It's another chat episode as we take a break between deep dives and this week we explore in more depth some of the experiences Daniel has had in the organizing for his new work. It turns out there are important lessons to be learned for not just Daniel, but all of us even in his first few days on the job. David also shares his latest organizing work and explores some trends in the world around us.
Reflections on naming and shaming, community work, food justice and agricultural sustainability, the tipping point of a global future, community radio, rants, and more - this week we've got it all!
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(This is an automatically generated transcript and it sucks. We'll fix it soon!)
Thank you Alexey for this incredible transcript!!
[0:04] I’m David Torcivia.
[0:06] I’m Daniel Forkner.
[0:08] And this is Ashes Ashes, a show about systemic issues, cracks in civilization, collapse of the environment, and if we're unlucky the end of the world.
[0:18] But if we learn from all of this, maybe we can stop that. The world might be broken, but it doesn't have to be.
[Daniel reads from the book]
[0:28] I feel the need to address a rhetorical framework quotidian to our daily lives: violent sucky we-s. The inferred Trumpian we as pervasive as misogyny and black mold. This inferred we is not a we I want in my mouth. We the dominant, the still included, the not-yet oppressed. We the unchallenged male eagle of global NW, we with a freedom to cringe or pity or disdain those to whom the current tragedy is occurring. We whose credit cards are swiped without an angry sound. We who are not afraid to carry guns. We who choose our warlords. This reflex flipside we, the superioristic moderate left we is, I'd argue, also toxic. White urban wired educated first world we? People like us we? We who do not participate directly in violence that is committed in systematic ways to keep us comfortable and who therefore do not acknowledge or associate with the violence? I refute such we-ing. I suggest we replace it with we the implicated, we the complicit, we the orphans of oppressive biocide, we the granddaughters of extraction. We neighbors and creatures nearby the supply chain. We the most certainly impacted by the chemistry in our watersheds and therefore in immutable alliance with one another.
[1:59] Which brings me to they, the ill-defined the other. The befuddler, the misunderstanding, the bureaucrat, the corporate, the confounding other who has opposed the proceeding exclusive we. I wonder what role TED Talks have played in this habit? The script that says, “these days people are... revisionist, enclosed, forgetful, desensitized to violence, disconnected from their sexuality.” And provides then a succinct critique. I wish this TED way of being were a bit more embodied, connected to a commitment of action. Name your subject, who is doing the action? Who holds the cards? Who made the rules? Who is affected? Who is driving? Who is alongside? An amorphous blaming they won't cut it, not in these times of concentrating power and gangster politics, coalition-building, subtle sidestepping, subversion, subterfuge – all these tactics require a precise read on who exactly is causing the action and how. Contributing your own clarity of analysis is step one, committing to participate in the often muddy process beyond commentary is step two.
[3:20] Step one, a gentle and insistent naming of the subject, specifically in a way that clarifies and requires discipline, not vilifying or they-ing ruthlessly and without account. For instance, “they fucked up the bridge” becomes “the Municipality of Scottsburg, Oregon ran into a conflict with the State Highway Department over the recent construction project which leveraged federal funds from the stimulus package to enact major changes to the flow of traffic through the historic center; those charged with planning profoundly misunderstood and sadly compromised the beloved bridge at the center of town”. Especially in front of children, showing the discipline to identify the actors, factors, decisions, jurisdictions, and processes that lie behind governess decisions is the first step to reclaiming our agency in a democracy. I challenge myself and I challenge you: name the subject, name the object, learn what happened. And step two, use that learning to inform and design proposals for a saner way. This is the world we are in and the times we have together.
That was an excerpt from the introduction to The New Farmer’s Almanac, Volume IV by Severine Von Tscharner Fleming.
[4:50] Can I can I disagree with something there, Daniel? Am I allowed to do that? If you're opening a show with a quote, can I just like jump and say, “well,” is that allowed?
[4:59] I suppose it is, David, why don't you tell me what you disagree with?
[5:04] I like her point on naming the “they” and I think that's an important thing.
[5:10] People tend to just handwave and say that these forces are the things that are attacking us or they say, “it's these X number corporations that produce 71% of greenhouse gas emissions” or whatever, or it's, “it's those people over there that screwed us over or the CEOs.” There's always names and there's always addresses attached to these things, I think it is good to remember those things to point that out. I think when we're just waving our hand at a list of companies, and then you open up the companies and see that they're all actually like nationally run things that that are owned by like the state of China changes the meaning of that very much than when it's just an amorphous company. But at the same time, in her example in that text, when you list out the process of the zoning issue that messed up the bridge or whatever, you take away a lot of the urgency of the language in that process. It doesn't seem like something that needs to be fixed but it just seems like a mistake of zoning or the consequence of bureaucracy. And the way that you react to problems of that nature is with more of those tools of bureaucracy: zoning permits and stuff – and those are the kinds of solutions that take forever and never really paste over the actual core these problems, they are just more Band-Aids for symptoms that shift around, create new symptoms and a new problems in the process until, I think, emerging of those two things where you are using the language of urgency but with the definition of who caused this problem, and what is the core of that problem is an important thing to add for sure. You know this is the same type of thing that leads to that language in the news like officer-involved shooting when they just mean that a cop shot someone.
[6:55] Would that not be an example though of not naming and shaming by just saying, “someone died at the hands of police shooting” as opposed to “officer Bradley shot so and so in the back after they did nothing wrong?”
[7:09] Well, but it sounds like in her example that it would be more like “Officer Bradley was involved in a shooting that resulted in the death of Thomas whatever because of lack of training from the Department in their use of force scenarios” or something like that. And then we’ve very much shrunk the magnitude of this crime that is literally taking someone's life in this scenario, or if a bridge, it's quite possibly could be impacting people's safety or it could be a denying them some sort of economics, it could be hurting their job, taking away from their bottom line, putting into some sort of economic precarity. And so that urgency, once again, is gone. And there is a middle point here where it's, like I said, “officer Bradley gunned down – what was my example in it – Thomas, blah blah blah blah blah and you go from there.
[8:06] I think you might be a little nitpicky here, David, but I don't necessarily disagree with you, I think it's important to keep the urgency in the problems that were trying to solve. But I think you raise an interesting point because you mentioned the news, right, and I'll be interested to ask Severine who her target audience is when she's writing this. Because I know that she's extremely embedded in local communities and how to support local communities, especially around agricultural land and young farmers and this type of thing. And I wonder if there's a difference between a major news outlet reporting on something versus people talking amongst themselves about the problems in their communities, which I think is what this advice has more aimed towards.
[8:51] Well, that's actually part of the point that I take issue with. I think you're definitely right on that point, it’s talking to other farmers, other people in these who are used to dealing with things like CSAs or land trusts or whatever, whos very vision of the world is defined in these regulatory bureaucratic bodies that defined the organizations that they're utilizing to make the world a better place, don't get me wrong. But when your framework is aimed entirely around like a specific sort of mechanization of the process of interacting with people – like she did use in that bridge example or like you do in a CSA or a land trust or something – and you try and approach every single problem like that, you really limit your ability to see larger scope issues and to see outside of these mechanisms that the state or other individuals trying to deny you to utilize as a way to solve those problems, oftentimes solutions that are more effective, are more encompassing, are deeper and have been effective for thousands of years in some cases. But I mean, you're right, I am nitpicking on like a very brief quote from somebody I know very little about, who's doing a lot of good work, so maybe I should shut my mouth.
[9:58] Or how about we just transition from the theoretical to the real world? Because I read that quote because it in some way relates to what I'm doing in my day-to-day life, the new path that I'm on. And I wanted to kind of share with you two projects or organizations that I'm a part of going forward. An I just, I'm learning a lot about and I kind of want to talk about.
[10:26] So as listeners are aware, I just moved up to North Central Massachusetts and the transition has been wild. And I'm now working for two organizations. I have a semi full-time position through my AmeriCorps / TerraCorps position where I'm working with a local nonprofit that's focused on food justice.
[10:47] And we have this project. The organization before I came I've been working with a local community here pretty extensively and they've identified a number of problems. Which is: the residents of this town that we are targeting has no food, they live in a food desert. That's something we talked about in episode 14, I believe, Sweet Release. You know, people who just have no access to healthy food, right, their only option is a convenience store, right, where they can buy a bag of chips or some processed macaroni and cheese in a box. And so, what this organization is doing is building partnerships with people within this community to first, identify what's not working, what do people need and what do people want and how do we adapt the food system to serve their needs as opposed to asking them to adapt themselves to the food system, which is what leads to things like food deserts. And I went to one of these local community meetings a couple of days ago and I was blown away. I was just absolutely blown away because I feel like for the first time I'm a part of a community, you know, something we talk about on the show all the time: find a community, get involved in your community, work with people within your community. For the very first time, I feel like I'm around people who embody that perspective and are working within that framework. So we go to this community meeting, it's at a senior center in a nearby town and it's this steering committee that has been made up of people from the local hospital, people from the local schools, people from the local YMCA – all these like different groups of people that have different ties into the community who are all invested in the health outcomes of themselves and the people that live next to them. And, first of all, it's all women. Everyone there is a woman except me and one of my colleagues who is kind of in a similar role as me. And everyone is just going around the room, they're saying: look, this is what we've identified that we need. And kind of like what Severine was talking about in that excerpt, they are literally identifying the barriers and challenges in their community and naming names. They're saying: *look, this grocery store down the road knows that we live in a food desert and they are price gouging. So this is a region that has one of the lowest incomes in the whole state* yet the grocery store, the only available grocery store has the highest prices in the entire state. And it is very clear that they're monopolizing the region and forcing poor residents to pay way more than they should just to get healthy food.
[13:28] And so they're talking about that and then they're talking about: okay, who are the specific local political leaders that we need to put pressure on? How can we do a feasibility study on this vacant building, commercial building down the street that would be perfect for a commercial kitchen which we could integrate a food hub into? And so they’re just bouncing all these ideas off each other, and then someone will come back and say look, we need to keep the needs of our residents at the forefront of our mind, how can we really hone in on what the people want? Oh, let’s organize a public meeting, we’ll get the local residents to come and we'll have a survey where they can tell us what their favorite foods are and what their favorite produce is, and if we could get them that produce, what challenges do they have? And oh, we did this survey and we found that the older adults have trouble prepping their food, so what if we got a bunch of produce and we centralized in a food hub and then we got volunteers to prep it so we can chop it up – that way the older adults don't have to – and we can organize those into meal kits and do a CSA and deliver it to people's doors, right. So all these ideas are taking shape and then people are figuring out how to organize themselves to actually create this thing. And it's all in rebellion against the commercial model that is our food system that says, here's the shopping market, this is where you can get your food. If you can pay for it you're good, if not you're screwed.
[14:52] Sounds like communism, Daniel. Are you telling me AmeriCorps is paying people to establish communism in America?
[15:03] Okay, I need to take a step back real quick and say that all of the thoughts that I am expressing, all of these ideas are coming directly from Daniel Forkner and not in.
[15:15] They do not represent the United States of America?
[15:18] The United States of America or AmeriCorps or anybody else except my own. And no, I am not saying that AmeriCorps is advocating for communism in any way, shape or form.
[15:28] Okay, well I got what you're saying – wink, wink – and with that definitely-hold-up-in-court disclaimer that sounds pretty rad, man.
[15:39] I'm excited too, cause I'm learning. I'm just learning, these are all new things to me, I'm realizing I'm sitting in this meeting with all these women who are getting things done and I'm trying to think of my brain when's the last time I've seen this take form?
[15:54] Daniel, I got the perfect recommendation of a book for you. It’s called Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons by Silvia Federici. And it is filled with stories of basically exactly what you're talking about: women – and it's almost predominately always women – who have come together in communities in all sorts of areas around the world, but especially in Central and South America, and take charge of the committee and ask the question: what do we need and how can we solve that need? And that you see in this moment where people take their lives into their own hands, the most radical things happen. Because – and I've been in these scenarios as well – it's incredible how when people sit down and they start actually talking about the problems in their communities and they talk about them among the community with each other, how quickly everybody is jumping up to volunteer solutions to this. And these solutions are almost always things not aimed at we can help this one person this way, but rather: oh, if we just do this, if we all put a little bit of work in, then everybody can be much better off. And this is an idea that is so often, they try their best to drive this idea out of us: why would you volunteer for bunch of other people when you could take that same amount of work – that work ethic that Americans love so much but only when it's for yourself – and drive that so you can leave this community and can get into a better one and be fully self-sufficient? And maybe that's like that weird American idea of, you know, the lone cowboy on the west living by themselves with their own farm, and that they don't depend on anybody except their knowledge of the land and their toxic masculinity or whatever. But really, those communities that Americans model themselves after in reality, not in this fictitious mythical format, but really ones that are built up on huge amounts of cooperation and a lot of work ethic, but the work ethic that is magnified and made better by collective work.
[17:56] Yeah, send me that book, David, you got my new address, right?
[18:00] Everybody send Daniel Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons by Silvia Federici, send him copies and then he'll send them or distribute them in his community and definitely get fired.
[18:12] Well let me tell you about the second role that I've taken on. And I don't want to go into detail right now about the organization or anything detailed because I’m still onboarding at the moment, but I'm going to be doing some part-time work with a land trust which is national in scope but really implementing this very innovative and new model for preserving valuable agricultural land in the hands permanently of local communities and...
[18:42] Before you go on, could you very quickly summarize what a land trust is for listeners who aren't familiar with that specific legal agricultural term?
[18:52] Yeah, good point. So short answer, a land trust attempts to preserve land. And these come in very many different forms: forest land, agricultural land, wetlands, watersheds at rivers and all types of things. And generally, they use a legal structure called a conservation easement – and of course, we're talking about the United States right now – and what that conservation easement does is it takes away one of the rights associated with that land, for example, the right to develop it, and by doing that they preserve that land in its natural state, or that's the goal, and it gets very complicated. But the one I'm working for has identified a gap in what the traditional land trust does. And that gap is that we have a crisis going on in the world and in this country right now. That crisis is that for every farmer and rancher under 25 there are five that are over the age of 75. Which means a lot of land that is in agricultural hands right now is about to be shifted to new owners, and those new owners are most likely going to be large companies that are not invested in sustainable land-use. The price of farmland over the past 15 years has risen over 400%.
[20:20] And 90% of all farmland in the United States is owned by people who don't even farm, they rent out the land and they charge exorbitant fees to do so leaving many farmers dependent on the financial commodities market: that is banks come in, lend the money, and because of that money being lent farmers are forced to adapt to industrial practices that degrade the land. And so we're in this crisis in our world where we're losing soil health at an alarming rate, we talked about this in our recent IPCC report, saying that land is being degraded in terms of the soil at rates a thousand times faster than the Earth's ability to regenerate that soil. So this is a huge agricultural crisis. But what this organization has recognized is that a traditional land trust will come in and say: okay, well, how can we conserve agricultural land? And they'll slap a conservation easement on it saying, oh this land can't be used for a shopping mall needs to be kept agricultural. But that alone does not prevent destructive farming practices, right, you could get an organic farmer who comes in and really appreciates the soil and grows it and takes care of it, and then that farmer sells it, a new farmer comes in and just put down sod or some kind of monoculture and just depletes everything – there's no recourse to prevent that. And this is where the new model comes in. What this organization is doing is establishing community trust across the country that will purchase agricultural land either from farmers or from other owners and then assign community members to own that land. It will be made up of the farmers themselves, local community members, the board will be made up of all these diverse people who are directly tied to that community. And then they would turn around and lease that land to farmers who are committed to sustainable farming practices.
[22:17] And in that lee structure, the type of farming you can do will very much be restricted to only that type that takes care of the ecology, restores and regenerates the soil and provides food for the community itself. This is the permanent removal of land from the financial commodities market, no bank will be able to get in there anymore, no international corporation will be able to rape that land anymore once it's in the hands of local people in perpetuity. And so this is very much in the beginning stages of expansion and so I'm very excited to be kind of in the beginning of this process to see how it's going to play out. I've actually visited one of the first farms that will be captured in this new process and got a farm tour from the farm owner. It's at 600 acres and this farmer has had trouble with his bank, you know, the mortgage is too high. And this organization has stepped in saying, let's rally the community, raise the funds to purchase this land from your bank, then we will turn around and lease it back to you. And the ones who own that land are 100% invested in the future of that land because they depend on it because that's where their food comes from.
[23:28] Yeah, this is such a cool model and it doesn't exist only in the agricultural world as you mentioned, there are things like forest trusts. But increasingly some people are trying to deploy the same idea to suburban and urban areas. There's some plans to utilize this type of land trust system in like Detroit. And if that gets kicked off, we could see some really cool communities that are devoted to always upgrading and maintaining their community first and foremost. And then once people are that invested and that bought in not only in their own personal property but in the larger community that supports their property in which they also turn around and help support, then we're going to really start being on the right direction.
[24:10] David, let me ask you a question: do you feel like we're at a tipping point? Cause I feel like we are, I feel like the more people I meet there's just this great awareness that our world is in crisis. And in the nonprofits that I'm working, the community members I’m talking with: seems like everyone is aware that our world is in crisis and something must be done. And I feel like we're seeing a shift in people's mindsets that like, for example, in the land trust organization I'm working with, they are raising millions of dollars, and a lot of the people who will be supporting their expansion are people who are willing to give their money to something that will support the land even if it means losing out on a higher investment return if they put their money somewhere else. People are really understanding that we need dramatic change. But at the same time, I feel like there's a lot of uncertainty in the future where, you know, the US elections are coming up, like I mean, I feel like the battle lines are being drawn so to speak, right, like there's an intensification occurring among those people who want to preserve this world and those who want to maintain the status quo. And like each side of that battle is becoming more armed so to speak, you know, in both their resolve and the strategies they hope to employ.
[25:28] Yeah, I mean there's a lot of points for me to unpack there but overall my answer is unequivocally yes. This crisis that we currently find ourselves in is nothing new, there's been nothing but a string of crises for at this point a hundred, a hundred fifty, two hundred years, beyond that, where we’re continuously in this economic crisis that's occasionally punctuated by various other types of crises that intensify the economic components of what's going on. That is nothing new nothing has changed there. But for me, I think most people, at least in the United States where I interact with the vast majority of people, are fairly insulated from things, especially here in New York City, especially with younger successful people that find their way here who oftentimes are supported by their networks outside the city, much less so for the people who are born and bred here, who have their roots here. But suffice to say, in a lot of the privileged people that I meet I saw a big shift happen in their understanding of where we are in the world in terms of this crisis that you’re blanket addressing right now.
[26:33] I think last year was the tipping point, I see mainstream “oh shit, we’re fucked” awareness pop up. And not just in the people in New York but also in family members who live all over the country, I might heard this on various family gatherings and things. And they're not all just listeners of this show but they bring the stuff up organically, right, and I think it was just a lot of the crises, especially the climate crisis, sort of came home that year. We had a lot of hurricanes the year before, I think Houston, the hurricane was 2017, last year was punctuated by those massive wildfires, this year these things are continuing to happen, we just saw the catastrophe of Dorian, the Amazon’s on fire, lots of people were talking about that. And so this more global awareness of what's happening, it suddenly feels much closer to home because these things are finally starting to come at home, and I think it woke up a lot of people, they said, “Oh shit, we are actually in what might be end times if we don't do anything about this,” and for the first time a lot of people are saying, “well now what can I do? What do you do in the face of this?” And I think a lot of people are channeling the energy right now into this election with the hope that some sort of different leader on the top of everything will be able to reverse these changes that are all over the world increasingly getting worse, but these are thoughts on a rooted in a fiction that is taught to us from when we were young that the only way to impact change in a large-scale is by doing it politically, by casting your single vote and then walking away and then hoping that the person you vote for did get elected, or if it didn't get elected, that at least pressures the person that did to eventually do the right thing. But this system has continuously failed us for hundreds of years at this point, basically since it was first incepted. And it doesn't matter who we extend the right to vote to – at this point you know almost everyone can vote, not everybody, a lot of felons still can't do it, a lot of undocumented people who live in the United States who are very much still beholden to the policies that are put in action here can’t vote, and then even on the global scale, the people who basically have to deal with whatever dumb decision the United States make which does impact their life materially around the world also can’t vote – so then we, the very lucky landed citizen class can decide, you know, this larger direction of the world. But in the end, it's just: do we want a lot of suffering or slightly less? And it seems to be our decision. But increasingly, I've seen people mobilized saying, “what else can I do?” And I think the visibility of some sort of actions like XR, like climate strike coming up, is giving people easy ways to slide into these systems with things that almost everybody agrees with, almost everybody does want to fight climate change. And then from there, once they start getting the vocabulary and the knowledge of exactly what these issues are, what these systemic problems that are creating the symptoms that they see that terrify them in the first place, then that start getting the language and the tools to step into actually making actions and decisions. And that's why you start seeing people more and more show up at these types of events that are community events where they say, “okay, you know, things are bad, what can we do?” And that ends up in results and solutions and land trusts and CSAs and things like you're working on to help expedite and create at this moment, Daniel. And so I really do think we are on a tipping point. And it could go any way at this point, there are forces on the opposite side who don't want this was, who want to step back into more conservative traditional method of personal relationships, of sexual relationships, of economic relationships and they are willing to up the ante in that process too. And so we're seeing on both sides of this extreme battle lines being drawn, and so increasingly the people who could cover their ears and stick their head in the sand in the middle are being forced to pick sides because as the problems of the world start coming home, problems that are created increasingly by those here, in this place, by those who stood in the center pretending nothing was wrong, well, you have to pick a side. You can't just sit there, the world doesn't let you do that anymore. There's too much information, there is too much knowledge, there’s too many problems happening that the moment of denial, the moment of indecision, the moment of inaction is gone. And so the next few years I think, you know, two to five years are going to be very interesting to see how it plays out. And this moment right now I think is a very important moment in history and the future of not just the United States, not just these communities, but for almost everybody in the world. And, you know, I hope what you and I do, Daniel, helps inspire some people into action. And I know it's done that personally for me and it sounds like it's done that personally for you. And I hope those effects triple.
[31:34] My whole life has been fucked up by this podcast, David.
[31:37] Yeah, same though.
[31:40] Which is how it should be, right? I mean, voting is not enough, voting is not your political participation. And we go a little bit more in-depth on voting itself in episode 48 - Black Ballot Box. But yeah, I mean you're absolutely right: the crisis that our world is in is such that you can't just sit on the sidelines, eventually, we all need to take a stand and we all need to live out our values and our principles and live out the future that we envision for this world and not let those in control of our economic and political resources to make that decision for us.
[32:16] I had a thought occurred to me the other day, and these types of rhetoric, the things that we're talking about right now, I think a lot of times the focus in these, the target audience I guess if you want to use a marketing word, is almost always aimed at the young, you know, high school kids, college kids, people in their early twenties, maybe their late twenties and thirties. And that is what we see as, you know, these are the activists, these are the organizers.
[32:44] But increasingly I'm wondering why that's the case. I'm thinking of people like my own parents, other people who are older that I know who are oftentimes retired and suddenly find themselves with all sorts of time on their hands, time that sometimes they don't know how to deal with. There's a lot of people I know who are older, who didn't know what to do with their retirement, so they end up taking a part-time jobs not because they need the money necessarily, but because it's just they're so used to working on something they figure, well, I'll work at Home Depot or I'll be a greeter somewhere or I'll take this cashier job just so I can get out of the house and meet people and do stuff. And I think there's a huge opportunity there to take those people who are obviously craving some sort of purpose, who are craving those relationships that you would find outside of the home, outside of your family, outside of your immediate friend group and channel that instead of into this workplace, the only way that they've known to interact with people their whole entire lives because of the way that we programmed our society and culture, and instead turn that into service at community into these actions that are about liberation and making the world a better place. We have this huge amount of highly skilled labor with a lifetime's worth of experience and knowledge with very specific will develop skill sets and also oftentimes huge amount of resources whether in just time itself, which is something that's incredibly valuable, and places like physical places – places to organize are very hard to find, but the elderly population owns a huge amount of those physical spaces, whether it's homes or other things – and then also you know material resources, they spent a lifetime saving those resources under the greatest most successful economy in the history of the world, an economy that they of profit off of primarily through the exploitation and just sheared pillaging of other nations and other economic systems to benefit themselves, well, they have a chance now to turn around and give that back, to use that ill-gotten money for something good. And we’re not just talking down about philanthropic donations which we talked about on this show in episode 61 - Owning Change, but I mean actual physical feet on the ground doing work.
[35:05] We should be extending our hands out to these people, giving them the tools and the pathways and the knowledge to take their experience, and make it a point that we understand they have that experience and so much to offer, and give them the tools to reorient themselves, to relate to the rest of the world not through the workplace but through the community and service to that. And I think there's a huge opportunity in this field. And it sounds like, Daniel, in these types of meetings where you're going to there are people branching out and attempting that.
[35:37] Well yeah, I don't remember if I mentioned or not but that group of women at that community meeting I went to, every single one of them was… I want to say they're older adults cause they're not, they're older than me, I'll put it that way.
[35:49] Retirement age or approaching retirement age? When I say older I mean, you typically are retirement age, when you can start choosing to voluntarily draw Social Security in the eyes of the state, you are old. So that is what I'm going to also use, so 60s, early 60s, mid-60s is my definition, sorry Mom and Dad, when you start – label older.
[36:10] An older adult is the proper adjective not elderly. I learned that recently. But David, what's going on in your life? You know, we've been talking a lot about the theoretical things and things that I'm doing, what about you? What's new in World David?
[36:26] World David, that sounds like the worst theme park on the planet. No, my organizing has been really either devoted specifically to this show or trials and tribulations in community-owned radio. I think I've mentioned it on the show before but I'm running for the local station board of WBAI 99.5, radio station here in New York along with some friends and other activists and organizers. Give us a check out if you're in New York, if not check us out anyway, it's redwavewbai.org, where you can see all of our pretty faces and some of the things that we've said. We will also put up our slate and stuff. So the elections are ongoing right now, community radio is a wild wild world and there are so many characters and personalities and passion there, to put it very democratically. Somebody carried a sledgehammer to one of the board meetings and just like was waving it around. I’ve seen some just insane email threats. Anyway, it's cause it's a lot of people, oftentimes older people who are just really genuinely care deeply about this medium and about the ability to broadcast without any sort of profit, incentive or censorship and self-censorship that accompanies that. So it's an interesting process, I'm not quite ready to talk in-depth about my specific thoughts on that, and maybe in the future, I will, but suffice to say, whoof, community radio is wild.
[38:00] Wait, so why are you trying to get into community radio? What exactly is the responsibility if you and your group gained power?
[38:08] Well, it's not about gaining power, it's about making sure that the station stays in the right direction. This is part of the Pacifica membership of radio stations, there's 5 radio stations that are owned by this foundation, and they create a lot of content and other material that is farmed out to other stations all around the country, hundreds of stations. Democracy Now! actually came out of WBAI, and now WBAI actually owe them like millions of dollars but that debt was recently forgiven. But that aside, so it's about stewardship of the station, and it’s stewardship through an elected board of primarily listeners, there's 24 positions there, 12 are up for election right now. It's a group of listeners who run for this board that sort of act as a governance body for the station and then also a smaller group of staff members of the station, those are people who aren't necessarily paid by the station but either volunteer or create content for them. And the combined body of these two groups of people sort of direct the station through various mechanisms and tools, I don’t want to get too into it cause it's a lot of procedural crap.
[39:14] But the idea is just that we think that radio should continue to be free of outside influences, of capital, of censorship, of obligations beyond serving the listeners of the radio. And we believe that the content that the radio station creates and ultimately serves to its listeners should first and foremost serve those listeners. So that means a lot of content that is created by underrepresented minorities that aren't profitable to create traditional material for on a station with profit incentives. So there actually is a very vibrant history of pirate radio stations here in New York where people, because they have an underrepresented minority, create their own radio station illegally until they are eventually chased down by the FCC, and that they will broadcast at specified times every, you know, day, every weekend or something from like 7 to 11, I don't know.
[40:00] And people in those communities will tune in for that, there's a very vibrant Haitian Creole Community here in New York City and they get a lot of their news, a lot of their culture from these sort of pirate run radio stations and we would love WBAI to serve some of that in a legal way that gives them a broader reach and shares their culture, shares the news, shares this identity with the larger group of New York City as a whole. So, I mean, it’s part of it, we'd love to have more radical messaging in other stations and stuff on there, it's a wide variety of content and techniques and also fundraising that we're trying to address to bring the station to a more 21st century model of sustaining themselves financially.
[40:39] it's a lot of work, there's a lot of money on the line, there's a lot of very high tempers. And it comes at a time when the radio itself is being threatened. So NPR actually just this week hired a new CEO for themselves, a guy who's previous tenure was at Voice of America among other things. Voice of America for those of you not familiar is the United States propaganda radio station, they play around the world in order to push State Department content down people's throats.
[41:05] And this, of course, goes alongside a time when NPR is being increasingly used as a tool of propaganda, as a tool to serve the needs of the state after the removal of some laws a couple of years ago that prevented explicit US propaganda to be aired in the United States, well. that law’s gone, now they're literally put into the head of propaganda in charge of NPR. So even though the public radio bastion's that we've looked for years, you know, I was an NPR supporter years ago back in the day, is under threat. And so I think it's increasingly important now that we strive anywhere we can to preserve independent media outlets, which it doesn't, you know, necessarily just mean community radio, I do have a soft spot in my heart for radio but also content like we're creating here, Daniel, where it can be online, free of censorship, supported by listeners if they choose to, if not you know the messages out there, that's what important; and not just in podcast but in content, people writing articles in non-advertising media like Medium, even sometimes Twitter threads – I mean, all this stuff is important in giving people a voice in the area where it's traditionally been dominated by organizations and corporations that have a very specific, very niche worldview in the reality of things that is aimed at maintaining the status quo. And the status quo has gotten us into this crisis that we’ve established at this point over a hundred hours of this shows tenure. And we just can't keep going down that road if we want to continue living, so if it's time for change, it’s time for new voices and we're really lucky that we live in one of the few times in history where that kind of content is readily available to anybody who wants to seek it out.
[42:45] Oh, that's good to know. And I hope that you and your group are successful and can keep community radio viable and providing that very necessary alternative to what is very quickly becoming state propaganda.
[42:58] Yeah, I mean, it's more important now than ever, Daniel, cause we are at that tipping point. Since this seems to be like a rambly-ranty episode, let me continue on with something else has been on my mind, Daniel, and that's a weird thing – and I saw this just on Twitter recently which I guess is why it stuck in my head – a lot of the candidates right now running for the Democratic nomination for president have in their policy things like a debt forgiveness and student loans or other types of things: giving a citizenship to undocumented people who in the United States – things like that. And it's interesting how angry that makes some people. Sometimes they're people who, you know, they never got student loans or they paid off their student loans, and so they're mad that they don't get anything but other people do. Sometimes they're immigrants themselves who say, you know, I suffered through this process, took me 10 years to get to the United States, why should other people just get in automatically for breaking the law? And I’ve talked about this on the show before but it's such a fucking weird mindset to me. But if you ask me these people: if you had a choice and you could let your friends and family and your children skip the suffering that you did, you know, not have them have to spend years paying off your student loans or not have them spend 10 years before they could get into the country and join you, wouldn’t you give them that opportunity if you could snap your fingers and make all that suffering just disappear for that person, wouldn’t you do that? And I mean some of them lie to themselves and say like, no, I think the responsibility of paying off my student loans, you know, made me into a better person or whatever. It's a fucking lie, man, they stole years of your productivity and work for this process. And I am sorry you had to do that, we allowed to do that, but you were stolen from and you didn't get any better, they denied you the opportunity to be a better person in that time while were working off something for someone else. And if you could let somebody skip that step then you are giving everybody else a chance to live a better life, to make the world a better place and for yourself to live a better life because you're living in a better world because of that. And if they do say: yeah, I would want that for my kids – well then what the fuck happened in their lives where they don't want this for strangers? You know, how selfish is that where you want somebody not to suffer because you know them or you love them, but if it's somebody else who you don't know, you don't have any relationship, you want them to suffer the same way that you suffered? I don't fucking get it. And so I've been thinking about this for ages and it just popped up again recently cause I was like I said browsing Twitter and reading comments to tweets that you should never do.
[45:40] It's a great way to relax yourself before bedtime: reading Twitter threads.
[45:46] I'm really trying to dial down my Twitter browsing: I usually just like log on, read my friends, drop a tweet and then come back later. But it's going to better my head and is in real life. But by the way, follow us, ashesashescast, we’d love to have you on Twitter! I wonder if part of this is that people have become so jaded, so worn down by the fact that everything sucks shit that it becomes hard for them to imagine a better world, a better world especially without a catch because everything in our world right now if it is better almost always comes with a catch. And when somebody offers them that opportunity to bypass suffering or like the general shittiness of existence that we’ve created through our weird-ass bureaucratic structures, I mean, they're leery about this: oh, this will never work first off – and then once it makes it pass it – well, I don't want that because, you know, I had to suffer so I don't want other people to...
[46:42] You know what that I think it is also though? And I don't want to call this human nature because I hate the whole human nature narrative. But I do think there's something about our need to justify current situations. I mean this is literally the reason why our whole population is complacent in an economy that continually exploits them. Because it's very hard to imagine an alternative but also: just imagine if you were to go up to someone and say, like ask a question about the way the world and say, “Hey, how come the trash picks our trash up on Tuesday?” Just a question about why does this happen. And I think people instinctively reach for a justification even if you don't know anything about municipal trash collection, a lot of people I think we'll reach for an answer like “Well, Tuesday's a good day, you know, it's not the middle of the week, it's not the end of the week so there's not a lot of traffic congestion; Monday, everyone's trying to get to work for the first time so Tuesday makes sense.”
[47:42] I'll take it up an even higher level than something like that. With trash, it might very well just be a random day, but in some cases, there are things that are designed maliciously to take advantage of people but they are justified away in other, whatever mechanism they can. So something like, “why do you pull in, you know, millions of dollars worth the sale for your company and they pay you $75,000 a year?” And this is a conversation I've had with people, and they say, “well, you know, the company provides services, they gave me a place to work, you know, the name attracts clients or whatever.” And then I will respond, “but it seems to me that you brought the clients in, you did all the work coordinating with them on the phone, I mean, the only thing your company really did was provide like the back end of a billing system, somebody to handle the mechanisms of the shipping maybe and give you a place to do all this work, but that doesn't seem like it's worth them making 10 times as much money as you did over the course of this year.” And people just justify it away, they just keep on explaining like “oh, of course, you know – blah blah blah – that's just the way things are, that’s you know: boss makes a dollar I make a dime.”
[48:47] And then I think we tend to justify things harder the more pervasive they are. So if every single person in this country has student debt, the concept of just doing away with that I think is very hard for people to accept and come to terms with. Because it’s like, well, this is the way it is, this is how everyone interacts with it, why would we change it? It must exist for a reason. I think a lot of it is like a cognitive dissonance like well if I question this, I'll realize that it sucks and I don't want to realize that my life is oriented around these things that dominate and exploit me so I'd rather just justify it so I can get some sleep at night. #####David Torcivia: [49:23] Exactly, exactly. And I think a big part of that too is this point that I was initially making which is a lack of imagination of a better world. Because one, we've been told every single system that we can come up with besides the current one is worse, we say: oh, you know capitalism is imperfect or democracy isn't perfect but it's the best system that we figured out so far. And that's, first off, is a fucking lie. Second off, you know, it automatically precludes the invention of anything new or different because we just assume: well, this is as good as it gets. It's not. We work more than at any time ever in human history, we are more unhealthy, we have more diseases than almost any other time of humans. And we’re in like a really bad place right now. But it just seems inevitable, it seems like this is the way things always work. And a lot of these components of our day-to-day life also seem like they just been here for forever. I mean, police, police is less than 150 years old, they're not permanent, when this country was founded, the United States was founded, there was no such idea as police, that didn't exist, this was invented later. This like the world as we know it was very slowly built up to this point, it wasn't always like this situation. And I think this way that we frame everything, these conversations, the way that we teach people are very much set up in a way that minimizes our ability to imagine something better, something different.
[50:37] And I think giving people an alternative or at least allowing them the agency to imagine something better, to imagine a situation where they are making as much money as a company or where they are being treated equally or fairly or something is very important in giving them the tools and the language to ultimately find and push forward for their own liberation. And I think it's a really important thing for not just regular people who aren't “woke” like of use collapse folks on this show to do, but also for us who are standing here at the precipice of the end of the world, at the end of civilization if things continue on as they are right now, and ask ourselves: well, we’re fighting for the better world all the time, right – like I hope you all are, I hope you're not just laying down and accepting defeat because that's not the message of this show, and I know we all go through that stage at some point, but really, in the end, it's about using this knowledge and trying to use this system knowledge, in particular, to attack the root causes of this stuff to make the world a better place – but if we know that we want to the better world, we have to have the language that can define what that better world is. When you say that I want a city that is ecologically sustainable, what does that look like? When you say I want to find that my food is grown in a sustainable and ecologically responsible way, what does that look like? When I say that when I wake up in the morning, this is what my day looks like in the better world I want to build, you should be able to define that. You say: I show up and do this for this long, this happens. You know, we should know specifically the world that we are looking to build, because otherwise, we're just chasing around problems this whole time and not working on building out solutions to build that better world. And I would be very interested in hearing from you, specifically, all of our listeners and also you Daniel, what that better world that you want and then just you – capital Y, lowercase y, whatever – you...
[52:40] Or just the letter U.
[52:41] Just the letter U. Did I say capital U or capital Y? Lowercase y?
[52:47] I think you did say capital Y.
[52:49] Capital Y, lowercase y or just the letter U, u u u u. Imagine that world. And write it down. Put it on the post-it-note and put it on your mirror. Write it in an email to us. Leave us a phone call about it. Because I want to hear. I want to hear what everyone’s vision of a better world is because the more ideas of what this world that we’re trying to build are out there, the more bits and pieces we can pull together to actually realize that.
[53:19] And not just a big systemic things, like even if your imagination of a better world is the relationship between me and my next-door neighbor looks like X. That's a great imagination, right, it doesn't have to just be like oh, I imagine a world where the Amazon rainforest isn't burning to the ground. We need imagination at all levels.
[53:39] Yeah. And that's so important and I really want to drive that home, thank you, Daniel, where it's not just saying, you know, these large this is the way that we're going to run the country or this is the way that global international trade will be working. I mean like in your personal life, what does a better world look like? And that little bit of microscopic knowledge is so important in realizing this larger idea of a world that works for all of us instead of the world that we’re actively working against.
[54:07] I think that's a great way to end this episode, David, with a little bit of imagination.
[54:15] Yeah. I'm dead serious, please email us what you want your world to look like, contact at ashesashes. org. Or if you don't like writing it down, give us a call and just give us a stream-of-consciousness thought of what your world is, the numbers 31399-ashes, that's 313-992-7437. And if you are international, don't want to make a call to a U.S. number, record yourself, record the audio, email it: contact at ashesashes. org; or come and tell us directly on our Discord, the link to that is on our website ashesashes. org, click the Community button, you’ll find a link that says Discord and that will take you to our awesome chat community where you can tell us all which your specific vision of the world is.
[55:03] And as always a lot of time and research goes into making these episodes possible and we will never use the dirty money of advertisers to support this show. So if you like it and would like us to keep going – you, our listener can support us by giving us a review, that five star is the one you're looking for, if there are 5 Stars. If there's 10 Stars, you’re looking for that 10th star on your favorite podcast application. Talk about this with your friends and family, that's the most important way you can support us because let's be honest, we're doing this to spread a message that we need a better world. And so help us spread that message, you hear somebody at the coffee shop talking about climate change or talking about social inequality or talking about isolation, let him know, send him Coping with Collapse, episode 77. Let him know that they're not alone, let him know that we can work together and actually do something. Another way you can support us though is giving us financial support, you can visit us at patreon.com/ashesashescast and we have a Collector patron category there, we’ll send you stickers every other month. We'd also like to thank our associate producers Chad Peterson and John Fitzgerald, thank you so much for your support.
[56:22] And if you don't want to reach out to us directly but would love to consume more of our content, you can do so on any of your favorite social media websites, our handle on all of them is ashesashescast, we've also got a great subreddit r/ashesashescast, check us out there. Next week we're back with a deep dive episode, so we hope you'll tune in for that, there's a lot to look up to there.
[56:46] Yeah, believe it or not, we might just be leaving Earth behind.
[56:51] Oh, that gives away too much. But we hope you’ll tune in anyway. There's a lot of exciting things there. But until then, this is Ashes Ashes.