Probably the biggest reason I haven’t blogged in a while is my lack of immersion in anything. So far this summer I’ve been in Bellingham. I went for a bike ride around western washington. Went to a music festival on orcas island. I played soccer and read a book about becoming a monk.
Work has been relatively slow lately and it has left me adequate time to think about what I do. Not so much why I do it, because helping people is always good, right? But what I do is, I am finding out, so plagued with double edged swords that some days render me useless, slumped in my desk chair in front of my donated flatscreen. I love who I work for and I even love how we do our work. But so often I hate the environment we do it in, the foreign aid environment. I would always like to think that organizations large or small working in other parts of the world have their constituent’s best interest in mind. But it seems we(Americans) are so far from taking off our glasses of opportunistic empire building that we can’t see the pain empire is causing. But as much as I hate the damage the “aid” of empires expanding their empire is doing I don’t know shit about it. So I have been letting a completely ignorant anger grow in me without knowing the fact. So I bought some books off recomendations of people who have experienced the “aid” of empires first hand.
1. the road to hell by Micheal Maren
2. the shock doctrine by Naomi Klein
3. confessions of an economic hitman by John Perkins
20 pages into “confessions” i am already feeling the anger grow.
But with this sort of anger always comes a sort of “fight or flight” response…except that flight isn’t really an option since it is an affront to humanity not just myself. So we are forced to fight, to take some sort of action. The response is simple, yet complicated.
I have begun constructing a theory of action which I am sure is not my own, new, or anything profound. But it involves removing oneself from active participation in economic systems that promote shitstorms while increasing involvement in social systems. Oh…does that make me a socialist? Maybe as I read I’ll describe what I mean by “shitstorms” in more detail.
But let me just say the situation of empire, foreign aid, and child sponsorship(maybe another post) is much worse than you think. But the response is, I think, much more beautiful than we imagined.
“does that make me a socialist?” where did that come from? one of the traps of the empire is that it provides us with a language. one the simplest level, we all have to speak and read english. but then there is the much more subtle level of providing us with questions and answers that pre-define our answers. as my friend cj said when he came back from viewing the foreign aid to new orleans, “if they can get us to ask the wrongs question, there is no right answer.”
so we are told to think in terms of capitalism and socialism, to discuss in our dorm rooms over our guilt-and-freedom bottles of beer, which of these is better, without getting behind either marx or smith to question whether it matters who owns the great beast of industrialism which has raped our mother, if the rape continues.
Point very well taken. Even more so because that was merely something that popped into my head and I wrote without thinking too much about it. I do agree that it is most definitely the wrong question, one of many we have been asking way too long.
Oh dear … if ever I knew your frustrations and endlessly long, circular self-debates … come to Geneva one of these days, my friend! I am eternally frustrated by the humongous divide between what happens in the halls of the UN/international community and what is happening in the field. I’ve been working on one issue for the last year or so, which has actually moved quite “fast” in int’l bureaucracy terms but every other conversation run into people who say that the issue is “too hard” or “too complicated”. Lazy way out in my opinion, and I won’t even get started on use of funds ….
I think we need to start an underground army to usurp the bureaucracy of foreign aid.