Waking up: freeing ourselves from work

Every public building and its adjunct lands should be generating electricity and growing food. We can identify which cities in the Transition Movement have set up Energy Services Companies (ESCOs) “owned by the community, to provide locally generated electricity,” and pressure our local city councils to emulate their example. And we can further demand that land be set aside to address the growing problems of food and shelter insecurity, and youth abandonment – land granted to “the people” in perpetuity.

Land set aside for communal living cannot be commodified. It will fall into the category of “human intelligence, water, air and fire.” Eventually the attractiveness of communal living, the good fellowship found there, will lead to it supplanting other forms. As “the state” withers, so will our narcissism-needs.

Low income youth particularly, but all youth generally, need, desperately need, their “own things,” need the art that emanates from their hands recognized. They need to feel seen, needed, and loved.

We are failing them utterly.

Why shouldn’t they plan, site, design, and build their own earthships as shelter and gathering places? No one knows the possibilities of neighborhoods better than the youth who live there. They know where the abandoned buildings and neglected open spaces are located. And Earthships are inexpensive to build – assuming that irrelevant and onerous codes are moved out of the way – they are beautiful, safe, self-sufficient, and they are the future.

A major factor in establishing the proper frame of mind for “voyaging” in an Earthship is that an Earthship is not a house. A house as we know it is an out-of-date concept, no longer appropriate for human life on Earth. With this understanding, we will not be trying to make an Earthship into a house. An Earthship is a vessel to take care of us in the world of tomorrow, when population and global abuse will be realities to reckon with. This tomorrow is coming fast. We will be more concerned with self-sufficient comfort and food production than with “style” and “tradition”…The point is that human dogma is the only thing between us and a harmonious future on the Earth. (Michael Reynolds, Earthship, Volume One, p. 227)

The local government can, and should, subsidize the earth removal, and provide the automobile tires and recycled aluminum cans (the primarily building materials of the earthship.) As Michael Reynolds says:

The only real major piece of equipment needed to build a tire building is a backhoe…Other typical tools needed are a chain saw, skill saw, and a cement mixer…The secondary materials are those which make up the fill in walls, ceilings, floors, glazing, and miscellaneous carpentry…Floors can be made from any local indigenous material from concrete to flagstone to tile or wood. Some Earthships in New Mexico have used adobe mud floors which are traditional in the area. They are very beautiful and will work anywhere. Floors should take advantage of local materials that are of a low energy impact nature, however they are quite conventional in the application to the Earthship structure. (p. 78-9)

Earthship architects of the people can teach the skills and supervise the construction. The construction site will be safe, healthy and protective of its people of all ages. There will be no deadlines or time pressures. It takes what it takes.

Any and all who want to help and learn are welcome. In particular, youth and adults without homes are invited to learn the basics of self-sufficiency.
Earthship construction sites are also learning centers that should be open to people of all ages and backgrounds who want to learn the basics of shelter security. The few operations that present hazards to small children can be performed in a separated area. But, as a rule, when a small child asks, “why aren’t we helping?” the correct answer should be: “you are so right. Let’s go help. What do we want to learn how to do first?”

And because time is not an issue, it doesn’t matter if it takes that child four times as long to stuff an automobile tire with earth as it would an adult. What the community gains, and what the child gains, from everyone helping is immeasurable.

One way to begin reaching out to young people driven from the school system, even before bringing up the idea of Earthships, is to attract them with “traveling tutorials.”

While I was haunting our branch library during the petition drive to save it, I noticed a lot of black youth taking advantage of the free internet access. They were checking out each other’s MySpace pages, which meant they had to endure a lot of frowning and lectures directed at them because of their inability to be quiet. The vibe, clearly in evidence from most of the library staff, was that black youth were not wanted. The patrons weren’t bothered, as far I could see. I certainly wasn’t. When you go to a public space, you expect living humans to show some signs of life.

A van that is simultaneously a screen for displaying webpage-design tutorials – along with explaining how to use other youth-driven software obsessions – would give young people what all people want: to belong, to be a part, to feel as powerful, capable and brilliant as every other person. And it would accommodate them – their need for movement and fresh air, and authenticity – rather than demanding that they adjust themselves to a system unworthy of any of us.

Low-income children of color are being pushed to the fringes of this current system and they know it. They know they are purposely being excluded from access to the goodies. Their rage is real, and justified.

At the same time, we low-income parents of color (and many parents of all incomes and races) can no longer, out of our own feeling of grief for our lost dreams or exclusion from “the good life,” direct our longing for our children’s acceptance into violence and abusive pressure on them to conform…to obey…to do what they’re told, without questioning, without discussion. We have been worse than merely autocratic with our children, we have caused them to doubt their worth.

‘Force’ must be divorced from our lives.

When we become autocrats to our children, we present a free gift of unpaid Division Work to the vampires. We perpetuate the cons, the hurt, the hate, the hopelessness. Our children cannot be their best selves with us sitting on their souls, any more than they can with an abusive system sitting on them. Once we have a world designed for living things, it will remove the barriers to our wholeness, to our ability to relax in the world, and with our children.

Done with the fearing youth.
Done. Done. Done.
Love them
and they’ll love you back.
Feed them
and they’ll grow.

Done with the hurting youth.
Done. Done. Done.
Hitting is so passé,
so completely
yesterday.

We’re too brilliant
for such crude techniques,
Too buoyant
to be so cold.

Why should young people be hammered into seats to learn their "numbers?”

Why shouldn’t our brilliant children be taught how to read and create blueprints? Why can’t knowledge of the earth be taught through practical application?

In our hearts, we know that the “education” we impose on our children is designed to make them obedient followers of orders, not creative thinkers. We lie to ourselves and we lie to them. We tell ourselves (because it’s been hammered into us) that “merit rises,” that if we push our children to be the “really smart ones,” they’ll be recognized by the system and rewarded with the designation “boss.” Though none of us are happy either bossing or being bossed, we perpetuate the cons out of fear that our children will be left behind, out of fear that there’s no alternative.

It’s time to stop lying, and to stop being afraid.

If we love ourselves and our children, if we want them to be able to fulfill their potentials, to claim their biological inheritance, to be the powerful and joyful beings that all of us inherently are, then we must stop lying, stop fearing, and embrace the quite visible and obvious alternatives to coercion, force, violence, competition, limitation, division, and isolation.

Each one free…a youth! It is the youth, primarily, who will have to take this on – along with their adult, wage-working and wage-free supporters. But our acts, when informed by a coherent theory and a ‘workable plan,’ are engraved, and therefore enlarged, with a monumental meaning and mission.

If you consciously embrace the wind from below, it blows stronger.

This system makes us feel unconsciously trapped by our children because while “the market” uses (some of) them, we bear the costs (of bearing and raising), costs that often break us financially.

What if we gave our children permission to free us? What if we got on the same side?

What is the real work, the real learning, our children (and all of us) might do in The Nascence?

Our youth are inheriting a lot of problems, so they’ll (we’ll) need to study them and find the solutions.

Problem: ending wage work globally.
Problem: designing self-sufficient villages.
Problem: harnessing clean energy for all.
Problem: cleaning polluted environments (hint: read Paul Stamets’ Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World)
Problem: designing systems for consensus-forging / collective decision-making.
Problem: staking the corporate vampire and retooling production facilities.
Problem: recirculating resources and designing inter-region product exchanges.
Problem: sustainable transportation systems.

We have to grow what we want for our children and for ourselves, and that means shifting our minds, bodies, and spirits away from commodities and towards building the commons.

It’s like growing a garden – our garden – what we give love and attention to thrives, and that which we turn away from becomes dry and spare, to eventually curl into itself and die.

We have to release our children and youth from our unconscious insecurity patterns. In a rare recording of a speech given at an organizing meeting, Doctor Martin Luther King told the adults in the room not to worry about the youth risking arrest, risking their lives. He said, “they’re gonna be alright.”

I think I know what he means. Young people must do this work in order to claim their biological inheritance. It’s too important not to do.

So we must have their backs – and model their courage.

It’s critical that we adults allow our children to stay awake.

It’s critical, therefore, that we awake.

And…though it may be difficult, we’ll have to take to heart the following precepts:

Refuse Division Work;
All of us, or none;
No tests;
No diplomas;
No degrees.
They aren’t needed
to be free.

Competition is Division Work. “All of us, or none!” points to our Culture Work.

...it asserts itself as acquired knowledge asserts itself and will not let us see as we saw in the day of our ignorance. (George Eliot)

Continue to "The Plan" - Part 13

Nascence to End Work

Waking up: freeing ourselves from work

Chapter V: The Plan (Part 12)

Waking Up: Freeing Ourselves From Work