in a world of rubble, be a dandelion
and boycott billionaires
I’ve not been able to write lately as every time I come here I find a cart full of soap boxes that all seem to be calling my name, demanding my voice, stirring up my opinions, and indignation, and sense of injustice.
When I spend my time “staying informed” via online platforms my day-to-day life becomes a merry-go-round of disbelief, anger, despair, and ultimately defeat.
To move away from this feeling of treading water in a sea of doom, I’ve had to find another way of moving through my life. I’ve had to commit — quite self-consciously —to staying only partially informed.
Why self-consciously?
I worry that what I am calling self-preservation or sustainable activism is actually just me putting my head in the sand. I’ve turned into one of those people who is the last to know about the latest catastrophe or illegal action by the chump in office who gets high on his own cruelty.
What I have figured out for myself is that over-consuming the bad news makes me less engaged, it drives me to depression and hiding away in my home. It reduces how much I participate on the frontlines of my community. I cannot explain the cruelty and dehumanization and so I am left with paralysis and the absence of hope.
This, my dear readers, is not an equation that fuels my ability to catalyze change.
So what does?
To start, I’ve committed to cataloguing the beauty and simple divinity that still exists all around me every day, every second. Always there, waiting to be noticed and reveled in.
In April, the summer sun and heat posted up to stay, despite my body’s internal clock decrying that it is too soon, too soon, too soon.
While Lavender everywhere else on the island is in full splendor, my sweet girls haven’t bloomed yet, which has me wondering how much I have to learn about the rain shadow and how the microclimates ebb and flow here.
My Blueberry Bushes are plump with still-green fruit. My Star Jasmine has just begun to bud, and my Gardenia is teaching me that I have a propensity to overwater her.
Unlike in the city, the birdsong on this island lasts all day. From dawn until dusk you can hear Swallows, Cowbirds, Mourning doves, Thrushes, Finches, and other Winged Neighbors singing, chatting, dancing, and foraging.
The Orcas continue to make their summer migration northward and can be spotted from the corkscrew forests of Madrone that clamber up our windswept shores. If you are patient, you’ll see their fins crest the sun-gilded waves that reach all the way to the horizon.
The Swallowtail Butterflies have emerged and they are delicate bundles of both clumsiness and grace as they careen gently from blossom to blossom. Against the backdrop of the iridescent blooms of delphinium, it’s almost as though they are cheekily daring you to take a picture, but as soon as you pull out a camera to do so, they flit away coquettishly.
Native plants like Purple Camas are finding purchase in the rocky outcropping by my house where all other life has been scraped away by recent construction. Further on there are orange Poppies undeterred by the harsh living conditions, and a non-native visitor that looks a bit like Dandelion or a Sow Thistle is faring swimmingly.
The metaphor I find here is that even after all life has been harmed around it by forces bigger than itself, this little import is striving to grow, dotting the deadened dirt with the beauty of swaying butter-yellow kisses. It sends its taproot deep into the ground and rocky crevasses to pull nutrients up into the soil’s top layer. This can create conditions that help other plants reestablish themselves and maybe even thrive again someday.
We can learn from this wee cousin of the Dandelion. Those of us who are not native to the ground where we find ourselves, can play a crucial role in restoring the place around us. In fact, maybe this is the truth the demands we must. That we must contribute beauty, and embrace our part in making this place more habitable and welcoming for others.
As I’ve worked hard (though not with full success) to disconnect from the online world of fear, anxiety, and impending doom I’ve discovered more mental, physical, and emotional energy to plug into the community.
I’ve had more real time and internal bandwidth to seek out local treasures, like the seafood shop down on the docks where I can buy smoked salmon and fresh shellfish from a father-daughter duo who run their floating seafood shack like a true mom-and-pop neighborhood staple. If you arriving huffing and puffing a couple of minutes before closing after running through downtown and down the pier, they tell you not to worry and that there is no need to rush. They’re happy to get you the mussels you need for dinner.
The hardware store employees and I now recognize each other, and there is one guy who works in the lumber yard that I always have fun trying to roast, but darn it if he doesn’t always have a zinger at the ready! One of these days I’ll win the banter battle, mark my words.
By allowing myself to divest from the constant feed of horrible news and incensing videos, I freed up the energy and resolve to reach out to my local library to propose teaching a Spanish-language class for adults. The attendance has been inspiring and seeing how many people in my community want to connect and engage with Spanish-speaking neighbors has been food for my soul and hope. It’s fun, silly, connective, and stimulating. I leave every class fuller than when I arrived.
What a lovely unintended consequence I couldn’t have anticipated gaining when I chose to reduce my digital time. It turns out that the class was something the library had been trying to offer for the last year and a half. Imagine if I had stayed too overwhelmed by the anxiety and never stopped by? What I would have missed out on. How many neighbors wouldn’t have gotten to meet one another?
I fear that that the access ad addictive pull of our phones, chews up so many of those seconds and minutes of rich boredom that would drive us to connect with a friend, connect with a local group, read a book, or simply just sit outside and soak in what surrounds us.
Is there anything in your life that you feel tied to? Compelled to do? Dependent on that makes you feel exhausted and hopeless, rather than more empowered and more able?
Would it be worth the uncomfortable experiment to divest for a while? What rich relationships and experiences await you in the space that you would free up? Who knows?! All I can share is my personal experience and how much more meaningful my life feels and is now that I have slowed down and detoxed from things that so many others take for granted as “normal”.
What’s been unexpected and a bit wild is that my activity and engagement has increased while my anxiety and sense of despair has decreased. Proving true the guidance that “action kills fear”.
My civic engagement has increased 5-fold with no increase of stress. I’ve tuned in to town council and county council meetings during my lunch hour, sat in on a few public sessions hosted by local not-for-profits that play pivotal roles in conservation and quality of life in the islands, and discovered powerful political action groups that are taking meaningful steps against fascism and greed, and for preservation, good living, and freedom.
I have had more space—mental and logistical—to spontaneously go to a neighboring farm on a Sunday night to listen to a fiddler and guitarist serenade the valley. Overheard Violet-Green Swallows wove patterns across the sky hunting Mosquitos in the waning, golden daylight.
In the real space between taking impactful actions, there has been more time to organize summer bonfires that bring my neighbors together to meet one another and learn about one another. More time to help my friend by taking her dog to the park or have the neighborhood kids over to do crafts.
There has been more time to read fiction, learn new recipes, and daydream about this future I keep going on and on about.
It seems like the math shouldn’t math but in spending less time on screens I’ve been able to realize more true activism while expanding that time I have to be bored, make art, play music, play pickle ball, journal, cook, knit, and forge authentic connections with the people I will need to know and be able to rely on if the future continues to worsen.
I am not ignoring the horrors that are unfolding. I am defying the fear that they can use as a tool to make me think we are less powerful than we are. Powerful people are working hard to sew fear deep inside me where my hope and determination are meant to grow, and I’m unwilling to let them do so unchallenged. I am preparing through connecting and helping, so that if outside actors come to harm my neighbors, we can close ranks and protect one another. I am holding on to the very things that make life and living worth fighting for so that I can root deep in the remembrance that every human being, wherever their feet currently stand, deserve to listen to musicians play beautifully under apple trees as wild birds weave mystical scripts across the sky.
Some people on this planet are hoarding power and money, milking us for profit, and quite literally waging war on our ability to live let alone live happy, peaceful, artistic lives.
But many, many others are dissenting. We’re finding ways to boycott and undermine their power. We are taking away their ability to profit off of us by refusing to participate. We are teaching one another and encouraging one another. We are reweaving real world networks of exchange, commerce, and support. We are seeing one another as whole humans and together we are creating large pockets of culture that are making a more beautiful planet and future real now.
If like me, you feel small and ineffective and you wonder how you could ever disrupt or counter what is happening on a national and global scale, I’d encourage you to watch the documentary The Day Iceland Stood Still. You will be unable to entertain the silly idea that you are not insanely powerful, especially arm-in-arm with those around you.
Then, I urge you to put down your devices - phone, tablet, and computer - for a few days. Lift your eyes far enough to see what is happening at your local library, your local theater, your town or city hall, your local environmental group, your local protest, your local woodturning collective, your local immigrant solidarity network, your local table games gathering, your local walking group, your local ANYTHING.
Watching the world unfold on a screen won’t restore your sense of power.
But shaking hands with someone new and looking them in the eyes, listening to an original song, making one, putting your sweat equity into helping your neighbor build that thing in their backyard, investing your time in making someone else’s day better today CAN AND WILL remind you how goddamn powerful you are.
Now finally, one of those pesky soap boxes…
CW: This next section is a call to arms, and as such, it will probably make you feel uncomfortable. I’m not pulling punches. It is meant to challenge you and pull up the pebbles of misalignment we all have to grapple with. Don’t shy away. Excavate your patience, courage, and innate resilience. You and our future are worth it.
The craziest part is that the things we feel burdened by that drive us to make shortcuts for convenience, will lessen.
If me and my loved ones are any indication, we all have things that we feel guilty about, that we know are harming us and our community fabric, that we wish we could change (less social media, less online content consumption, less phone/screen time, less shopping on Amazon, you know what it is for you).
That guilt we feel when we compromise our values for convenience, erodes our sense of self. It makes our connection to our power threadbare. It chips away at our conviction and self-esteem because who are we to talk? We watch ourselves betraying the causes we say we believe in and we lose trust in ourselves. Then we lose trust in everyone else. After all, if we’re not doing what we say we want to do, why would we expect that anyone else is? So it follows that no one is really fighting for what we all say we want.
Or so the quiet, unexamined feelings within us whisper.
This is exactly how greedy, corrupt, fascist politicians and their billionaire boy bands triumph over us. They profit hugely from us feeling this way. We not only feel deflated, but we become so. They don’t want you to look long enough to realize you don’t need their shitty, throwaway products or mediocre apps or emotionally-hijacking services because then you will stop funding their $50 million dollar yachts and 6th vacation homes and the imported sumo fighters they hired as entertainment for their birthday while their goons kidnap parents and children on the doorsteps of our damn public schools.
They don’t want you to realize that you DON’T FUCKING NEED them. That you really really don’t. You feel like you do. You feel like you need Amazon, or Instagram, or Youtube, or Spotify… but you really don’t. Don’t listen to that knee-jerk response that just chimed in to list all of the reasons you really do need it.
They have poured so much damn money into slowly training you to feel this way. They can’t make nearly as much money money off of you if you remember that you have neighbors, friends, yet-to-be-met connections all around you who grow food, make goods, mend clothes, and can fix things you use and love. They don’t want you to realize YOU can do all of those things, because then they can’t keep extracting your money from you in conveniently “small” sums of money each month.
I know some people will think I’ve gone a bit conspiratorial, prepper even, about all of this divesting and protesting, because I’ve joked with friends about it.
But when I slow down and sit with it, isn’t that a convenient dismissal? Isn’t it odd that my approach of encouraging people to get a sponge or a candle or a sheet set at your local grocery store, hardware store, home goods store, or *gasp* local artisan(!) is seen as “more radical” and “alternative” than giving money to get that same sponge or candle to a corporation owned by a billionaire that we all hate? How in the world did door #2 become “more normal”.
We have to face the fact that many of us are more committed to convenienec than we are human rights. That we are more comfortable funding these neo-robber barons than we are making small lifestyle shifts in our day-to-day habits.
When we look at it for 2 seconds, really look at our excuses, they become flimsy under our gaze. It’s easier? It’s convenient? They provide free shipping*?
(*No they don’t, it’s factored into the cost of doing business, you prepay $140/year that’s 10-20 packages of shipping right there. It’s a scam and you have to unlearn how they have conditioned you to think about shopping with them, using their platform, and so on.)
If we mean what we say, then we have to put our time and money where our mouth is, or we can’t pretend that we are part of the solution.
If we’re upset about the political landscape we’re in, but we’re not willing to see if our local hardware store has what we’re looking for because getting something with the click of a button is easier, then we’re full of it.
It’s time for us all to make some uncomfortable decisions and change how we spend our money, consume our information, and wield our power.
It’s time to take back your time and your thinking.
It’s time to do hard and uncomfortable things, especially when no one else but you is watching.
No one is going to sweep in and fix this for us. There is not political savior, party, or individual that is going to turn it all around. WE have to do it in all the small and big ways we have access to. We have to embrace discomfort for the future we say we want, or that future will cease to be available to us altogether.
We’ve already lost the future our parents told us we will inherit. Job stability. Housing stability. Economic stability. How much worse does it need to get before we realize that the oligarchs are shaping this into their world, and we’ll be the collateral damage living in it.
S,o what part of your life can you reclaim today? This week? This month? This year?
It took some minor adjusting but within 30 days I’ve seen these commitments pay dividends in time, money, energy, connection, and other intangible riches.
I’ve given $0 to Amazon this year and my life is easier and simpler by an order of magnitude. Arguably more so than the people around me who seem so committed to patronizing Amazon through their continued dependence on it. I know this can kick up weird stuff for people because everyone all feels so overwhelmed, but I would argue that you can’t keep doing the same thing and expect different results.
If you want a different reality, you’ve got to try something else. I’ve sat down with family members and friends who said they wanted to boycott billionaires and move away from online shopping but worried it would be hard. We challenged the thoughts they were having together and identified a few simple ways to start the shift.
EACH ONE has called or texted me about a month later saying something along the lines of “Oh my gosh, I had no idea how much time I was spending looking at things I thought I needed. Not only am I not buying much of anything online anymore, but I’m just not thinking about buying things much in general. We’ve actually saved quite a bit of money.”
I promise that if you want to stop funding billionaires, and you make the commitment, within one month you’ll be so damned glad you did. And if not, then you can hop right back on that bandwagon and resubscribe.
If you want ideas on easy ways to shift away from supporting company’s and using services that you are morally opposed to, email me! We can workshop it. It doesn’t all have to happen tomorrow. We started making shifts back in December and just now are finally kicking Spotify to the curb.
Want a relentless cheerleader to help you interrogate those guilty justifications you keep battling with, hit me up. We are supposed to be in community, helping each other problem solve. I won’t pressure you to do it my way. I will help you figure out how to do it your way, on your own timeline.
But I beg of you, don’t keep doing something that demoralizes you out of convenience. You really don’t have to and you might be astounded at all the unforeseen benefits that emerge once you take that first step.
For some simple, easy-to-implement guidelines and ideas that will help you reclaim your economic vote and start boycotting billionaires, check out the steps in this essay.
The Extras:
If you are still boycotting Neo-robber barons (keep on keeping on rockstar!), please consider dedicating what you were spending on things like a scam like a Prime subscription ($135+/year) or streaming services ($108+/year) and considering making an annual recurring donation to your local library instead. Not only can you get SO much hardcopy media, but most libraries also host apps like Hoopla, Kanopy, and Libby where you can stream a lot of the stuff you are currently paying for, for FREE! Every dollar we spend is voting for the future we want to come true for our children and grandchildren. Choose accordingly!
What is a “neo-robber baron”? It’s the Mark Zuckerberg’s and Elon Musks of the world. Billionaires who dress up their wealth extraction, money hoarding, labor exploitation, political interference, and public harm in business terms like “innovation” and “industry leadership”. It’s not admirable. It’s avarice. It’s extreme, pathological greed.
If you want to know how to help neighbors who are being targeted and kidnapped by immigration agents, consider doing one or both of the free trainings offered by Washington Immigrant Solidarity Network.
If you haven’t read On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder yet, it is a quick read that, despite the title, will leave you feeling grounded, hopeful, and more powerful. Its about 100 pages and each of the 20 chapters is something simple and easy you can do in your daily life to disrupt the momentum of fascism. If you have been feeling daunted, grab this book, find a library, coffee shop, or field, and take yourself on a date. You will leave invigorated and more liberated. Get it from a local library or book store, or if you absolutely must shop online consider getting it from Thriftbooks.com. But for god’s sake not Amazon!
I finished listening to Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver this week and it swept through me. As the narrator, Charlie Thurston, read the last line and then thanks listeners for listening, I found myself standing in my kitchen, hand pressed against my heart, and tears misting my eyes. I don’t have words to describe the sensation that sluiced my body, other than that I was overcome. I understand why it won a Pulitzer Prize and reigned on the New York Times best seller list for over a year. It’s a masterpiece. Again, please look at getting it from your library or local bookstore, before ordering online :).
Here is a song I want you to get the chance to fall in love with: