hope

Hope is the Thing with Feathers
--Emily Dickinson

I know a young individual who has decided to spend the rest of his life building earthen houses -- cob houses as they're called. These beautiful, sculptural dwellings, which are outlets for artistic expression as much as places to live in, are remarkably energy efficient. When combined with an energy source such as solar panels, they can provide a self-sustaining and endlessly renewable mode of living.

The Uncompromising Ecological Architecture movement is a completely independent development, made from the ground up by committed individuals, and unaffiliated with any government program or large-scale private enterprise. Like the buildings they produce, this movement of independent and self-actualized individuals sprang from the earth itself.

I also know a person who owns a piece of land in one of the Southwestern states and has learned over the years how to produce prodigious amounts of organic food and herbs in raised beds, which are easier to keep free of weeds and pests than a ground-level garden plot. Her objective is to "get off the grid," and like the young architect she has acquired her skills without any help at all from "the system." What's most significant about both these individuals is that they have bypassed the larger political, economic, and cultural realities of American society, and now look for both sustenance and meaning through a return to the earth itself.

There is an inherent wisdom in this approach, for revolution, as one of these people recently said to me, "is within," and the emphasis here is on each individual. For with the collapse of any possibility of political remedies to address the country's problems, we have of late become an "every person for himself" type of society. Each of us must save himself or herself, since neither the political system, nor "the company," nor the union is able to help us. And maybe out of this movement of individuals to salvage their lives, a larger social movement may grow.

The moribund political system and how it got that way are analyzed masterfully today by Alexander Cockburn in a remarkably comprehensive post at his blog Counterpunch. Cockburn says:

(T)he Bush years saw near extinction of the left’s capacity for realistic political analysis. Hysteria about the consummate evil of Bush and Cheney led to a vehement insistence that any Democrat would be qualitatively better, whether it be Hillary Clinton, carrying all the neoliberal baggage of the Nineties, or Barack Obama, whose prime money source was Wall Street. Of course black America – historically the most radical of all the Democratic Party’s constituencies, was almost unanimously behind Obama and will remain loyal to the end. Having easily beguiled the left in the important primary campaigns of 2008, essentially by dint of skin tone and uplift, Obama stepped into the Oval Office confident that the left would present no danger as he methodically pursues roughly the same agenda as Bush, catering to the requirements of the banks, the arms companies and the national security establishment in Washington, most notably the Israel lobby.

As Obama ramps up troop presence in Afghanistan, there is still no anti war movement, such as there was in 2002-4 during Bush’s attack on Iraq. The labor unions have been shrinking relentlessly in numbers and clout. Labor’s last major victory was the UPS strike in 1997. Its footsoldiers and its money are still vital for Democratic candidates – but corporate America holds the decisive purse-strings, from which a U.S. Supreme Court decision on January 21 has now removed almost all restraints.

Almost needless to say, such an incompetently administered, corrupted, and corporatized system would be helpless to solve any of our real problems, even if any of its functionaries had an interest in doing so. And unless we forget what our real problems are, Bob Herbert's column in the New York Times this morning conveniently reminds us:

We’ve now lost 8.4 million jobs in this recession, and a vast majority of them are gone for good. The politicians are clambering aboard the jobs bandwagon, belatedly, but very few are telling the truth about the structural employment problems in the U.S. and the extremely heavy lift that is necessary to halt our declining living standards and get us back to an economy that is self-sustaining.

We don’t hear a lot that is serious about the sorry state of the nation’s infrastructure or the trade policies that crippled so many American industries or our inability (or unwillingness) to compete effectively with China when it comes to the new world of energy for the 21st century or our abject failure to provide a quality public education for the next generation of American workers, scientists, artists and entrepreneurs.

Speaking at a conference here on Wednesday, Gov. Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania said that if we don’t act quickly in developing long-term solutions to these and other problems, the United States will be a second-rate economic power by the end of this decade. A failure to act boldly, he said, will result in the U.S. becoming “a cooked goose.”

(snip)

The conference was titled, “The Next American Economy: Transforming Energy and Infrastructure Investment.” It was put together by the Brookings Institution and Lazard, the investment banking advisory firm.

When Governor Rendell addressed the conference on Wednesday, he used words like “stunning” and “unbelievable” to describe what has happened to the nation’s infrastructure. His words echoed the warnings we’ve been hearing for years from the American Society of Civil Engineers, which tells us: “The broken water mains, gridlocked streets, crumbling dams and levees, and delayed flights that come from failing infrastructure have a negative impact on the checkbook and on the quality of life of each and every American.”

Herbert also mentions a remark by one of the conference's participants that the U.S. might have to get used to having an economy "that's not number one," and would be "More like Germany's." But I've been to Germany, and life there is pretty good, if somewhat overcrowded. I foresee the U.S. economy in just a short time becoming more like Mexico's.

I suppose that's not all bad. Some individuals in Mexico live very well, although most don't, and I'm convinced anyone can live well who lives within his or her means, learns to shepherd whatever resources come to hand, and relies on the earth as the source of all things of fundamental value. There is hope for some of us. For the rest there's CNN, Barack Obama, and frozen pizza.