pervasive indoctrination April 18, 2008

From an article about the Yearning for Zion child abuse case:
“An expert in children in cults testified Friday that while the teen girls believed they were marrying out of free choice, it’s a choice based on lessons they’ve had from birth.”

Of course, ALL of us who believe we have free choice are also operating based on assumptions/lessons we’ve learned since birth… how is this different?

Some lessons learned in the “cult” of America:
- a nuclear family comprised of a monogamous couple is right and moral

- independence = success: trusting other people is foolish, and asking for help is a sign of weakness

- food comes from the grocery store, and medicine comes from the doctor

I don’t mean to pose this question as a way of justifying whatever has been happening in that community of people (which currently seems unknown and unable to be judged until more information comes out) – I’m just using it to highlight our own indoctrination, which often goes unacknowledged (this is the sociology geek in me, still alive despite my choice to leave grad school).

November 22, 2006

A friend just wrote in response to a depressed and distressed message I sent her. In her short note, she asked:

> tell me what’s in your heart right now that you
> don’t want to see or know! and what is keeping you
> going and sustaining you?

I replied:

Thanks for asking the great questions. What’s true for me that I don’t want to see? I’m changing… my identity as communard, radical lifestyle activist, and polyamorous multi-lovered independent spirit has diffused away, and I feel mainstream and uninteresting, unchallenging to a crazy system. I feel ineffective and unimportant, like my life is just becoming a part of the Machine. I’ve lost a sense of what I offer the world… I’ve lost a sense of purpose and passion. I don’t have a driving motivation behind what I do everyday… I just do it because I’m “supposed” to. This is the life I judged in other people from my lofty seat at Twin Oaks, where my life was grand and important and fulfilling a larger purpose. Now I’m judging my own life from that perspective, and I hate it. AND, the hardest part is that I don’t see a path towards something different, except back to TO, which isn’t a possibility as long as I’m with Free.

These are the thoughts that drag me down. What sustains me? Coming back to the belief that my purpose in the world is to share love and offer the experience of love to whoever I come in contact with. Remembering that I have the capacity to be open and loving whenever I choose it. Writing in my journal and working with tarot helps me remember, and dancing, and sitting in meditation. Crying to Free helps sometimes, when he just listens, and when I feel his love I remember my own capacity to love.

thanks for asking… it helps to acknowledge both pieces.

love,
tickledspirit

September 5, 2006

I’m at school early this morning because I carpooled with Free, who was going to the ceremony for the kids’ first day of Waldorf school.  First grade and fourth grade — they’ve been homeschooled all their lives!  They’re both looking forward to it…

To balance the last post, I have to say that the one piece of grad school that I’m loving is teaching.  I’m a TA for SOC 101, and I get to lead three discussion sections of 20 students each.  I get to ask the questions I want them to consider, and so far, they actually answer!  I get to say “These are the institutions that have shaped your perception of the world, and this is your opportunity to examine their messages and CHOOSE if you want to continue to view the world through their filters.”  And they look, wide-eyed, back at me and nod slightly (or is that just my imagination?).  We were talking last week about the different institutions through which “society” determines the scope of our agency to act, and when they said “education,” I said “Here I am, enculturating you right now!”

I feel like I’m on the right path when I’m in a room with 20 students talking about culture.  I feel like I’m on a “less right” path when I’m sitting in my office for hours reading about research design and worrying if my office-mates are offended by my smell (I shower almost every day, and I’m adverse to masking my natural “human” smell because social norms tell me it’s not okay.  I’m CLEANER than the people who smear chemicals in their armpits everyday!  These are the things I tell myself when I get paranoid that the people in my office think I stink).  The one compromise I’ve made in the body smell department is to wear deoderant (Tom’s of Maine, of course) on Thursdays, the day I teach.  In the small cramped discussion rooms, I want my students to focus on what I’m saying, not on how I smell.  I thought about bringing it up in class, just acknowledging my reasons for not wearing deoderant, but I think it’s still a bit early in the semester for that deconstruction.  I’m sure it will come out eventually!  I’ve thought about researching and writing a paper on “the social construction of stink.”  I’ll keep you updated…

The main thing I think I need to remember is to not take any of this too seriously.  Find a gentle balance.  Enjoy myself, pursue my interests, and spend time with my partner and family.  We went hiking in the mountains this weekend, and though I had moments of guilt for the reading I needed to do and the papers I needed to grade, I was able to let it go and appreciate the grand beauty of the Shenandoahs.   Swimming naked at the base of a waterfall after a long hike puts grad school in a different perspective.

bridge building August 11, 2006

I just finished my second-to-last day of being a camp counselor. It’s been a long and exhausting journey, and I’m relieved to be at the end of it. I’m satisfied now, feeling like I’m on the road to accomplishing what I wanted: having a healthy and opening influence in the people’s lives… and today was the culmination of all of that work with the kids at camp.

Every Friday we have an event called “All Camp” that involves all of the campers and counselors in the entire camp. Each week, a team of 3-5 counselors are responsible for planning it, making it loosely related to the theme for the week. Past themes have been things like “Into the Wild,” “Musical Mayhem,” “Stars and Stripes” (for the 4th of July week), and “Disco Fever.” This week’s theme was “Express Yourself,” and I was on the committee for planning it. I arranged for several of my friends from Twin Oaks and Shannon Farm (another nearby community) to come out and teach juggling, poi, and “advanced hula hooping” to the older kids, and then perform for the entire camp. They came, they taught, they performed, and the camp was enthralled.

What I love about today’s event is that the kids got to experience “alternative” type people in their own comfortable environment. It was a mixture of the new and the normal, which I think helps folks open themselves more to new experiences. The kids got to work with and learn from talented, beautiful, powerful women who didn’t wear makeup or shave their armpits. No one made a big deal about it, it was just a subtle exposure to people doing things differently, and it so happens that these different people are also very very cool and taught the kids some very cool things.

The metaphor in my mind is that all summer I’ve been building a bridge between the camp culture and the culture of places like Twin Oaks where collaboration, personal responsibility, communication, and creativity are of primary importance. At camp, hierarchy and the need for control seem to take precedence over most other things. Today the kids got a chance to choose their own activities, take responsibility for themselves (they left their assigned groups and counselors that they’ve been with all week), and challenge themselves in new creative endeavors.

The camp directors were worried about there not being enough control of the groups, worried about the potential for chaos. I was so frustrated yesterday when we turned in our All Camp plan, and one of the directors started telling me all of her concerns. I wanted to tell her, “Just trust the kids — give them the opportunity to be resonsible and they will be! When you expect them to act up, they will, because you don’t give them the chance to take responsibility for themselves.” Instead, I said “I understand your concerns… I’ll do what I can.” After All Camp ended today, I felt totally validated (though of course, my boss didn’t say any kind of congratulations — I hate having a boss! It’s such a weird power dynamic…)

Ah, back to the bridge metaphor. l feel like I’ve been building this bridge all summer, sharing myself and my ideas with the other counselors and the kids. Not being overtly “different”, just authentic in who I am. (Except for last night at the end-of-summer staff dinner, when the three progressive women counselors ended up sitting with the most conservative male counselor on staff — I was more overt and passionate about my beliefs than I’ve been in awhile!). So, the bridge — building slowly, step by step, and today I opened the bridge, and the kids and staff got to take a peek into this other culture by experiencing more than me as an individual… by experiencing and observing some of the culture itself. Multiple people communicating deeply, loving openly (lots of hugs), and having confidence in their natural bodies. Seeds have now been planted…

And next week, some of the high school campers are going on a field trip to Twin Oaks… crossing the bridge.

November 10, 2005

For the past few months I’ve been co-editing a column for a new DC paper,  The Washington Spark.  I work with my friend  Sky Blue (the name his parents actually gave him!) on a column called “Beyond the Box”, which focuses on radical and alternative lifestyle possibilities.  So far, we’ve covered the Farm commune, car co-ops, Network for New Culture, Burning Man, and support work for Katrina victims being done by folks from the Rainbow Gathering.

Sky recently wrote a message to the editors’ email list, about the struggles of working on a cooperative project like the Spark.  It’s an independent, volunteer-based paper, and each month we struggle with everyone getting things in on time and following the requests of the managers for word count, photos, and other details.  I thought Sky’s email was an insightful reflection on what it takes to work cooperatively, and I thought you all might enjoy it, too.

—–
The challenges we face with the Spark I think are highlighted by the fact that news media is typically run in a highly hierarchical manner and working cooperatively is pretty far removed from what most people are used to.

The way the Spark is structured and being runs puts a huge amount of responsibility and grants a huge amount of autonomy to the people working on the project, in particular the column editors.  This is of course a double-edged sword.  In my experience many if not most people perform better under deadlines and supervision.  Left to our own devices we tend to put things off till the last minute.  I tend to think of this as largely due to social conditioning.  Being told what to do and when to do it by is what we’re used to.  We tend to need something motivating us.  Making personal choices and commitments and sticking to them, especially when there are no consequences like being fired, getting a poor grade, being evicted because you didn’t pay the rent, having your boy/girlfriend angry at you, is not something we’re particularly practiced at.

The Spark presents us with a great challenge.  Given that the work is volunteer we all must be starting from a place of idealistic belief, passion, or some other perspective or attitude that motivated us to even volunteer in the first place.  But looked at in certain ways the project is non-essential, neither to our lives nor the lives of others.  This can be argued philosophically but it is true from the perspective of our practical and visceral experience.  The only bad thing that’s going to happen if I don’t get my column in on time is that the issue might be late and some people might be inconvenienced.  This is not much skin off my nose. But in that perspective is the death of cooperative group endeavors and activist endeavors that have a more creative and less tangible
impact on the world.

If we fail to have a strong sense of empathy and compassion for the people whom we are inconveniencing by not following through on what we said we would do we are missing a key aspect of the motivation that will make success possible.  Again, lack of follow-through has little in the way of adverse effect on our personal lives. We need to take on a sense of ownership, collective ownership.  If we don’t see our role, however small it may be, as being crucial to the success of the project then the people who care more about the project and are more committed to it will end up picking up whatever pieces gets dropped.  This is a great recipe for burn-out, martyrdom, and resentment.

In terms of the creative and less tangible aspect of the Spark, I would say that there are easily measurable results produced by the paper.  38 pages, 30,000 copies, and over 500 distribution points on a monthly basis is no small accomplishment.  But what impact does that actually have?  We have various anecdotal experiences of people saying great things, and the recurrence of advertisers is a good indication as is the rate at which the paper is picked up from the distribution points.  But that’s still not much.  What I think is really required here to give us the motivation to be solid on producing issues is a sense of long-term vision and a leap of faith.  The vision has to do with the transforming or replacing of the mainstream institutions providing various services with those based on a vision of a sustainable, peaceful, and socially and economically just human society.  Providing viable alternatives to all mainstream institutions, media being a key example, is crucial to true revolution.  The leap of faith has to do with the fact that we can’t really say whether what we’re doing is really helping to change the world for the better, we just have to follow our hearts and trust ourselves that we’re doing the best that we know how at this point and that we’ll continue to learn and change and do even better.  This is the long-haul not the quick fix version of revolution.

What a lot of this boils down to as well are issues of ethics and integrity, primarily in the realm of doing what we said we would do.  If we aren’t prepared to do what we said we would do we need to not make those promises.  So while the agreement of what we’re saying we’re going to do is made with others, in the context of a cooperative group endeavor, the commitment to follow-through must based within ourselves.  We must make it matter to ourselves because no one else is going to make us do it.  And this is what we want isn’t it?  We want to be living in a cooperative, non-heirarchical society right? This is an opportunity to make that happen.

- Sky Blue, Nov 2005

lessons from Black Rock City September 11, 2005

I got home from Burning Man on Wednesday, and since then I’ve been struggling with trying to describe the experience to people who have never been.  It’s a bit like trying to describe what the color orange sounds like — we just don’t have the vocabulary.

I stayed up last night until the wee hours before sunrise, trying to write an article about it for the Washington Spark, an indymedia newspaper based in DC.  The deadline was this morning, and I finally got to a place of having a reasonable, though nowhere near comprehensive description of a small piece of the experience.  I’ll post it here, and write more freeflow about it later as I’m inspired.

The Burning Man Festival: A City of Possibility

The inspirational directive to “dance as if nobody’s watching” is elegant, though it might be more appropriate to say, “dance as if nobody cares”.  In the desert of Nevada for one week each year, it’s true.  As long as you’re dancing (or expressing yourself however you feel inspired), no one cares what it looks like.

Next year marks the 20th summer of the Burning Man festival, a celebration of raw creative expression and temporary autonomous community during the week before Labor Day.  For one week, a city of tents, RVs, and geodeisic domes is created by over 40,000 people on an ancient lakebed (the “playa”).  No money is exchanged; people pack in their own supplies, and share. The result is a mix between a frat party, a commune, a playground, and an art museum.

Collective camps make up the bulk of the Burning Man experience.  Groups of participants organize beforehand to offer elaborate setups of food, space, information, and experiences to share with the rest of the city.  Some of my favorite offerings from camps included the roller disco, homebrewed root beer, daily yoga sessions, a giant teetertotter, S&M workshops and bondage lessons, the Crappiest Lemonade Stand Ever (make your own out of powdered gatorade and water while the camp hosts sit back and watch), and aerial silk dancing lessons and performances.  We passed by one camp on our bikes where we were accosted with invitations to come in and join a party of exotic drinks and grilled cheese sandwiches.

Beyond Black Rock City (the unifying name for the temporary civic area) lies the open playa, which over the course of the week becomes spotted with interactive, experiential works of art.  From giant statues to quirky installations,  over 150 artistic expressions are scattered across the desert carpet.  Anyone is welcome to display a piece of art, and some artists receive grants from the festival in order to finance their creations.

The real power of the experience for me was in the openness and essential limitlessness of the event. There’s no established program; things only happen when someone decides to make them happen.  There’s no established social rules about acceptable behavior, beyond a basic value of civic responsibility.

Cultural rules give us a sense of what to expect, providing social safety which is at the same time comforting and limiting.  Traffic rules provide smooth flow with other travellers.  But when people are for the most part on foot or on bicycles, interactions can be negotiated in the moment.  For the power of direct engagement with other people, I’m willing to accept a few near-misses and ungraceful swerves, at least for a week.  For one week of freedom from expectation, it’s worth it to put the extra energy into intentional navigation of every interaction.  This is the power of this temporary autonomous zone, where we can choose to make this daring and ineffecient tradeoff for a limited amount of time.

Burning Man isn’t a model for a sustainable alternative society.  Instead, it offers an experience of new possibilities, a look at what lies beyond our normal limits of experience and expression.  The lessons of Burning Man are about empowering the individual, with the intention of creating a community based on both self-reliance and trust of others.  Individuals expressing themselves fully, in needs, desires, thoughts, and fears, create a strong base for a powerful collective.  I experienced this in the final days of the festival, once I trusted myself more in seeking out what I really wanted.  I got silly with strangers.  I explored new art forms.  I walked in solitude across the vast playa on a self-directed mission to pick up scattered trash.  I asked questions that seemed irrelevant, gave away random gifts from my bag, rode my bicycle naked, and offered to assist a struggling juggler.

Coming back into larger society, I want to carry these lessons with me.  If I see someone doing something interesting, I can ask them to teach me.  If I see something that needs to be done, I can do it.  If I’m lonely, I can find someone to play with me.  If I’m curious, I can step forward and experience more.

Lifestyle Activism August 3, 2005

I just filled out this brief survey about activism for someone’s senior thesis, and I figured I’d post my response here.  Enjoy!

Hi there.
I got this survey through the “anarchist academics” listserve I’m on.  I actually wrote my undergrad thesis (sociology) on activism, too!  It was mostly focused on student activism and determining motivation.  I loved working on it — I wish you a grand journey in your exploration!> 1. How do you identify yourself as an activist? i.e. What “kind” of
> activist are you?
I’m a “lifestyle activist.”  I put my energy towards exploring possibilities and bringing them into reality in the world, in my life.  I live in an intentional community (commune) of 100 people where we grow our own food and sustain our lives through our collective work.  We’re constantly having to explore the challenge of how to work together and make decisions together without hierarchical power structures.  We’re effectively a “laboratory” for creating effective tools for communication and sharing.A large part of my activism is sharing this possibility with other people.  I travel to colleges and conferences to facilitate workshops and classes about life in community, and I write a periodic blog about my experience here.  When I talk about the reality of our lives here, I help open people to the idea that a very different world is possible.  And it’s not just that communal living is the way to go — if this is possible, this way of living that is so far beyond what most people think of as real, if THIS is possible, then so much else is possible too.

> 2. Do you think the world can change for the better? Please explain your
> answer in 100 words or less.

People make choices based on what they think they know and what they fear.  When people are aware of more possibility and give less power to their fears, they’ll make choices that will change the world “for the better”, because they’ll be actively engaged in intentionally creating the world they want.  This is a neverending process of change — we aren’t going to reach a perfect utopia where we have it all figured out and don’t need to change anything else, because that would become stagnant, passive, and unintentional (leading to the need for more change!).

> 3. What three books (title & author) have most influenced your worldview
> as an activist?

Living My Life, the autobiography of Emma Goldman
Days of War, Nights of Love (CrimeThInc)
Hope for the Flowers (Trina Paulus)

enjoy your work!
tickledspirit

Making the Matrix My Own May 4, 2005

Tonight I played, and I had a grand time.

So, the Matrix.  I loved the first movie.  I loved the idea of choosing raw, real Life over manipulated, manufactured experience.  I loved all of the wild bodily contortions and utter defiance of the “laws” of gravity and physics.  I loved the strong woman character who didn’t have long flowing hair and enormous breasts.  I cringed at the extreme violence, and the rest outweighed it.

I first saw the movie here on the commune a few years ago, with a whole group of Matrix-loving communards.  One of those was Valerie, a close friend of mine with whom I’ve had several exciting adventures (including an 18 hour roadtrip to Iowa — yeehaw!).  She and I have a similar love for feminism, dancing, chocolate, Madonna, and cultural revolution (not in that order).  We also love the Matrix.  We recently realized that neither of us had seen the third movie, so we decided to make a date to watch it together.  We both had seen the second one, and neither of us were particularly thrilled with it (one of the reasons why we hadn’t yet bothered to watch the third).  We figured it was time to complete the Matrix experience, so we set aside tonight to be the night and Valerie put in a TOR (a request to the daily “town tripper” to run any errand) for the DVD.

We planned on borrowing someone’s laptop to watch it  (we have several — 3? — actual DVD players hooked up to tv’s, but they were all signed out for the night).  Last night, I mentioned my  upcoming date to one of my lovers, an ex-member who lives in the nearby city of Charlottesville , and he suggested bringing the movie over to his place and watching it on the (gasp) wide screen television!  This morning I proposed it to Valerie, and we studied the vehicle log and found that someone else already had a car going in to Cville tonight and was planning to stay late.  We checked in with her and decided to carpool (it’s about a 45 min drive).

About 10 minutes before we had arranged to leave, I had a stroke of brilliance.  I ran up to Commie Clothes (our free thrift store) and found tight black pants and a tight black strappy tank top and a (gasp again!) long black leather jacket.  I grabbed them all, strode over to the office, grabbed Valerie and dragged her back up to “Commie” to find a similar outfit for her.  She’s very thin, and we were despairing about finding pants to fit her when suddenly I reached into the rack of pants and pulled out the perfect stretchy tight sexy black pants (how many times can I use the word “pants in one sentence?  What else can you call them?), which fit her deliciously.  And believe it or not, we found another long black leather jacket.  Commie Clothes is a treasure trove for creative costumes.

While we were wating for the other carpoolers to gather, we practiced our Matrix moves in the parking lot, jumping and spinning and cocking our arms at weird Fosse angles, swirling our leather jackets around dramatically.  When the other carpoolers showed up, we rolled over the hood of the car and jumped into the backseat.

The rest of the evening was more of the same.  When we showed up at Free’s place (yes, his name is Free), we Matrixed up to the front door and put on a show for him to let him know what he was in for.  We jumped around the living room and demonstrated how we could cut up the broccoli for dinner by throwing it in the air and chopping with many knives all at once.

Then we watched the movie, which wasn’t nearly as exciting as all the playing we were doing.  It was cheesy and violent and a too much of an extrapolation on the original concept of the first movie.  And still, we had a great time — lots of strong female characters, lots of non-white leading roles, and lots of wild body gymnastics.  And when the movie was over, we jumped and danced around some more to the music that played during the credits.

And then our ride came to pick us up, and we all drove back home (Valerie and I agreed that neither of us should drive, though, because of all the things we might attempt to do with the car).  We showed off our costumes to some people who were up late in the courtyard (who didn’t really get it), and then said goodnight.  I’m getting ready to head to bed, and I wanted to document my excitement before it diffused into the dreamworld.

All through the night, I felt a kind of freedom in the silliness of our costumes and antics.  Before we started the movie, we took Free’s car to the nearby grocery store to buy ice cream and popcorn.  I felt a relaxed excitement about going out in public in costume, and I loved that feeling of  “I’m living my life, having fun, being silly” without the fear or worry of other people thinking I’m weird.  That fear has played fairly big for me at other times in my life, and I think it’s really been my time at Twin Oaks that’s helped me to relax out of it.   I guess that by choosing to live on the commune, I have the experience of doing something that I really believe in despite the judgement of other people, and I’ve discovered that that’s okay.  I can handle that judgement; I can handle being thought of as weird.  So, I can give myself even more flexibility in that and dress up in costume and go to the grocery store and delight in dancing in the parking lot.  Another piece of it, I think, is that on the commune I have the experience of being honored as a whole, complex person.  When people know so much of Who I Am, doing “weird” things doesn’t automatically give me a “weird” label or devalue who I am; it just adds to the complexity that people already know.  And as a person  who has throughout my life highly valued what other people think of me (too much, oftentimes), I find abundant freedom in feeling known for more than just labels attributed in fleeting interactions.  I stop worrying constantly about what people think of me because of the look I just gave them or what I’m wearing, and I begin to focus more on the larger question of Who I Am, who I want to be, and how I want to engage with other people.

I know it’s been awhile since I’ve posted, and I’m hoping to get back into more regular posts.  It’s a bit difficult to find time to sit in front of a computer for very long lately, and I’m not complaining about that.  I have a whole queue of topics I want to write about… perhaps tomorrow (which is already today)….