September 8, 2007

Eat Something!

Posted by Adrienne Maree Brown at 7:57AM

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I began fasting 5 days ago, along with 1,150 other people, to call attention to the Climate Emergency. Most people did the fast for one day. I signed on indefinitely, for a few reasons. I've been wanting to do a deep cleansing fast for a while and the time was never right. I also just turned 29, and I've been wanting to start off my 30th year in a new way: not drunk, not high, not chainsmoking, not stuffed to the brim with amazing food..present, focused, even disciplined. But I'll get to that.

When I've told my friends and family that I'm fasting for the climate emergency, the responses have ranged from surprise to concern to interest to support to "Eat something!" I'm friends with a lot of cynical beloveds who only understand not eating if I added that I had been wanting to fast personally anyway, diet, get my health together. Which is true, and I chuckle at myself along with them, because quite often it is a selfish undertow sweeping me into the most selfless acts. But the personal is so political for me, my body is my own personal fragment of the world, my unhealthiness an addition to the sickness of the world. So what would health look like?

I speak to this from the clear headed delirium that comes from deep cleansing, and as a thick woman for whom discipline around food has always been my penultimate challenge. Here are some stand alone and deeply interconnected thoughts that occur:

On a grand level, I'm concerned about the socio-economic-environmental survival of my species, and how although more and more people are aware that global warming is real, I see very little change in actual behavior. I just completed a survey* of young people's knowledge of global warming that will come out in November, and frankly, it depressed me. Whatever we're doing, its not enough. Particularly for impacted communities - after Katrina, more people outside the environmental justice movement seemed aware that people of lesser means and darker skin are most likely to feel the worst of global warming. Still, very little change in actual behavior.

We live in a special time, so numbed by the detritus of capitalism that we believe the comfort of our daily lives is of our own making, and permanent. Debt, credit and the proliferation of corporate non-profits have played a pacifying role in even the most valiant of hearts. While many of us understand on a logical level that eating locally food grown in ways that sustain the planet and workers while not polluting the air, water or soil of our countries or our cities with litter, cigarette additives, cars, planes, etc is most sustainable; our actions don't reflect that knowledge. Too many of our actions are self-defeatist, our actions are of a dying people reveling in our last days. Which, in a nation of sinners led by an ideology of radical religious focus awaiting a Rapture, is not surprising.

Those most impacted by this short-termer's mentality, holy or unholy...some of them know that we can't wait for or rush towards an end, they want improvements, are hungry for knowledge and perspective. I have written a longer piece on what I mean by the term impacted communities* and why I feel the leadership for socio-economic-enviro-and all other kinds of justice movements has to come from that space, but to tease you and place it in context here - there are those who can't avoid reality by retreating to a world of comfort, simply because they are directly impacted every day. Those are the people I trust to be leaders in the work. Comfort is debilitating and confusing. It doesn't matter what color you are, you can reach the tipping point where you're a little too comfortable and you lose the taste for hard work and sacrificing for the greater good and for discipline. Yes, I can do so much with the privileges I have, and yes we are all connected and all impacted in the long-term, but fundamentally we must be willing to submit our work to the evaluation of those most impacted now. Is their situation improving? Are they centered in the work we do? Do they need us? If the answer to any of those is no, then we need to be willing to shift - and by we I mean anyone who can recognize their privilege*.

And how to approach this evaluation, the education, the work?

I was a pleasure activist before any other kind, focusing on sex and drug education, reframing it so that safety and pleasure became synonymous - surviving a sex or drug experience was not an annoying sidebar but actually another component of the pleasure. Have safe sex and you can have more of it, do your drugs the right way and you can get high again, etc. Harm Reduction with a smile. I feel quite similarly about justice. On one hand is the doomsday side: overdose, STIs, Ice Age, Race and Class Wars. On the other hand though, its: multiple orgasms, visions of Nirvana, getting to go outside without a radiation suit, your grandchildren having clean water to drink, equity, self-determination, evolving past war.

Late in my short life, I have tasted the pleasure of beautiful clean natural places, the strength and joy of family and whole communities that look out for each other against all odds, the great of multiple orgasms and visions of Nirvana - I'm still a pleasure activist. Those pleasures keep me going against the reality of the ugliness I see in the work I do. The ugliness I see is overconsumption, surface responses, ego gone wild, white supremacy and racism, misuse of resources, burn-out of bodies, visions, hope. And when I feel tempted to submit to that, an act of unprecedented kindness, a reminder of love and interconnectedness, brings me back.

I understand now (again?) it is the combination of knowing the ugly and the beautiful that allows us to strike the balance needed in our movement(s). These things are all relative - in a community with few resources but lots of love and care, that connection can pull you through. In a community with many many resources, its actually harder to come by, because individualism is a key part of amassing resources in a capitalist democracy. It is not, however, impossible.

So how to make the personal political? How to reach across every experience of privilege and impact to make a case for our common, global evolution? How to prepare for my own evolution, increasing my own commitment, submitting myself further to my calling, opening my own ears beyond the great ideas to the community generated solutions that bridge the distance between tradition and future?

For a shameless moment, as a gift to myself, I am fasting to explore my health, my discipline, my commitment. I can't call for something in the world, in any community, in my own work, that I am not willing to practice myself. An emergency is upon us, and it's time to act like we know what time it is. But the wonderful part is - as all of my favorite people in Detroit constantly teach me - there is opportunity in crisis. What I hold in my hands, what we hold in our hands, is the opportunity for quantum leaps, for miracles, for the healthiest year I've ever lived, and for a movement that comes with enough love for personal examination, willingness to submit to possibility, freedom from judgment, transformation and commitment to ourselves and the generations to follow.

What a gift the present moment is...Happy Birthday to me!

* In the coming months, as part of the Building the Movement series, I'm publishing pieces on Identifying Privilege, Impacted Communities, the Green Generation, Facilitating Transformation and an Action Framework for Climate Justice.