Stardate 09122003
Burning Man
“I watched the sunset in a tree that had bells hanging all over it and a man parachuted down from the sky and asked me for water.” -Erin
Every article ever written that attempts to describe to the uninitiated, which is a great many people, what Burning Man IS or what Burning Man is LIKE begins like this …
“There is no way to describe what Burning Man IS or what Burning Man is LIKE …”
Burning Man is what you make it. Everyone is a participant, a co-conspirator in the bliss of others. Burning Man is what happens when you build a temporary city, which in 2003, consisted of a record 30,500 people in the middle of the Nevada desert with no amenities or services, food, water or power, other than what the participants bring. Burning Man happens at Black Rock City, Nevada – the seventh-largest city in Nevada which exists for one week only. There are, as in any group of humans, social forces on which hinge all the activity at Burning Man -- radical self-reliance, radical self-expression and a gift economy.
Some people think it’s a pagan gathering. Others are confused about why some people call it an art festival. Some people think of it as an experimental community. And other people think it’s a great place to walk around naked, drunk and judgement-free. I have a more idealistic idea of what Burning Man can be for me, so it becomes that for me. A friend of mine thinks that Burning Man is still just part of the larger culture – a shallow mimic of everything it portends, such as ecstatic spirituality, radical self-liberation, personal transformation and an inversion of capitalist, consumer culture, and I think she has a point, but I also think that it contains within it, still, a critique of the larger culture and active opposition to business as usual. Just showing up says that your values are not those of the larger culture in that you are willing to live inside of a completely inverted cultural paradigm, if only for a few days. It’s a dream that can’t sustain itself but it’s nice while it lasts.
Radical self-reliance
Bring it in, take it out and leave no trace. In recent years, Black Rock City has provided a minimal infrastructure. Port-a-potties, roads, lamp lit thoroughfares, a civil safety force (the Rangers) and emergency medical services. In the early years, there was just you confronting the chaos of your being but then the event was also free. The ticket price, which averages about $225, helps to pay for some of the niceties that participants were previously totally responsible for. Burning Man is wilderness camping at the infrastructure level and participants must contend with the reality of a harsh, inhospitable environment.
The blinding, choking dust storms; the 100+ heat at 9 am, the 40-degree chill of 2 am; the relentless sun; the ultra-dry air that sucks the moisture right out of your body day or night as fast you can get it in (an orange peel will dry to a crisp in a couple of hours) and the alkaline playa underneath that eats away at your skin and causes your cuticles and heels to dry, crack and bleed, are the environmental conditions you must be prepared to deal with every moment. The fight against the playa is a losing battle. The playa always wins. The best we mere humans can do in the face of this awesome, unforgiving god is to run damage control 24 hours a day.
Nobody but you is responsible for your well-being but everyone else is nice enough to watch to make sure you are getting enough water, enough rest, and enough food. Self-reliance is not the law of the jungle. This is a human community and the community comes together to ensure its collective survival.
The over-riding concern of the event is to Leave No Trace. Which means that whatever you bring in, you must take out and everyone is expected to keep MOOP (Matter Out Of Place) off the playa floor and properly contained. “Don’t let it hit the ground” is one of the watch phrases used to remind participants that we are going to return the playa the pristine state which we found it. Coming home, I was alarmed at the amount of litter blowing around and the thought that landfill is an unnatural pile of man-made material that can’t be reabsorbed by the earth sent my MOOP alert into a death spiral.
Radical self-expression
In our industrialized, regimented white-washed suburban mono-culture detached from the spiritual mysteries and our bodies, we are severely limited in the ways we interact with each other, communicate with each other and express our personalities. Our options are delineated not by our individual imagination but by the voice of fashion and propriety that we accept as authoritative. Our uniforms are divided into work and leisure. Our sex-crippled, pornographied culture can not incorporate bare flesh into our outfits without inviting judgment or aggressive sexual advances, rather than sensuality, healthy eroticism and celebration. Body adornment and make-up is heavily divided along gender lines and the choices are minimized to avoid extravagance, passion, baroqueness, wildness, color, playfulness. And we take all our direction from a select few we have deemed “authorities” on what is stylish and fashionable. [Although, I must give a hearty thumbs up to QUEER EYE FOR THE STRAIGHT GUY. In spite of being so dictatorial, they are helping straight guys express the inner queer without having to demonize the feminine or the non-heterosexual. Which is an incredible leap for our culture.]
At Burning Man, if it’s worth doing, it’s worth OVER-doing. If it’s worth it to show your navel, it’s worth it to walk around nude. If it’s worth getting an erection, it’s worth proudly displaying your manhood as an expression of the body rather than a sexual advance. If it’s worth a headband, it’s worth a head-dress. People wear outfits that make them feel good and with all judgment suspended, everyone conspires to enable each other to show themselves to the world any way they want.
And since everyone is a participant, nobody feels like they are the show. Everyone is doing what they want to please everyone else and everyone is everyone else’s show. They are all proudly displaying themselves to each other. It is the exact opposite of our media-driven celebrity showbiz culture where many people are focused on one person. At Burning Man, everyone is focused on their own pleasure. Everyone is the star of their own show. Although, there is a certain percentage of people who show up to WATCH rather than PERFORM and those people are called, appropriately enough, “tourists.”
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Self-expression goes beyond what one wears. In the consensual hallucination of the corporatized, mediated, industrialized, “rational” culture we live in, our methods of communication stay in little boxes. We can not dance an apology or explain that we were late by making a big red scribble. We feel as if the amount of money we spend is equal to the importance we attach to a person or an event or an object. We are not living. We are collecting.
Perhaps the traditional containers serve the corporatized, mediated, industrialized consensual hallucination well by keeping the machine running smoothly, along definitive lines, maintaining an important social order because we are all isolated, alienated strangers fearful of the other and incapable of bridging the communication gap between self and other and we need rules, structure and familiarity to feel safe, to identify with our tribes, and to find a cultural context. We favor the left, logical, rational, planned side of the brain at the expense of the emotional, creative, irrational right side. At its most basic, our culture favors male modalities at the expense of female modalities and that plays itself out in the basic conceptual framework of our understanding of “reality.” Which in turn influences the way we create our society.
Burning Man is not a complete departure of the left brain – after all, you must moronically remember to drink water constantly and to eat occasionally and to nap often, but it does integrate right-brain modes in a dynamic, palpable way so that participants are walking a balanced third road, fully embracing their whole selves, body and spirit, mind and matter, magic and miracle, mystery and mayhem.
Gift Economy
Nothing and nobody is for sale. Everyone paid the price of admission to be the center of their own attention. To walk their own catwalk. To sing their own aria. And everybody is recognized and rewarded for their efforts by the community at large. There is no commerce at Burning Man. There is no money. Nothing is traded. Everything is given freely with no expectation of a return. This creates a serendipitous environment where you always seem to be receiving whatever it is you need. Everyone is an agent working in the best interest of everyone else. Rob Breszny (THE TELEVISIONARY ORACLE) calls it “pronoia” – the irrational belief that the universe is conspiring for your best interest – which is the opposite of paranoia. It also creates an environment of trust and good-will.
Radical self-reliance, radical self-expression and the gift economy are ideals that participants of Burning Man strive towards. Because it is a human community, it is imperfect but there is a high degree of inclination towards those three principals. People show up looking to participate in the experiment and everyone brings not only extra supplies but also playa gifts – hand-made tokens that participants routinely give each other to mark a meaningful personal interaction with another participant. Gifts are like the gold stars rewarding people for their audacity and impertinence, for the lengths they go through to weave the spell for the benefit of the entire city.
And after a couple days, you realize that everything is a gift – not just the items made from materials acquired through the traditional market economy. The hug, the smile, the pause to let you pass, the pb&j that suddenly appears in your hand, the cold beer, the massage. We are co-conspirators of pleasure allowing and assisting everyone to follow their bliss. Participants are completely self-involved and taking care of each other ensures that they too will be taken care of. Your well-being is in the hands of others. We become like babies being cradled by the mother, who is us all and we implicitly trust that our needs will be met. There is no competition, no self-promotion, wealth is not measured through the aggregation of scarce goods, but through the quality of your experiences and interactions with others.
This city only lasts for a week, but many participants consider Black Rock City to be their true home. It is unfortunate that this experiment can only exist in the midst of the culture to which it aspires, on one level, to invert. We must bring in supplies from “out there” to enable the utopian environment to contain our vision quests, whether we go on them consciously and with intention, or whether they just happen to you regardless because you just stepped through a portal into a wholly other way of being.
The closest thing I can think of that resembles Burning Man is a pilgrimage to India, where the western world is completely inverted and you see, hear, smell, do and experience things that throw you completely outside of your understanding of reality. Nobody is supporting your hallucination about what is “normal” or “rational.”
What’s it all … for?
Burning Man is about experience, not about gathering objects as a replacement for experience. It is about BEING the thing, rather than WITNESSING the thing. It is about a collapse between subject and object. The only thing you find in the desert is yourself. Other people are your mirror.
Outside of the philosophical and metaphysical high-mindedness, it is also just a big party filled with binge-drinking and rampant drug use so that all those seemingly authentic moments you had with your 30,000 new best friends can feel like a cheat if you weren’t chemically enhanced enough to be feeling (or not feeling) as deeply, passionately and poignantly as all your stoned friends. Burning Man is so conducive to altered, ecstatic states that you don’t really need any other intoxicants, however, I can only imagine what kind of a playground of the mind and body is available to those who do choose to chemically tweak their experience of so-called reality.
During the day, most people are moving about, sloth-like under the Death God Sun, visiting, receiving visitors, communing, planning, talking, bonding, and recovering, but as soon as the sun dips down over the mountain ridge that frames the playa, the people cheer the coming of the night and an impossible vision emerges. The city comes alive with lights and music and people. Generators provide the electricity to power the sound systems, the lights and Dr. Megavolt’s giant tesla coil.
While most people bring gas generators, our electrical engineer, Andy, built a solar power system for us. Our wattage needs were very low since we were only powering L.E.D. lights. The photovoltaic panel charged two car batteries during the day, and the batteries powered the lights at night.
In spite of the number of camps with electrical light, there isn’t a lot of ambient light, just sharp points against what was this year the black of the new moon, like a giant Lite Brite (there actually was a giant Lite Brite that someone had built which was like a fractal of the larger city). In the dark, your only defense is whatever light you can put on your body and people build light sculptures around themselves to amuse others and to keep from getting run over by any non-bi-pedal moving thing. The strategy works. There was one unfortunate death when a young woman from Belmont, CA fell off an art car and was run over by the back-end trailer, but being well-lit wasn’t going to help her.
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An e-mail was circulated written by the driver of the car explaining how he felt, but nobody blamed him. He was doing nothing differently than of the other drivers of any other art car. He wasn’t driving too fast or too erratic and he wasn’t under the influence of anything. On the back of the ticket, in a font that is nearly three times the size, the disclaimer begins “You voluntarily assume the risk of serious injury or death by attending.” And it is unfortunate that every year, some minor miscalculation results in a fatality.
Another participant flipped her car on the way home and wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. Her arm stayed in the car while the rest of her body was found crumpled into a bloody heap several yards away. She was probably under-rested and burned out from partying and hurrying to get home, perhaps delusional from dehydration and feeling like the rivers would part for her after her magical, mystical journey through Burning Man.
Which is why it is important to take moronic check-ins with yourself about how you feel, what you are capable of at that moment and whether to climb the Scaffold of Death which the sign clearly says only holds eight burners, and do so at your own risk and there are already nine up there, all of which are blotto and it’s amazing they all managed to get up there and a miracle none of them have fallen yet, but you want to see the view. The most basic question you should always ask yourself is, “Where is my water?”)
And the Man stands in the center, a blue neon North Star atop his Temple, from which radiates the entire encampment. Everything is charted in relationship to the Man like hours on a clock face. Amidst all the relativism and subjectivity, The Man is the only absolute, a gravitational anchor holding the ship of fools in place so it doesn’t drift out of its orbit. The Man is the portal between the worlds and a reminder of the temporality of Black Rock City.
The day after the Man burns, there is a deliciously unhinged chaos that rampages through the city. The anchor is gone! We are no longer living in relation to an external center -- a star, a god, a hero -- and must be our own center, orienting ourselves towards the basics -- water, food, rest, human companionship and our creative, intensely personal journeys of vision and passion. We may not have achieved enlightenment or Nirvana or found Shangri-La or El Dorado, but we have been returned to ourselves as autonomous agents, co-creators of reality, weavers of the web, builders of the dream.
I forced myself to write one journal entry a day so I would have a roadmap. Every moment was chained to the next. There were no starts and stops, just undulating waves and cycles – analog reality.
Tuesday – Blow Jobs and Love Potions
Last night I meant to go to bed. I headed out to the Johnny on the Spot and met a guy who made love potions. He invited me back to his camp where he presented me with a tiny glass sphere filled with amber liquid wherein was suspended a tiny heart. After introducing me to some of his campmates in the common area, we went back to his tent and he told me he thought I had a nice dick and kept calling his friends over to look at it. They all appreciated it accordingly.
He told me there was a camp having a party that they were going to. Every camp is having a party. So they invite me to come along and I know I need to get some sleep because if I stay out too late, the sun will wake me up and I’ll be a zombie all day and by the end of the week I’ll be a jellyfish sliding over the playa floor. I’m having spa-week rather than crash and burn week and I’m determined to defy Burning Man and feel better at the end of the week than I did at the beginning.
It was getting cold and I was only wearing yellow and blue sarong and I had been dyed yellow, head to foot, earlier that day and the string of bells I was wearing filled the air around me with delicate, cascading chimes. I forgot to tell my new friend that I was covered in food coloring but blowing me would be no more dangerous than eating a Popsicle. I thought about his surprise in the morning as he tried to figure out how his tongue got so yellow.
We went to the camp, which had visuals projecting on the side of a two-story geodesic dome, a kickin’ sound system and a groovy tribe of freaks shaking it to the funky trance beats. I danced for a little while and then told my paramour de la nuit that I really had to go home. We promised to visit each other but I could tell our moment was over. And it didn’t really matter. There was nothing to get sentimental about. There were 29,998 other people to experience.
As I was walking away, a double-decker party bus came by and I jumped on because it was heading towards my camp. It immediately made a sharp U-turn as if to prevent me from doing anything sensible, encouraging me to abandon myself to the flow and headed out into the opposite end of the playa. If I stayed on, I may not make it back to camp, a mere one mile away, for a day.
This morning, people are crashed out on all the couches from an intoxicating night. The chaos is swirling and I’m waiting for a rhythm, if you can call it a rhythm, maybe a dithyramb, to kick in.
Wednesday – Reality slips away
Who even knows what time it is. In spite of the Frat Party atmosphere of last night, I keep having beautiful, magical moments.
The Department of Public Works, who are on a mission to get all the naked men to wear pants, shouted at me through their bullhorn, “YELLOW IS NOT PANTS” because I was wearing just a string of bells and my skin had just been freshly dyed. If they weren’t being such assholes, I would have laughed. But when I walked away, I did laugh.
Thursday – Yoga, Roller Disco, Cosmic Phenomena, Impossible Art, a Hot Bath and other Miracles.
The frenetic energy has given way to a mellow, steady beat. I now like the night. It feels welcoming rather than hostile, confused and disorienting. I feel connected to the dark container that embodies so many disparate contradictions. There is a new moon and Mars is at its closest point to earth than it has been in 60,000 years. We are experiencing something that our stone age ancestors last experienced. Mars asserts himself like a fiercely proud, fiery red warrior. I am falling in love with the city. I’ve never been here before, but I feel like I am in my native habitat. A camp mate said to me, “You seem to have taken well to the city.” I keep telling people that this is the first year I showed up, even though I feel like I’ve been going for years since I’m always involved in all my friends Burning Man adventures. Showing up, as Woody Allen said, is 90 percent of life. I am acutely aware that I am not consuming this experience, I am helping to create it and my presence changes it, adds to it, makes it more of what it is and yet I feel completely anonymous.
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I got up early, as usual and went to Yoga camp. I had never done Kundalini Yoga or any kind of Yoga but I’m hooked. I felt great all day, open and limber and balanced. After yoga I walked up the street and found Xanadu Roller Rink. The pair of old, beat up, cast-off roller rink rental skates that were nearest my feet fit me well enough. I was wearing the pink and black sheer checkerboard cocktail dress I had made and I had my silver umbrella to reflect that evil Sun back up to itself. I didn’t want to glom on the sunscreen and be caked in a sticky layer of sunscreen, sweat and dust by noon. If I use the umbrella, I can’t ride a bike, but the trade-offs are worth it, so I plan the portions of my day according to my sun-abatement strategy.
I had my discman with me. For some reason I left camp thinking that it would come in handy. I put in DJ Soulwax Volume 2 and skated around my own private roller disco. People kept coming by and taking my picture. I’m sure I looked ludicrous, but I felt great and I kept pointing at the skates and saying, “Come inside this moment, have your own experience, don’t record mine and call it your own.” I’m not a big fan of cameras at Burning Man, I didn’t look at all like how I felt so I think the camera is a bit of a cheat, but I liked all the photos that my friends took.
After roller-skating for an hour and drinking nearly a gallon of water in the process, I went across the street to the Storm Cellar – a fully enclosed box lined with black vinyl tarp that cycled cold water from a collection pan and then through a drip system in the ceiling to create a rain storm. A strobe light blinked for the lightening effect. I needed to rinse off and cool down and I met a couple of guys in the tiny space who told me that visiting the Storm Cellar was their daily ritual. There is no shortage of beautiful, sexy men willing to show off their bodies. Straight men who are not afraid to be sexualized by gay men is a gift in itself. And a relief, since I can’t help what I desire. Gay men make room for heterosexuality every day of their life so it’s great to be in a heterosexual environment that, to a much greater extent, makes room for homosexuality and recognizes and accepts gay male desire.
I shouldn’t have skated so much. I think I overdid it. I forgot I had a back injury from falling out of the hammock yesterday. I was swinging upright in the hammock doing some kind of Cirque Du Soleil maneuver when the rope broke and I fell flat on my back. Bill got me ice right away so I had nothing more than a little soreness and stiffness. I wonder if doing Yoga the day before helped me avoid any kind of injury. I got up and walked an hour later and I haven’t had any serious complaints. The headache even went away after an hour or so.
I went back to camp and rested and chilled and tried to eat an entire peanut butter and jelly sandwich and got through half. Chewing is a chore.
For the next four hours I talked about how I was going to go to Aromatherapy camp, which was a few streets behind us. I had succumbed to the Dome Syndrome. Whenever one person was in the dome, any other person who arrived would create a black hole that would attract others until the entire camp was assembled and the gravitational force would be so strong that it took a heroic act of will to leave again.
I finally left to the dome and visited Aromatherapy camp. I stripped off my clothes and sat in a hammock while cool water was misted over me. When I felt like it was time to get up, I went over to the essential oil table and anointed myself with genuine rose oil, lilac and gardenia. I felt like love and couldn’t wait to get back to camp to be a living stick of incense, a bouquet of flowers to enliven a long, hot, sweaty, dusty, difficult day.
Back in the dome … the sun set soon after. Night had come and everyone was putting the finishing touches on their night costumes, adjusting their camel backs, securing their goggles and facemasks and making plans about where they wanted to go, what direction they would travel.
I didn’t realize that I was spending most of my nights alone, exploring the city as a stranger. But I’m kind of a loner, a very sociable, people-oriented, extrovert who likes to trip around the world by himself, not searching for a complement, but just happy to go at my own speed and meet the world as it passes by.
I took one of the bikes, we brought nearly 20 of them, and decided to go on a night time art tour of the playa.
I found a symphony machine out in the Wholly Other. I was riding my bike around the dusty darkness and came upon a sound sculpture. As I approached I saw the control panel and the buttons and dials. I began pushing and turning and the sound mutated. I was out there for maybe an hour until I massaged all the noises into something that I wanted to leave for someone else to discover. As I was driving away, I saw a glowing stick figure a ways off. It was dancing and skipping and walking around. Living playa art. The stick figure would turn sideways and become a straight line. It was very cute and I watched it for quite some time. As long as I watched, it would perform.
I rode back to camp and dropped off the bike. I walked to Jiffy Lube, the gay sex party camp at the corner of Ridiculous and Dogma for some routine maintenance and then took a walk along the Esplanade – the main thoroughfare that borders the half-mile diameter central circle of Black Rock City. I turned to go see a sculpture called Desert Bloom – a wooden Japanese inspired temple structure, three stories high. The moment I turned, my ex-roommate and her sometimes-boyfriend moved across my field of vision. They were sitting in a speedboat that had been converted into a hot tub, being pulled by a truck across the desert. I jumped up on the bow of the boat and somehow managed to get off all my clothes while balancing precariously on one foot and then another. I threw the clothes into the truck where people I didn’t know gathered my things and put them in a neat pile. I stepped into the water, which was hot and soaked in a hot tub while moving about 5 miles an hour. It was so luxurious to take a hot bath in a place where taking a shower is a whole production. This is camping, after all.
We drove off to a side street and parked and got out of the tub and sat in the back of the truck, sleepy and talking about tricksters and shamans, sharing herb tea and organic nuts and dried fruit. A woman walked by the truck asking, “Is Reality that way?” and pointing west. Reality is the name of the street that was two streets east of us, but we didn’t realize it at the time. Instead we told her, “We don’t know where Reality is.” And then I remembered that since we were just past Ridiculous, that Reality was in the opposite direction. So there was a woman wandering around Black Rock City in the middle of the night looking for Reality. I doubt she ever found it.
And then some guy came by looking for Evidence. I woke up feeling like I had been slugged in the head. I had to re-read this to remind myself that this all happened in one day, and it wasn’t an unusually action-packed day.
Playa Poetry
Turning head
To see Mars
Get blinded by headlamp, instead
Pink cloth flows upward
Escaping through the whole
In the dome
Rushing, fluttering, flowing
Pouring itself through space and time
Seeking itself
Seeking freedom
That was one day out of ten and each day had its own unique challenges, rewards, surprised and adventures. One day I tried to keep track of all the Burning Man miracles that happened, but I lost count before the afternoon. I could write my own ON THE ROAD about just this one week, with as much heroism, risk taking, colorful characters and epic scope as Kerouac’s signature travelogue.
Burning Man is like life in that you get out of it what you put into it and what you allow to happen to you. You have to determine your boundaries and be open to grow. Eventually the desert sucks you in to the maelstrom in spite of yourself and whether you plan to or not, your sense of purpose and your sense of self are subsumed in this great Bacchus-like transformational God and this great Cosmic Hedonistic Lustful Throbbing Loving Goddess.
And to really experience Burning Man, I made some paper art that I burned on the last day after passing it around for my camp mates to admire and remember. While the thing itself was valuable as an artifact, no doubt to be puzzled over by archaeologists and ethnographers, psychologists and historians, it was meant to exist only for a week in the only container that could hold it, Black Rock City.
“Real” Life Encroaches
On the way home, the farther we got from the desert, the dirtier I realized we all were, filthy in fact, covered in dust from a white-out dust storm. And all the little trinkets that were so important during the week are now sitting in a Ziploc bag. Maybe some day someone will organize an exhibit of playa gifts – a massive shrine to gift giving. But you couldn’t charge admission, and the reality of our lives is that we must sell experiences to acquire fiat cash to trade for other goods and services. But it would be an interesting traveling exhibit – the kind of thing that Oxford would want for it’s extensive collections – when it was in the business of reaping the spoils of aggressive imperialist colonialism and taking cultural objects out of their context of meaning and turning them into commodities to be bought and sold and displayed as objects of conquest and dominance.
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Perhaps the Smithsonian would be game for a Burning Man exhibit. At some point, the larger culture will want to examine this phenomenon as not a fringe movement, but as a vital creative force in our culture – the visionary, mystic, pioneering spirit that America once worshipped.
The counter-culture has a lot to offer the mainstream if it could open its mind to why an alternative culture even exists and why millions of people self-identify as “cultural creatives.” And if you ARE a counter-culturalist, come out of the closet and share your ideas with the people around you. You may find that you aren’t as alone in your ideals and concerns as you might think. Talk through your fears and prejudices and stand up for your ideals. And vote. Vote. Vote. Vote. Vote.
Start Where You Are
While at Burning Man, one of my camp mates brought military Meals Ready To Eat (MREs) and I refused to eat them, saying that I didn’t want anything to do with the war machine. But then I thought, what if the military used a minimum 50% organic content in an MRE – that would be a tremendous boon to the organic agriculture industry. And the dome had an interesting conversation about why the military doesn’t support organic agriculture. So you can have trade-offs and find ways to use what’s already there to create change.
My feeling is that the military is generally apathetic about toxification seeing as how all it’s technology is essentially biocidal and that the generals and CEO’s and senators are all working to protect each other’s transnational capital. I also think that the current government is afraid of organic agriculture because people who support it generally share a progressive political platform and why throw money at something that will prevent one of your big campaign supporters from selling another million metric tons of toxic waste that will be filtered through our bodies and on into the environment. So the NEXT president, (a Democrat, one hopes, and one that is running on actual issues they intend to take action on that will preserve human and civil rights and protect the natural world that we humans are totally dependant on) as the commander in chief of the armed forces, could simply decide that all MREs will have a 50% organic content to be implemented immediately.
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That would be an order. Nowhere else does the president have such absolute, unchecked decision making power. There would be no meeting with the Secretary of the Interior, no feasibility studies, no consultation with a stacked and fraudulently unidealistic Environmental Protection Agency, no PAC’s invited to present their case as to why this piece of legislation will prevent them from donating millions to your re-election campaign. Just a “You are smart. Figure out how to do it, and do it.” Maybe the next one will use his or her power for the good of all, rather than the material benefit of a few.
Half of the US budget is used in military spending. There is tremendous opportunity there to support healthier, less toxic businesses. The military could be leading the use of alternative, non polluting energy resources, biodegradable containers and zero-waste disposal technologies. Start where you are, they say, and spiral outwards.
This is only instance where I think a top-down hierarchy of obeisance could be used to create a positive change. And if the military ever became a consensus-based organization, then the concerns of a private will matter as much as those of a general and everyone’s pain and need could be brought to the table in the quest to find the happy medium.
As it stands, low ranking military personnel are powerless to express their grievances and most of the foot soldiers are fed up with their commanding officers and the culture of control inside the military. It’s a seething hotbed of internal resentment that will eventually be unleashed on militarism in general.
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