You Can Change the World

This week’s essay has a generous free preview but is partly paywalled for the paid subscribers. If you are diggin’ what I am throwing down in the free preview, sign up for that paid subscription or ask me to gift you one to read the rest. Regardless, I would love for you to become a free or paid subscriber. All free and paid subscribers are what make this whole project spin round. Paid subscriptions go to paying for web hosting, silly stickers, and materials for my weaving. Both Free and Paid subscribers are literally a jolt in the arm that makes me believe that my writing matters. Every other week, a free essay is available. If you want to read all my essays, a paid subscription gets you access to all the essays published as part of this projects. Thanks for caring enough to read and support. Your attention means the world to me.

This week, I am toast from this medical journey in apocalyptic times. Yeah, super profound, right? Oh look, It’s another white dude talking about how hard it is to live with a job, a house, a family, and health insurance while recovering from a bike crash that happened from riding too far. Lmao. I kid, sort of. I know it’s all valid, but sometimes it’s just funny to think about how ridiculous it is to really think I am that bad off compared to any Palestinian who is fighting just to exist while my tax dollars go to sending bombs to a country that want to force all the indigenous people of Palestine out so they can drill for oil and sell ocean front properties. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? History just cycles and cycles until we make it stop. 

It’s easy to get cynical, especially right now in the states. We got about as comical an election as one can get with one party calling for mass deportation and another that is sending bombs to an active genocide. It’s in these moments that I feel the most powerless and useless. My mind has a hard time not meditating on how far afield we are from where I wish we are. It’s sort of crushing to see the failed hope of the last 15 years. And look, this is laughable for me even to talk about because the sovereign tribal nations that are the real owners of these United States have had to deal with this clown show since 1776. And yet, they have endured and kept their culture alive. If they can keep going despite a way worse hand being dealt them, so can I. 

So, what is to be done? Well, as per usual, I’m gonna advocate for taking care of my everyday business by seizing the opportunity to build trust, love, and solidarity in my local community and combat hate in all its forms. This isn’t flashy work and it’s intensely humbling. For one, I am still learning how to live up to my values and constantly fall short. This is the work though. Just like an artist must try and fail at various techniques before they are comfortable with them, I show up everyday trying to live out my little set of values. Sometimes I come up short and others I show up in ways that I am proud of.

One moment that I am particularly proud of happened this past week. I was riding

along under a bridge and looked to the left at a wall that frequently has graffiti tags. There, plain as day, was a tag from a group that the Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled a white nationalist hate group. I rode past slowly with a quizzical look on my face. This was a new one of me. My momentum took me past the tag, so I turned around and took a photo for my records. It almost felt like a moment to surreal to be real, so I better document it to ensure that I have proof it really happened. It’s not everyday that you see blatant white supremacy being advertised. Usually, it’s a subtle undercurrent of our everyday lives, embedded in our institutions, and it rears its head in microaggressions or veiled language. Then a thought occurred to me. “I don’t need to let this hate fester here for everyone to see. I know exactly how to get rid of this tag.”

Later that night while making dinner, I called my city services line and reported the tag. I told the helpful person on the line, “Never in a million years did I think I would be calling my city services line to report a graffiti tag.” The person told me, “we will take care of that and hopefully the next time you ride past there the tag will be gone.” There is something very satisfying about getting your local tax dollars moving toward eliminating white supremacy propaganda.

Will this tiny action change the world? Yes, Yes it will. I wanted to say, no, as I typically would do after talking about taking the small action available to me in line with my values. However, I think that responding no to such a question doesn’t make any sense. You know why? Well, all our actions everyday are changing the world. The problem is that if we are on cruise control and not actively setting your values into action then we are just passively carrying out the change that other people want you to enact. For example if you drink all your water out of single use plastic containers due to its alleged convenience, you are benefitting companies like pepsi and coke who bottle tap water and sell it to consumers and contributing mightily to plastic pollution (Apparently only 9% of all plastic ever produced has been recycled—LINK). By drinking your own tap water out of a reusable container or glass, you are changing the world, because we don’t need to save a spot in the city dump for each of your single use plastic bottles. That space that would of held our pollution will never be needed for that purpose and we won’t ever need to spend anytime mitigating its influence.If your actions change someone’s day or the built environment you navigate, then you are changing the world. Viewed within this “right-sized” framework, its hard to not change the world each day. Yes, indeed, we change the world everyday by living in it, so why change it in alignment with our values.

So we all have a decision to make: Are we gonna change the world in accordance with our values and imagined futures or sleep walk our way through life in accordance with the profit motives of a corporation or political aspirations of a politician? Me, I’m working toward the egalitarian, democratic future where everyone is taken care of and no business is too big to fail and no one politician cannot be exiled to never return to public life. I believe fervently that my actions matter and won’t abandon my small work that will build toward something greater. I hope you don’t either. Never give up.

Speaking of small work, I am dedicated to weaving and spinning my way through this little analog life that I am living. I’m still wound up like a ball of yarn from the bike crash, but I am hoping that my continued fiber work will reset me. I know that my nervous system is prolly just shot from ramping up for each test, waiting for the results, and then the inevitable learning that everything is fine or that I need more tests. I am just hoping that my bone density scan from this last week is my last test. I have a call with my primary care doctor this next week to talk next steps. Finger crossed that no more tests are needed. Each night I return to my weaving and I feel myself release as I add a couple little rows to this piece. That release is what I love so much about weaving. I just like letting go into a piece and becoming a simple carbon-based life form who makes things with their hands.

Honestly, I think the world would be much better off if people had to ply a craft that requires years of mastery outside of academic or business circles. Such a pathway carries different lessons than what I learned in graduate school the private or public sectors. If I am honest, I think that my craft knowledge is more valuable to me than my technical skills that I use for a job. I know I certainly have a longing to just be a simple person making things and telling stories, especially with all the games people play for power and money today. I think if some of our aspirations for money and power were replaced with aspirations for wisdom and skill then we would likely be in a very different place as a society.

All I can say is that weaving saved my life. It has never abandoned me. It never required me to be anything but myself. I never had to prove anything to weaving. Like a good friend, it helped me tell my stories of heartbreak when I didn’t know if I was strong enough. Weaving helped me realize my dream of becoming an artist. It held me by the hand and helped me go to therapy. It helped me be with my mom after she died in ways I never could have imagined. Imagine a world where we embed ourselves in craft guilds, dedicated to self illumination and craft exploration (not mastery).

“The storyteller makes no choice
Soon you will not hear his voice
His job is to shed light
And not to master.” ‘Terrapin Station’ — Grateful Dead

Thanks for being here, dear reader. This sort of stuff feels risky to talk about, but I think it helps for my subscribers to see this more vulnerable stuff. Like, it legitimately scares me to speak openly about opposing white supremacy, but I think its important to do it. Anyways, Here’s to the week ahead. I hope you have a good one.

James