Sharon Astyk, Ready, Aim... (original)

One of the criticisms levelled at my end of (the relocalizers, permaculturists, sustainability crew) is that we’re unrealistic, utopian, that we don’t fully grasp how hard it will be to simply keep alive, and now we’re shooting at making things better?!? And there’s almost certainly some truth to that criticism - as there is to all potent critiques. And lord knows, as a recent Onion Headline (”Small, Dedicated Group of Concerned Citizens Fails to Change World”) points up, it is easy to get a little too fuzzy and cute about empowerment and imagine that simply by reducing the scale of some things while fundraising and putting up the right bumperstickers that we’ll magically make all the entrenched powers go away.

But while they are pretty good at ignoring or subverting small groups of concerned citizens, the old adage about coyotes (that they are more scared of you than you are of them) rather applies to politicians, corporations and other entrenched powers when faced with big groups of pissed off people. Want proof? Look at history - at the number of times angry groups of people have changed societies quite rapidly and radically. It happens all the time. It isn’t happening yet, but that doesn’t mean it can’t.

So as I cast about for answers to what my correspondent can dream for his children, and I for mine, I found this - a dream of anger, used wisely. A world in which today’s parents, and all today’s grownups have the courage to get angry, and use the power they have. In which they have the ability to see what is possible, and to take in a host of ways as much power as they can for ordinary people. As institutions and politicians and corporations are more and more proved utterly unequal to the task of meeting our needs, we can open our eyes and see that we can meet them - or we can withdraw our support and tolerance from those institutions until serve us, rather than forcing us to serve them.