Stupid Ways Smart Activists Destroy Public Support and What to do Next

There are many ways to champion even desperate causes and draw public support for them. Lately, however, well-meaning but thoughtless activists have failed, utterly failed in generating support for their causes and programs. Makes one sad. No, their actions piss people off!!! Piss me off! Self-righteous idiots dashing about destroying incredible paintings and interrupting football games and blaming corporations and lecturing governments in the name of fringe ideologies too rigid to function in the rough and tumble of reality.

Forget about raising much money to make a difference. Forget about rallying the general public and their many institutions of religion, government, and business to support a wide range of environmental and social justice causes. As the end is apparently so nigh, why antagonize potential allies with stupid stuff when there’s so little time left to take action? To make a real difference? Makes me wanna go, “Boo Hoo Hooty Hoo!” at The End of the World. Let our art stand long after we’re all dead!

The tragedy is we do indeed have little time left as our human lifespans are so short and we reproduce so prolifically across Planet Earth. As a species, we face multiple and convergent global challenges and interlocking local problems. They blur together into a thorny thicket of so-called Wicked Problems, each one in itself a cluster of multiple apocalypses in the making. Continue reading

Beyond Country over Party

During times of strife and division, we often hear others and sometimes ourselves responding emotionally to events seemingly beyond our control. We may remind ourselves and others to remember our priorities. We say and write slogans such as, “country over party.” Or, perhaps, we may feel events have gone so far we must put party over country “to save” the nation. Or that the working class or the ruling class, depending on where you put yourself if not in the middle, transcend politics and thus our country. Or the Goddess, God, or whatever entity you consider as the Divine must rule over country and planet. All of these perspectives, save for country over party, are destructive, self-destructive, and inevitably result in violence and loss of freedom. Here we look briefly at country over party and go beyond that slogan.  Continue reading