Reading Hedges - Change is inevitable; progress is optional

The only thing that doesn’t change is change itself which is inevitable and while change is inevitable, progress is optional. The insecure don’t like change as well as those who have vested interests in the status quo remaining the status quo, but the oppressed, the subjugated, those with a moral compass truer than others want change, hope for change, will work for change, and sometimes even deliberately and with intention make efforts to revolt. Revolutions can be nonviolent and they can be violent. Those based on moral principles more often will be nonviolent than violent and so if revolutionaries like Gandhi and Martin Luther King want to throw off the chains of their oppressors and permanently change the people in the world for the better they have purposely engaged in nonviolent revolutions.

Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco have done a great job describing four sacrifice zones in the United States where corporate capitalism out of control have destroyed whole communities such as the Pine Ridge Reservation in North Dakota, Camden, N.J. the poorest city in the United States, the state of West Virginia with its mountain top removal, and the farm workers in Immokalee, Florida. I have also made reference to the Village of Brockport where a small group of slumlords have converted the housing stock built from 1850 – 1920, beautiful single family homes, into tenements for high transient college students, then sought the dissolution of the village so they could advance their destruction of village neighborhoods with no restraint and compliance with building codes. In the last chapter of their book, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, Hedges and Sacco describe the need for and activities of  revolution. So far these activities have been nonviolent such as the Occupy Wall Street movement which has made the term “1%” the meme of the decade. Hedges writes:

“The vaunted American dream, the idea that life will get better, that progess is inevitable if we obey the rules and work hard, that material prosperity is assured, has been replaced by a hard and bitter truth. The American dream, we now know, is a lie. We will all be sacrificed. The virus of coporate abuse – the perverted belief that only corporate profit matters – has spread to outsource our jobs, cut the budgets of our schools, close our libraries, and plague communities with foreclosures and  unemployment. The virus has brought with it a security and surveillance state that seeks to keep us all on  a reservation. No one is immune. The suffering of the other, the Native American, the African American in the inner city, the unemployed coal miner, or the Hispanic produce picker is universal. They went first. We are next. The indifference we showed to the plight of the underclass, in Biblical terms our neighbor, haunts us. We failed them, and in doing so we failed ourselves. We were accomplices to our own demise. Revolt is all we have left. It is our only hope.” P. 227

We feel this in Brockport. Gone are the good jobs at Kodak with health insurance for our families. Young people are happy with a job at the Brockport Walmart working 28 hours a week at minimum wage and happy as a clam with Medicaid and food stamps. 25 and 30 year olds living with their parents and with no hope of being able to support a family of their own and live independently as their parents did. They are all around us and many living in our homes. The farm workers are sequestered in their camps afraid to come to town and we see the ICE SUVs rolling up our streets in the roads around us keeping us safe from what exactly? The news has us living in fear of terrorists cells in Lackawana while people are being arrested for  in DWI who can more easily kill us than any terrorist,  and property is being destroyed every weekend in our village by drunk college students. Comments left on this blog state that people in Brockport are arming at faster rates out of fear that our nation might take some further steps on gun control. Will this make us safer or put us more in peril. We don’t need to fear terrorists we more appropriately should fear our armed neighbors and their children.

Hedges writes further:

“Our decaying corporate regime has strutted in Portland, Oakland, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and New York sending its baton-wielding cops to clean up “the mess.” The state always employs the language of personal hygiene and public security in the effort to make us disappear. They think we will all go home and accept their corporate nation, a nation where crime and government policy have become indistinguishable, where nothing in America, including the ordinary citizen, is deemed by those in power worth protecting or preserving, where corporate oligarchs awash in hundreds of millions of dollars are permitted to loot and pillage the last shreds of collective wealth, human capital, and natural resources, a nation where the poor do not eat and workers do not work, a nation where the sick die and children go hungry, a nation where the consent of the governed and the voice of the people is a cruel joke.

            Get back in your cages, they are telling us. Return to watching the lies, absurdities, trivia, celebrity gossip, and political theater we feed you in twenty-four-hour cycles on television. Invest your emotional energy in the vast system of popular entertainment. Run up your credit card debt. Pay your loans. Be thankful for the scraps we toss. Chant back to us our platitudes about democracy, greatness, and freedom. Vote in our rigged corporate elections. Send your young men and women to die in useless, unwinnable wars that provide huge profits to the corporations. Stand by mutely as our legislators plunge us into a society without basic social services while Wall Street speculators loot and pillage.” Pp.232-233

And what is the hope in such a dystopian scenario? We have seen human dignity arise such as the Arab Spring and in the Occupy movement and demand that people organize to work together in a better way to realize the human potential of all human beings not just some at the expense of others. It begins with a raised consciousness that current operations are not right for all people and therein lies the seeds of injustice, suffering, and degradation.

Raised consciousnesses lead to a desire for right action, finding ways to change our key societal processes so that they better serve us all and not just some at the expense of others.

Right action, when successful, leads to celebration, contentment, peace, joy, and a desire for even further improvement. We will not stop as a species until the whole world has been saved from its own ignorance, selfishness, greed, and lust for power to manipulate the weaker for the benefit of the stronger. When all of humankind have achieved their full potential, then we will have brought about heaven on earth which is our birth right as humble participants in the great interdependent web of existence.

Editor's note: This is the last installment on the December, Brockporter Book Discussion group selection. It is hoped that people will read along and comment on the postings. Even if you have not read the book under discussion, your comments on the ideas are very welcome. The book for January is The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. The book for February has not been selected yet. Your nominations are welcome.

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Reading Hedges - Farm labor working in the shadows

In the book Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco tell the stories about the effects of capitalism out of control and the consequences of what they call "sacrifice zones", that is, those parts of the United States which have been devastated by corporate practices. The first sacrifice zone described was the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota and the consequence of genocide on Native Americans. The second sacrifice zone described was Camden, NJ, the poorest city in the United States. The third sacrifice zone was the mountain top removal and the devastation of the Appalachian mountains in West Virginia, and the fourth sacrifice zone is the farm workers in Imokallee, Florida.

Hedges writes, "The U.S. Department of Labor estimates that the agriculture industry has a death rate seven times higher than the average rate for most industries." The farm workers perform grueling work for 10, 12 hours a day in the fields often covered in pesticides in sometimes extreme weather conditions. These workers are paid very low wages which allow only the most subsistent living, if that, often sleeping on the woods or incarcerated by crew leaders in confined accommodations so they cannot flee.

Here, in Brockport, we eat our cheap tomatoes in February because of the oppressive conditions which the farm laborers in Florida endure. We also see these folks when they come north in the summer to work in our fields here in the Brockport area. Tom Rivers does an excellent job documenting their work here in his book, Farm Hands, which is available at the Lift Bridge Book Shop.

While our nation has been very inhospitable to undocumented farm laborers, the fact is their labor is needed if we are going to continue to eat cheap produce. Americans are huge hypocrites when they stigmatize and mistreat the very people who do the hard, dirty work, they are not willing or are unable, because of their poor physical conditioning, to do themselves.

Farm workers deserve better working conditions, benefits, and most importantly, to be treated with dignity. Here in Brockport they live in fear, and last year the Bienvenido celebration was canceled for the first time in many years, because of fear of border patrol harassment were the farm workers to gather in public.

Congress has yet to pass a humane and viable law to manage the millions of undocumented but badly needed and hard working immigrants among us. We should promote and affirm justice, equity, and compassion in our human relations and when it comes to farm laborers, we have failed because of economic pressures which, for the most part, are invisible to most Brockporters.

Let us become aware of the plight of farm workers and celebrate their hard work and gifts which make our quality of life possible eating fresh vegetables all year around.

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Reading Hedges - Days of Devastation in West Virginia and next is New York

"Elected officials at the state and federal level are paid employees of the corporate state. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the front group for the major corporations in this country, including Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Chevron, News Corp, spent more money on the 2010 elections than the Republican and Democratic National Committees combined. A staggering ninety-four percent of the Chamber's contributions went to politicians who deny the existence of climate change." p. 129

"The coal companies write the laws. They control local and state politicians. They destroy the water tables, suck billions of dollars' worth of coal out of the state (West Virginia), and render hundreds of acres uninhabitable." p. 128

West Virginia is one of the poorest states in the United States and its beautiful Appalachin Mountains are being destroyed by the coal companies who have no interest in the environment or the people or other living creatures who live in those mountains. The interest of the coal company is purely financial profit.

Hedges quotes Patty Sebok, a resident of the mountains, 
"A lot of people didn't want to believe their water was bad because they are coal mining families," she says. They just don't want to hear it, because, I mean, it's a hard choice when you gotta make a living, or you gotta say you water is bad from the company they're working for. They're scared".

While we don't have mountains we do have gas and the gas companies what to destroy our water tables, pollute our land, fracking for gas. They have a huge lobby in Albany. Our Senator Maziarz has the largest campaign fund in the State because of utility contributions to his campaign fund. Maziarz is not working for his constituents in Western New York, he is working for the utility companies and for a profit and money the environment in Western New York can be put at risk and destroyed. Keep your eye on the 1% willing to sell the well being of the earth out from under us for their profit.

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Reading Hedges - Principle or profit? What's destroying our cities?

Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco’s book, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt is a book about what they call “sacrifice zones”, those areas of the United States which corporate capitalism out of control has destroyed. The first chapter described the problems for the Native Americans on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. The second chapter describes Camden, New Jersey, the poorest city in the United States.

Hedges writes “Once communities break down physically, they bread down morally.” P.69 and I was struck with the analogy to Brockport where we have witnessed our family oriented neighborhoods taken over by slumlords who have turned the housing stock into student rental and allowed the buildings to deteriorate and watched the crime rate escalate fueled by adolescent hormones and alcohol. The demand for public safety services has increased in these neighborhoods with constant calls for service for disorderly conduct, vandalism, thefts, rapes, and this year even a murder on the campus.

There have been calls by the slumlords for Village dissolution and they have been especially critical of the police department wanting it dissolved. Here is what Hedges writes on page 70 about what happened in Camden:

“Camden is a dead city. It makes and produces nothing. It is the poorest city in the United States and is usually ranked as one of the most, and often the most, dangerous. In early 2011 nearly half of the city’s police force, one hundred and sixty-eight officers, were laid off because of a $26 million budget shortfall. By the end of 2011, although more than one hundred officers had been rehired, homicides had climbed by thirty percent and burglaries by more than forty percent from the previous year.”

On page 76, Hedges writes, “The city spends seventy-five percent of its budget on the police and fire departments, a harbinger of the corporate state where only the security apparatus is maintained. The main branch of the city’s library has been shut down due to lack of funds.”

Again in Brockport, the complaint that almost half of its budget goes for the police department which is needed because of the high concentration of non home owning transients who live densely packed into the Village core. The Village has maintained its contribution to the library which was moved out of the Village into the Town of Clarkson.

At the end of this chapter, Hedges interviews Fr. Michael Doyle, the Pastor of Sacred Heart Catholic church, who, in his 70s now, has been at Sacred Heart since 1974. Fr. Doyle describes the anger that like toxic poison destroys Camden’s young people who are 95% people of color. Fr. Doyle is quoted as saying,

“And so that’s, I think I see violence – I’m not talking about violence on TV, which might be a violent show – but I’m talking about the violence that rises out of the marketing that shows the kid what he could have, creates a huge anger that explodes, easily. That I discovered very quickly when I came to Camden. I discovered the anger was so near the surface, you just rub it and it explodes. And there’s no respect for you if you have no money. I think the constant assault of the marketers, never-ending, it’s building up an anger that’s - you can understand it, but it’s so violent.” P.110

What Fr. Doyle seems to be saying is that it is not the poverty itself that is so much of the problem as the disparity between the haves and the have nots. It is the income inequality which is driving the violence in Camden and in other places in the United States.

We have seen this inequality in Brockport between the Village and the Towns. Village residents pay more taxes than people living in the Towns to provide services for a much more dense population in the Village and which the people in the Towns benefit from just as well. In 2010 the Towns voted to change their ambulance contracts from the Brockport Volunteer Ambulance Corps to Monroe Ambulance, a profit making company based in Rochester, in an attempt to “starve the beast” as one leader in the fire department told me to force the Village to cooperate with a fire district. The attempt was ultimately successful and a fire district was created which in its first year of operation has raised fire protection rates 41%. This additional burden will affect Village residents much more severely because they already pay higher taxes than those who live in the towns.

Hedges further quotes Fr. Doyle who says,

“I grew up in Ireland and we had the songs of our struggle, and it was clear against whom  we were struggling. The enemy was clear. I was saying about Ireland, that it’s nosediving now at an enormous rate. And I was saying before it was nosediving, that we have an enemy and we don’t know it’s an enemy. It’s the money crowd. It’s an enemy. But people don’t see it as an enemy. And you can’t challenge it because you don’t see it. And I think it’s the same way for the young people here. You have an enemy, and that enemy is greed and prejudice and injustice and all that type of thing, but you can’t get at it. There’s no head, there’s no clarity, so you take it out on your neighbor, it’s just horrendous what people do.” P.111

The enemy is the capitalistic system which seeks only profit and nothing else matters. Human well being and safety, a sense of belonging, and self worth are not quantifiable on the profit sheet and we have decided that people are to be sacrificed for money. Money is our national God and so when Americans tell you its not the money it’s the principle of the thing, you can bet your last buck they are lying, it’s the money.

Brockport is not Camden, NY, but the slumlords have tried to turn it into a Camden by extracting as much profit as possible from its housing stock destroying neighborhoods and communities in the process. When building codes were put in place and were enforced there was an effort to dissolve the very government which provided any over sight and constraint on this greed. These forces almost destroyed the Village. But Brockport is small enough that the enemies could be identified. They are a handful of slumlords and their backers who would take over the Village for their personal profit.

The point is not that there are bad people as much as we have created a bad system where money has become more important than other human values. The question that begs to be answered is “in the end what really matters?” This is a spiritual question. It is one about values. What matters the most to you, to us as a nation? What kind of a person do I want to be? What kind of a community do I want to be a part of? Who do we want to be as a people?

We look at Camden, N.J., and other former industrial cities like it, and the Occupy Movement and others are becoming aware of the enemy – it’s the 1% and their insistence on corporate profit as more important than any other human values. Capitalism, out of control, is destroying our country, our cities, our families, and unfortunately, individuals.

Fortunately, here in Brockport, we voted to keep our village government and support it. Camden, NJ and other cities have not had citizens as committed and knowledgeable. Those who could afford it emigrated to the suburbs and left the poor to fend for themselves. Here in Brockport, there are enough of us left in the Village who care about it and aren't ready to turn it over to the greedy capital extractors who would destroy it for a buck.

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