> <http://gawker.com/5165556/college-radicalism-replaced-by-tucker-max>
>
> KIDS THESE DAYS
> College Radicalism Replaced by Tucker Max
they are busy planting gardens as a form of revolutionary liberation and solidarity with migrant workers! ha ha.
this was written in comments to a post recently and it strikes me as something someone could easily have written in the supposedly radical 60s. He can't imagine anything more radical than retreating to your kitchen and backyard or community garden
Which, I hate to remind these ahistorical folks, were all the rage in the 60s and 70s! and they were the rage back then for the reasons this guy outlines as well. Because 40 years later, all those community garden and patio plots and rooftop gardens and shit really revolutionized things yessireejimbob!
Growing your own veggies -- so as to be in solidarity with migrant farm laborers doncha know -- and also because, as such, it is somehow the first step in the revolutionary transformation of society. because? because they said so! and it's goona reverse the entire "historical arc" and suchlike. wheeee!
"I haven't given up on protests and placards and organizing meetings with annoying white leftists who never fail to dominate discussion. I still do some of that. But my passion pours so much more freely into the kinds of things you've been writing about. The outdoors. Walking. Gardening. These are areas of transformation and direct action which lie at the nexus of so much of what has gone wrong in our society.
I mean, it's hard to even imagine today that cities once served communities; not always, of course, but it was possible, a century ago. People lived together and worked together and played together and organized together and pursued happiness together in public spaces which they controlled. Such spaces were consciously destroyed in the service of fossil-fuel-based industrial capitalism. Zoning laws were created explicitly to break up communities. Highways were built on top of fenced-in ghettoes and the internal combustion engine became the heart of economic expansion. The suburban nuclear family was held up as the social ideal by propagandists of the capitalist state, to isolate people in television dens filling their minds and bodies with stupid destructive crap. The elderly who no longer served capitalism were carted off and abandoned, disrupting the inter-generational transference of knowledge. Much wisdom was lost. Today the word "urban" is a bizarre code word having something to do with people of color and hip hop.
Hehe, wow I had no idea I was about to go off on some wild history lesson. But what you're doing, it appears to me, is an attempt to reverse that entire historical arc. In small ways. It has to happen in small ways. At the literal grassroots. And squash roots. And lettuce roots. If we're going to make it on this planet, if we're going to turn this ship around and stop our pathological self-annihilation, this is how it's going to happen. One garden at a time. I can't imagine anything more radical."