Be a Revolutionary

of a different color

To be a revolutionary means your pulse quickens with the hope of change.

But the idea of being a revolutionary by raising a gun in the air and declaring freedom with a spray of bullets is barbaric, has been performed countless times throughout history, and only produces mass graves, destruction of societies and our natural resources.

We need to survive, be alive, awake, aware of the trouble we’re in globally. As friend of mine said to me, we need to be lucid (clear in understanding : intelligible; having full use of one’s faculties). In part, this means putting aside the warlike rhetoric that repeatedly blares on social media channels, political platforms, and pulpits.

This means thinking for yourself, making decisions not knee-jerk reactions. The concept of making choices that are good for you and your family, and the welfare of your neighbors. An example would be if you had a stream that ran through your land, you wouldn’t build a dam that would stop the flow of water into your neighbor’s land. Your neighbors also need water to live. This type of action, denying access to natural resources is referred to as eco-fascism, yet almost every country, no matter their mode of government, engages in these extreme acts. Practicing conservation has little to do with restricting access; rather, we need to share resources and avoid waste and mismanagement. This and we also need to stop blowing each other up and destroying our lands and water resources.

If I put a name to what I’m referring to, people would call me a Socialist, or worse a Communist, or even more unthinkable an Anarchist. To think that people, communities could take care of each other without a gun (literally or figuratively) pointed at their heads and obey laws, is a scary proposition for governments.

I am none of these political labels; maybe if you put them all together you could call me a person practicing sanity, socialism and anarchy. A Sanarchist maybe? I don’t know. Labels are not a friend to progress, since they create boxes that people either want to defend or destroy.

But I do understand that we desperately need a new way of thinking about being a revolutionary. I grew up in Massachusetts, only a few miles away from the infamous battle of Concord and Lexington, where the colony militias fought against the British Army, and so began the American Revolution. In school, we learned about the militias’ guerilla tactics against the most powerful army in the world. The men were instructed by their commanders: don’t fire till you see the whites of their eyes. In other words: Don’t waste bullets, and stand your ground.

Push this idea forward 249 years, and a housecleaner is murdered by a homeowner. Shot in the head through the front door, because she had gone to the wrong address. This is not being a patriot, this is paranoia, hysteria, and criminal. Did the homeowner think to ask, Hello? Who is it? What are you doing? before shooting through a closed door? No, and the house cleaner was armed with nothing but keys to the wrong house. The state of Indiana’s D.A. admitted a decision on whether to file charges won’t be easy because of the “stand your ground” or “castle doctrine” laws in the state.

A home as a castle - kings and queens live in castles. The American Revolution rejected the idea of rule by royalty. But history and facts haven’t squashed the ideal of living like a king or queen in a castle. This tired concept of wearing the crown goes round and round in the U.S. from the media and entertainment sectors, to big business and big tech, run by CEOs and bros anointed by the moneyed elite. We the people can’t seem put aside the idea of getting rich and powerful. Dial back the clock to John F. Kennedy’s presidency (1961-1963) that was quaintly referred to as Camelot. The idealized kingdom of the U.S.A was solidified by comparing his presidency with Britain’s most famous and fictional ruler, King Arthur.

Old ideals, even ones that no longer are agreeable, reasonable, or beneficial are hard to put aside.

But this is the work.

There we have our evolution and being a revolutionary.

But not the dystopian evolution of destruction and mayhem. We can’t allow the pushers of this human-induced crisis evolution let humanity crash. These pushers of war and greed are the same horde who are desperately looking for scapegoats to pin all the world’s troubles onto - you know, the immigrants, the aliens.

Whether the aliens are from another state, country, or continent, the stranger seems to be an easy target.

All my great-great grandparents were all aliens to the U.S., and everyone in the U.S. has this same legacy unless they are indigenous. And now I’m an alien in Portugal. Forget the suspect and targeted laws that want to make people legal and illegal, because they cross one imaginary border into another. An allegiance that people swear to, this abstract idea, holds no relevance to us taking care of each other. These are rules made up by governments to separate the people, to create an Us and a Them. Patriotism is the easy sell. Give people a flag and tell them it represents all their wants and desires. Too bad we can’t trade our flags for food and healthcare.

Since the beginning of the beginning. There has always been someone standing on a soapbox, declaring their People are the Chosen Ones. With paper in hand, they dictate who belongs and who doesn’t.

In truth, we are all aliens, drifters, immigrants, and migratory. Even if a person stays in their town or city their entire life, they become alien, because the people, the landscape, are in constant flux. The band Pearl Jam, sang about this in, Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town

All these changes taking place

wish I’d seen the place

But no one’s ever taken me

…

It’s hard when you’re stuck upon the shelf

I changed by not changing at all

Small town predicts my fate

Perhaps that’s what no one wants to see

I just want to scream hello

The woman just wanted to scream

HELLO.

Isn’t this the truth. How many of us sense the same despair as governments become more fascist (here’s looking at you U.S.A.), bully each other with nuclear testing, creating mega-deals that reward the billionaires, while starving the people of food, clean water, healthcare, and education.

We are social animals in need of connection. Person to person, no government needed.

We need a revolution of hellos. At least they are far less lethal than machine guns.

This is not a wild thought, not even a drastic shift of perspective. We say hello everyday to someone even if this someone is your dog or pet fish. Greeting someone other than your own reflection in the mirror, is an act of acknowledgment, the existence of the other.

It’s such a small gesture, greeting a stranger; the act may seem insignificant.

But one small act stands out from a sea of inaction.

A small turn of the color wheel is a revolution in color.

Saying hello is like this a small turn of the wheel, a slight movement to look at someone in the eyes, a transformation.

However, this is not a solution, for the complexities of our world. And I don’t think the world is more complicated than it was 200 or 2000 years ago, other than needing a password, with a 2-step ID process, and a reoccurring one-time code to view my electric bill.

The world has always been a mix of cultures, identities, challenges, and tragedies. People have always needed to communicate, compromise, and work together within and between communities.

If anything, the tech that has made viewing my electric bill more work, has also challenged our abilities to communicate. There are more digital channels for communication, yet less understanding. Forget the media channels, we need in person, face-to-face, feel the other’s presence meetings.

How do we get there? No sound bite and snark remarks.

How do we evolve and put aside ideals, teachings, lifestyles, belief systems that are so old they have already turned to dust?

Knowing we cannot go back to Paradise. Understanding we can’t blow everything up and start over. How can we rebuild and painstakingly restore what we’ve destroyed and polluted?

Everyday I pickup discarded plastic that the tide has dragged onto the shoreline. I bend down for a bottle cap and discover a tiny straw and a next to that are tinier Styrofoam balls broken off from a fishing buoy. In the half meter of sand I’m looking at, the amount of plastic is overwhelming. When I think about all the plastic floating, buried, being used worldwide, my brain cramps.

There are no easy answers. Plastic is everywhere, used for everything, because it’s easy, affordable, light, good for storage, and making toys, cars, toothbrushes, and whatever else you need. Plastic never rusts or breaks down like other materials. Our world is drowning in plastic, so much so that we now have plastic in our brains.

Maybe the plastic is to blame for our inability to talk to each other. But whether it is or not doesn’t matter. We need to engage in a new way of being.

To solve the plastic crisis and all the other human-made crises, we need to talk and try to understand each other first.

We must be revolutionary and think beyond our thinking and not with AI. We must use our own powers of thought to create humanistic solutions based on nature/nurture, intelligence/instinct, that encompass the communities and connections that serve the emotional animals we are.

Saying hello to a stranger may be the twitch of a beginning to do this.