Civil Disobedience 3.0 — Would you like to update to the newest version? [2008]
**September 25, 2008
It has taken the implosion of the investment banking industry to smoke out the Bush Administration’s true disregard towards the people it governs. Now the public is being asked to pay for the mistakes of financial leaders and CEOs in a contract based on little more than good faith that the loan will be accurately and completely repaid. Perhaps the word of this administration would carry more reassurance if it were not for their torrential abuse of rhetorical terminology over the past eight years. How that translates into allowing for reassurance, or any version of confidence when it comes to our ability to take refuge in their word, is as much a mystery as the true value of the sour assets at stake in the proposed $700 billion bailout plan.
“We, the People,” by allowing Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. and Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke to set the terms of this deal, submit ourselves to a new precedence for future cases that weave privatized gains into socialized losses, and then get sealed up in a velum of black-hole statutory language that prevents any future investigation. If Wall Street receives its handout now, this sliver of leverage We the People teeter on, like an elephant who finds itself shipwrecked on a lamppost, will quickly disintegrate back into business as usual on the stock market floor. No matter how much money we “lend” the corporate bankers, it is time to admit to our selves that the crash is already here, and by doing so realizing that for the People — maybe that’s not such as disastrous as Paulson and Bernanke would wish us to believe.
Henry David Thoreau, writing in 1849 amidst the unpopular Mexican War — crafted by the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool — said, “That government which governs best, governs not at all.” By discovering now that “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for” — to sustain, to imagine, to empower, to cooperate, to organize, to commune — “We, the People” are finally ready to govern ourselves. So, let’s take a deep collective breath, get a good seat where we can watch as version 2.0 wreckage starts splintering seams. When the dust clears a bit, We will be ready to get to work on establishing true self-governance: a nation for the people, by the people, and run cooperatively by the people — call it America 3.0.
The new version will look a lot more like us, as we really are, right now: We are not fundamentalists or conspirators who want to centralize power at all costs no matter the detriment to our neighbors. We love our neighbors, near and far — we want to meet each other and get to know ourselves better so we can encourage a share-and-share-alike relationship. However, we can no longer subjugate our story to a plot of private gains and public losses. Our social language and narrative functions best as open sourced and adaptable, not as a diminishing funnel of patriot-act-approved dark info, closed for interpretation. Our government should reflect the revolution of Openness that has already taken seed inside the deepest parts of our culture, and incubated within the grassroots societies developed online and off.
In v3.0 it is precisely our global interdependence that will spur the level of freedom in our society evident in the founding fathers’ higher aspirations. As a people, we now possess the opportunity to transcend v2.0 roles of “consumers,” and “immigrants,” bestowed upon us by reductive, feudal-minded bureaucrats, Wall Street CEOs, and Madison Avenue pushers. We can create a just and open system of interactive governance capable of organizing its collective intention.
The level of dysfunction in the overall concept of Paulson’s proposal is equivalent to a surprise, red-eyed, 3 a.m. visit from your aloof and smarmy uncle, who’s always asking for money from everyone without sending so much as a thank you card in return. Suddenly one night you answer the door — he is family after all — only to find that an entire bar-full of his drunken friends have followed him home from the pub after having blown their last dollars on “one more round.” Now they are at your door to “urge” that you and your family should immediately assume the entire cost and personal burden of their “miscalculations” by taking them ALL into your homes, carte blanche.
It’s time to call your neighbors, organize a town meeting, or start a protest and get these bums off of our lawns! And our water treatment systems, and city councils, and school boards, and out of the Federal Reserve.
It’s not even an issue of responsibility or who made what mistakes. Any respectable American would make it their solemn duty to clean up after they’ve made a mistake. Bringing justice into the world is a founding principle of our government. The stakes at hand are not negating dribble on a toilet seat, its the liberty and lives our families, neighborhoods, townships, parks, farms, and businesses. Justice is our commonwealth, a truer currency than the Dollar. The Conservative and Neo-Liberal alliance must own up to their own mistakes, not stooping to inter the people as their nagging mothers — pressing to get toys picked up and laundry washed; these manners are completely devoid of integrity. And in case anybody’s forgotten, We, the People are a little busy right now trying to rehabilitate the planet’s ecosystems thank you very much.
Whether the populace chooses to invoke it’s voice or not, America’s will has always started with and depended upon communicating a clear consensus.
Undoubtedly we bear the resourcefulness, competence, creativity, and unsurpassed technological capabilities to conceive and mobilize a fully operational replacement platform of governance that will sustain our society into a more egalitarian and just future within a generation. We could run the entire country off of MeetUp.com if we had to! So why settle for a bailout plan that commits us, and possibly our children, into the service of furthering corporate corruption? Unless receiving constant verbal, emotional, physical, and economic abuse is somehow considered to be healthy, our relationship to neither Washington nor Detroit can no longer remain justly or accurately representative of the standards we, as people, practice in our daily relationships with each other.
In NYC, I witness real kindnesses every day.
Why suffer a rogue government’s own unabated breeding of divisive policymaking, when for over a year-and-a-half Paulson and Bernanke insisted that the mortgage crisis was “contained?” There is wisdom and progress in allowing a faulty edifice to collapse in on it self when it becomes clear, that through coordinated efforts, the debris can be recycled and the land sowed, so that something more mindful and regenerative might arise.
Like the patriots who invented US, our generation mustn’t permit its interpersonal public liabilities to be trod upon and turned into the privatization of civil liberties. This time, we would do best to withdraw our balances from the banks and bonds in favor of investing in the infrastructure of a more justly balanced society. We would also benefit in reminding Mr. Paulson, and the rest of the Bush club what Thoreau knew all too well: America was established to rebel from its oppressors’ penchant for drawing up urgent methods of taxation without representation in the cover of night. In doing so, we might all benefit from reinvigorating our government’s most revolutionary asset — that action from principle is the true path to reconciliation.
Your download is complete. Would you like to reboot and start the program America v3.0?
