living underground
i was burned out by the time i entered college.
in college i played it cool, being too busy holding down a practically full-time job and going to school to do anything more than accept the presidency-by-default (there were hardly any others in the group) of my school's sleepy environmental group. we did some cool stuff, but my heart was never quite in it. i was too busy.
but i never stopped being political, in fact, the less of an "activist" i was, the more political i became. when you are completely enmeshed in one "movement," it is almost impossible not to have tunnel vision, and when I left the animal rights world I was able to prioritize better. I also feel that most small animal rights community groups get too bogged down with infighting and vegan-policing-type activities to be truly useful, so while I support larger groups like Farm Sanctuary who do investigative and legislative work, I shy away from the smaller groups.
However, my time in the animal rights trenches led me to many other political ideas, and for that i am grateful.
sometimes, like most political, caring people today, i wonder if i am doing enough. things are so obviously getting worse in many areas (not animal rights, though. i think that many people are really open to vegetarianism, not wearing fur, etc lately. but feminism, civil rights, civil liberties and more are going all downhill, it seems), and instead of that fact making me want to go out and "fight the good fight," it's sort of just making me want to sit at home and knit.
I just want to go underground. the worse things get, the more i want to escape. i don't know if this is because i feel like things are hopeless or because the only hope we have to say "no" to all the ridiculousness going on lately is just to opt-out. non participate. no debates, no arguments. just refusal. the only way to show how fucked up their world is is to refuse to live in it.
i am lucky. i am enough in debt that money is not a problem (that is, i know i'll never have it, so i am blessedly unconcerned with making enough of it to live, much less with making enough to be able to move up in the world), so i am free to work where i want. so, my
life has for several years been an exercise in living freely by living underground as much as possible.
i work at a natural foods cooking school and a feminist vegetarian restaurant owned by anarchistic luddite lesbians. i buy my organic food at school or at small health food stores (i try not to shop at huge ones like whole foods). i carry organic cotton bags with me always, so i don't have to carry around bags with ads on them. i rent my webpage from a friend's small company. i use working assets, a leftist company, for my long distance and green mountain for my electric company because they use hydro and renewable energy. i chew my food, one of the most political things you can do in our culture of fastfastfaster. i don't watch TV. i listen to npr. i am vegan. i haven't bought new clothes in years, with maybe 2 or 3 exceptions. i buy used ones, trade clothes, or make my clothes.
and on and on. i'm not writing this to show off how cool i am, but to show what i mean by living underground.
of course, all of my planet-conscious efforts to make new clothes from old are completely undone every minute of every day by all the fucks who don't turn off the water when they are brushing their teeth. or by the amount of paper wasted by viacom in one millionth of 1 second.
i do not think this is escape. i think it is creation.
living underground is not the negative act of rejecting the world, it is the positive act of creating a real life independent of the sado-society. it is the process of remembering that WE are the ones who decide how to live our lives.
living underground makes activism obsolete.
this position is a bit harsher than the old activist's position of "it's ok that i work for the GAP because i hand out anti-sweatshop flyers in the subway on weekends." many activists get too caught up in a life where one "bad" action can be erased by a "good" one. when you are living underground, your entire life is the activism, not bits and pieces. underground,
on one hand, it would be easy to say that living underground does not bring about as much change in the world as does traditional activism. on the surface, it seems like going underground is giving up. but seeing things on the surface is just the problem. if one is unapologetic and forthright about ones underground life, i believe much more change can come about than through mainstream activism.
i know 2 good examples that will convince you of this.
the first is this dude mike who goes to the natural gourmet. sometimes i call him mountain man, in an affectionate way. mike makes a living certifying organic farms. he grows much of his own food. he has a sourdough starter that is older than me. mike ordered tempeh culture and miso starter and makes his own tempeh and miso. he fashioned a tempeh-maker from an old ice chest, lots of thermostats and thermometers, a lightbulb, and some plexiglass shelves. he has a million sprouts going at one time and is a mushroom hunter, a wild foods gatherer, a slow foodist, a champion bread baker. it is rumored that mike does not live in a house. when i asked if i could call him up sometime to get some advice on how to make my own tempeh maker (my god,
mike lives underground. he does not try to convert people. he does not go around bragging about how wonderful his tempeh is. he shares. he brings in 20 pound chanterelle mushrooms he found that would have cost (i kid you not) $75 in the store. he brought in his tempeh maker, his sourdough starter, his sprouts. he will talk to you about everything, but he will not preach. in this way, mike has enlightened so many people. i am sort of becoming a mike disciple. in absolutely no way is mike an activist, but in his own way, through his own creative, unrepentant, unapologetic way, he influences everyone he encounters.
the second example is the bloodroot women. you can read about them here, but briefly, they are amazing. they run a restaurant built from their own stubborn creativity and strength. they run their place on less than most people on welfare make in a month. they unapologetically run a feminist vegetarian restaurant, and for 25 years they have been adamant that feminism and food go together.
these are some of the most underground people i know, and they are also the ones i know who have
when you are living underground, i think you naturally become more open to meeting and being able to learn from people like this, and so your world, and the world of the underground as a whole, grows.
there is this great line in the movie "6 degrees of separation," about how each person is a new door, opening up to new worlds. underground, i feel like i go through my life as the dot in the center of a wheel with spokes coming out of it. each interesting person is a spoke, leading me to new places. some spokes have more divisions, like those of a tree branch, coming out of them -- people who lead to other people or ideas. mike's spoke would have another branch coming out of it all about making your own tempeh. and i am a spoke on other people's wheels.
so the underground world grows exponentially. a subterranean world, steadily spreading, moss-like, stealthily taking over the sado-society, the whitebread fratboy disney world. slowly more and more people turn inward and towards the real, and the subterranean underground turns on its axis.
march 2002