'Why do we bother?' - Towards Community in the Now
“When you're so committed to the future, it's real easy to let your life right now turn to shit” - Brad Warner
Picture the scene: around one hundred activists on an embankment above the outer fence of Kingsnorth coal power station. Our first attempt to storm the place has led only to some broken fencing, and now a line of police wait inside the fence to arrest anyone attempting to climb through. Someone is having an epileptic fit and a police medic arrives to provide advanced first aid. Most of the group stand in a circle discussing how to proceed. There are some good ideas, the merits of which are being debated. Despite the fact it is just 10am, one activist is really drunk, and keeps disrupting proceedings with loud, obtuse and irrelevent comments. As he is less and less politely told to shut up, he begins to verbally assault some of the other activists. Some of what he is saying is sexist, and draws an angry response from everyone else. Eventually someone accuses him of being planted there by the police to disrupt the meeting, to which he acts with outrage. Meanwhile, no decisions are made, energy seeps from the action, the minutes roll by, and the coal continues to be burned...
Or this: Occupy London's Finsbury Square, a couple of weeks in and in the 'information gazebo' we are busy engaging with members of the public – the curious, supportive, derisory – on the topic of 'the financial system as it is and how it might be made fairer'. Sleeping in a tent in the middle of central london with the constant threat of eviction is not a restful experience, and I am tired but putting all my energy into a discussion with a taxi driver, who has heard on the radio (LBC) that what we are doing is actually pretty good, and wearily but with open ears he has come to ask some questions. Just as he is coming round to the idea that this ugly protest camp may be part of a solution to problems that he himself acknowledge are key to our collective future, one of the homeless chaps who has been staying with us wanders past, drops his pants, and takes a huge crap at the bottom of a tree in full view of us and everyone else. The taxi driver looks at him, looks at me, winces slightly, then walks away in disgust.
One more: the interminably long community meeting, badly facilitated. The discussion: whether to collectively buy expensive organic coffee or cheap inorganic coffee. The discussion goes around and around is circles, a few people get fed up and leave, and three well-meaning, principled individuals are left frustrated and angry as no decision is made (the third argues that we should only comsume things we can grow in our own climate, and shouldn't drink coffee at all).
If you are part of a community in which everyone has an equal voice – be it a housing co-op, activist group, community garden, bike workshop – it is highly likely you will have been in situations like these. Moments in which everyone's hard work and utopian dreams seem to be slowly unravelling, and the overwhelming question in your mind is: 'why do I bother?'
I have spent much of the last 10 years in communities of various sorts – living in squats, forests and caravan sites, protesting and partying, making music and planting seeds and building movements – and have observed scenes like these manifest in many ways. I have also seen enough good people drop out, burn out or fade away from movements because they asked themselves the above question and couldn't find a good enough answer. In these few paragraphs I want to share my own response, and perhaps in the comments section below you can share yours.
My current community is a special one: five souls sailing across the pacific ocean on a beautiful steel boat named Karaka- adventuring on remote islands, fishing, reading, vomiting, mending sails, making music, staring at an ever-shifting, unfathomable ocean. When I first arrived on the boat there were no spare beds, and I would sleep on the roof of the boat, close to the steering wheel and gear-box. I have always been known for being clumsy – losing things, breaking things – but always saw this as an endearing if slightly annoying part of my character. A couple of times I accidently stood on the gearbox in the middle of the night, but thought nothing of it, until one night, sailing between islands, the wind dropped, we started the engine, and it quickly became apparent that the gearbox was broken. The next day, as the captain strained and swore over bent steel tubing, I felt full of shame and realised for the first time that for most of my adult life I have been wandering around in my own thoughts – my memories and appetites and dreams – and very rarely been in the present moment. Just like when you are eating and watching TV at the same time and suddenly your plate is empty and you can't remember tasting the food at all. Or when you really need the toilet mid-conversation and you are waiting for the other person to finish speaking so you can make your excuses, and then have no idea what the person was actually talking about. I realised my life was like this nearly all the time. It was a big shock and also quite funny.
And so I started playing with this, and trying to be in the present moment as much as possible, and suddenly lots of things happened. For one, I started noticing much more of the world around me, and by really listening to people started to hear the intention behind their words and actions much more, and was therefore able to increase my empathy and usefulness. I also started being able to see my emotions for what they were – knee jerk reactions that were always going to appear, but by holding onto them I was preventing myself being present in the here and now. On the small, close-quartered boat, and in random island communities where I was dealing with ways of thinking and being totally different to my own, these realisations were incredibly useful.
Additionally and somewhat paradoxically, being more aware of myself* in the present moment means I can better survey my past and understand how I have got to where I have got to, and why, and how I might best position myself for the future (long night watches on the boat, under the stars, help with this too...). I remember my formative experiences as a young person, listening to punk and post-rock and reading Crimethinc and Kerouac. I remember the moments that opened my eyes to the fact that our consumerist, capitalist society is not only vacuous and boring but also necessitates extremes of poverty and wealth, constant war, environmental destruction, and the isolation and disempowerment of both community and individual .
And I remembered the glimpses of alternative communities that I had in those formative years – squats in Bradford, beach communities in the canary islands, our very own 'DIY Collective' in Scarborough – and how great it felt to be building something new, radical, meaningful. I realised that all our achievements had been temporary, but the process of achieving or not quite managing to achieve- of building, planning, struggling – is what I remembered, and those memories were good ones. Perhaps you can take a moment to pinpoint the moments, people and learnings that shifted your compass to where you are now, reading this rather obscure little article, building your community.
The novelist Ursula Le Guin (for the ultimate study of non-heirachical community building, read her amazing novel The Dispossessed) states 'I learn by doing the things I have to do'. I realised that once one has eaten the matrix's 'red pill' and seen society for what it is, the only thing one can do is try and build something better, or spend forever cynical, detached, and probably drunk. Each community – yours and mine – has a vision that brings people together and inspires them to put in the time and energy to make it happen. We need that vision. But the vision – however important, be it self-sufficiency, conversion of people to your religion, global revolution – is intangible, far off, may never exist.
And that which does not exist is not as important as what does exist. And the only thing that we can be sure does exist is the community as it is in the here and now, warts and all. A group of people working together, sharing food and space and laughter and memories and knowledge. And the aim is to be able to savour every positive moment, and see every negative one – especially the momumentally frustrating ones – as a chance to ask yourself 'are we doing this in the best way possible?' and 'are our aims and methods still relevant to the community?'. At the very least, they are an opportunity to better hone your sense of the absurd. My example of Occupy London – in the end we functioned more like a soup kitchen/first aid centre/safe space than a revolutionary vanguard, but that was probably much more useful to the community around us. Kingsnorth power station – perhaps next time we need better medics, or smaller groups of activists, or a strongly enforced no-alcohol policy. The coffee – perhaps the learning points are around non-violent communication training, or a better decision making system, though of course we all know that coffee is a bourgeoise luxury and bad for the stomach...
But the point is that you have to do these things and learn from them because there is something deep inside you that pushes you to take the hard road and experiment with new ways of living and interacting that are as challenging as they are exciting. The emotions we feel when things are not going well are unpleasant, but if responded too with skill are the very things that make a community stronger, more focussed, and more effective. Building communities is not about creating the ideal community or individual or society in the future, it is about the reality of the here and now of yourself and the other people, animals and coffee beans around you.
This doesn't mean we shouldn't be aware of how our actions will impact on the future. Instead, we need to know that treating ourselves and those around us with dignity, patience and humour is much more likely to create a future we want to live in than resenting or reprimanding a colleague for not eating zapatista hula-hoops, or believing that some cops are actually ok, or feeling guilty or indignant because someone has accused you of the very same. The existence of your community – a space in which all are welcome, treated with fairness, working towards a common goal – in such an unforgiving world is an achievement in and of itself, and that should be explicit.
And if the beauty and ugliness of the present moment are not enough for you, take a cold look at the changes taking places in our climate. It is clear that things are going to get a lot worse for humanity in the next decades. Our boat has just visited an island that is expected to be uninhabitable in 30-50 years due to rising sea levels, and as activists and citizens in the west the issues we deal with in the future may be at the level of access to food, water, and personal safety, rather than councils cutting arts budgets, use of pesticides and the democratic process, important as these issues are. What we are learning now as we build our communities are the skills we will need when society decides to face the gathering storm. Your community then may be your family, or your street, or your town, and the skills you are learning now will be essential then.
So to my brothers and sisters who are indeed asking themselves 'why do I bother?', I would like to suggest that the real measuring stick of whether or not to 'bother' is not 'did we achieve our goal' but 'did we truly live the experience, and what have we learnt?'. We are building communities because, on some fundamental level, we know it is the way forward for ourselves and those around us. Some work some of the time, some work nearly all the time, some don't make it out of the pub. All of them bring together people, ideas, and an endless supply of present moments to make the most of, and in this sense, it is always worth bothering.
*the word 'mindful' probably best describes what I am talking about here, but as this word seems to have been co-opted by business as a way to feel ok about continuing to maintain the capitalist status quo, albeit with occasional pauses in the lotus position, I avoid it.
21/3/16
Location:NTA Driveway,,Marshall Islands
