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Rules for Reasonables: A Draft Manifesto

With apologies to Saul Alinsky, whose Rules for Radicals sits mostly unread on a shelf, a reminder of a brief and successful long-ago battle to defeat the erotic music bill in Washington State, what follows is an attempt to move beyond the apocalyptic and powerless despair which runs like white water through much of what I've been typing here.

It was inspired by my friend up east, who wrote a couple nights back that another musician had been screwed by our health care system. Instead of getting tests and a cure a year ago, he waited until his wife got a job with benefits and he qualified for those tests, only to find that he now has a year and a half to live.

What, my friend asked, can we do?

Power to the people. Right on.

That's my answer, and I mean it, man.

We the people have been disenfranchised. We have been sold a perversion of the American dream: Greed is good.

Greed was never the American dream, not for most people, not for most of our history. Enough was our dream. Enough to live, enough for our children to live, enough room and freedom to live as we choose. Greed has taken over and the greedy have, for the moment, triumphed.

This is their triumph: We teeter on chaos, chained by the great unfairness of limited opportunity. We live in a society which does not value physical work, at its peril. You want chaos on a scale Al-Qaeda can only dream of? Get every plumber in the country to take the same week off.

We have known at least since the 1970s that the growing population of humans on this planet was potentially dangerous, and that we would some day run out of petroleum.

So, to borrow from an essay by V.I. Lenin that I once owned but never read, What is to be done?

(1) Fight the power. The most immediately participatory and meaningful democracy available to us each day is economic: That's where our votes are counted, and there are no hanging chads. So every time you shop be conscious of what you're buying, who made it, where it came from, and what its impact on the environment is or will be when you discard it. If you value organic produce and independent local businesses, as I happen to, support them. Yes, it might cost more; it might not. Not everything at Wal-Mart is offered at the lowest price possible; that's how they make their money.

(2) My mentor, the late Maxine Cushing Gray strongly believed that public officials need to know they're being watched. And so for many long years she was the only member of the press or the public regularly to attend meetings of the Seattle Arts Commission. She was affectionately known as the Tweed Hornet. The corollary, courtesy "The West Wing" is this: Decisions are made by the people who show up. This means attending and participating in public meetings held throughout your community. Not all of them, some of them. Find what interests you and what you can manage to keep up with. Participating, by the way, doesn't mean recycling the received wisdom of talk radio or the editorial page; participating means listening and being open to a variety of positions and to the reasonable possibility that other people have different competencies.

(3) Use viral marketing. Not that I quite know what that phrase means, but I know this: Every gay person who comes out makes it that much harder for their extended family to oppose gay rights and gay marriage, because it takes a very particular kind of son of a bitch to hate one's own children. As the baby boom ages, and as we hear more and more stories about the catastrophic disaster that is our health care system, we need to share those stories -- so long as they're accurate. A fellow here who I don't know was recently told his present health emergency would cost him nearly a half million dollars. He is well-loved; there was a fish fry and an auction and it was standing room at the Carl Perkins (not that Carl Perkins) Center. Raised $18,000, which is a lot of money in these parts, and a drop in the bucket.

(4) Break up the monopolies, and if Wal-Mart and the other big box category killers aren't technically monopolies then let's redefine the word. We need a national law or court decision or whatever obliging the major corporations to break up into manageable component parts. This is unAmerican, right? Well, the American dream is not to work as middle management for a large corporation, obliged to move from rootless suburb to rootless suburb until your children are college age and friendless, and then downsized back into the service industry. (OK, so this is a less immediate and achievable goal. But a fella can dream.) In the meantime, don't shop there unless you absolutely have to.

(5) Borrowing now from the Cowboy Junkies, cheap cannot be how we feel. The fundamental law of corporate size is that we consumers care only about how inexpensively we may buy whatever is newly marketed our way. That has to stop. We have to appreciate the long-term economic and ecological costs of what we buy. Saving a penny is not the highest good, and never was. Thrift is the old Yankee virtue. Cheap just ends up landfill and breaks when you need it, anyhow.

(6) Trouble to meet your neighbors. Try living in a real community of people who aren't necessarily just like you, instead of the nicely sanitary and like-minded virtual community we increasingly occupy. If your house is on fire, your tire's flat, or you need that cup of sugar, you'll be grateful to have made their acquaintance.

(7) Learn to grow something you like to eat, even if it's just a windowbox of basil. It helps to know where food comes from and what it tastes like freshly harvested and not delivered from Chile. And if you've bothered to grow it, you'll want to cook it, and maybe invite the neighbors over.

(8) Compost. You will not live on your particular plot of land forever, and it doesn't matter whether you garden or not. Every patch of soil would benefit from the compost you can generate simply by saving out spare vegetable matter (hey, it makes cleaning out the refrigerator a little less guilt-intensive) and finding a way to compost it that fits your lifestyle. I'm still working on our household solution to that challenge, but it doesn't take more than a half-hour online to come up with an inexpensive strategy worth trying. Even if you grow nothing in the soil you create, somebody down the line will appreciate your efforts. And recycle, but that doesn't really still need saying, does it?

(9) Walk somewhere everyday. It's good for your health, physical and mental. It's a good way to meet your neighbors. It'll save a little bit of gas.

(10) Take time out to help somebody out once in a while. By which I do not mean that you should involve yourself in somebody else's soap opera, nor that you should (or shouldn't) take to giving spare change to the homeless. But if you see somebody walking down the highway with a gas can, it might be worth offering them a lift.

And there I will stop, for the moment, aware that I may prove a public fool tilting imaginary windmills. I can live with that.

This is a draft. I'll probably revise and amend over the next little while. I'm open to whatever ideas y'all may wish to share. The comment button works on this blog, more or less.

Posted by grant on July 18, 2007 11:30 AM | Permalink