Don’t Believe the Hype (by Crow)

(Introduction: I’ve never before posted anything here that I didn’t write myself. Today, however, I offer an essay I found in Slingshot #133, by “Crow.” I love Slingshot, and I’m always glad to see it, but especially now, and I hoped this new issue offered some anarchist perspective on the current pandemic crisis, which it did. This piece by “Crow” resonated strongly with me, and I think it puts our current situation in clear focus, so I’ve reprinted it without permission.)

It has been a dizzying whirlwind of a year. It’s hard to know what to think these days. I find myself questioning if the political analysis that I had pre-pandemic is still relevant. Clearly when times change, it is necessary to adapt, but how.

We must reaffirm our core values. Anarchism is the philosophy of freedom. It is predicated upon voluntary association, mutual aid, and the belief that there is a symbiosis between the freedom of the individual and the health of the collective.

And here we must get into a question that has been gnawing away at me for several months. Why have anarchists been so silent in the face of government lockdown orders and related arbitrary rules approaching martial law across the world? Even though the lockdowns are ebbing now, they could come back. Aren’t radicals defenders of civil liberties such as the freedom of assembly and privacy? Yet, until recently, there seemed to be a taboo against radicals criticizing measures justified in the name of Public Health. Almost the only people protesting lockdowns were right wingers.

Thankfully, that is now changing. In Quebec, home to a fierce anarchist tradition, it took the imposition of curfew before anarchists reached the point of organizing, but I am happy to report that radicals in Quebec are now taking to the streets. There have now been two anti-curfew demonstrations organized by anarchists. I hope that it will lead to further dialogue about the path forward for a resistance movement in the age of COVID, for the old world is behind us.

Social media platforms are scrubbing their platforms of information deemed to be contrary to the recommendations of Public Health. This type of censorship works to create a type of groupthink by making criticism of lockdown measures seem like an extremist ideology, by placing it outside the bounds of what is acceptable to say.

We need to question authority. We need to ask ourselves: What is Public Health? What is justifiable in the name of Public Health and what isn’t, and who gets to decide? What is really implied by the term “Public Health”? Often, it seems to suggest that individual wishes, needs and desires must be subordinated in the interest of a greater good. Who determines this greater good? The state, of course.

I believe that human beings want to be free. However, there is one thing that most people value over freedom. That is safety. That is why, when a regime wishes to gain the compliance of a population for nefarious purposes, such as war, they focus on making people afraid. This is basic. The War on Terror was accompanied by a massive effort in fear-mongering propaganda. The US government issued daily color-coded “Terror Level Alerts” as part of the mobilization of support for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. This fear was accompanied by propaganda promoting patriotism, justifying an invasion of another country in the name of freedom. Is it such a stretch that a modern-day propaganda machine could have people believing in and supporting totally untrue things? Whenever the media is clearly pumping fear into the public, the natural question should be: “For what purpose are they spreading fear? What do they want the public to believe?” When we ask ourselves those two questions, we can operate with another assumption, that the thing they want the public to go along with is not something the public would normally support.

Every day, we are told over and over again how dire the situation is. We are essentially being told that we are under attack. The only difference is that our enemy is not a foreign power but a force of nature, a virus, an invisible enemy.

It is clear that some people are more at risk than others, and of course we should respect the boundaries of those who have a different level of risk assessment than we do, always basing our ethics in these matters on principles of consent, self-determination, and respect of the bodily autonomy of each person. We need to talk about these things and decide our own ethics about them, rather than reflexively reproducing the dominant narrative being promoted through mainstream media.

We need to reject the logic that we need to be protected from ourselves. To accept this logic is to accept defeat. If we accept the logic that the information we have access to must be controlled, we are accepting the logic that we must be controlled. The state would have us believe that it has our best interests at heart, and that it is manipulating us for our own good, in the name of Public Health.

This pandemic points towards some very big question for society in general. Society is being radically transformed. Who are the winners and losers? Which corporate interests and which segments of society are most adversely affected? Some of the questions are not just political, but spiritual. For example, is Western society pathologically death-phobic? Throughout human history, society has dealt with the natural human fear of death through spirituality practices, philosophy, and theatre such as funerary rituals.

Do we need a grand narrative within which we can understand our own mortality? Is our lack of such a narrative making us behave irrationally? Today it seems like the constant stimulation of electronic media is distracting people from understanding the meaning of life, which is the natural antidote to the fear of death. Some from the tech world, drunk on the power of their privilege, dream of overcoming death through biohacking and nano-technology, but this search for immortality is an ancient folly.

So, I would propose that the conversation around COVID needs to go beyond its current obsession with “saving lives” and focus on the larger question of how to live and to die well in a world where death is an inevitability. I hope we will all agree that there is more to life than just being alive. This is not just an individual question, but a question for society, because if we don’t want our elders dying terrible deaths in nursing homes, we’ve got to do some soul-searching… because if our ideal society doesn’t involve the state, it means that people like you and I will have to provide for people who have gotten too old to live independently. And this is a topic about which anarchists over the past few decades have been mostly silent, an oversight we must now address. Are we including elders in our imagination when we think about the autonomous communities and neighborhoods that we desire to bring into being? Because if we aren’t, we are part of the problem.

In the end, though, I think that the crisis is a spiritual crisis. We all die, and until we make peace with that fact, we will desire a freedom that will remain out of our grasp. There are many important questions raised by the current crisis, which we cannot afford to leave to the domains of governments and corporations.

Don’t believe the hype. Governments lie, politicians lie, the media lies, and corporate executives lie. If we want to know what constitutes appropriate action in the context of a pandemic, then we need to understand what the risks are and how to mitigate them. To do that, we should seek out the best available information. There are tons of medical studies regarding lockdowns and related subjects that you can check out online. A year ago, we didn’t have a lot of information about COVID. Now we do, and the picture that has emerged is clearer than the media would have you believe. Lockdowns are not justifiable in the name of public health, and we should oppose them as fundamental violations of our autonomy.

Stay Safe, Stay Sane, Smash the State & Get Free!

We are NOT All in This Together

Just stop with this bullshit that “we are all in this together.” We are not all in this together, as any musician, restaurateur or bartender can tell you. A few people, like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and other high-tech scumbags are getting even filthier rich as the rest of us retreat from the real world into their online cesspit. Dr Anthony Fauci, who would otherwise only be remembered for his leaky bio-weapons lab at Ft. Detrick, can enjoy his newfound fame and gets to play this amusing game of “Simon Says” with a terrified American public. Big Pharma, like Pfizer and Moderna just had a truckload of money dumped at their doorstep, even though they’ve been ripping us off for decades and usurping our democracy with the money they extort from us. They recognize the pandemic for what it is, an opportunity to tighten their stranglehold on the throats of the American people, and to rake in a hell of a lot of cash.

These people do not share our pain. They’ve always treated us commoners as though we were infected with some dreadful disease, and we are, it’s called poverty, and they cause it. Thanks to the pandemic response, they are now completely immune to it. These people don’t mind wearing masks in public because they know that if we had any sense we’d kill them all, on sight, if we could recognize them.

For the cowardly little twerps who sold their souls for the meaningless life of an office drone, the pandemic has been a godsend. For these people, believing that they are “smart” matters to them. They’d much rather believe that the decisions they made in life were guided by intelligence rather than cowardice, but it ain’t so. They chose the security of a soul-sucking job in a suicidal culture rather than risk the poverty, hardship and unpredictability of a life outside of it. A life lived in fear is bound to suck, but the sight of homeless desperate people begging for spare change scares the shit out of them and keeps them in line.

All these people gave up for the pandemic was their commute, and the necessity of having to get dressed for work in the morning. They already spent most of their life in front of a screen, because they were already deathly afraid of the outside world. For them, the pandemic just reinforces their own proclivities and prejudices. Since all they do is “Zoom” each other all day, its no surprise that they’ve completely forgotten about the people who live in the real world. Unless you are in their “feed” they don’t even know you exist.

Among these sniveling desk jockeys, journalists deserve special recognition. Remember this. The reason most journalists became journalists, was because they couldn’t pass a science course to save their lives. If they could’ve passed calculus, they’d have a better job. Journalists don’t know shit about this disease, and they don’t know enough about science to challenge the bullshit story being fed to them about the pandemic.

For journalists, the pandemic has become an excuse for laziness. Why bother investigating political corruption, corporate crime or the environmental crises when you can just regurgitate press releases from the CDC and local authorities ad nauseam without ever having to leave your bedroom? Journalists ignore the impacts of the pandemic response on people in our community, because investigating them would require effort. They continue to tow the line on government-sponsored fear-mongering propaganda because it is easy, not because it is true, and they berate us for non-compliance because they desperately want to believe that their own obsequiousness is “smart” rather than cowardly.

No, we have never been “all in this together,” in this country. This pandemic response helped some and hurt others. It may have saved some lives, but it certainly destroyed others. Perhaps precautions are warranted, but berating people for non-compliance with draconian civil rights restrictions is not, because this crisis deserves an intelligent response, not a cowardly one.

Not the Time to be Afraid of Covid-19

Alright folks, I think it is about time we all calm down and take a good look at how we are responding to this current wave of Covid-19 infections. The election is over. For what little difference it will make, the ballots have been cast. I thought it stupid to politicize the mask issue, and all of the fear-mongering and mask-shaming really showed the ugly side of liberals and progressives.

When I saw how quickly the Democrats threw our civil rights under the bus, along with small businesses, working people, artists, not to mention our summer, our vacation plans, and damn near a year of our lives, in their effort to sew fear into the hearts of the American people, I recognized the Democrats for what they are: the other side of authoritarian fascism.

Trump’s Republican supporters boldly display the arrogance, belligerence and contempt for the truth that we expect from a fascist regime, but Biden’s Democrats reminded us that the other side of fascism is a cowardly, timid, and obsequious populace, easily manipulated by fear. Nobody voted for Biden because they thought he was a great leader. People voted for Biden because they are afraid. Because of their fear of Trump, liberals and progressives settled for nothing, and that’s exactly what we’ll get from Joe. Similarly, if you are afraid enough of the pandemic to settle for a life mediated through Zoom and Facebook and endure the dehumanization and restrictions of our civil liberties inherent in masking and social distancing guidelines, that’s exactly what you will get from now on.

Covid-19 is not Ebola. Covid-19 looked scary back in March, but it turned out that putting Covid-19 patients on ventilators killed patients who probably would have survived, had they not taken their doctor’s advice. Over the summer, treatment protocols changed, and the death rate dropped significantly. Also, we learned that many, if not most people who get Covid-19, have mild symptoms or no symptoms at all. Both of these facts indicate that the virus is not as deadly as we, at first, feared.

Today, we don’t hear about these important facts, nor do we have meaningful conversations about how to balance the increasing costs of social isolation against the more realistic assessment of the virus. Instead we hear the same old story: “Covid is deadly! infection rates are rising! Be afraid! Be very afraid!” This is not the time to be afraid, of the pandemic anyway.

The response to the pandemic, on the other hand, has had unprecedented impacts on our freedom and civil liberties, and it threatens to undermine our sovereignty over our own bodies. Covid-19 blindsided us. We were so distracted by the Trumpster fire that we never saw it coming. We’ve never seen a public health coup before, but we just turned our lives over to doctors and scientists, who we did not choose, and cannot replace, because we are afraid of something we cannot see. Doctors and scientists make good advisers, but no matter how much they condescend to you, you should never trust them to make decisions for you, and you should remember that their specialties are extremely narrow.

First, we need to face the fact that people die. Life is 100% fatal. No one here gets out alive. Almost three million people died in the US last year. We lose about 650,000 people to heart disease, another 600,000 people to cancer, and 400,000 people a year die of medical mistakes. These are mostly preventable deaths, that we accept as part of the cost of liberty and a global hi-tech economy. Even if we lose 300,000 people to Covid-19 this year, it will, at most, amount to a 10% increase in US overall mortality, and many argue that it is much less than that.

Besides that, saying that 250,000 Americans died OF Covid-19 this year is very misleading. That statistic includes anyone who died this year and tested positive for Covid-19 postmortem, including many people who died of completely unrelated causes, like the blunt force trauma of a car crash, not Covid-19. Covid-19 is NOT the killer pandemic we all feared, and ramping-up the fear is not how we should handle this new wave of infection, but that is exactly what is happening.

Fear mongering about the virus has eclipsed any discussion of the impacts of the response. Why don’t we hear about: A) Since when do public health directives trump constitutionally protected civil rights? B) What are the negative health impacts of social isolation and economic disempowerment? C) Why on Earth would we agree to curtail our lives in response to the inadequacy of our health care system? Or D) How long do we think we can hide from nature?

This whole episode smells very fishy to me, and I think the draconian response to Covid-19 might be much more deadly than the virus itself. It’s about time we come to our senses and take a serious look at what we’ve let our fear of the pandemic do to ourselves, our communities and our society, because unless we can shake off the shock, face the fear, and reclaim our rights as citizens, including our right to make our own decisions about our own health, those rights may well disappear forever.

A Meeting About “the Greenrush”

I attended the “Greenrush” meeting Beginnings in Briceland. It turned out to be a great opportunity to see your neighbors, meet some government officials, and watch four hours of your life evaporate away. The Civil Liberties Monitoring Project hosted the meeting to air complaints about the expansion of mega-grow pot plantations in Southern Humboldt, and because those folks up in Bridgeville got to have a meeting about it, so we had to have one too.

Of course, the mega-grow plantation owners didn’t come to the meeting. They didn’t send a manager, or even a spokesperson. They were too busy growing pot, and making money, to care. Instead, it was all the people who have been complaining about them, including yours truly, as well as 2^nd District Supervisor Estelle Fennell, Undersheriff Honsal from the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Department, Adona White of the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board, Jane Arnold from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, and Senior Planner from the Humboldt County Planning Dept, Steve Lazar.

It’s still weird to hear pot growers demanding stricter enforcement and more surveillance, but that’s what I heard. People were outraged that the Sheriff wasn’t busting these giant grows we can all see on Google Earth, when they used to look at every ridge in the county, every year, with a magnifying glass and a fine-toothed comb, pulling-up every single pot plant they saw. Undersheriff Honsel told us that since the Feds stopped picking up the tab, the Sheriff doesn’t do much marijuana eradication anymore.

Instead, Honsel referred us to the people sitting at the table beside him, Adona White from NCRWQCB, Jane Arnold from Fish and Wildlife, and Steve Lazar from the Planning Dept, and told us that they would lead the enforcement of the new regulations. All of the people from the various state and county agencies kept telling us, “We’d love to bust these bad guys, but we need you to file complaints against them first. Then we’ll send them a letter.”

“Oh great, a letter.” we all thought. Our neighbors carry machine guns and run international organized crime syndicates, and you are going to send them a letter. We know how mobsters work. Mobsters bribe public officials, but they kill informants. All of our state and county agencies would love to start negotiating with these new “clients,” if they haven’t already, and they’re happy to do it over our dead bodies. They can’t wait to try out these new shakedowns, I mean “regulations,” and they love to let the public do their legwork.

In order to make sense of this whole legalization process, you need to understand what politicians mean when they talk about “a well-regulated industry.” They don’t mean “regulated in such a way as to protect the environment, provide workers with a safe workplace, and insure regional economic stability.” When a government official talks about “a well regulated industry” he or she means that all of the bribes and payoffs that used to get paid under the table, have now been institutionalized as above-board fees and penalties.

 

As the spectre of legalization threatened to expose the corruption at the core of our local economy, the Board of Supervisors worked furiously fast to codify new licensing and fee structures to keep the economic ball rolling. Because Humboldt County acted so quickly to adopt these new regulations, big growers everywhere now know that they can grow big here, and if the county comes after them, they’ll send a letter, instead of 60 trigger-happy cops.

These new regulations have made Humboldt County look appetizing to a whole new category of speculators, gamblers, and weasels working both sides of the law. They pay ridiculous prices for real estate and then totally blow it up with clear-cuts, massive water-sucking light-dep operations, loud generators, bright lights and too much truck traffic. That’s what we mean by “Greenrush.”

The forest has become an unregulated industrial zone as operators race to suck the last gulps from the teat of prohibition while they position themselves to come out on top in the legal market. The stakes are high. No pun intended. The competition for domination of the emerging legal cannabis market is fierce, and Humboldt County has become the battlefield.

That’s why it looks like a war zone around here. Our hillsides are cratered by pot plants instead of bomb blasts, massive convoys of dump trucks, cement mixers and earth-moving equipment crisscross our watersheds while desperate refugees survive in make-shift camps. The War on Drugs has given us all PTSD, and now that the government has finally conceded defeat, growers have gone on the offensive, and they’re fighting each other for market-share. This last battle in the War on Drugs may be the most deadly yet for Humboldt County.

At the meeting, they told us that they can only work with the growers who want to come into compliance. At the moment, about 2% of cannabis growers are actively working towards compliance, which means that about 98% of the marijuana growers in Humboldt County continue to supply a robust nationwide black market that doesn’t take names, ask for licenses or collect taxes. Undersheriff Honsell told us that most Humboldt County growers grow for the black market because: “That’s where the money is.” Duh!

Essentially, they told us that as long as the black market for marijuana remains profitable, we should expect the unregulated destruction in the forest to continue, and accelerate. In the meantime, the Board of Supervisors has proposed a new excise tax on every licensed pound of legally compliant medical cannabis, just to make sure that those cut-and-run greenrushers get a little more time to plunder the forest, while licensed legal growers pick up the tab.

They told us to be patient. In five years or so, this will all be over. By then, everyone will be in compliance and there won’t be any more black market. That’s what they told us. They didn’t bother to tell us that all of the salmon would be dead in five years, along with the local cottage cannabis industry, poof, gone, extinct forever. They didn’t tell us that real estate agents are getting fat as ticks off of this ruse, right now, by inviting every drug dealer in the country to come here to ruin the community, saw down the forest and suck the rivers dry. “Please be patient,” they said. “In five years, it will all be over.”

Yeah, that’s what we’re afraid of.

Choice and Change in Humboldt County

People talk about homelessness as though it were a choice. How many times have you heard someone say, “If that’s how they choose to live…” when talking about homeless people? What a ludicrous idea! Homelessness happens to people. They don’t aspire to it. They don’t plan it, and few are well prepared for it when it happens to them. People don’t choose homelessness. Homelessness is what happens to people who run out of options.

On the other hand, people do choose to become middle-class. The aspiration to become middle-class is so pervasive that it has acquired a nickname. We call it the American Dream. Yes, people choose to become middle-class. They aspire to join the middle-class. They work to achieve middle-class status, and even after they’ve established themselves within the middle-class, they never quite feel middle-class enough.

A lot of people choose to live a middle-class lifestyle, and it’s a choice most people make without giving it a lot of thought. It’s an expensive choice. The middle-class lifestyle consumes people’s lives as greedily as it consumes the earth’s resources. The middle-class lifestyle doesn’t happen by accident. It takes dedication and lifelong commitment to join the ranks of the middle-class.

At the same time, the middle-class lifestyle has a very poor record of making people happy. As anyone raised in a middle-class home can tell you, the middle-class lifestyle ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. Still, people throw themselves at the middle-class, like proverbial lemmings over a cliff. Even real lemmings aren’t that stupid. What gives?

You see, most people don’t choose a middle-class lifestyle because it looks particularly attractive. Most people choose to become middle-class because the prospect of homelessness frightens them so much. In this way, the middle-class are a lot like Christians, who abstain from earthly pleasures, not so much because they dream of someday flying through the clouds playing a harp, but because they fear the fires of Hell.

This kind of fear grows into resentment. In the same way that deeply frustrated Christians vent their resentment at gay people and women seeking abortions, the middle-class vent their resentment at the poor and homeless. In both cases it’s a gross display of stupidity, gullibility and cowardice aimed at the most vulnerable. Like Christians, the middle-class have been frightened into believing a fairy tale that controls their lives and makes them resentful of non-believers.

No one forces them to become middle-class. I’m sure they feel a lot of pressure from family and friends, not to mention the media, and society at large. Even the government tries to enforce a middle-class lifestyle through policy, sanction, and ordinance. However, the decision to pursue a middle-class lifestyle remains a personal choice, and one that can only be realized through dedication and hard work. Still, it’s a choice most people make without much serious thought.

We know that most of the serious crises we face today, like global climate change, habitat loss and the extinction crisis, result directly from too many people choosing a conventional American middle-class lifestyle. From a scientific perspective, it seems clear that the single biggest threat to our long-term survival, is our global infatuation with becoming middle-class. If we actually thought about it, we’d realize what a destructive, high-maintenance, low-satisfaction lifestyle the middle-class have chosen. Few of us would eagerly repeat their mistakes. But instead of thinking, we blindly perpetuate a culture of fear and oppression that serves only the super-rich, while it pushes us all relentlessly towards extinction.

Who do we blame for this? Invariably, we blame the poor. We blame the poor for not pulling their weight. We blame the poor for frightening children, driving off tourists, blocking sidewalks, and especially for not going away. Then, when they finally crack, under the pressure of poverty, lack of sleep, poor diet, constant harassment and social isolation, we blame their poverty on mental illness. How does this make sense?

If you ask me, I say, “Blame the middle-class.” Blame the sniveling cowards who turned their backs on humanity and stuck their tongues deep into the rectum of the super-rich, just for the chance to spend the future, today. Blame the middle-class for their greed, stupidity, and cowardice. Blame them for their choices, because the choices were all theirs to make.

Whether it was their lack of imagination, their gullibility, or their infatuation with bright shiny objects that lead middle-class people to make the dreadful decisions that define their lives and shape our world, ultimately, blaming people doesn’t solve the problem. To solve this problem, people have to learn to live differently.

I realize that you’ve heard this before. “Create a sustainable lifestyle” has been a mantra of environmental organizations for decades, environmental groups that rely mainly on the middle-class
for their support. Still, if we manage to survive this century as a species, it won’t be because we developed some new clean energy source, it will be because we learned to live differently.

Do you remember that part of our Humboldt County heritage? You’ve seen the experimental houses, the strawbale, cobb, ferro-cement, and wattle-and-daub buildings, the yurts, tepees, wikiups, and benders, the domes, tree-houses, house-trees, and the thousands of funky, idiosyncratic little wooden dwellings that grace our Humboldt County hillsides. Those houses exist because a lot of people came to Humboldt County to experiment with different ways of living, not to become middle-class yuppies by growing dope.

We’ve seen how these experiments pay off economically. The Solar Living Center in Hopland, and the Schottz energy lab in Arcata come to mind immediately, as examples of how a modest cultural experiment can catalyze change and create real economic opportunities.

We have a long history of experimental, owner-built housing in Humboldt County. We need housing now more than ever, and we need housing that works for people, rather than vice-versa. We need to learn to live differently, and few things reflect the way we live more than the homes we live in.

Here in Humboldt County, we have the opportunity to take a humane approach to our housing shortage, and open a door to the future, or not. People need a place to live. We can continue to deny our neighbors the dignity of privacy and a place to escape the elements, or we can create the kind of cultural incubator that solves problems, sets trends, and creates the economic opportunities of the future.

Class War against the poor will never succeed, and the middle-class will never be happy with what they have. We need to find another way to live, and if we want to know what that looks like, we need to allow the people who need it the most, an opportunity to build it for themselves.