These are “interesting” times. And I haven’t seen much coming forth from the Resilience community lately. Interesting times are when we should look to that community most closely, I think. So, in an attempt to replace the depressing with the pro-active, even the Polyanna-ish if only as a catalyst, I’m going to set a little dish of . . . well, something . . . on the table to see if anyone can be enticed.

All this talk of reforming the Democratic Party (while the present leadership is still in place and not about to step aside graciously), or taking over the Green Party (which has failed miserably in its every outing and has its own leadership that may not want to just hand the reins over to outsiders), or creating a new political party with all the hurdles that that task entails – and just when and how did we think we could accomplish that in the four years we have until the next presidential election? – may be missing an opportunity, or at least one dimension of where our efforts might be directed.

As there is enough on this planet to enable everyone to have a rewarding and comfortable life, but as we also see some covet what others need, see some insist on grabbing it all for themselves, we are talking about wresting power from those who have it, while that power they have enables them to resist anyone’s wresting anything valuable from them. But what if we are thinking about this wrong, thinking in their brutal terms instead of the ones we need. What if we don’t have a chance to wrest power from them, but rather need to drain power from them? Why are we talking about parties at all if the party hierarchies are what got us where we are now in the first place? What if we were to delegitimize the parties by simply considering them to have no legitimacy and withdrawing our support and consent altogether?

Yeah, I realize that opens the door for the powers that be to do all kinds of nasty stuff to all of us, crippling our health and healthcare and social security, sending more of us into more wars, destroying the planet through more resource extraction, but they’re doing that anyway, just maybe slightly more cosmetically for the moment, and are not going to stop just ‘cuz we decide to cobble together a fledgling political party that they can stomp like a bug.

This is not a new idea at all, but what if some of us at this site were to concentrate again, at this juncture, on starting a movement and not a political party? What if, at the most granular local level, we put our heads together to create a network of people who build small things, very manageable improvements, of a local impact in every community here (and abroad?) that incrementally, collectively, make up a bigger impact. Yes, I said it: incrementally, because short of revolution we can’t replace the system overnight, and collectively, because it is the aggregate of innumerable local changes that constitutes larger change. We would not be the glacier that dramatically scoops valleys from between mountains – those walls of ice are the big parties, the nation-states, and their armies and militarized police forces. We would be the grains of darker dust and pebbles dotting the ice surface or the path the glacier aims to take that absorb the sun’s rays and warm and melt the glacier until it’s gone. I’m asking, what if we were to become the climate change?

We’ve seen something like this already, with Occupy. And yes, we’ve seen it brutally crushed by the big-party powers that be, too, but that is because the Occupiers of Zucotti Park and other sites overtly opposed the powers that be. And those with the power still have all the tools and resources to crush any such movement again – and they’d use them again in a heartbeat, whether they’re conservatives or liberals. I’m suggesting, though, that we don’t oppose, but replace, the power. We drain the power until the power is us. Occupy (in which many among us participated) was a step, a most valuable and needed step, an ancestor, toward something more fundamental and more effective.

I propose we each imagine one thing that will improve our communities, every community, or tie one community to another in a mutually beneficial way, and we implement that small thing, individually or in small groups. We start a food co-op. We swap books or computer skills with others in our neighborhoods. We share our abilities – teaching, programming, doctoring, lawyering, building – helping someone else with something we can do and receiving from them something they can do. We take a lesson from the Amish: we come together to “raise barns” for each other, everyone contributing knowledge and skills or labor or lunches to achieve tasks that would be beyond an individual or single family. We steer excess resources to shelters or marginalized or remote families that are now receiving nothing. We help someone, somewhere, get a necessity that has been denied them. We do it on every street, in every town, the smaller the better. We think granular. We think in tiny steps, many little momentary actions. We do it more than we each do presently; we do it as part of a collectively planned endeavor.

At the same time, we starve the Powers That Be. We abandon the consumerist society that made them wealthy and powerful. We seek only what we genuinely need, and we get it from those who share our mission and philosophy. We spurn the latest and most special whatever that the Powers That Be have manufactured for us to buy. But we produce what they and their families want: foods, art, landscapes, even the bricks for their walled communities. Let them compete with each other for status, as we gradually, quietly, pull tiny increments of their wealth away to more beneficial purposes. We probably can’t stop their plunder of the resources in the current and forthcoming administrations, but we can make that plunder effectively worthless to them.

Above all, with each benefit we provide to someone, each bit of good will that our actions accrue, we build a network of mutuality, of allies. Those doing the good will acquire new skills and support along the way. We wonder where the next generation of leaders will come from, when the neoliberal Democrats have been so intent on concentrating rewards at the top. This is where those new leaders arise.

All of this would come about almost invisibly. There’d be no riots or marches. No armies. No mega-factories or industrial farms. No “disruptions” of the stock market – their own greed will produce those. Even at the simple level of taxation, the change would be so small – with benefits that cannot be taxed – as to be unremarkable. The change will be personal, at the individual-to-individual level, adding up to something more significant. It would be an upwelling, as of a richer, deeper, higher soil level after years and years of applying thin layers of compost.

If runaway climate change will kill us all, it doesn’t matter what we do now. It’ll all be for naught. But if there is any chance we will survive the circumstances the Powers That Be insist on creating for us, we need a plan. We likely won’t change the System through the structures that enable it to perform poorly for us. Those reins of power are always going to be denied to us. And we, frankly, at c99p, won’t be the violent Revolution. Others will take up Second Amendment remedies or sabotage of the System. But when this System fails, as it seems inevitable it will, probably soon but not soon enough, or when a Revolution overturns the status quo and devolves into squabbles of its own, this network we would create will be the only cohesive, effective, and respected entity to receive the reins of power, if power is to be of any use at that time. We’d be the only ones trusted to have everyone’s survival and comfort in mind.

I said this patchwork of thought is not a new idea, not a single piece of it, and it isn’t. It may be gravely inadequate, too. I present it here not because I think I’ve worked anything out, but to get us thinking about more than one path at this moment of political turmoil, to solicit more discussion from others also wondering what are our next steps. So have at it.
Others have thought about this before me, before us. Long before. And certainly better than I am doing. But this is one simple consideration: if we don’t have power, where will we get it? And should anyone get it?

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.