Big yellow taxi siren song

July 14, 2003 at 11:25 pm | In yulelogStories | 3 Comments

Some recent developments in the arrest of Betty Krawczyk, Jen Bradley, and the Women in the Woods action in the Upper Walbran Forest on Vancouver Island: Stephen Bradley reports on Betty & Jen’s July 8 victory: Justice Pitfield “reworded the injunction and also the undertaking in such a way as to instruct [the authorities] to arrest under the criminal code if there are further civil disobedience actions. This is a major breakthrough. Persons engaging in civil disobedience will still be arrested, but under the criminal code and all the rules and protections it contains. (…) The whole injunction and contempt of court procedure [under which Betty & Jen were arrested the first time] was invented by the Norman Vikings in the 12th century in their corporate take-over of the British Isles. It has no place in the ‘justice’ system of a ‘democratic’ society.” Bradley adds a plea, interesting on several counts: “Let’s not demonize any of the players here. [He refers to the people in government, in forestry, in the corporations.] They may well be serving a corrupt system, but they are also human beings like us who want to go home at night and sleep with a reasonably good conscience. They are just very good at lying to themselves, as are we all. That is why Truth Speaking is such a disturbing Act of Magic. The old Class War scenario is still being acted out by the rulers, but the divergence of interests that fuelled it is no longer a reality. Our interests are all the same now. We will all suffer or thrive together. There is no safe place for the exploiters to build their castle.” I’m interested in this, first, in terms of blogging and trying to tell the truth, based on what we see and experience, vs. what we’re told to see and experience; and second, in terms of people who read & write on the internet, who are connecting, building virtual platforms, sharing interests and concerns. And, one hopes, acting on and working for change in the real world. Ingmar Lee posted pictures of the 4th largest Douglas Fir in British Columbia, which grows in the Walbran Forest: it’s called — what else? — Big Betty. Local magazine Focus on Women includes a feature article on Betty Krawczyk this month. On a related note: my friend Betsy writes in an email from Florence, Italy that her region is experiencing a huge drought, with talk now of having to choose between giving water to industry or to agriculture. There will probably be planned power cuts, and severe water rationing. In the north, about 70% of crops have already been lost. On that note, see also Amity Wilczek’s July 14 post. Sigh. The feel-good pie-in-the-sky new-agey “cosmic” stuff makes me nervous, and Stephen Bradley’s hope for Truth Speaking as a disturbing Act of Magic ruffles my misanthropic pessimistic feathers a little bit. Even Jim Moore and Chris Lydon with his stuff (& nonsense) about Emerson as a god for bloggers sometimes make me twitch. But my simple misanthropy isn’t very useful anymore, because, damn, I’ve got kids, AND WE ALL KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS: cut the crap, stop messing around, help around the house, figure things out! It means “don’t panic” even as you’re getting fed up to the teeth. We’re rowing past Scylla and Charybdis daily, and there is no guarantee that our Odysseus is going to make it home safe. None whatsoever. It’s time we asked the lot of them — Scylla, Charybdis, the Sirens, and all the other monsters — who the hell they’re working for, because it’s time they retired. Our poor Earth is getting founders’ syndrome.

Electric karma

July 14, 2003 at 9:03 am | In yulelogStories | Comments Off

Chris Locke asks everyone of good will (and without smarmy new age monetary aspirations) to send a prayer Ann Craig’s way. Give it a try. Had a longer post yesterday, but lost it on a borrowed machine, the iBook is still kaput. It was trivial, though: all about unearthing LPs after we found the pre-amp & record player, packed away since our move into this house last November. Woke up this morning from a bad dream about 400 coins, which I think were the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse, times 100 (we live in a nuclear age, right?). I usually never dream stuff like this, can’t imagine where it came from except from listening to too much of The The’s Soul Mining and other 80s Brit pop/punk last night. Not that they sing about coins or horsemen, it’s all a porridge of despair with them, which is what made them so cool in the decade of battleship shoulder pads.

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