Trying to change currently enclosed power structures, political processes and systems of information is futile. If we engage with these things, we give them credence. We accept enclosure.
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Instead, let’s evacuate and settle together on the common. Such a movement exists – apparent in a great diversity of skilled trade’s peoples’ green and egalitarian feeling and thinking.
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It is late – very late, and so every road we take will be through differing forms of tragedy. It is too late for painless transition. Our choice must be the best tragedy – where societies can remain a part of the ecologies, which sustain them.
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All our effects must shrink, which means that monetary systems and the casino of stocks, bonds and shares will cascade around us – bringing real tragedy. That is the tragedy we must embrace. All others are far, far worse.
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Don’t forget, we step into darkness towards a light on the other side. We walk towards delight. We’ll not find delight without a passage through the dark. New Year’s Day 2020 is dark. Embrace it. We made it. It is ours. Past ways of life made 2020. Now we must end them. Present action creates the future.
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Until now, we have asked others to create a future for us. We have asked, Tesco, Amazon, BP, British Airways, Nissan and all the rest to make our future. We have paid them to do so. We have commanded them to do so. Without our spending and without our working hours they could not exist. Jeff Bezos did not create Amazon – we did. We are the great mind, or if you like, the complex invisible hand behind it all – the expanding GDP, the crashing ecologies, the extreme poverty, the extreme wealth…
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We are the great, subconscious, comfortable, egalitarian master mind of it all.
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Wake up. Be conscious.
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We have ordered soil to vanish beneath the plants and animals, which feed us, so that soon, we cannot be fed.
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We have demanded cheap labour manufacturing from opposite hemispheres so that our own skills have died, so that invisible poverty deepens and so that atmospheric CO.2 thickens in a life-stifling blanket.
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We have asked that unnecessary life be extinguished by pesticides, fungicides, herbicides and fire, so that social pleasures can thrive – foods and sports and so that eventually, all food, and all sport will be extinguished.
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As our own skills have died, we have demanded that our servants, Amazon and etc., use their own skills better to please us. We forget that Amazon and etc., have no skills, but those we provide. We refuse, preferring dependency – but we depend on empty air.
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We subscribe NGOs into existence, as our governmental lobbyists. We rely on their expertise. We sign their petitions. But NGOs have no expertise. Governments have no expertise. Where is expertise? We abandoned it.
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We march with Extinction Rebellion, demanding that governments and corporations change to please us, forgetting that it is we who must change. We made the corporation. We spent it into existence. Only we can unspend it. Extinction Rebellion is a consumerist movement. We must abandon consumerism.
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Ah! – but the School Strike is different. Children ask that their parents change. By all that’s holy, listen to them!
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Lead the children with sheltering arms into the darkness of collapsing infrastructures. Find the skills and tools to build human-sized settlements inside humanity’s ration of Earth. Let the birds sing. Gather at the piano, until the human song also belongs.
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