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- Subscribe - Contact Us - Rate Card - Place an Ad Archives Revels Classifieds Real Estate Menu Guide Wedding Weather Subscribe Contact Us July 15, 2005 I’ll Shut Up — Right After This What would Jefferson do? Seen it 35 times now, that Fourth of July spectacle — can’t stop traipsing down there — what is it that’s so irresistible about it, this crazy marriage of Halloween, militarism, political protest, beer blast, pyromania, this pilgrimage of silliness, eroticism and above all, this freedom to publicly flaunt views for which millions have been tossed in dungeons and lynched. John Darling I’m interviewing Eli, new to Ashland. He says he cried for half an hour, beholding this wholesome, messy, glorious surging forth of expression. Of freedom, really. We’re free, we really are, even if we go in long, dark cycles of giving it up, as we are now. We’re sleepwalking and have lost our democracy, says Eli, an author-lecturer, a veteran of the ’60s anti-war movement and civil rights protests in the South in 1965, where you could get lynched quick by the racist majority. Eli Jaxon-Bear was just in Washington, on a speaking tour and, while visiting the Jefferson Memorial, saw the third president’s engraved words — that as we become more enlightened and discover new truths, so our institutions must advance, thus we escape “the regimen of our barbarous ancestors.” We’re being called upon in these difficult times, not to become better at the barbarous practices of making war, consuming and mastering the environment — but rather at being enlightened, says Eli, which means just what it says, enlightened, like Jefferson, Gandhi and King were, able to develop intellectually and spiritually, to think, see and live beyond the dogma and self-interest of party, commerce and religion. Pointing to the many “disappointments of democracy” — the assassinations of JFK, MLK, RFK, Vietnam, Watergate, the failure of Carter and Clinton to change much, the stealing of the 2000 election, the falsity of the premises for the Iraq War — many, like activist-author Bill Kauth, are moving ahead with new social forms, beyond the democracy Jefferson gave us. In the first meeting of his “Sacred Lifeboats,” July 5 at Ashland’s Peace House, Kauth passes out workbooks to two dozen attendees, stating as premises that we’ve lost our democracy, electronic voting machines are “corporate controlled,” the “corporate media” no longer give us the real news, those in power today behave as predators, without conscience — and “the Singularity” is happening, meaning all manner of systems, the economy, environment, energy, socio-political conditions, are changing and coming to a head so fast that a lot of scared people are making “lifeboats.” I’m sitting in the circle with a lot of people I know or recognize and I’m hearing a lot of conspiracy talk around 9/11, fixed voting and going to war for oil. I hear stuff like, “if the Evil Empire takes away the Internet” and “big changes are coming” and “part of me is looking forward to it,” meaning the decline and fall of society as we know it and a return to a simpler, more agrarian, community style of living. My stomach does a slow roll listening to all the things wrong with our society and democracy and how it’s natural to want to be in denial about it — but that facing reality and planning for survival will make you feel strong and enable survival. What to do? Educate yourselves, Kauth says, (like with the book “What Would Jefferson Do?”) and form “relentless optimist” groups to help each other create new ways of living, such as co-housing, alternative money, alternate energies, local organic gardens. Kauth points out that everyone he knows has an “exit strategy,” that is, if it comes down to it, they’re already thought about running away, like to Canada, Mexico, New Zealand, but for now, despite the many disappointments of democracy, we’ll just keep hoping it can come back to center. I say that I have to believe, somehow, in the democracy given to us by Jefferson and other giants in the Age of Enlightenment. That’s nice. Hope is good. But hope can mask denial — and foster the passivity we see in our populace. We’re listening to Martin Luther King III at the college stadium. He says the FBI’s surveillance done illegally on his martyred father can now be done legally to anyone, that the “quagmire” war in Iraq is unjust and illegal, that the dollar and the economy are in big trouble and that “corporate interests seem to be running everything.” Americans, he adds, badly need to educate themselves about all this. Meanwhile, the most vigorous example of public debate seen in our town in years is about how graphic pictures of fleshly piercing and suspension on the Tidings’ front page have outraged the sensibilities of Ashlanders, whose considerable assets have allowed them to create a lifeboat safe from the diverse and scary writhings of the outside world. As one writer wittily pointed out, a whole religion was built on such piercing — and the spiritual transcendence achieved by it — and that image is pushed in our face everywhere, including in a recent boffo movie. Of less concern among our populace was the story that a resident of this Valley has just been convicted of sitting down on the sidewalk, this in an exercise of free speech and public assembly in Jacksonville last fall, when Bush came to dinner. They called it “interfering with a government administration,” which sounds bad on its face, like he sent anthrax letters. But, folks, this is a litmus test to determine if you understand the First Amendment — is protest against a public official “interference” or is it “free speech?” Is the quashing of dissent “homeland security” or is it tyranny? Do we care? Contact John Darling, an Ashland writer and counselor, at [email protected]. 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