It is a time of freedom and fear, of Gaia and of borders, of many paths and the widening of a universal toll road, emptying country and swelling cities, of the public bought into privacy and the privacy of the public sold into invisible data banks and knowing algorithms. It is the time of the warrior's peace and the miser's charity, when the planting of a seed is an act of conscientious objection.

These are the times when maps fade and direction is lost. Forwards is backwards now, so we glance sideways at the strange lands through which we are all passing, knowing for certain only that our destination has disappeared. We are unready to meet these times, but we proceed nonetheless, adapting as we wander, reshaping the Earth with every tread.

Behind us we have left the old times, the standard times, the high times. Welcome to the irregular times.


 

Doing Your Part

If you visited Irregular Times a few months ago, you would have noticed that we were writing a lot about war. One of the liberties of writing on an amateur basis is being able to write about whatever stokes one's fire -- and believe us, our war fires were hotly stoked.

Having witnessed the defrauding of a nation, and seeing the futility in continuing to protest a war that was a largely accomplished (although not altogether accomplished, as we have seen) fact, we turned to prophylactic politics: action directed toward prevention. To prevent travesties like this in the future, we decided the best and most principled single act would be to turn the principle practitioner of war politics, George w. Bush, out of office.

In a healthy democracy, the thing to do would be to wait for the opposition party to, you know, oppose those in power. Individuals could get involved by voting for the opposing party in elections. For some time, through the fall of 2002, through the winter and into the spring of 2003, we waited for the opposition party to do its opposing. And waited. And waited. You know this -- you were probably waiting, too. And if, like us, you were watching and waiting, you know that the opposition party never got off its ass.

This spineless lack of resolution by the most powerful figures in the Democratic Party has led some to despair. But we despair not! No! Okay, I'll tone down the exclamation points a bit, but I do want you to know this is the part of the entry where the mood shifts and all.

You see, the veil has been thrown from our eyes. It has become clear to us that simply voting for the better candidate, while important, is not enough. The reason that the Democratic party can be irresolute in the face of an arrogant twerp is that its own constituents -- that is, US, have been such passive participants. The key to getting the Democratic Party to take an aggressive stance for its core principles is to SEIZE THE STAGE AND GRAB THE MIKE.

Those of on the Irregular Times staff have found a few ways to do this. Two among our number have started working their way into the local Democratic Party leadership circles. They are, in mucky but necessary fashion, jumping into the party structure head first, building local activist networks and pushing from the inside for a progressive vision. They report a surprising amount of room at the local and even state level for impassioned people -- as a matter of fact, at the most local level they are organizing the Party where no organization was there previously at all. If you would like to get active in your local Democratic Party, it's easy to get started: just click here to get to Democrats.org, then select your state over on the left-hand side.

Others among us (me included) have devoted their time to "grabbing the mike" by acting as sloganeers. This work started when we wanted a bumper sticker that stated opposition to George W. Bush, but just couldn't find the right one. After a couple weeks of stymied frustration, it dawned on us that there must be other frustrated individuals out there like us, just waiting for the right sticker to slap on their bumper -- the one that said what was in their hearts, what they were ready to share with the rest of the world. So we decided to open up an anti-Bush, anti-Republican and pro-alternative bumper sticker shop with a few selections that spoke to our hearts and, we hoped, to the hearts of others. Once we started, we just couldn't turn off the spigot of outrage, and now we have the single largest collection of anti-Bush and pro-alternative Election 2004 stickers out there on the 'Net -- at 233 designs and counting. We've committed ourselves to adding at least one new design a day until the 2004 elections. This has been incredibly rewarding: we know that somewhere out there, hundreds of bumpers are publicly festooned with anti-Bush messages because we got irked. To make the experience doubly rewarding, we've committed to donating 25% of our profits to worthy political causes, and another 25% of our profits to worthy charities.

Both of these sorts of actions meant jumping in and doing something that nobody else was doing, something that we'd been waiting for someone else to do. Getting involved in this way has turned our impotent rage into a potent force for change. The next time you find yourself saying "Why don't they just...", stop yourself in midsentence. THEY can be YOU, and YOU can be the one who gets it done. So stretch beyond yourself and do something: it's a wonderful tonic in a toxic age.

Posted by James Cook at 9:08 PM. # (permalink)




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