November 18, 2008
A Short Sermon after Long Years
Change is one thing. Progress is another. Change is scientific. Progress is ethical. Change will happen no matter what, but Progress is a matter of controversy." -- Bertrand Russell
We are at the end of the romance with the word Change and at the beginning of the ethical controversies of Progress.
Breaking the power of international brands and banks, of torture and wars, of energy monopolies and the Patriot Act - when the smoke clears we are left in our own neighborhood. We stand in the street by our home and look out across a landscape. What do we see? Lots and lots of pavement. Billboards. Little shops are shuttered and chain stores with their famous logos up in the air on long metal poles -- waiting for us to return.
Ethical, controversial Progress? - Don't go back to the mall.
Real progress will be local. A Vision of the Local now appears before us. Local-lujah! We don't defer to celebrities, to suits in skyscrapers, to the theater of power in the glamorous distance. What do we have right here?
In Newsweek Reverend Billy gets to say, "The mall is dead." I've been waiting to make such a grand statement from the pulpit for a long, long time. This is the first year in fifty that no super malls are opening in the continental United States.
You remember? When the salesmen for a new mall came to town - they came with their MBA rhetoric and their graphs and bullet-points. Wall Street financed this. Local TV anchors just repeated the corporations' press releases as hard news. Jobs and income would be magically created. This is the future, they said.
Now we know the results. Everybody shopped by driving and parking. Employment was in the $7 to $12 an hour range with no job security. The environment of pavement and ads and cars broke up our human connections, our talking to each other, the unhurried richness of neighborhood life. And the prosperity? Our money went back to corporate headquarters. And where is that? Often, we had no idea. Now we know that a lot of our money went to a damaging gambling culture.
Now so many of us have lost our jobs, our savings - we are starting new businesses out of our garages. Out of our personal computers. We discover that our hobbies can make money. We teach in the home. Trading, bartering, thrifting... we are doing what we can. We are making things. The old shuttered storefronts can be re-opened. We won't have a credit card Christmas this year, but we will give more.
We find the extraordinary in the ordinary. Stop and trade names with a neighbor, touching hands, not hurrying away from the eyes... .
This is the basic healing that we need now across our country. Do you hear my preaching? It's clear now - We were forced into isolation. We were taken from each other - that's what we allowed them to do to us. We are getting to know each other again. This is the stuff of our new economy. It will grow and we won't let it go this time.
Local-lujah!
Rev
We are at the end of the romance with the word Change and at the beginning of the ethical controversies of Progress.
Breaking the power of international brands and banks, of torture and wars, of energy monopolies and the Patriot Act - when the smoke clears we are left in our own neighborhood. We stand in the street by our home and look out across a landscape. What do we see? Lots and lots of pavement. Billboards. Little shops are shuttered and chain stores with their famous logos up in the air on long metal poles -- waiting for us to return.
Ethical, controversial Progress? - Don't go back to the mall.
Real progress will be local. A Vision of the Local now appears before us. Local-lujah! We don't defer to celebrities, to suits in skyscrapers, to the theater of power in the glamorous distance. What do we have right here?
In Newsweek Reverend Billy gets to say, "The mall is dead." I've been waiting to make such a grand statement from the pulpit for a long, long time. This is the first year in fifty that no super malls are opening in the continental United States.
You remember? When the salesmen for a new mall came to town - they came with their MBA rhetoric and their graphs and bullet-points. Wall Street financed this. Local TV anchors just repeated the corporations' press releases as hard news. Jobs and income would be magically created. This is the future, they said.
Now we know the results. Everybody shopped by driving and parking. Employment was in the $7 to $12 an hour range with no job security. The environment of pavement and ads and cars broke up our human connections, our talking to each other, the unhurried richness of neighborhood life. And the prosperity? Our money went back to corporate headquarters. And where is that? Often, we had no idea. Now we know that a lot of our money went to a damaging gambling culture.
Now so many of us have lost our jobs, our savings - we are starting new businesses out of our garages. Out of our personal computers. We discover that our hobbies can make money. We teach in the home. Trading, bartering, thrifting... we are doing what we can. We are making things. The old shuttered storefronts can be re-opened. We won't have a credit card Christmas this year, but we will give more.
We find the extraordinary in the ordinary. Stop and trade names with a neighbor, touching hands, not hurrying away from the eyes... .
This is the basic healing that we need now across our country. Do you hear my preaching? It's clear now - We were forced into isolation. We were taken from each other - that's what we allowed them to do to us. We are getting to know each other again. This is the stuff of our new economy. It will grow and we won't let it go this time.
Local-lujah!
Rev
Comments
Progress-a-lujah!
Change is dead too, unless it's the precious metal kind. . .
Inventively, it is what we erect. The architecture of inequity, builds a house from some loathsome experience, still, designing with it's inherent flaws, as the days pass away, (it doesn't happen to the effect of the cause), so does the memory of reality. Truth is, easiest to remember, lies are easiest to mutter as one dwells in the muddledom. A twisted web it has spun, in our heads, betwixt brains, and friends undone, by the chaos that ensues, it now consumes you. There is nothing cohesive, it has come unglued. It being the apparent bond that now separates the two being me and the third being you, the first to go of course was the truth. Now it's a stalemate, it's like an odoriferous bog that is stagnate, we are the putrid bacteria that continues to degenerate.
Let us decide to disinfect are addiction to dereliction, pause, make it gradual, wait a moment, breathe, add a bandage and gauze to the wounds, seeping, they were deep punctures but there won't be anymore death by necrotic weeping. We stopped it before it went too far. These wounds will scab and scar, being an intentional reminder as we touch this regenerated tissue. Regrowth and progress are now the issue, so let us rebuild a new domain, from fallow earth to the freshly sewn plain of higher existence. We'll forever reconnect, as long as we choose not to neglect how we got here. From the score of millenia to the moment right before these words were written, became sound. As we continue to progress, we dig in the ground, exhume, not to unearth the past (like for fossil fuels), but to cultivate the land for this labor of love to last. Enduring these trials, our testament to tenacity, perseverance is not insanity insofar as we learn from mistakes. And we should, if need to, to go to great lengths, the greatest if need be to be diligently fructuous. We desire this, but if we deny ourselves this, it is allowing the contemptuous traits to dominate and denigrate as they have for so long. Did we decide to occupy the designated space for absurdity? I think not! And let us not hope for change, rather let us be proactive for progress! Thanks Rev. Billy and The Church of Stop Shopping.
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