This little film shows Tuesday's simulcast between the London and New York OCCUPY communities. I flew out to the encampment at St. Paul's Cathedral, and we sang the 99% song together, across the Atlantic - what a wonderful moment! That made the whole London visit worth it - when Londoners held up a sheet to show the Stop Shopping Choir from Wall Street.
Join critically acclaimed author, KtB editor, and OccupyWriters.com founder Jeff Sharlet and the unstoppable evangelists of anti-consumerism Reverend Billy and Savitri D for a discussion about religion and politics in the Occupy movement and beyond.(more)
I visited the occupation of Wall Street late afternoon yesterday, after recording this Freak Storm sermon. What an unusual time we live in. Tropical storms and people storms sweep through the public squares. Climate change and national debt are Devils releasing deadly energy. Leaders in politics seem like ciphers, drained of energy.
Believing that the Earth is our god, government, economy and culture - all wrapped into one big institution - that is simple common sense! When we draw our last breath together, all the functions of living will be mixed together in that one breath. There won't be separate powers anymore.
Alarmist? Pessimistic? Radical? … are things so bad?
Sky thunderous, dark; the river raging black
Trembling land under foot, starting to crack
Rolling ominous clouds, lightening clap
Will the day’s sun ever come back
How long will tumultuous conditions last
Human patience for change is wanning fast
Resources to survival limited by contrast
Political will to remedy scarce, but much bombast
Exorcism - the act of driving out a dark spirit that has possessed a person or a place, by commanding it to leave in the name of a more powerful power, in our case the life of the Earth - this is one of the oldest of our human rituals. However, exorcisms are also embedded in the arts of our culture like little noticed but powerful micro-climates.
At the Tate Modern in London, British Petroleum seeks to capture our imagination by hitching its BP sunflower logo to the Miro exhibit. The artistic experience is then reduced to a dangerously passive consumerism. Only the Earth itself, a kind of freak storm inside, can free us from such a damaging lie.
We tried to let all the victimized life of BP come through us on Monday.
As The Church of Earthalujah takes off for our European tour, Reverend Billy gets a lesson in hysterical revolution from British activists and his one-year-old daughter.
What if there is a switch in our brains that Bond-like villains can flip with impunity, sending us into spasms of shopping? Horribly, this is now an American fact of life. Yes - corporate researchers have discovered a circuit in our brains that actuates our shopping.
Very few of us know how much we must change. We talk of climate change but not human change. We look through a window and envision a completely different vision of life on this Earth. And then that window actually is a door. We open it and we walk to our first task – and that might be gentle sustaining love, or a shout of horror.
Sometimes people come up to me and ask “The Church of Earthalujah...what is that? Is it a political rally? Is it a real church? Is it a comedy sketch? What is it?!”
Why do we offer Fabulous Sainthood this week at our Earthalujah! church to a hero of the housing rights movement, Ms. Marina Metalios? Aren’t housing and the environment two different issues?
Announcing our doom and damnation? That’s as American as apple pie. We tell pollsters we believe in ghosts, angels and the Second Coming. The current style of apocalypses dates from the days of Jesus’ death 2000 years ago. The rapture was supposed to be hours away.
In April we experienced 600 tornadoes in the US. Last year the count for April was 110. The six fold increase is an astounding climate change. But how did 600 twisters happen? And why? In our public reports such basic questions are strangely restricted.
Philadelphia citizens are uniting to transform our city into the next American Transition Town. Transition Philadelphia is a grassroots group that is networking and building connections of grassroots groups and activists in order to achieve the critical mass needed to achieve sustainability and resilience in our city.
There were hundreds of millions of Kindles and Nooks frozen in death, stuck on one page – “Why America Slept.” You can say one thing about us, we were a species that scribbled, texted, hologrammed and burst a blood vessel of pixels in the final years. Every last atrocity was broadcast virally. By 2015, every consumer could make a major feature film with a gadget fitted to the hand.
Cancun, Mexico is the site of an international climate meeting that started Monday. Those familiar with such summits express little hope for the Cancun climate summit. Virtually no one believes that a climate change treaty with any substance will result.
"Banish the word 'struggle' from your attitude and your vocabulary. All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration.
We are the ones we have been waiting for." — Hopi elders
