Everything is Connected: Currents of Activism, Occupy Wall Street, Tar Sands

everything is connected

Everything is connected: the things we do, the things others do, affect people’s lives. The aura of our material planet is a body of energy that is part of us and extends around us from the inside out. This connectivity is showing up willfully in our streets. Bill McKibben points out: “We cannot solve the carbon problem until we solve the power problem.” He also acknowledges the good timing of now-linking movements of activism. The time of putting positive energy into a collective force is in action now as a space to heal these gaping wounds in culture and environment unfolds.

To stop the inevitable disaster to ecosystems the Tar Sands Pipeline would create, let us consider other ecological disasters, such as radiation released in Japan and Chernobyl — disasters that did not stay in one place. As a world, we are connected, by atmospheric pathways and by waterways. And, thus, these disasters in other places affected us and the whole of our globe. One does not escape the movements of big business, bad water, poverty, and so on just because they are not directly upon us in our singular lives.

environmental activism occupy wall street

Positive thought cannot be separated from pragmatic action. Tragedy in landscape, humanscape, and environment will not go away simply by ignoring it. To be positive, one has to create the knowledge of a simpler footprint, particularly our increasingly important water footprint, as well as all other natural resources.

One of our most innovative thinkers of the last century, Carl Yung, discussed the collective unconscious, the super conscious and more. This connection in consciousness is what is making the impeccable timing of many activist movements to join together now.

Many believe this positive connection of Light and Love is what we are seeing operating in sync now, at this time of renewed activism. The collective movement coming together, not like different soap boxes, but like streams joining the same rivers, and rivers joining the same great body of consciousness. This is perhaps manifesting of activism from subtle or less subtle levels.

occupy wall street activists

Banks Are Robbing the World

Julian Assange, in public speech on Oct 8, mentioned something that most of us know but have not verbalized so clearly. It is the same something that has affected many of the dissolving middle class, affected the many struggling to move out of poverty, affected even the ‘comfortable’ as they consider the abject poverty of their fellow humans in this life and evolutionary process that demands more compassion and respect for others.

It is a time change, some losing their homes, their savings, their jobs, and their sustainability. Assange communicated that banks do Big-Time money laundering. Those banks get away with what is otherwise considered highly illegal and, because they are banks, they are even supported or protected in the process. Verbalized by Assange, who is under fire for exposing what needs to be exposed as a journalist, this message is not something new to most of us. He simply voices it. Most of us have experienced this information moving from subtle or greater levels for most of our lives.

Environmental Robbery Connected to Political Robbery

One of our most educated and educating leaders, endless in ongoing of environmental efforts, is Bill McKibben, who, coming from a seemingly different vantage point, is on the same page with Assange.

“I guess the way to say it is, we’ve been concentrating on how environmentally dirty this project is, and we’re going to spend a lot of time now also talking about how politically dirty it is.”

Children deserve to drink clean water and breathe clean air. This should be considered an inalienable right of humankind. To even question that consciousness, this wisdom and decency in protecting these things, to question the willful activism of the Tar Sands movement and the Occupy Wall Street movement, is to question that children deserve to have protection of the most basic needs in humane levels.

McKibben: “For me these things have never been blindly separate, but unfortunately not everyone has seen or experienced the connection, as it is becoming now.” Smaller, gentler footprints are natural for some. However, everyone deserves to know the peace of such a way of life. This is the time we have come to now, whereas we must reconsider the effects of rampant development of land, property, possessions that brought us to this false idea that we had a safe and protected middle class — “a chicken in every pot” — an ideology that our parent’s parents hoped and dreamed for. Unfortunately, this idealistic dream is a legacy that they as a generation were not really able to pass on.

Where to Go Next?

The question for us now, as we rise up to demand simple sustainability (without horrible sci-fi like toxic destruction), is where to go with this current of activism set in motion. I believe, like McKibben, that it must go to stopping the tar sands pipeline. This is going to illuminate who Obama really is capable of being — in either direction.
Energy is now in motion to raise a big STOP sign to Obama with the tar sands movement, and simply for honest want for a decent life.

The end to victimization is perhaps a hand, as we see that many are not willing any more to quietly live the lie that the robbery by Wall Street is something we cannot stop, or end, or at least raise a response to through of civil disobedience in the way of Gandhi and Thoreau.

Safe, clean water, eco-systems, air, cannot be separated from Wall Street. Alternate realities of money spent to destroy, to take away our resources, does not happen on a different planet from the ecological one that we all walk on.

Footprints of ecological health equal planetary health equal political health. This is the connection. Wall Street cannot afford to overlook this, unless its game is one of blind addiction to greed, or a heart-disconnected vision that is like a machete splitting clear vision in deceit.

Image Credits:
AttributionNoncommercial Some rights reserved by DBarefoot
Attribution Some rights reserved by pweiskel08
AttributionNoncommercial Some rights reserved by pameladrew212

4 thoughts on “Everything is Connected: Currents of Activism, Occupy Wall Street, Tar Sands”

  1. Love the top graphic, but it would be so much more powerful (as well as make a great fundraising poster) if those names were replaced by environmental, social and economic issues and how they all connect.

  2. It is good to see that their are some that want to keep these critical issues in focus. The problems discussed are not new and there is an importance that solutions to these issues must be continued to be developed. It is good to see some of these coming to the market, but the changes will unfortunately be gradual.

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