no room for hipsters

(from addair)

I’m in the early stages of working on an art show/happening and am interested in getting your feedback.  The following is a rough draft of the event’s manifesto (entitled “starter kit to actual rebellion” – I’ve posted a portion of it before).  The show’s intent will be to gather and empower people toward education and action.  The “starter kit” will be printed on a single sheet of paper in a text-as-art format and distributed through an interactive art installment.

Send me your thoughts so I can make it better (it’s a long way from finished) via the comment feature or you can email me (see “about addair”).

beauty keeps me grounded in the important (photographs from our visit in bristol, tennessee)

Starter Kit to Actual Rebellion

We are living in an illusion of wealth, progress, and democracy as we drown in loneliness, apathy, and toxic waste. The powerful pretend to administer resolution while exploiting our lifeblood. It is time to rebel because the injustice has pervaded nearly every inch of everything. We are poisoning our bodies. We are poisoning our air, water, and soil. Too many of us have lost a sense of community and our connection to place. Too many of us wake up only to move through the motions of a vague purpose, to earn the right to survive in a system that sours the condition of life. Our vitality is reduced to the breadth of endurance while material goods and fleeting facades serve as a poor substitute for the richness of the human experience. We are forced to run in a race that we cannot win. We are sick. We are guilty.

Humankind has adamantly placed itself as exploiter of nature, rather than recognizing its place as member of a living community and so we are detached from our environment. We are made helpless and foolish by our disconnect and ignorance of how we get our food and other basic needs. We are so sheltered from the natural rhythms of our earth and our sustenance that we forget our basic dependence on it.

gives me hope

 We take but we do not give. Careless urbanism has stolen many opportunities for simplicity and leaves us with compromised and limited choices. We are enclosing ourselves in stores of sewage and waste; we are relentlessly administering wreckage to ourselves and future generations.

The economy’s primary objective is to create more consumer goods: not wellness, education, or less poverty and hunger, but to produce more stuff. This stuff costs more than the dollars it takes to purchase it; consumer goods are drawn from the Earth and eventually they are returned to the Earth as harmful waste. Other costs include the energy it takes to construct and deliver the products, leaving the water, air, and soil defiled and depleted.

in redemption

What we consume affects nature as well as our daily experience of being. We consume and we let ourselves be fed with readymade answers and identities. We’ve become pawns, distracted from the real venture of living. We don’t make meaning, we buy a packaged version and it has drained us of our own humanity. We are trapped in an arbitrary and flawed system that insists we consume more to secure prosperity but in the same motion dooms us to hollowness and collapse. Purchasing might provide a rush of temporary amusement but the void is insistent, creating an empty cycle. A system that centers on self indulgence and competition has left us isolated and cold. The present economic system is not a natural one, it is not sustainable and it is crumbling. If the economy doesn’t work for us, then we have the right and the duty to overthrow it.

To keep the monster functioning we must feed it, without the fuel of our participation it must die. We can rebel and take our culture and lives on our own terms. Science, technology, or politics won’t assuage our crisis. We will continue to make a forever updated mess until we reevaluate our standards, thinking and ways of relating. The solution will take time, energy, creativity, and courage. The necessary rebellion is dangerous and authentic because it requires a shedding of apathy.

and love too

We must become fully connected and present to bloom in the responsibility of being a human. We need to fuse our individual actions to the fact that they have real, lasting, and communal consequences. It is time for a rebellion because it’s necessary, but know that it comes with responsibility. To maintain liberty, we must learn to sustain our significance. We do not have to participate in perceived power structures. We have the power. Ban together. Forget about party affiliation. Refuse to be divided. Act for yourself and for others. Vote with your dollar. Give your money to real people that make real meaning. Don’t feed the monster. Eat real food. Support your local economy.

for all the corrupt, we cannot ignore this

Take the little steps and make the stout ones in chorus. Don’t wait for government action. Speak up. Urge elected officials. We can stop fighting the source of our sustenance and start living in a symbiotic relationship with it. We can reclaim our right to enjoy the authentic pleasures of living and loving and working. Wake up and do the things that are important and that you care about. Everyday.

Tags: art show, audacity, beauty, bristol, change, corruption, culture, energy, enjoy, environmental justice, food, happening, hope, lifeblood, love, manifesto, mountain hardwear, nature, old cars, photography, rebellion, redemption, revolution, rural, snow, tennessee, tire swing, tracks, urgency