WTO Update
By Vicki Robin
December 20, 1999
Dear friends,
Gratitude first. Gratitude to all of you who responded from your hearts to my last letter about September in
These last two months have been so rich that one letter can barely contain it all. So I'm breaking it in two. This letter will be Vicki trying to make sense of the vast event focused around the WTO Ministerial Meeting in
Daunted by the sheer volume of this letter? Here's a map:
- WTO AS MIRROR
- WTO AS WTO
- WTO AS MANIFESTATION OF A WORLDVIEW
- WTO AS A FRONT FOR THE TEN TON GORILLA: OVER-CONSUMPTION
- WTO AS THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK
- WTO AND ANARCHY
- WTO AS WAR?
- WTO AS INFOTAINMENT
Okay, let's roll…
WTO AS MIRROR
This was no picnic, and not because I got tear gassed or faced down by the police (which I did). The battle in
So I spent the week in the center of marches and rallies and workshops, but on the sidelines of the major conflagration. I didn't plan to do civil disobedience. I took a non-violence training in case the marches stumbled into violence but I didn't plan to get arrested. I have not been a political activist. Ever. I've been a cultural activist. I've been a consciousness activist. I've stepped over the line of many friends' comfort zones to speak the truth as I saw it. But this was the first time I was taking to the streets for anything. My most incendiary act was to carry a huge sign on a march through a boarded-up downtown that said: LOCALIZE CHRISTMAS – GIVE LOVE NOT STUFF. (Well, the day after the WTO left Seattle I did go downtown dressed as Mrs. Claus with a sign on my red coat saying "MRS. CLAUS SAYS: MAKE COOKIES NOT DEBT FOR CHRISTMAS." Luckily, none of the merchants trying to get back to the buying bacchanalia stoned me. So, you get the picture, I wasn't directly part of the story most of you read.)
WTO AS WTO
For an excellent summary of the WTO, please go to Making Sense of the WTO #679. My awesome friend Tom Atlee has collected the best of the best of the WTO writings on his web site http://www.co-intelligence.org/CIPol_CIWTO.html. Beyond this, you're on your own. I'm sure you have your own sources and are forming your own opinions. Rather than offer another personal account of events I want to make three simple observations.
- 1. THERE ARE THOUSANDS OF ALTERNATIVES
- The WTO thrives on selling the idea that there are no alternatives to globalization. It's an ideology nicknamed TINA – There Is No Alternative (Trekkies, sounds like the Borg, doesn't it?). It's ironic that the acronym turns out to be a woman's name. Most women I know are much more inclusive of a range of opinions than TINA is. The world I live in, however, could be called TATA (There Are Thousands of Alternatives – a term used at the IFG teach-in). I like that. It sounds like a kindly grandmother. And it is.
I admire and participate in a myriad of successful, common sense design strategies for a world that works for all of life. I'll name a few to indicate my meaning, but the list only points a finger to a rich, diverse and densely populated territory. The Natural Step. Ecological Footprint. Non-violent Communication. Barter Networks. Indigenous wisdom. Meditation. Engaged Buddhism. Appropriate Technology. Results. Mindful Markets. The Universe Story. Beyond War. Holistic everything. Natural foods. Community Supported Agriculture. Biointensive Gardening. Permaculture. Citizen Juries. Consensus. Home Schooling. Ecological Economics. Town Meetings. The Genuine Progress Indicator. Ballot Initiatives. Boycotts. The Ceres Principles. The Earth Charter. And yes, http://www.yourmoneyoryourlife.org Your Money Or Your Life. You get the drift.
Globalized free trade could be seen as putting the economy on steroids and amphetamines. TINA is having delusions of grandeur and is in the midst of a serious psychotic break. If "she" were a person, we'd institutionalize "her". The lock-out of the WTO in
The teach-ins, marches, rallies, workshops and NGO meetings in
- 2. GLOBALIZATION "R" US
- So shoot me. I'm in favor of globalization. First of all, communications and travel have woven our world together to such a degree that I don't have to believe in quantum physics or metaphysics to know that when a butterfly flaps its wings in
The WTO's version of globalization is a fantasy of material progress. It has its good points. Free trade certainly is effective at stimulating the production and distribution of more, better and different stuff – just like the free-traders claim. I am grateful for many goods and services the global economy has made available to me and I do want others to have access to them. But it's pitifully insufficient as a Utopian ideal for humanity. We need to fold in our perennial aspirations to have it make any sense at all. The people in the streets, by and large, were not against trade, but want the "goods" of globalization to make room for "goods" like clean water, fresh air, intact ecosystems, respect for non-human life, wholesome foods and sharing the benefits of prosperity more universally.
- 3. WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE UNITED NATIONS?
- Given this perspective, I came to wonder why the WTO isn't just another UN agency. I'm not dumb. I know the UN has been rendered impotent and irrelevant in many ways. But it's what we have, along with the
WTO AS MANIFESTATION OF A WORLDVIEW
One of my favorite teaching tales: Two monks sat in contemplation by a river. Suddenly they heard the cries of a baby and saw the infant struggling for breath as it floated by. They waded in, brought the child to shore and revived it. Satisfied, they returned to their peaceful state. Again they heard cries, saw a struggling infant, fished it out, revived it and settled down for meditation. But the tempo of drowning babies increased. Both men shuttled from river to shore, saving babies as fast as they could. Soon they were soaked and exhausted and totally out of peace. Suddenly one monk ran away. Now the other was REALLY out of peace, angry at being abandoned. Hours later the stream of babies stopped as mysteriously as it had started. Then the second monk returned. "Where were you," cried the first monk, "when I really needed you!" "I went upstream to see who was throwing babies into the river," the absent monk replied.
Fishing out babies is a front lines holding action, necessary for immediate survival. Such actions take courage, commitment and a willingness to get waist deep in the torrent of the times. A great deal of activism is just this sort of heroics. Shutting down the ministerial meeting was, among other things, a holding action. It was like lying down in front of a tank or climbing a tree in a threatened forest. As I said, many times during the week I felt the tug to this moral high ground, but I was there on another mission.
For years I've "battled" the blindness and manipulation at the heart of overconsumption. It's as far upstream as I could go. I have been deeply distressed by the whole tempo of trashing the planet to fill the pockets and presumed needs of those who already have more than enough. Yet "overconsumption" seems to be a many headed beast – lop off one and 10 other brains seem to kick in to keep it going. So I've been searching for its lair and its source of nourishment. I've been searching for its heart. (More on this later.) The WTO, for me, is extremely dangerous, but it isn't the problem. The mindset it stands for is. I spent my week deepening my understanding of the WTO worldview and learning as much as I could from the full range of activists present how to reveal its assumptions so stunningly that it might melt like the Wicked Witch of the West.
The WTO is merely the handmaiden of a worldview that is:
- materialistic (profit is our most important product, economic growth = well being)
- undemocratic (of, by and for the people with wealth)
- cut-throat (do what you have to do to compete successfully today – even at the cost of compromising the future – or you're history)
- cynical (purporting to be for the poor – a rising tide lifts all ships, y'know – but actually fueling the increasing rich/poor gap) and
- sociopathic (greed is good; altruism is suspect; cynicism is de-rigeur).
It is a self-organizing system that would, from its own point of view, work better without the constraints being placed on it by worry warts. It has removed as many natural and artificial controls to its ascendancy as possible, against all good sense. Money isn't tied to any form of natural wealth. The natural world is a subset of the economy and, if any natural limits are transgressed, technology is called in to fix it. The ability to overturn national laws that limit free trade is a completely coherent demand of such a worldview. Never mind that global warming, water shortages, loss of topsoil, overpopulation, rising inequity, collapse of fisheries are flashing "red alert". The worldview cannot let this in without cracking its internal logic. My favorite recent example is that Clorox, the leading global manufacturer of dioxins, has purportedly bought out Britta, the counter-top water filtration system to make our drinking water pure again. Do I hear double speak? Hate is love. War is peace. Instead of "polluters paying" (a sensible principle of ecological economics), polluters can profit from both ecological destruction and remediation. We need this world view like we need another hole in the head. But, as
Think of it this way. If you are a farmer and your farmland is taken away, you don't only lose your land and your livelihood – you lose your identity. Even if you are given a job in the new prison facility built nearby or given a pension for the rest of your life, a hole in the center of your being has opened up. And if you are a rich person profiting from the Industrial paradigm you will be hard pressed to change. Even if you have no time for your family. Even if you have had to do things that violate your original sense of fairness. Even if your doctor says you have to slow down. Even if you learn that your company's product is doing harm.
In fact, I suspect that the faithful followers of the dominant economic paradigm are as much its victims as are the voiceless. The managerial class is being milked for its productivity like forests for their logs and chickens for their eggs and sweat-shop workers for their labor – and they know it. Perhaps this is why Your Money Or Your Life appeals to people in every income bracket – it's a defector's manual. Yet, if you are a winner in the casino where the future of the biosphere is being gambled away, it's still hard to push away from the table. Aside from people influenced by compelling moral figures like Mohandas Gandhi or Jesus, few privileged individuals in history have voluntarily given up their advantage.
So, in my view, the materialistic mindset is what's throwing the babies (living systems) in the drink. The WTO is just a visible representation of a mindset that puts profits over people and the planet.
The emergent worldview, in my opinion, has it all over that old one. It starts in the vastness of the unfolding story of the Universe, cracks open the future by showing that evolution is still going on. It affirms that spiritual values are as determinative of outcome as material ones. It lifts up the non-economic side of life (laughter, generosity, dance, intimacy, caring, art, music, philosophy, inquiry) and embraces the economic side of life like a cherished younger brother. It wants the economy to do what economies do well – meet real material needs. And it wants the rest of life to flourish. It honors democracy, decency, civility and law as part of what it takes for humans to live together. It honors the earth as the home of all life, the only home we have. It is practical, sane, common sensible.
In terms of worldview activism, I believe that my recent choice to devote more time to writing will be my primary form of demonstration. But I'm not sure. Is the keyboard mightier than the sword? Or, for that matter, than the commercial culture…
WTO AS A FRONT FOR THE TEN-TON GORILLA: CONSUMPTION
One anarchist and a couple of wise women associated with the International Forum on Globalization (Anita Roddick and Helen Norberg Hodge) were the lone voices of the obvious. If we want to really get globalization where it lives, we need to look at our consumption. We don't buy... they can't sell.
Of course, there's more to it than that. There always is. But being simplistic helps sort things out. We are in a condition globally of overshoot – we are living beyond the means (the productive capacity) of the earth. Like any family digging themselves deeper and deeper into debt, we've got to stop, yet we've built a lifestyle based on excess. So many habits, preferences and conflicts would need reconsideration that denial sounds like a better alternative. Rather than share (TV's, bathrooms, phones, cars, parks, public transportation) we consume. And externalize the costs onto the future (credit) or others (our creditors, the poor, ecosystems, the privilege of polluting the biosphere).
One of my favorite TOLES cartoons has a guy watching TV. The announcer is saying, "The Worldwatch Institute says we have to stop consuming or die". Several panels go by as the guy absorbs the message. Then he says, "Decisions, decisions." The subtitle says, "How long am I going to personally need the planet, anyway." So within decades we will enter a time of paying the piper for over-production and over-consumption. Livelihoods will disappear. Families will be hurt. Land will become unproductive. Water will be used more efficiently and then, I fear, run out – especially for those who are stranded in rural areas with no political clout. Floods and droughts and other by-products global warming will come. Who needs an angry God when we've got human blindness to visit such pestilence?
As we face this as a culture, I imagine we'll indulge in blame ball for a while. Blame ball? That's when everyone will want to shed the full weight of responsibility and toss blame to another party. The rich. The poor. The government. Advertising. The corporations. Inflation. Truly, since over-consumption comes out of a paradigm that's dying (there's always more where that came from) we're all innocent and we're all to blame. The question is: Who will have the strength and sanity to say, "the buck – literally – stops here." Will it take breaking the eco-bank before we face our predicament?
If I fault myself seriously for anything, it was not seeing how necessary this point of view was to the whole challenge to the WTO and at least passing out some printed jeremiad on street corners. Because at one level, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that as people and as a planet, we need to live within the means of our productive capacity. And it's obvious (to me, at least – what about you?) that the less dependent we are on the economy, the more we can challenge its core premises.
Remember, no matter how much we criticize the global economy, we are tied to it. Fans of Monty Python may remember the scene in THE LIFE OF BRIAN, set in the time of Jesus, when the small political cabal is stoking their revolutionary ire. "What have the Romans done for US anyway???" one cries defiantly. "The aqueducts?" another tenders, sheepishly "Yes, but besides the aqueducts?" "Sanitation" "Yes, but…" "Education" "The roads" "Yes, but besides, aqueducts, sanitation, education, the road, what HAVE the Romans done for us."
What HAS the global economy done for us, anyway? It turns out it's done a lot, and not just for us but for many people in the two-thirds world as well. We need and appreciate some commerce to support ourselves and meet our needs. But what needs is the economy – global or local – good at filling and for what needs is it just gross and clumsy? For some things I need money. I won't bore you with an accounting of how I spend my $850 a month income. I know that even if I were more of a gleaner or gatherer than I am, I would need aspects of the money economy to survive in today's world.
Many other needs, however, are met by my own self-responsibility, creativity, struggle to learn, willingness to feel, and, of course, by my relationships. Once basic needs are met, most real human emotion is centered on the joys and sorrows of living itself. Birth. Marriage. Death. Overcoming challenges. Missing out. Achieving. It's more about love than a Lexus, no matter how much advertising tries to sell the latter with the former.
In Your Money Or Your Life, a daily practice is established of distinguishing between purchasing to meet real, tangible needs and buying to try to fill non-material needs. Quantity is differentiated from quality. Calculating real hourly wage and the fulfillment curve (simple analytic tools used in Your Money Or Your Life) illuminate the true cost of the product-intensive American way of living. That's why people's expenses drop like a rock. What if we could energize such a process globally? What if we put serious restraints on advertising (c'mon folks, that ain't free speech!)? And what if we taught media literacy so that even toddlers could differentiate between commercially stoked needs and a wet diaper? What if we reclaimed some of the air waves from commercial interests, used them to inspire, inform and empower, and made citizenship a better game than "more" (consumerism)? What if we established a really progressive income tax again, just like in the good old post-war days when the poor were getting richer faster than the rich were? And what if we actually started a national and international dialogue about the big "R" word – redistribution of wealth? What if we overturned the Supreme Court ruling that gave corporations the rights of personhood to corporations? Initiatives in all these areas are already underway. So this isn't idle chatter.
Now, what about the two thirds world where basic needs are still not met for billions and those that are entering the middle class are clearly better off. Am I advocating voluntary simplicity for the poor of the world who've had their appetite for consumption whetted by our media? Am I saying that the billions of poor shouldn't have their crack at the good life? Fortunately, a great deal of research has been done about how to provide room for the poor to expand their consumption while the rich moderate theirs. Studies by Friends of the Earth Netherlands, among many others, reveal that consumption fairness can be achieved while still giving the wealthy (us) as high a standard of living as we had, say, in the 1950's. Implementing such a system, of course, will take much political will and courage, but in times of real need people have shown a remarkable willingness to pull together for the common good. Do you think polluting our scant water supply, for example, might be a crisis worthy of making some adjustments?
WTO AS THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK
My favorite chant in the marches was, "This is what democracy looks like!" Free speech. Right of free assembly. Freedom from cruel and unusual punishment. Of course democracy is more than marching in solidarity against the WTO alongside people who might disagree with you on a host of other things. But there was a whiff of citizenship in the air – especially heartening during the Christmas shopping season in a country where consumerism has all but supplanted the quaint virtue of civic participation.
Then the Empire struck back. Conservatives, shoppers, shop-keepers, business people, downtown workers and the Federal government that insisted on a show of force might all think that all police actions were justified – necessitated and provoked by the actions in the streets. But there were hundreds if not thousands who were brutally treated by the police, assaulted, injured, and some in jail tortured and denied basic rights to food, water, legal representation, etc. The police wore riot gear. The protesters wore sweat shirts, rain gear and sported a few signs. Sure, if this had been elsewhere in the world, there would have been real bullets, so in a sense we got off easy. But real damage, psychic and physical, was done to some pretty harmless people.
To me, the show of force was a show of something much more troubling. Those of us who are white, polite and off the streets don't know what many others in
I was also troubled by how easily I and many others adapted to the tear gas, curfews and police blockades. "Oh, tear gas on
The police and National Guard, in their frightening array of force, was the old paradigm baring her teeth. The temporary loss of democratic rights in
The problems weren't specific bad cops or "anarchists". The problem is that we thought we had a democracy and we may not. Worse, I think many of us have forgotten how. I've not thought much about democracy, just like I hadn't thought much about the economy until 10 years ago. I learned in 7th grade that we have one and left it at that. Now, I'm reassigning myself to Poli Sci 101 (I actually never took that class in the first place). The beauty and hope from all this is that there are, I believe, millions like me who have been rudely awakened from a civic laziness. My guess is that once I catch hold of what democracy really is, I will be in awe of its beauty and proud to be part of the species that invented it.
WTO AND ANARCHY
Luckily I had a couple of anarchist friends staying with me or I might have dismissed their cause as incoherent at best and counter productive at worst. We stayed up late into the night talking. Amber saw in anarchy a utopian ideal – self responsible, aware people making considered choices that benefit the whole. She was quite aware that pulling off a functioning anarchist society would take a level of maturity that humanity might never achieve, or only after some profound growth at a species level. Mike saw anarchy as an appropriate response to an insane world. "I don't have to understand the phonebook-fat trade regulations to know they don't work. Just look around. Injustice. Unhappiness. Uncaring corporate power." For him, crimes against property aren't like crimes against people. Only those corporate outlets that exploit people and nature had been targeted. Their property, in his view, was ill-gotten. Those plate glass facades literally come out of the hide of underpaid workers and abused ecosystems.
I thought of my own sentimental affinity for Luddites and Monkey Wrenchers. If I believed that smashing things would actually work, I might do it. But I'm just far enough along in life to know that in some perverse way such acts are good for the GDP (the clean up and repair WILL happen) and ultimately bad for the natural world (more resource consumption to tidy up the mess). But what struck me about Mike's argument was the fact that the world he's expected to inherit and uphold makes no sense to him. He doesn't want it. And he's no "trust fund hippie." He rides the rails, dumpster dives and plants trees for money – embracing a marginal existence as the only thing that's consistent with his stark view of reality. While the ones who did the tagging and window smashing were few, I suspect there are many Mike's out there, and this is as much a by-product of the consumer society as deforestation.
Before leaving the anarchists, I want to tell one more story. At the end of the final big march on Friday, the labor contingent had chalked DEMOCRACY in large letters down a whole city block. They had us arrange ourselves along the lines so a media chopper could take our photo for the evening news. Perhaps to say, THIS is what democracy looks like. I was on the spine of the E. Behind me, a young man, standing precisely on the curve of the D, shouted until he was hoarse: "Don't cooperate. If we are peaceful, they win. Go back to the jail. Protest. Don't just do what you are told." All the while his feet never budged from the line. He could have broken rank. He could have run around every letter, fomenting revolution among the obedient. Instead he protested as he complied. I thought about those two forces in me – the one who thinks "outside the box" and the one who counts on the box to maintain an orderly world. I don't think that anyone really wanted it all to collapse – however much we might fantasize about the demise of western civilization in moments of disgust with crass materialism and gross injustice.
WTO AS WAR?
A dear friend of mine – a man enamored of truth and beauty who happens to be a Republican – wrote me last week saying: "The worst thing about highly contentious situations is that they can come between friends." People I cherish are strung out along much of the spectrum of opinion about the WTO. I wonder who might feel required to distance themselves from me because I haven't taken quite the right stance.
During the year I lived in
Listen to the rhetoric. The
So skirmishes began on the streets of
Perhaps, for me, the luxury of empathy with all the humans I met that week will be sorely challenged.
I recall now the young policewoman with braces who was part of a three deep blockade of a small group of middle-aged women carrying a non-threatening banner and chanting peace songs. She stood at attention but whispered to us conspiratorially "Hey, if you'd just roll up the banner there would be no problem." She was much less inclined to fight than some of the feisty old activists in our group.
I recall the girls in anarchist garb joining me in trying to give a small dog a drink of water from the bottle they were carrying to wash tear gas from their eyes. The dog, one said behind her bandana, was "the only person who'd been nice to me all week."
I recall distributing fruit to the people in vigil at the King County Jail. One girl declined, saying she'd not been so well fed in her whole life. People were coming by non-stop with food. "There was a pizza a protester," she said.
I recall the calm of the peace keepers, their tense good cheer as they shepherded thousands through incendiary intersections.
I recall the tireless work and patient repetition of explanations on the part of intellectuals in the Third World Network and the International Forum on Globalization.
I recall the exasperated woman who came out of her shop on Friday, took one look at yet another rag-tag throng of protesters marching up
I recall the woman in a "WTO for Beginners" workshop with me who on Monday hadn't even heard of the WTO. She'd been at a bus stop and struck up a conversation with someone who gave her an earful. By Tuesday she was at every teach-in she could find. By Friday she was in the March. By the next Wednesday she was front row center with her tape recorder at the first City Council hearing. She'd gotten radicalized – along with many other people on the streets and in front of their TV's that week.
And I recall an old folk song about the civil war: "Which side are you on? Which side are you on?" If lines get drawn and sides picked, which way will all the people I know and those I met on the streets go?
Something in me wants to stand up for the perfection of the whole pageant and all of the passion and outrage and courage that flushed the old paradigm out of hiding. I want to stand up for the camaraderie and bridge building I saw happening outside the "war zone." I want to have those who were locked down give respect to the people for whom the greatest act of courage was just to show up at a rally. I want us to celebrate those who were disobedient and got arrested, to remember what we learned dutifully in American History books – it was the SHOT heard round the world, not the teach-in or march. At the same time, I want all of us who protested to remember the humanity of the delegates and ministers. I want us to heed people like Holocaust survivor Elie Weisel and playwright Anna Devere Smith who have had the patience and vision to tell the whole stories of horrors like the Holocaust and the LA riots. I want the precious possibility of new alliances to flourish and not get beaten down by ideological hair splitting. If "Turtles and Teamsters" are going to have more than a fling, they will need all the courtesy and respect they can muster to deal with their real differences.
I'm not just being nice in this call for respect. I'm being practical and fierce. And true to my own conviction that all elements have information that will lead to unheard of solutions – if we will listen deeply. Demonizing is running rampant now, filling column inches and email boxes globally. It won't help. Having trained in many forms of Aikido, on and off the mat, I am deeply concerned by my colleagues demonizing the WTO and what it stands for. I was especially troubled when this attitude spilled over into subtle and not-so-subtle put downs among the broad range of citizens and NGO's who formed common cause for a few glorious days. A few folks engaged in direct action seemed to be wearing a bit of "You Wimp" cologne that the rest of us could smell. Any choice short of battle mode was capitulation. But there was other polite sniping going on. I literally fear that after years of careful work we will arrive at the crest of the hill, see the "whites of the eyes" of the old paradigm, stand up and turn our guns on one another for some obscure differences of analysis and strategy. (Monty Python could do this skit up good.) The battle lines need to be drawn between paradigms, not between people or preferred tactics for change. We are choosing the rules for the future. Let's do it eyes wide open. In a way, the ideology of greed and growth thrives because it is simple-minded and single- minded. How can we, diverse as we are, be of one mind too?
Some of the people who impressed me most for their inter-NGO bridge building were representatives of
WTO AS INFOTAINMENT
I have annoyed my enviro friends by asserting that the future belongs to the press agents. Surely science, public policy analysis or ethical debates should guide our cultural conversations. But they don't. Publicizing Your Money Or Your Life taught me that the media mediates reality and bestows validity much as the church or royalty did in bygone eras. If it's on TV, in the papers, in a book, well, it must be true – or at least worthy of forking over some my limited attention span to consider.
Sound bites. Photo ops. Conflict. Sex, violence, scandal and celebrity. Face it, we eat that stuff for breakfast, lunch and dinner. So isn't it pitifully predictable that the stunning show of outrage and concern about what the WTO represents made headlines thanks to our much maligned anarchist compadres? They knew how to make news, and, in making news, they made all of our concerns a bit more newsworthy. It's not their "fault" that they upstaged everyone else except, ultimately, the police. Those two factions, with the direct action folks playing the Greek Chorus role of highlighting the morality of the moment, captured the media's attention and thus the attention of the world. That's how the media environment makes us make news. In a way, the media fosters the very misbehavior society is bound to condemn. Could it be that our capitalist epidemic of busyness and distraction are making us all into the cartoon yuppie parents. Civil society has to throw a tantrum of major proportions to get any attention. Ironically, the media makes money reporting on the very insanity it fosters. Oh well, who said the world isn't weird and getting weirder.
The media isn't recognized as a player in these pageants, but it's got the central role. In this century's revolutions, guerrillas have learned that they must capture the media if they want to capture the state. Campaign finance reform is really media manipulation reform – politicians use soft money to capture the minds the media is adept at delivering. How can activists for the "new paradigm" capture at least their fair share of the media? How can we cut through the palaver and trivia that the media churns out? "Alternative" media is marginalized and serves only the already converted. Mainstream media seems to be such a huge fortress with commercial interests in every gun turret (as well holding a pistol to the heads of Station and Program Managers). So part of a measured, coordinated strategy post WTO Ministerial meeting has to be, dare I say it, a good media strategy.
Your Money Or Your Life was, in a way, a media strategy. A life free of financial constraints yet strangely dismissive of traditional wealth and status symbols had enough curiosity to capture media attention. It irked and attracted people all at once. And I got hundreds of hours of air time – very frugally I might add. Then I used my thousand hours of fame to educate people in a new way of thinking about money, success, savings, status, freedom, purpose and stuff. Ironically, I would gently use the sponsor's ads on interview programs to enhance the points I was making. Somehow, no one recognized this work as subversive. And somehow I have a feeling that this experience has educated me in as yet untapped ways for the kind of transformation I believe we all yearn for. Many friends call me when they want media contacts (especially Oprah!). But that 's not what I am talking about. Rather than getting our messages out singly, we need a two-prong media strategy. We need the grit and moxie to reclaim some rightful space on the media for the leading cultural edge. AND we need to Aikido the current sick set-up to give us power (air time) using the very tools (shock, celebrity, style, sound and video bites) they use to make news. We can change the rules by playing their game better than they can. I know we can. I already know people who are doing it.
WTO AND SPIRITUALITY
Say what? Where's the link? I only bring it up because I am determined to integrate my devotional side and my activist side. And, as I do that, to seek this reconciliation in outer events. We all look with dismay on how religion and war have made common cause with every side claiming God is with them. Result: a lot of suffering. So what is the role of spirit? I am not a contemplative; I don't believe that prayer alone is sufficient to change the course of events. I am also not a materialist; I distrust any process conducted in the absence of the sacred. Perhaps it is with the natural love of a mother for a newborn that we need to hold the affairs of the world. His Holiness the Dalai Lama, when asked about evil in the world, spoke about the centrality of teaching happiness. Everyone wants it, yet to achieve it ultimately requires that everyone's happiness be assured. Peace Pilgrim, our American "saint", said, "Overcome evil with good."
In the Babemba tribe of
I can see the faint outlines of Direct Spiritual Action. Blockade the entrance. Form a human chain. Then praise the WTO functionaries for all the good the global economy has given us and for all their hard work in making it happen. Thank them for the cell phones and computers that make our civil society hum. For the planes that brought us to the demonstrations. For donations to Universities where we got the training in law and medicine that allowed people to be protected and defended and healed on the streets. For the factories that make the bricks and mortar that make our homes. For our cars and trains and televisions, because we use them to bring us together and bring our message to the world. For providing some of the food we cannot grow ourselves anymore. For their good intentions. For being parents who want the best for their children. For standing up for their belief that they are doing the arduous work of stitching together the world economically so it doesn't fall apart politically. For every unknown act of kindness and courage they have ever done. For…
Too improbable. Too idealistic. Every religion teaches such love. I suspect it will take incredible courage for me and everyone else to be boldly wise and fiercely loving in the face of all that needs repair in this world.
AND SO IN CONCLUSION…
I am famous for poor wind-ups to my public talks. Sorry, there's no summation for this story. It's unfolding in front of all our eyes. I am grateful to be part of it. I am grateful for every disturbing aspect of that week. I am grateful to the WTO for having given us a visible target for our distress; so many friends now are saying, " When I thought about the WTO I realized I needed to change a habit or a plan or a point of view." I am grateful to know more about the world I live in and know it's going to require more of me than I've ever given. Never before has the simple intention to be a responsible and compassionate human being meant stretching one's awareness to encompass all natural and human systems. Ouch. As hard as it is, the alternative of living in a plastic world or a comfortable bubble no longer cuts it. I'm going to need my sense of humor big time. And kindness, because I'm going to fall down a lot of times on the road to real global citizenship. And discipline. Discipline to use my time really well, which means knowing when to stare out the window and think as well as which meeting to attend, which project to start, which essay to write, which friend to join for an intense discussion over tea, which book to read. Discipline to strengthen my spirit, deepen my reflection. To learn those tools and skills that will provide comfort and encouragement for everyone on the journey with me – including me. And I'll need all the help I can get.
With love,
Vicki
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