Photos: Thoreau’s cabin (reconstructed) and Emerson’s house
SIMPLIFY SIMPLIFY SIMPLIFY
On page 240 of my raggedy 75-cent copy of Henry David Thoreau’s book Walden; or Life in the Woods is a quote that I found exhilarating early in my 20s.
“I learned this, at least, by my experiment;
that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams,
and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined,
he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary;
new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him;
or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense,
and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings.
In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex,
and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness.
If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost;
that is where they should be.
Now put the foundations under them.”
For years I could practically recite it by memory. Looking at my life, this paragraph seems to have served as a guide in many ways.
While recently researching Thoreau and also his mentor, friend, and patron Ralph Waldo Emerson, I had the thought that Thoreau created his book with the dual advantages of living very, very simply, and of receiving what amounted to a UBI/Universal Basic Income from Emerson. One of the very great attractions to me about instituting a UBI is how much more art and creativity — and beauty and fun — we could have in our world if people’s basic needs were taken care of so that they could give their unique gifts. And yes, instituting a Universal Basic Income is do-able; read Utopia for Realists by Rutger Bregman for real-life examples. There is certainly money enough for it, in a world where the richest 1% own almost half of the world’s wealth. (What’s the best way to describe a billionaire having his own space program: obscene, surreal, diseased?)
First I wrote the title of this piece using a Thoreau quote, “Simplify Simplify Simplify” and I realized I didn’t want to suggest, as Thoreau himself did not suggest, that we should disconnect from the rest of the world. Thoreau was an ardent abolitionist, and believed the message of his essay, which was included after Walden in my tattered paperback, “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience.”
So I added to the title:
CONNECT CONNECT CONNECT
Solidarity is something that we’ve not been taught, quite the opposite actually. Many people, however, are now organizing to strengthen unions, which are organized groups of workers in which solidarity is a key principle. Unions have diminished in numbers and in power since the 1930s and 40s when a strong union movement pushed for FDR’s New Deal reforms. A class of people who want to centralize wealth and power in their own hands have very deliberately been weakening unions in the decades since through legislation and intense anti-union messaging. There’s good news in that this past month Kshama Sawant, Chris Hedges, and Jill Stein were among the speakers in a Workers Strike Back conference in Seattle. Our challenge is to work together for common benefit, even with people who may hold very different opinions on issues important to us. It is a challenge, but to build a big planet-saving movement, I believe we should not cancel each other out because of our different perspectives, when we agree on so many other things.
February 28 is an example of both simplify and connect, as a “24-hour economic blackout” was called. More organized efforts are planned for the future, with the intention to disrupt “business as usual” monopoly capitalism.