Alternative Editorial: Swimming Against The Tide
Week 24 of the lock down and it’s hard to know where to look. If you are keeping your eye on the UK government, there are multiple fronts. Should we be trying to understand the new ‘rule of six’ which has very little coherent logic but heavy fines for breaking? And then customised for Scotland and Wales?
Or should we be anxious about the Track and Trace App which invites users to co-create safe spaces by sharing where we’ve been and with whom? There’s no doubt that we have become a much more surveillance-conscious society. Especially with the constant re-writing of anti-terrorism rules that could put 80 year old activists behind bars for turning up at a march. And while the Google-Apple app designers claim a 60% buy in would deliver worthwhile results, that’s still a 40% margin of error for someone with underlying conditions.
Or should we tear ourselves away from the threats to our personal and social health and clock what is going on in the Brexit saga? For those who saw that the original referendum was always bogus because it would run into the problem of the Anglo-Irish Agreement – putting the internationally acclaimed historic Peace agreement into play – this continues to fascinate..
It’s like watching a child try once again to fit a square peg into a round hole—and wondering whether screaming will commence, or the peg be abandoned. What we are watching now as international law is flouted is Boris forcing the peg while teachers, parents and siblings shout “you can’t do that!”
“Just watch me”, he replies.
Crashing daily into our inboxes and twitter streams is news from the US. Competing for attention there are unprecedented wildfires being blown across California, Oregon and Washington, razing whole towns to the ground. This alongside a Presidential election that seems more about ‘life and death’ than any in memory. This is not about an overseas war, or debates over liberal policy programmes: people are being killed in the streets while protesting, police are out in force suppressing the innocent. All the while the US is suffering the world’s highest morbidity rate due to mishandling of the Covid crisis. Meantime, in tweets and emails to his followers, the President is inciting hatred against the majority of his own citizens.
With no small irony – that is, from the country that invented the term ‘soft power’ to describe any nation’s charisma —we see the media falling out of love with America on a global scale.
Did anyone—apart from the good people of Plymouth (see our blog)—notice that this is the 400th Anniversary of the Mayflower departing with Columbus, for the “not new world” America? We haven’t seen a mention in our news feeds. Maybe by the time Covid allows the carefully prepared celebrations to take place next year, there will be something to celebrate. Maybe not.
97-year-old, great-grandfather of 7, Arnold Pease is one of the XR Elders arrested during the rebellion. Photo: Helena Smith
But all this week and last, our hearts were aching for what should have made the headlines but rarely did – Extinction Rebellion’s third taking over the streets of London. For readers of this Editorial who were not taking part or getting daily updates here are some of the highlights and pictures below.
It’s a continuing and inspiring story—of the young and old who have grasped the present and accelerating dangers to our way of life from environmental breakdown. Who have put their own lives in danger, risking arrest and prison records, to wake others up. And who are being criminalised by a government too closely connected to and profiting from the industries that are causing the catastrophe. We have a Home Secretary who wants to put people in prison simply for trying to draw attention to our house on fire.
Each week this Editorial takes on the task of summing up the world according to our mainstream media – the one that the vast majority of people depend upon for their truth. But at AUK, we are living concurrently in a second life – one in which an alternative reality is always possible and, each day, incrementally more likely than the day before. We offer our Daily Alternative to show innovation in means of personal development, social agency and global collaboration and impact. We connect the dots between them to tell a new story of human potential and planetary resilience.
Yet even we-all (that’s you too), consuming this relentless diet of positive input, have to work hard to stay response-able (meaning capable of responding to this splintered landscape). Reading our correspondence and social media interfaces, even the most visionary of us have to battle with a daily onslaught on our minds, as we continue to occupy the toxic culture we are trying to leave behind.
Preach it, sister. Photo: Jamie Lowe
It is not only external systems that need reinventing, but the internal programming that made us acquiescent – or at least unconscious - until now. Even as we react to events and the behaviour of those in power, we are also having to deeply question our own intolerances and dismissals of issues that, until recently, we have not considered our terrain.
How many of you reading this have experienced a recent outbreak amongst your own trusted colleagues of an identity clash? Maybe where one person accuses another of racism, sexism or elitism? And in that moment words were used that surprised and offended from either side of the debate? Often because those words and deeply held views were new or never heard of before from that person?
Rebels from XR Youth, XR Fashion Action and the Textiles Rebellion glue themselves to the H&M shop window at London’s most iconic shopping destination, Oxford Street. Photo: Jonathan Vines
Apologies, if you are hoping we might reject and oppose this phenomenon—as if the turbulence can be avoided or suppressed in the name of calm. It can’t: this is society ‘waking up’ to inequalities and atrocities that have been hidden or not properly understood before now.
We have been taking part in these cultures of abuse, these wrong frameworks for action, without giving any explicit permission. Yet the same time, when the evidence of injustice arises before us, we haven’t given it adequate attention either.
As the law courts would say, these are not ‘acts of commission’ but they are ‘acts of omission’, affecting the decisions we make about what matters, as we create and edit our daily agendas.
At the same time, it’s not a simple matter of “correcting our course”, as we come up against these internal, unspoken biases. We are caught up in a web of addictions. To the consumerism that prolongs environmental destruction. To gender dominance that allows power to flow in the old patterns of growth and competition. To racial privilege that ensures the spoils of modernity have been shared with a fraction of the global population.
We have to do the hard work of swimming against the tide of our collective patterns of behaviour, especially when we don’t recognise them as our own. We are unconscious convectors of past cultures that we never questioned, until now.
In each of the meeting-eruptions that I witnessed this week both parties were deeply pained: incredulous on each side that the other could not see how they were transgressing. But rather than take responsibility, it’s become our way of being social to prize our reactions – the more incisive and decisive they are, the better. We rarely listen to objections with curiosity to know where the hurt originates.
Using our recently acquired emotional literacy, we choose to be more skilled at elaborate defence than mutual understanding. In addition, we have convinced ourselves that we are in a terrible hurry to save the world – and so we fail to give the vulnerable in our communities the space they need, in order to grow their own voice and agency. A new listening has to be forged.
But if we can weather that storm and allow new relationships to form, with those who can be heard authentically for the first time—then a new future opens up for all of us. Not only for those previously excluded from the inner circle of power – be it social, business or political – but those who were feeling isolated while inside that circle, unable to progress. That feeling of liberation from old value structures and inequities is scarily unfamiliar at first. But it quickly becomes joyful as new, vital energies flow into our shared space. This is the fuel we need to leap from the old to the new.
Animal Rebellion take their message to DEFRA. Photo: Helena Smith
This kind of development is not done easily en masse: fear of change has the effect of polarising groups and inviting extreme behaviour, often doing more harm than good.
But in small groups we can highlight and support the inner work that each of us has to commit to individually (come and see Rosie Bell and Jamie Bristow on Tuesday presenting mindful methods for this). These tools and new patterns of behaviour are quickly copied and shared.
When we do, the rewards will be plentiful. Once we take hold of our personal responses to the old and still dominant culture – becoming response-able - we can withstand the daily pressures coming from the media, from our working cultures and from high-street advertising – all that holds the old system in place. We can choose consciously where to put our attention and what new cultures to grow.
If we don’t, we will continue to be sabotaged by the social effects of the old work left undone.
Waking up to our shackles is only the preparation for waking up to our wings.
XR Shut down the Murdoch Press CREDIT: Yui Mok/PA
Photo by Vincenzo Lullo
Photo: Jonathon Vines