““… being political” is a foundational aspect of the fight for our liberation.”
~~I applaud you for your activity and commitment to a cause, -to doing anything actually. But do try to understand that words like “political” and “liberation” can have many different meanings to different folks.
When I was a bit younger, I lived in an intentional community. We of course didn’t think of it that way. We more called ourselves The Commie House. Gus Hal, the perennial Presidential Candidate of the Communist Party USA, used to come often to visit. We published a newspaper called the Rubber City Radicals, that we handed out at factory gates. We marched. We organized. We protested. We held rallies. We practiced Marxism/Leninism/Mao Tse Tung Thought. Eventually we were founding members of The Revolutionary Communist Party, which later birthed Antifa and BLM. We got clubbed, we got guns, we bled, we got arrested, we camped in the woods preparing for the “revolution”. We did it all. --We Fought for The People!!!
~~We didn’t actually accomplish much, but it did feel good.
Then I moved to the land. And grew a garden. And gave away food to the poor oppressed. And that was so good, that we then grew lots of gardens, -at an inner-city elementary school to feed the hungry school kids, and at a Free Clinic, and on city owned land that we just took so that people living on the street could come and pick a free fresh grown tomato. And we cleared land next to a homeless men’s shelter and taught the men how to garden. That accomplished a good deal more.
During those days, Indian People were organizing for Native Rights. They decided to protest what had happened to the Original Peoples of this land. They organized The Longest Walk, walking from California to Washington DC. Their goal was to raise awareness and to ultimately meet with Members of Congress and the President, at the end of the journey. But when we reached Washington, something even more interesting than all the shouting and protesting, happened. All day, every day, we made our presence known in D.C. At night, we stayed at a local campground/park. And did what people did. Slept, ate, threw our trash into the provided dumpster. And then one fellow, without “permission” climbed into the trash container. And tossed everything out, in to piles of like with likes. It was a horrible job. Rotten food, banana peels, wet cardboard, mostly consumed apple cores, icky stuff. He was recycling. He was returning to Earth all that was good for Earth. And he wanted to send the sticky, empty pop cans to be remade into something useful.
The Walk leaders were outraged, the park rangers upset. They put all the trash back into the container!! And the fellow, without saying a single word, got back in the trash dumpster and began again to separate all the garbage. By that time the whole camp was in a ferment. That guy was doing more to “save the earth” than all our other protests. He set an example that sometimes “being political” and “fighting for liberation” can be much more meaningful when practiced in a quieter and more personal way.
~~It’s a lesson I’ve carried to this day. There are all kinds of Communities. There are all kinds of political. There are lots of suggested solutions to perceived ills. But maybe a first question to be asked of any of those actions, is, “Will it Grow Corn?”.
So maybe, before you, and the one or two others on this forum of like mind, get too far into the weeds concerning calls for “liberation”, and use words and phrases like "imperialist, parasites, fascist, white supremacist, fascist settler, ghouls, time has run out, crisis, and such like, ask first, Does your rhetoric and harsh language and fear, grow anything? Or does growing food and teaching by example, accomplish much more?
Who is doing more to change the world? The person who does the hard work every day, setting an example of how to treat each other in a better way and how to raise our children to be more awake in a confusing world? Or the person who shouts and protests at the weekly meeting of the Spartacist League? Building a new world or singing slogans? Which would you choose?
