No One Is Born A Writer; Literacy

It Turns Out That We're Actually Capable Of Something Other Than Neoliberalism And Actually We're Really Capable Of Enjoying Ourselves More Than We Do Under Neoliberalism. It Feels That If Neoliberalism Is First About Privatizing Desire And Imagination Before The Economy, Then We're In This Process Of Publicizing It Again.

If You Look At A Lot Of Traditional Societies, They're All Organized Along What We Might Call Anarchist Guidelines, But It's Not Like The Zapatistas Were Reading European Social Theory.

At A Certain Fork In The Road Of Automatization, Europeans Chose To Have More Time, And They Work Far Less Than We Do And Get Much Longer Vacations. We Chose To Have More Stuff, The Stuff Sold To Us Through Those Beckoning Adjectives-bigger, Better, Faster: Jet Skis, Extra Cars, Second Homes, Motor Homes, Towering Slab Tvs, If Not The Time To Enjoy Them Or To Enjoy Less Commodified Pleasures.

Stories Are Compasses And Architecture, We Navigate By Them, We Build Our Sanctuaries And Our Prisons Out Of Them, And To Be Without A Story Is To Be Lost In The Vastness Of A World That Spreads In All Directions Like Arctic Tundra Or Sea Ice.

If Gold Has Been Prized Because It Is The Most Inert Element, Changeless And Incorruptible, Water Is Prized For The Opposite Reason -- Its Fluidity, Mobility, Changeability That Make It A Necessity And A Metaphor For Life Itself. To Value Gold Over Water Is To Value Economy Over Ecology, That Which Can Be Locked Up Over That Which Connects All Things.