Occupy Your Brain!
Like everyone else, I’ve been watching the ‘Occupy Tsunami’ wash across North America, crashing in the public squares of city after city across this great land of ours. This rag tag protest movement, as much about building community as it is about the articulation of a coherent set of beliefs or objectives, has been a marvel to observe. To their credit our media outlets have been taking it all very seriously, struggling to grab a sound bite that makes this rather shambolic protest movement comprehensible as something other than the generalized whining of unhappy campers who are pretty much making it up as they go along.
Now that things seem to be winding down everyone is asking what comes next? Was this whole thing a hiccup, a viral phenomenon driven by social media? Or was something larger in play, the first evidence of a grass roots social uprising that’s going to keep gaining traction? I vote for the latter interpretation. Ordinary people are starting to find common cause around the inter-connectedness of a whole range of economic, environmental, social and cultural issues. At bottom, we’re living in an era of radical disequilibrium. Our most pressing problems are all global in nature and our elected representatives can’t see beyond the ends of their own noses. They pay lip service to the higher ideals of democracy while they cater to the interests of the same old elites. None of this is news. What’s different now is that the disequilibrium has reached such an intolerable (and dangerous) state that ordinary citizens feel threatened. The Arab Spring, the political and economic convulsions in the E.U., the Occupy Movement, even the Keystone Pipeline brouhaha are all evidence of people in settings all over the world starting to come to a boil together. The message is we’re tired of the same old-same old bait and switch politics of the status quo. I predict a lot more sound and fury as ordinary folks fight to take back control of their own destinies.
While we’re on the subject of curing the world’s ills, there has been of late a flurry of public debate about the traditional healing properties of an Amazonian medicinal tea called ayahuasca a.k.a. ‘the vine of the soul’. Last week David Suzuki devoted an entire program to the work Dr. Gabor Mate has been doing with hard core addicts using this incredibly powerful substance. Dr. Mate was subsequently contacted by the Mounties and told to cease and desist his experiments because ayahuasca is a controlled substance. Here is my friend Richard Meech’s response to the RCMP’s saber rattling.
If you want more information there’s a feature article on ayahuasca in the current issue of VANITY FAIR. And here is a piece I published last Spring about my own experiences with it: HUNTER AND COOK, Issue 9, pp 16-17, reproduced here with permission of the author and publishers.
Click on each page to see a large version.
David Young
One thought on “Occupy Your Brain!”
Maybe the tents in the park was a hiccup, but “the Occupy movement” is a collective wake up! But a lot of the 99% are still snoozing.
It is amazing how often someone will sneeringly say of the Occupy movement (or Fair Trade or local food etc) “What’s that about?”
But people are waking up. The day is coming that corporate personhood will go the way of CFCs and the dodo. Pay attention; spend responsibly; vote with your dollar.
http://goodevaning.wordpress.com/2011/11/25/occupy-the-99-how-to-shop-on-buy-nothing-day/