Knocking on the Sky

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Today I have a head full of bees and I’m letting them buzz up on my screen. I’m thinking about how we must un-learn our learned helplessness and dependence on a government that has gone beyond corrupt and into the toxic zone, and has compromised our very survival.

I’d say that as a government this democratic republic called “The United States of America” did work from time to time for some people, but it was doomed to failure from the beginning because it built itself on the ashes of genocide and enslavement, the colonization of the Indian nation and the enslavement of entire generations of African Americans, the two screaming skeletons in the American closet.

Our human (as opposed to nationalistic) imperative now is to dedicate ourselves to re-creating our reality from the ashes of what was stolen from us. We have to re-create community, solidarity, and mutual aid if we expect to survive the days, months, and years ahead. If we fail to do this, we will surely perish.

Jane Meyer reveals in her book The Dark Side that the bush administration’s policies on interrogation have utilized methods of coercion including “learned helplessness.”  We know now that there were psychologists at Guantanamo to observe these methods put into action to break people down. So, the detainees, most who are innocent, underwent unspeakable suffering and torture, both physical and mental.

Here at home, we’ve also been coerced into learned helplessness, the fact now driven home by a weak dollar, inflation, a ridiculous amount of home foreclosures, bad job market, over-extended credit markets, banks going broke and so on. This coercion is what the GNP (not Gross National Product, but Grand New Party) is all about. We always get stuck paying for their platinum parachutes. It is our imperative to not let this happen. It is our imperative to fight our way out of this sleep of learned helplessness.

Like a hill of disturbed ants we run around in disbelief wringing our hands and tearing our hair about the economy, the environment, and the general destruction of everything. And to think that only yesterday we were busy leading such soft, sheltered lifestyles of waste and convenience. We lived (and continue to live) a state of learned helplessness because we have no leader to show us how to continue and in what direction. We’ve forgotten everything we know about community, autonomy and self-reliance, the very things we will need to survive the coming “perfect storm.” But we can learn to re-member.

We Invertebrates

Learned helplessness has allowed others rob us of our lives, our liberty, and our pursuit of happiness for the past 30 years. We have lost autonomy and spine. We are now invertebrates. We cower and bitch in our corners as we read and listen to news reports that disgorge dirt from the endless rabbit hole that sheltered the lives of the upper one-percent and their supporters. When I say “learned helplessness” I don’t mean we’re incapable of action. I mean they’ve stripped us of our unions and our avenues of redress so that we cower in fear of saying or doing anything that will cost us our jobs. Unlike the French whose government fears them and not the other way around.

Those who robbed us, those subpoenaed CEOs, hedge fund investors, speculators, and bankers, are now either refusing to testify or claiming the Fifth and getting away with it. Funny how the Constitution is useful to the rich and powerful in such cases, while they decimate selected Amendments that don’t serve their purpose, such as the Fourth, our right to privacy. The truth is, in America you only get privacy if you can afford it.

What will the super-rich do when the truckers can no longer truck in their fois-gras and caviar?

These same rich and powerful thieves (these creeps didn’t earn their money) with their 50-room mansions, their private jets and horse ranches have parceled out the most beautiful places in America, insulating themselves from the taxpaying untouchable riffraff.  They wouldn’t be caught dead using public resources. They continue to gentrify and privatize everything funky and egalitarian to support their own interests as they drive out those they pay to serve them. America is a seething vat of class bubbles. The super-rich and upper classes easily forget about the untouchable class who provide them with countless comforts and luxuries: the fieldworkers, the  manicurists, the nannies, the masseuses, the drivers, the untouchables to which they pay sub-survival wages. This is called employment without the necessity of human interaction.

How bizarre and ironic that the servant class that takes care of the rich is not allowed a place to live. These servants who can’t afford even the smallest home are given permission to sleep in in their cars in designated areas. Santa Barbara’s “safe parking lots,” for example, allows homeless people and their families to sleep there overnight, but by city ordinance they must be out by 7 a.m. This is now America’s social housing policy.

Cognitive Disconnect in a Meritocracy

The screaming question here is Why don’t Americans get angry? The passivity of learned helplessness by Americans is truly astonishing. It’s like sleeping sickness. We live in our bubbles made up of friends, television, and separate continent, none of which gets pierced by any force of reality. This is partly because the corporate media carefully creates an illusion that makes consumers feel inadequate yet at the same time, included.

The reality is that most of us poor sots live our lives believing we’re only temporarily embarrassed by poverty, buying into the hype that we, too, can win the lottery or succeed at some get-rich scheme, or at least find some measure of comfort in our skins. Reports cite that American upward mobility is lower than that of Northern Europe, and even lower now that we’ve begun to lose our jobs and our homes. Our society has been drained of resources and strength, including our military, which is made up of the working poor who will return to low paying jobs and no health care. Fewer and fewer of us feel we will ever achieve financial security. We now live in a warfare state as war is now the sole source of wealth and power for the rich, who abhor socialize anything except loss. The bulk of Americans are now finally seeing American economic policy for what it has been for a long time: a tyranny of the privatization of profit and the socialization of loss.

Only recently has the most secretive and sensitive middle-class American possession been violated: the wallet. Only recently do 80 percent of Americans see that we’re in a recession. There’s still that 20 percent who still believe we’re only seeing a blip in an ever-growing economy. Citing current GNP figures, bush goes on about how the economy continues to grow (no Hoovervilles in sight) even while Bernanke warns about ever-higher prices, no end in sight for the housing foreclosures, and an overall impending meltdown. What we have here is a cold reality check.And we continue to allow ourselves to be fleeced.  All $4 billion bailout will go to banks. Homeowners will ever see a penny of that. Lobbing for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac has trumped even the pharmaceuticals and tobacco lobbies. Oil price fluctuations only reflect upwards at the pump. Developers continue to drive city council policy, and so on and so on.  Earth to bush: GNP is an outdated measure of the true state of the economy.

The brutal reality of what’s happening to Americans has been banished from corporate news as we try to wrap what’s left of our lives around the price of gas. We’re seeing massive layoffs, including the financial industry where tens of thousands of downsized employees are hitting the streets before they even know what happened. And they won’t find similar jobs to take up the slack.

As we watch our world coming down around us, we continue in our paralysis and denial. We grow increasingly depressed (pun intended). But any ethical psychologist will tell you that action is the greatest remedy for depression. What are we going to do other than stock a lot of canned goods in our basement or garage?

During the great depression, when banks foreclosed on a house, groups of neighbors assembled to stop that foreclosure. There were Victory Gardens and Victory Bicycles. There was a collective response that we can’t seem to reclaim in an ideological-saturated media where everyone lives in his or her own bank-owned enclave.

There has to be some willingness to see ourselves connected to everyone else in this collapse, and to all other issues besides our own. Will we somehow miraculously become our brother’s keeper? For now I’d say, Not so much. What we are seeing are collective efforts from newly created obscure groups and grassroots organizations. A start at least. Links in my sidebar under the “CircleA/DIY” and “Sustainability” sections offer some of these ideas, but you can find plenty more from a search engine.

Oh lordy but we have a lot to re-learn…

At the very least we must move away from authoritarian analysis and scapegoating. Remember, it wasn’t an immigrant from Mexico that took your job or sold you that sub-prime mortgage. It’s the speculators and multinationals who did that. Already more than $2 trillion has been spent by foreign entities to buy out American interests since the 1970s when neo-liberalism began to rear its ugly head to bankrupt America while making things look as if we were all doing fine as wealth “trickled down.” Deregulation and greed went viral during Reagan with the help of Abramoff, Norquist, DeLay, et al. That’s when America went up for sale. And now we’ve become a “third-world” (a label as nefarious as “war on terror”) nation.

Oh, and I almost forgot. If you  have a couple hundred thousand dollars in savings and think you’re part of the “elite,” forget about it. The real elite (about 10 to 40 people) with their multi billions of dollars will be the only ones who can withstand a real depression (”depression” is so 1930s; I think we need an entirely new word to describe the abyss we’re about to fall into). So money, even a few hundred thousand in savings, isn’t going to save the rest of us sitting ducks. When the wheels start coming off, we will need to work together rather than living in our little enclaves still clinging to our deflated pipe dreams.