Nowtopian

I’ve been up to my eyeballs organizing the big “Slow Food Feast of Fools and Friends” this past Sunday, and I’m happy to say, it was a huge hit! I even got pied at the end of the evening! You shoulda been there… I gave a brief introduction to the event, emphasizing that this is one of the oldest, most global activities humans do–having a feast–but in this case it’s also the beginning of what will be a biannual Feast at CounterPULSE, and thus the starting point of a new historic thread itself. We had three speakers (Carmen Tedesco from Slow Food San Francisco, Bryant Terry, co-author of GRUB, and Erik Ohlsen of Earth Activist Training), eight video clips that I put together of various gardens and farms where we got the food, eight wild and crazy clowns as servers, three amazing chefs and a team of a dozen others who helped in all kinds of ways. It was one of those amazing collective experiences in which everyone brings something unique to the effort and the whole is so much more than any of the parts in isolation.

We had a stunning five-course meal, fantastic conversations, and a lot of surprising connections between our meal and our local suppliers, land use, community gardens, and healthy agricultural innovators. The first example of the title in this blog entry is this event, which is profoundly local, but a crucial example of the kind of thinking and practice that needs to be globalized as we cope with the coming disasters in chemical agriculture and disappearing fresh water.

But another wonderful eruption these past weeks is the appearance of millions of marchers in the streets. While I’ve been noodling on this blog, reading various interesting books and organizing events at CounterPULSE, a huge social movement just upped and took the streets… what a pleasure! I can’t remember a big movement ever appearing in my lifetime that I didn’t know anything about before it happened, so I’m delighted.

Here’s a couple of pictures from yesterday’s march up Mission Street in San Francisco:

So many people came out for this, a half million in Dallas of all places! Right wingers are fuming about all the flags from other countries, but of course there were way more American flags than any others… but I was surprised to see that global population of Soccerexicans make an appearance too:

Last week I went to Station 40 over on 16th street for a live video chat with a woman in Paris, a 21-year-old I think, who has been quite involved in the student protests of the past month or so. There were about 40 of us in the room, and we listened as she did her best to describe the day’s events, discuss the political implications, and so on. At one point after someone asked her about the politics of the protests, she clearly said they were not anti-capitalist, and that they primarily wanted good jobs and security. Interesting dovetailing with the immigrant marches here then, because a lot of what people are demanding is legalization and work.

This is a strange historic moment we’re living through, in which so many of the old systems and categories are sputtering and breaking down. People are feeling how tenous it all is, and it is heartening to see mass demonstrations erupt against the continuing imposition of precarity and insecurity. But obviously if these demos succeed, as apparently the French ones did, where does that leave us? Is getting a job really all we want? Clearly not. Besides, even if there are temporary victories against the march of neoliberal capitalism, the answer does not lie in stabilizing a version of capitalism that is slightly less barbaric than the one they’re trying to impose.

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