Wow, I feel more powerful already.
Because I know that toxin-laced microscopic plastic beads from toothpaste and other cosmetics have been sluiced into our waterways and ingested by fish and other marine animals in the lower Great Lakes.
I also know that frac sand mining and processing spews fine particulate silica sand into the air and blasts nasty chemicals into dismembered and mutilated aquifers in Wisconsin, where I live.
My power surges. I almost can’t contain it all.
(Insert your favorite examples here.)
What should we do with all this power? Write a letter to the FDA with its spectacular record of failure to regulate bad substances in a timely manner, coupled with attempts to prohibit or discourage the use of commonplace inexpensive remedies whose major flaw is that they do not massively increase the profits of big pharmaceutical corporations?
Or, maybe I should go to a fracking hearing at the DNR, the main point of which is to advertise that a) the DNR has no intention of seriously regulating such operations, and b) affected local communities lack power under state law to pass strict protective ordinances?
Our conferences, lectures, workshops, and study groups Describing the Problem are as numerous as the bison that once thundered the Plains. Our books, slide shows and folk songs Describing the Problem are as numberless as the passenger pigeons that once blackened the skies.
If there are limits to our drive to accumulate knowledge to Describe the Problem, we haven’t reached them yet. We leave no grain of sand unturned, no Antarctic ice crystal unanalyzed, no clitoridectomy unlamented, no habitat loss unmourned, no slain journalist unlisted, no refugee camp unenumerated, no polar bear hair unsectioned, no deformed frog undissected, no terawatt-hour of electricity unmeasured, no torture technique uncatalogued, no larva unprobed….Oops, I’ve fallen into Describing the Problem again.
Uh, does this mean that with all this knowledge we are like, really powerful?
Oh, all that knowledge we collect, collate, calculate, caress, characterize, calibrate, cross-reference. (Sigh). I know it leads many people to succumb to denial and depression, but how exactly does this translate into power?
We need knowledge to wield power well, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t need strategy. Yet we are obsessed with increasing knowledge via Describing the Problem, while strategy languishes. And the “problem” we have today stretches across the spectrum from zoophyte extinction to ageism.
Disclosure: In my background lurks academia, writing, and explaining this or that problem to a variety of audiences. I have done extensive research including writing a book about a single constitutional clause, so it’s not that I don’t appreciate research and description. Knowledge must be part of what we do, but it’s not the goal or the answer, and it’s certainly not the strategy.
1. Stop Describing the Problem to people who agree with you and start talking to those who don’t.
2. Try diagnosing the problem instead of describing it. (Like, is the problem the corporation that is polluting or the government that allows this—in fact, hands out permits for it?)
3. Use all the time you free up to strategize about making the necessary changes. And don’t bother with the sleepwalking methods (toeing the line at regulatory agencies, whining at demonstrations….) that have failed, for, oh, forty or a hundred years.
4. Strategize about how to challenge…well, here’s a statement of the problem that I wrote about twenty years ago, and it still stands.
“Over a period of many generations, corporate lawyers, in drawing rooms, cloak rooms and court rooms, worked over our imperfect but promising democracy clause by clause. In all too many instances, when a law got in the way of corporate power, the corporations either got rid of it, weakened it, prevented it from being enforced, got it declared unconstitutional, or influenced the judicial interpretation of it so as to render it inconsequential.
While the rights of most human persons were denied or diminished, corporations acquired by sleight-of-hand constitutional rights of “natural” persons. These newly anointed corporate “persons” claimed and gained constitutional protections for their “property,” which was first construed to be something tangible, expanded to include the intangible and now includes the imaginary.”
Is that quote just Describing the Problem again? I think not: Rather, it is diagnosing the problem. And if we diagnose the problem as our government and the power it gives to corporations, we need to take a break from counting parts-per-million and dollars-per-candidate and strategize how to alter our underlying legal framework.
People have been working on such strategies for at least two decades, yet that work somehow isn’t as sexy as Describing the Problem.
So, could you spend a week without Describing the Problem, and turn instead to planning strategy ? Or maybe a month?
Strategy isn’t optional. To plagiarize and paraphrase (plagiaphase?) a famous dead white guy: The point is not to describe the world, but to change it.
Snowy equinox. jam