whatever way makes them feel more powerful or comfortable or less at risk, regardless of how what they do or participate in impacts other human beings or our ecosystem. They treat people with an eye to maximizing what they personally can get out every transaction rather than an eye to stewarding a sustainable world for all.
As we become more and more entrenched in unsustainable systems where more and more people are suffering, we will hit a critical mass. Those of us who have been able to skate along until now, ignoring the way the systems crushed the lives of others, are getting pulled in the crusher at greater numbers. Sooner or later, we're going to clog it up. And enough of us will be stuck in the feeder tubes that we'll find a way to break out and turn the damned thing off. We'll probably have to cut our way out of the tube walls. Yes, property destruction will be necessary. The walls that protect those who are abusing the rest of us will have to come down someday. Don't you think?
I simply don't see it happening via an election in the United States. Believe what you will, but I don't see that even an overwhelming majority of Democrats in the House and Senate, with a Democratic President is going to mean the end of drones, the end of wars, the end of relentless profiteering. I don't see it leading to a awakening about how all the chemicals in our lives are killing us daily. I don't see it leading to restorative justice towards all the peoples we have harmed. Will we lay down our arms and give up power over the Native American peoples we continue to submit to genocide? Will we honor their sovereignty? Will we give the people of El Salvador the support they need to rebuild after we decimated their country in the 80s? Will we apologize for the all the hell we have generated in the Middle East, dating back to imperially forcing the definitions of countries in the early 1900s? Can we begin to make up for all the atrocities committed in our name around the world? Would we even try?
In short, will we give up power over others? We relish the idea of being a Super Power. Shouldn't every person on the planet be of equal power? If we pursued a world where no one had power over anyone else, there would be peace. As long as we seek power, we cannot seek peace. I don't see us giving that up, regardless of what political party is in office. They can't give it up because their sole job is to prop it up. It is still unacceptable in mainstream America to speak out against capitalism. Imagine if we had a candidate who said, "If I get into office, I will work to dismantle our role as international super power." Would she even get one vote?
I see all this. I don't know what to do about it, but to speak what's on my mind. Still, I recognize that as I get older, I'm not getting more conservative. Quite the opposite. I have no idea what this means for me as I walk through the rest of my life. But, here I am.