>>> TO PROTEST THE WAR!2 weeks after I arrived in New York City as a freshman at NYU,
9/11 exploded just down the street from my college dorm, and in one moment I learned more than 4 years of studying could have ever taught me. At first I was scared I was going to be the next to get randomly killed, then I was united with the nation in mourning, then I was disgusted with politicians for war-mongering, then I was disgusted with the nation for not thinking, then I was scared I was going to be the next to get randomly killed.
In the years that followed, I felt
it was my duty to march with the thousands of other New Yorkers in each and every colorful
parade against the war (which I then sincerely believed were "war protests"), grab my loudest harmonica, sing my loudest songs, and generally "shake my peace til my peace got sore."
Each of these
parades would end in the same way: the marchers would reach the end of the specified route and then half of them would go out for coffee and bagels, and the other half would start coagulating in a city park or traffic intersection like soft spaghetti in a concrete kitchen sink. This was where we'd undergo the ritual of getting
thrown around and thoroughly bullied by the well-armed Drano of the New York Police Department and their horses.
It was
after I finally got arrested at one of these post-parade shout-fests, had my hair and feathers ripped out, got riot-cuffs so tight that I couldn't feel my left thumb for 6 months, got interrogated by detective Iam Bacon who said he'd stuff me in the filing cabinet, and then was released from jail minus my first and favorite C-harmonica, that I realized the
futility of continuing to engage with The Man (or whatever you want to call the organized destruction of the planet)
in parades. It became apparent to me that for as long as I engaged with them in a game of physical force, no matter how many people I was with, the game was rigged:
they'd win. They're the bigger bullies -- and they've way more filing cabinets!
I needed a new way to protest the war...
>>> SHAKE YOUR SALT!Sitting in court a few weeks later, I began thinking of my home in Utah, its mountains, its rivers, its fields and lakes. I thought about the power of nature and I thought about the power of the government, and I realized that Gandhi had it right when he defied Britain ("The Man" in his time) by marching to the sea with his own two feet, kneeling down in his own Indian Ocean, and making his own salt by hand. He appealed to the
huge power of nature and so made the
finite power of The Man totally irrelevant. He didn't need The Man's salt because he had salt in his own backyard. Most importantly he had the
skills to make a livelihood from his own backyard. I imagined myself dressed in buckskins and running through the Wasatch Mountains like Mexican Tarzan...
My mind replayed the voices of activists I'd heard say again and again that the troops in Iraq weren't representing THEM in this war for middle-eastern oil -- no they'd say,
those troops were over there because the POLITICIANS were blah blah blah,
because George Bush blah blah blah. These were the same
war-protesters who like me
weren't thinking twice about taking advantage of the
war spoils of the American lifestyle: vegetables and fruit trucked to NY clear from Ecuador, riding in the car 2 walkable miles to the local store, buying a brand new lap-top, taking a plane ride for vacation, and everything else that relies on middle-eastern oil. This also made me realize that Gandhi had it right again when
he wouldn't just SAY that the British didn't represent him and he didn't need their violent system,
but by his own LIFE ACTION: spinning his own cloth with local Indian cotton, making his own salt, causing political change without any army --
he truly didn't need their representation. By becoming
self-reliant he made them irrelevant, and there was no question about who's troops were whose.
>>> I WANNA LIVE MORE, N'PARADE LESSSitting on that wooden church pew waiting my turn to take the floor, I had what to me was
a great revelation (but hardly a new one): I wanted to try to make my LIFE my war protest. I realized this:
it's in the piss activities of my life,
the 'mundane' things: how I get around, what I do for a living, what my diet is, what I buy, and even how I dispose of my excrement, that I'm either relying on "the war," or else
truly protesting it by living a sustainable and self-reliant alternative.
>>> PEACE starts with my PISS (and things like it)!The most helpful realization to me in my humble efforts to save the world with my pee pee and other daily activities, has been in realizing their hidden power --these choices CAN be the difference between literally growing flowers for the planet, and figuratively mailing them to its early funeral service. When I doubt I just consider the power of piss:
My annual piss output contains enough
soil nutrients to grow a field of grain to feed me for the entire year!
That might sound
gross.But you know what sounds
more gross?3-trillion gallons of "treated" sewage sludge destroying the coastal environment!
So then the trick is: how do we get our literal and metaphorical " piss" to grow grain, how do we do it safely, who else is doing it? This is where the SHAKE YOUR PISS! page hopes to be a departure point - a point of inspiration. Good luck on the journey!
>>> PISS!!?!!
