Hooray, I Love Long Hot Showers!

Hooray, I do indeed love to take a nice long hot shower, or at least I did before I moved to Arizona! Anywhoo, I am grateful to to Derrick Jensen for relieving me of the guilt I feel against my crime against Mother Earth and Humanity in his article "Forget Shorter Showers, Why Personal Change Does Not Equal Political Change". But seriously, an essential part of the capitalist culture is to reduce all action down to the level of individual choice and action. Want to save the earth? Recycle that aluminum can and buy a GE energy saver light bulb. Want to do something about world hunger and the suffering of animals in corporate food production? Then become a holier than thou vegan. It's all bullshit. To really effect genuine change requires macro level changes through radical mass action. So don't recycle, ORGANIZE! And enjoy a nice long hot shower! Here are some beginning excerpts from the article:

"Part of the problem is that we’ve been victims of a campaign of systematic misdirection. Consumer culture and the capitalist mindset have taught us to substitute acts of personal consumption (or enlightenment) for organized political resistance. An Inconvenient Truth helped raise consciousness about global warming. But did you notice that all of the solutions presented had to do with personal consumption—changing light bulbs, inflating tires, driving half as much—and had nothing to do with shifting power away from corporations, or stopping the growth economy that is destroying the planet? Even if every person in the United States did everything the movie suggested, U.S. carbon emissions would fall by only 22 percent. Scientific consensus is that emissions must be reduced by at least 75 percent worldwide."

"Or let’s talk water. We so often hear that the world is running out of water. People are dying from lack of water. Rivers are dewatered from lack of water. Because of this we need to take shorter showers. See the disconnect? Because I take showers, I’m responsible for drawing down aquifers? Well, no. More than 90 percent of the water used by humans is used by agriculture and industry. The remaining 10 percent is split between municipalities and actual living breathing individual humans. Collectively, municipal golf courses use as much water as municipal human beings. People (both human people and fish people) aren’t dying because the world is running out of water. They’re dying because the water is being stolen.

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