Trucks, Moby Dick, and Crystal Balls… Is Activism F*cked?

The capital is held quasi-hostage, disabled by a confused and confusing chaos of conflict between various interpretations of freedom, none of which are ‘winning’.

It’s a mess, and it will get messier yet, on many levels.

What does this mean for the future of true nonviolent direct action, for actual peaceful protest, for the voices of millions afraid to be as loud? What does it mean for the future of those working to save the future?

Disturbing prospects, to say the least… and that’s probably half the real point of the flu trux klan exercise — not so much the much-touted (tooted?) superficial goals, but to shut down the future of peaceful protest from others… from us.

At the beginning, it included (arguably ostensibly) concerns about occupation safety… that included health and job security, and so Covid mandates and bodily autonomy became a pivot point where right wing extremists and left wing activists fell into a violently blurry storm of agreeance and diametric opposition. Massive funding, largely from groups and individuals dedicated to preserving dissension and their own utterly unsustainable ways of being, ensured ample trouble and misinformation. Biased authorities, caught between the letter of law and its intent, act like they’re trying to balance rights, but the bias is painfully clear when their current actions are compared to their usual responses to peaceful demonstrators — those working for human rights, the climate, and peace — who are regularly met with heavily armed chaperones, tactical ambushes, violent arrests, and obvious snipers manning rooftops.

It should have been us (the broad general us who would like to mitigate the sixth mass extinction) creating this kind of action and response (but in constructive ways)… but we back off from creating effect, we cave in to acceptability, we are nicing ourselves to death, we are almost completely preoccupied with interminable meetings and talk, constant arguing and divisiveness amongst ourselves, too few are willing to believe let alone do… did we miss the have-an-effect boat and now it’s been boarded and taken?

If this was a 1970’s sci-fi novel, we’d use what the right is doing against themselves, let them burn their own ship along with their system.

If it were history, and a different sort of ship, we’d do that while we quietly raft the lifeboats together and set up a community and learn to grow bananas and desalinate water… or we’d leave the captains to meet their whales.

In this age of gaslight and fear, while our brains collect cumulative toxins from air and food, rendering idealism into political pablum, we sit and discuss comfortable placebo-plans for a future we aren’t creating in this moment, we ponder and bicker over paddles instead of bailing or building a better boat, we choose silos over community, we even choose benign acceptable behaviour over our own beliefs.

If we really had no options left for changing the status quo, what would we do?

Ask yourself that… because we are sliding past that point. Anything we can do now will have to come from incomprehensibly far beyond our comfort zones… because that’s where life begins.

With hope and determination,

Ann

There’s no photo on this post because it would take an entire photo essay to illustrate this, or a month of painting… so I keep using my own life as the illustration to my thoughts, my Climate Emergency Sailboat as my camera and my brush, and the world as my canvas.

If you can help, here’s how…

Sporadic and one-time support through Chuffed, at

https://chuffed.org/project/climate-emergency-sailboat

Ongoing support via Patreon, at

https://patreon.com/climateemergencysailboat

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This blog post began as an answer to my friend Eric’s email forwarding an article I’ll link momentarily.

Eric is 85 now I think, and I respect him deeply. He’s a lifelong human rights and environmental activist. He’s a distinguished professor and water engineer, who’s marched with Martin Luther King, spent almost as much time at the Climate Emergency Camp as myself, and could write a book about all he’s done to be part of changing the world. He’s wrought with care for life, and will probably continue protesting long after his body leaves the frontlines.

Here’s the article he sent, with his message (in italics)…

Here is a link to an interesting article that appeared in the Ottawa Citizen. “The future o f protest; where do we go from here”

What will be the long range consequences of this trucker protest? Andrew Duffy harkens back to Henry David Thoreau and his book “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience” written in 1849.

To take a look, go to;

https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/the-future-of-protest-where-does-the-freedom-convoy-go-from-here