Its 2008. We need to be serious.

I have been a part of radical subculture for about 5 years now, and have been into radical social and environmental thinking for almost 10 years. I have gone from being an 11 granola kid reading Ed Abbey and deep ecology, to being a red flag waving punk kid, to my present state. A vegan straight edge anarchist (I choose to see this an action, not a category) looking to walk away from this debacle of a culture and build something new and healthy, beautiful and connected.

I am sickened by and weary of not just society, but also the subcultures that supposedly arise to subvert and challenge the dominant culture. These subcultures seem to be, despite all the ideology and strong, honest words, little more than reflections of the shit that we all vehemently claim to hate. I think our failure is not in our passion nor our desires but in our will. Our will to achieve something, be it total liberation from civilization or just in the creation of a healthy local music scene based on DIY ideas, seems often to get sidetracked in the name of power dynamics, social stratification, alienation, domination, and consumption. Momentum gets replaced with complacency, and somehow we fail to notice this as we spin a new record, chow down a soy burger, and attempt to be the loudest one screaming at the demo. We trade hollow slogans and images on shirts for the satisfaction of subversion and construction. We choose to vomit the words others have written than reveal our own histories. We watch movies where people go and conquer the bad guys, find true love, and overcome struggle instead of going out doing it for ourselves.

I have been just as caught up in this complacency as anyone else, if not more so. I have denied it, hidden from it, been tread on and possessed by it, but no more. I am tired of being a spectator to spectators, to getting caught up in the shit that kills my desire to live. I want to live, especially in a way that destroys all that counters that vital desire. I hope this blog can be a forum, one of many, to ignite not just my own involvement and my own attempt to break away from complacency, but those attempts by others as well. To me, radical community building, alternative subculture, and subversive thought can be successful but only when we will it to be so. Let not these things lose their effectiveness. It is time to grow teeth and become dangerous not just to the world we hate, but to the complacency resting inside all of us.