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I was in Washington D.C. where politics is the currency of discourse and a friend who lives there and is a serious student of the political scene told me, the center is corrupt now. They’re all in bed together, the government, the corporations, and insurance industry, the military-industrial complex, the oiligarchy and the oligarchy. They’re too big and powerful for Obama to fight, so he’s compromising and giving in to them. On the extreme right you have the Tea Party and on the extreme left ? Nobody. No cohesive movement or presence. So maybe it’s time to crank up the Tidebuckas, the movement I started a year ago when the Republicans had immobilized the promise of change that Obama had brought in with them a year earlier. It had quite a global response, but taking it to the next step, actually organizing it and getting things happening, would have taken a huge amount of my time, which I didn’t have, plus I am not a movement person. I have no desire to lead anybody. Like the Babanzele pygmies of the Central African Republic. There are no chiefs. They just do as they please.
But were the Tidebuckas to take off, if some companheros were to get into the act and make it happen, what would be their platform and ideology. Besides the points I made in my Call To Action : Sometimes it’s Time to Buck the Tide. http://dispatchesfromthevanishingworld.com/dispatches.html scroll down to Dispatch #55. I have been thinking : it’s not the tyranny of taxation that it oppressing us, but the tyranny of money. What it makes you become, the compromises, and sellout of yourself and others you are willing to do to get it. The fear of losing our jobs and pensions that keeps us enslaved in the galley, too afraid to not go along with it. The stress of not having enough of it, or of having enough and keeping it flowing. There should be a big buck burning in some prominent place. A big crowd of people emptying their wallets and throwing their greenbacks onto a bonfire. How cathartic that would be ! As exhilarating as the original Boston Tea Party must have felt when they dumped the tea on the British ships into Boston Bay, or the draft-card burning of the Sixties, as Jesus must have felt when he upset the tables of the moneylenders, as the spontaneous demonstrations in the Arab world. Would that not be a great way to kick off the Tidebuckas ?
But what then ? Where do we go from there ? Societies without money– Marxist Maoist communist totalitarian governments– have paradoxically inflicted more suffering on their people than any of the other systems. But why does a moneyless society need a dictator ? All this requires some thinking. But what we have now. 1% of America controls 40% of its wealth. See the current Vanity Fair. Read Naomi Klein’s Disaster Capitalism. This is not healthy. What can we do about it ? A tall order. It’s like trying to do something about the inexorable destruction of the natural world. It’s so overwhelming that many people despair of being able to do anything about it and are resigned to letting it happen. Not many of us have the rebellious streak, and those who do often end up being worse than the original oppressors. So do we just sit there and shrug and wring our hands and let it happen ? I think not.