A Contrarian At Heart, I Am Often

We Make Ourselves Large Or Small, Here Or There, In Our Empathies.

When You Say 'mother' Or 'father' You Describe Three Different Phenomena. There Is The Giant Who Made You And Loomed Over Your Early Years; There Is Whatever More Human-scale Version Might Have Been Possible To Perceive Later And Maybe Even Befriend; And There Is The Internalized Version Of The Parent With Whom You Struggle- To Appease, To Escape, To Be Yourself, To Understand And Be Understood By- And They Make Up A Chaotic And Contradictory Trinity.

The Oil Corporations Spend A Lot Of Money To Get, Say, The Tar Sands Pipeline Through, But Nobody's - You Know, There Are Definitely Environmentalists Being Paid - But A Lot Of People Are Acting For Something Other Than Financial Compensation. So If The Tar Sands Pipeline Doesn't Get Made, It's Because A Huge Amount Of People Are Doing Something That Doesn't Involve Remuneration, Money, Etc., Because We're Not Actually The Self-interested Financial Instruments That Economists Like To Imagine We Are.

Globally, As The Nation-state Becomes Increasingly Less Meaningful - A Provider Of Positive Goods And More And More Just An Army And Some Domestic Enforcement - People Are Withdrawing To Shape And Support More Localised Forms Of Organisation And Power. To The Extent That It's Part Of That Civilised And Localising World, The Same Is True Of The U.s.

What Is Kind Of Beautiful About Katrina Is That Even Though The Media And Officials Are Working Hard At Telling Us Everyone In New Orleans Was A Monster, In The Immediate Aftermath More Than 200,000 People Invite Displaced Strangers Into Their Homes Through Hurricanehousing.org And An Uncounted Horde Go To New Orleans And The Gulf Coast To Give, To Love, To Be In Solidarity, And To Rebuild.