Witnessing Absurdities: Deep Seeing as a Skill for Decolonizing Activist Work

In the face of environmental catastrophe, and global capitalism’s never ending wealth grab, we in the crumbling empire seem to struggle to build lasting, holistic social movements. Divided by class, race, philosophical differences, geography, and so much more, the efforts that we collectively do bring about, like Occupy, flame up and then rapidly fade from public awareness.  Unlike in many parts of the world, coordinated government repression doesn’t have the kind of emboldening quality that wakes up and brings out the masses. Not on a national scale anyway. The Occupy movement was effectively propagandized against to the point where, when the militarized police departments arrived to bash heads and erase the camps, the average American viewed the whole thing as complaining from the lazy and marginal. Around the nation, the movement isn’t dead, but it’s become one of the numerous smaller, fragmented groups attempting to chip away at power of the capitalist elite.

It’s easy to look back and see a variety of internal reasons for why the Occupy movement didn’t maintain momentum. (I wrote more about it here and here.) But Occupy is just one of several larger scale efforts over the past twenty years that hasn’t had staying power. Diverse coalitions built to fight the NAFTA agreement in the early 1990s splintered apart after the racism of some groups involved, and political differences in general, became too much to handle. For a brief time, the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999 galvanized the American left, but any momentum towards a nationwide movement was probably quelled by the events on 9-11-2001. The Anti-War movement brought millions into the streets in the weeks leading up to the second Iraq War (in 2003), but everything from collective disappointment to divisions between those allied with the Democratic Party and everyone else eventually rendered it impotent.

Today, Idle No More and allied plus independent indigenous led movements appear to hold the best hope for bringing enough of us together across differences and geography to challenge global capitalism and environmental destruction. Unlike the other efforts I spoke of above, the indigenous led movements across the U.S. and Canada seem to do a better job of offering a more holistic vision for folks to plug into. Over the coming months, I and others at Turning Wheel intend to look much more deeply into these efforts, and consider how Buddhists might play a role in them.

In terms of the current post, however, I want to take a look at one of the elements I think has been lacking in many other American social change efforts: deep seeing or right mindfulness. By right mindfulness I'm speaking of it both as awareness of what’s present “inside” each of us, and also skillful attention to what’s present in the social, collective realm. The first step to waking up, and breaking the chains of a destructive pattern or social system, is simply being able to see what’s present. Not what we think is there. Not what someone else told us is there. But actually witnessing and taking in fully what’s there before us.

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I am an avid urban bicyclist. Three quarters of the year, biking is my main form of transportation. It’s also the perfect vantage point for bearing witness to the marks of colonialism and its attendant fossil fuel driven economy. 

This is some of what I see on a regular trip through St. Paul and Minneapolis, which together are often ranked in top ten lists of America’s Greenest cities:

Large swaths of concrete and asphalt covering the soil, preventing plants from growing.

Lawns of imported, uniform grass regularly mowed flat by gas powered mowers.

Trees circled by metal grates and concrete, the roots barely able to breathe.

Giant billboards filled with invasive advertisements.

Traces of oil, gasoline, and chemical solvents on the roads.

Smoke pouring from the rooftops of industrial buildings.

Plastic, broken glass, cigarette butts, and other kinds of trash.

Plastic and metal bubbles with wheels, cutting off their occupants from the natural elements as they spew gasoline exhaust into the air.

People with gas powered weed wackers, hoes, shears, regular scissors, or just their bare hands grabbing, ripping, pulling, almost attacking any plant deemed a threat to the uniformity of the lawn.

An abundance of ground ivy, garlic mustard, buckthorn and other invasive plant species.

The heavy presence of a tiny number of overpopulated animals and birds. Here in the Twin Cities, squirrels, rabbits, and pigeons are probably most notable.

Fences, walls, and other forms of division, markers of privatization, everywhere.

So much that looks like variations of this:

[image src="http://mrg.bz/MZ4eby" width="500" height="250" lightbox="yes" align="center"]

About a week ago, I was out for a ride through several neighborhoods in St. Paul. At one point, I came upon a little house, tucked between two larger ones, in the middle of a block. The owner of the house had torn out the grass, bushes, trees, and whatever else was living, and created an entirely artificial landscape. Artificial turf for a lawn. Plastic flowers in concrete pots. Nearly everything living had been covered over or removed all together.

As my eyes began to register what was actually there, I found myself squeezing hard on the breaks, coming to a quick stop, and staring.

Staring quickly moved into blinking, partly out of disbelief, and partly out a belief that maybe I was just imagining it.

As the shades of denial and disbelief arose and then fell away, the questions, tinged with judgment, arose. How could they do this? What would possess someone to take such steps? Why do we do such abusive things to the planet?

From there, my mind wandered into associations, including how it looked like a golf course. I have long had an intense dislike for golf, largely because of the ways in which the land is tamed and often poisoned in the making and maintaining of the game course.  Golf also seems to be the game of the power elite, and the courses the breeding grounds for many of the political and corporate deals that lead to widespread human suffering and destruction of the planet.

Finally, after all of that, I was left with nothing but silence and seeing. Just witnessing what someone else (or a group of folks) had done to a particular place, sometime in recent history. It was a surprising, almost stunning experience, but only so because of the extremes present.

The fact is that the settler colonial landscape is riddled with this kind of stuff.

Not only absurdities like the place I wrote of above, but also grand scale absurdities like giant parking lots, stripped mountains, miles wide oil fields, abandoned coal pits collapsed upon themselves, poisoned rivers and lakes, and this list goes on.

Below the surface of the land, and our vision, fuel pipelines snake through the soil, breaking the natural order and rhythm of life. So too does buried and abandoned piles of human produced garbage and toxic waste, threatening the health and well being of everything trying to live around it.

In fact, much of the settler colonialist built world is absurd. It represents actions far more about destroying life than enhancing it. Instead of functioning as part of the order of an ecosystem, even a human made ecosystem like a city, so much of the settler colonialist landscape functions to create disorder or disruption.

The same kind of seeing and witnessing applied to our environment can be directed inward as well. To notice and pay attention to the disorders and disruptions of the mind and body. And to see how linked the external and internal are.

Consider what goes into your mouth. The food with traces of GMOs and high levels of artificial chemicals. The water poisoned by waste from industrial companies, factory farms, fracking, oil pipeline spills, mining operations, and in many parts of the world, the various remnants of war. The air poisoned by car exhaust, industrial smoke and fumes, chemical spills, and toxic building and cleaning supplies.

Consider that the skin takes in some of the same elements, in addition to the chemically produced shampoos, conditioners, soaps, toners, deodorants, makeup , and other products we often apply to it.

Consider that some of this stuff travels to the blood in a matter of seconds or minutes, and may not readily be eliminated for years, if ever.

Consider that the absurdities of our external world are also being found in our bodies, indirect or direct products of mass scale environmental destruction and toxicity.  Things like cancerous tumors, aborted fetuses , blue-lined gums, softened bones, seizure disorders, and various mental disorders.

It is any wonder that the Buddha taught us that everything is interconnected, dynamically arising and falling apart together.

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Perhaps you’re thinking: that’s a nice reflection. So what? How can this kind of deep seeing or witnessing practice inform our activist work?

Well, I think it begins by shifting the kinds of questions that get asked. Let’s look at the housing justice movement, for example.

In light of the practice above, some of the questions that arise for me include the following:

Are city blocks filled with privately owned buildings and chunks of land really what we want in the long term? How might we support folks in need now, while advocating for something different looking for our neighborhoods in the future?

What kind of local economies are present within the neighborhood, and how might others be supported and developed? Here, I’m talking about things like material sharing, trading, time shares, skill shares, etc.

How can human health and well being be made a central feature of housing campaigns? (So that they might move beyond a fight over money, foreclosure practices, and banking theft?

How do our homes as they are disrupt or disturb the ecosystems of human neighborhood and the life on the land beyond that human neighborhood?

What are the elements that go into a holistic quality of life vision?

Who gets to decide what gets added and subtracted in a neighborhood? Are property rights the sole or main determinant? Is that what folks really want?

Once the questions shift, it’s easier for a broader vision to develop, and from there, for a more diverse platform of actions to spring forth to address various pieces of the system. Groups can move beyond the scattered, isolated parts approach that characterizes the colonized mind. (Perhaps readers have some examples of movements from the past or present that display this.)

Obviously, it’s easier to focus social activist work on specific targets that most everyone can understand, and also for which smaller victories or steps can be made in fairly short time frames.  However, one of the flaws in putting everything into the “concrete victory” basket is that once the goal is met, a lot of folks drop away. Or if the particular goal isn’t met in a matter of months or a few years, discouragement tends to heavily thin the ranks.

We sell ourselves way short when we individually and collectively fail to see the broader, interconnected picture and work to develop a more holistic approach to our actions. Beyond that, we fall into the colonialist pattern of dividing everything into separate pieces, including our power. Somehow, there has to be a way to come together that both embraces the differences amongst us, and also recognizes and celebrates our commonalities. Not just in a feel good, symbolic manner, but in a way that powers a social movement with the strength necessary to overthrow the oppressive absurdities of today, and replace them with something much better. Right Mindfulness is one skill that could help move in that direction, whether we’re Buddhist or not.