Reply #60: "shades of feudalism define much of modern life"

[bread_and_roses]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/03/18-2

Ominous Clouds: Nuclear Songs Remain the Same
by Randall Amster

... The storyteller Utah Phillips -- whose pro-labor, movement-oriented collaborations with Ani DiFranco in the late 1990s presaged many of today’s issues and responses -- once observed that “freedom is something you assume, then you wait for someone to try to take it away. The degree to which you resist is the degree to which you are free.” In the U.S. we’ve barely resisted, and thus stand today largely as mere vassals.

Indeed, shades of feudalism define much of modern life. Our serfdom is often masked by the ostensible “freedoms” and myriad creature comforts in our midst, while the “robber barons” continue to acquire wealth and power at our expense. The net result is what I have referred to as a “web of dependency,” in which we are ensnared by a set of forces that provide us with a modicum of “easy living” in exchange for our willing captivity within its spacious confines. As Pink Floyd once inquired, “Did you exchange a walk on part in a war, for a lead role in a cage?” The answer for most Americans is undoubtedly yes, and the effect has been to render us largely complicit with our own subjugation, as I wrote six months ago: “The hardware of our lives, from food and energy to transportation and shelter, is entirely bound up with the workings of a highly mechanized and digitized global economy. And no less so, the software of our existence -- communications, community, entertainment, education, media, politics, and the like -- is equally entwined within that same technocratic system.”

"Indeed." When we can't even assure our food (and in some locals, our water) without dependence on a vast network of profit-seeking entities we are serfs in all but name.

An enduring mystery in all of this is how people can behave so admirably as individuals, or even in small groups (think of that village in the mountains of - France, I think? - where the entire village collaborated in the rescue of Jews hiding from the Nazis) and so appallingly in the large aggregate?

from the same article as above:

Admirably, people have by and large not begun to panic, even as supplies of potassium iodide and other survival-related items have been rapidly disappearing from store shelves across the west. At my local health food store, the search for potential remedies even reached such a degree that all of the stocks of kelp (known as perhaps the best widely-available food product to ward off radiation poisoning) were sold out. Other seaweed items with therapeutic qualities remained -- so I bought them.

There’s no downside here, since I like seaweed anyway and it’s good for you in general beyond whatever properties it might possess as a self-help remedy to stave off the worst effects of fallout. Interestingly, as I cleaned out the remaining three bags of arame, a young woman with a long list of items in hand was nearby, and I could tell she was thinking similarly about what sorts of natural items might be of use in case of radiation exposure in the coming days and weeks. We got to chatting, and I offered her one of the bags of arame I had scooped up, saying somewhat awkwardly that “if we can’t cooperate in the face of the apocalypse, then all hope is lost anyway.” In this brief encounter, it was realized that the existence of an elusive “community” was perhaps the most powerful remedy of all.

As Galadriel said: "The Quest stands upon the edge of a knife. Stray but a little, and it will fail, to the ruin of all. Yet hope remains while the Company is true. .."