Nirvana. An Awakening. People who have had brushes with death don’t return wishing they had spent more time in the office.
The heart takes over. In the words of deep ecologist Joanna Macy: "Whatever happens, this can be a moment of unparalleled awakening. We have a sense of what it means for an individual to wake up. For the collective to awaken, we cannot even imagine what it will be like. If we allow ourselves to feel, crisis opens an opportunity for awakening fully to the present. Mary-Jayne Rust is Jungian analyst who lectures and writes on ecopsychology. Adbusters Culturejammer Headquarters. Dead or alive. , 15 Apr 2011 Courtesy of Maleonn / Galerie Paris-Beijing T he US Environmental Protection Agency has calculated the value of a human life at $9.1 million, up from $6.8 million during the Bush era. The Food and Drug Administration's current estimate is $7.9 million, up from $2.9 million since 2008.
Meanwhile, the transportation Department is sticking with its $6 million figure. The only real authority on a human body's worth is the periodic table. Darren Fleet and Kono Matsu Support + Share. Cocaine Culture. I, Revolution. Update Required To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin.
In all revolutions, the agents of change – usually a small core of fired-up individuals – reach a personal point of reckoning where to do nothing becomes harder than to step forward. Then come the televised actions, the rebellions on campus, the random acts of defiance in high schools, supermarkets, malls, workplaces. A mass of support accrues. The little daily confrontations escalate. The Second Great Global Uprising. G20 Jam. We are a colony of maggots, feeding on nature’s bloated corpse while economic policy makers soothe our troubled minds with lies.
Not to worry, they tell us, we’re pulling out of this recession, we’re making progress – the key is more liquidity, more stimulus, more credit, more consumption, more growth. The time has come to call their bluff. We need to band together and challenge this powerful intellectual army, whose generals include Greenspan, Summers, Bernanke, Geithner, who have boots on the ground in Blankfein, Buffett, Bloomberg, Straus-Kahn, whose propaganda ministers include Wolf, Friedman, Krugman and textbook authors Samuelson, Nordhaus, Mankiw, and whose foot soldiers are the business and economics professors in universities around the world.
Their combined efforts perpetuate the great economic myth of our time: the necessity of ever-increasing growth and consumption, a myth that keeps the ghost ship of consumer capitalism sailing perilously toward certain destruction. Buy Nothing Day + Buy Nothing Christmas. “Today, humanity faces a stark choice: save the planet and ditch capitalism, or save capitalism and ditch the planet.” – Fawzi Ibrahim Until we challenge the entrenched values of capitalism – that the economy must always keep growing, that consumer wants must always be satisfied, that immediate gratification is imperative – we’re not going able to fix the gigantic psycho-financial-eco crisis of our times.
The journey toward a sane sustainable future begins with a single step. It could all start with a personal challenge, such as this: make a vow to yourself to participate in Buy Nothing Day this year. This November 29th, go cold turkey on consumption for 24 hours … see what happens … you just might have an unexpected, emancipatory epiphany! Buy Nothing Day is legendary for instigating this type of personal transformation … as you suddenly remember what real living is all about … you sense an upsurge of radical empowerment and feel a strange magic creeping back into your life. Consumable Youth Rebellion. Over the past 30 or so years, most people have chosen to pursue the rewards of conformity instead of the fruits of revolt. What they have been left with are ugly and stupid lives, ugly and stupid places and a planet pushed to the very edge of destruction by capitalism’s efforts to keep feeding them new promises of consumable happiness.
But the thought that one is wasting one’s life is not a cheerful one, and respectable citizens everywhere have gone to considerable lengths to avoid it. They cling to these illusions with ferocious desperation; but the whole house of lying ghosts and grim parodies is a fragile one, and it is threatened by the depredations of delinquency. To the extent that delinquency prevents respectable citizens from misperceiving themselves as happy and free people who are blessed with rich experiences and who continue to grow as individuals, it provokes their fury.
It threatens to take away the very little they have, and to replace it with nothing.