United We Stand? : Houston Indymedia

Perhaps the beginning of Johnson's presidency was the last time any significant portion of Americans really believed the whole country could effectively compromise about essential solutions. In the Great Society speech in '64, he stated, "The purpose of protecting the life of our Nation and preserving the liberty of our citizens is to pursue the happiness of our people. Our success in that pursuit is the test of our success as a Nation... Your imagination, your initiative, and your indignation will determine whether we build a society where progress is the servant of our needs, or a society where old values and new visions are buried under unbridled growth... It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice..." There was sufficient money and resources to imagine that the whole society could lift the poor out of poverty, combat pollution, and address racism. Liberals had a basis for shunning radicalism, as the government system itself seemed to have corrective mechanisms. But, the Vietnam War disproved this, and was the undoing of the idea of unity. The liberals who had been willing to support the system (despite knowing that it had a long way to go in terms of progress regarding race, economics, and civil liberties), found themselves impatient and unable to reconcile themselves to the war. And the activists who had been willing to use peaceful straightforward tactics, became increasingly desperate and militarized.

Today we are used to living in a society with vastly divergent voices. The idea that we should promote unity is one that we hear often, and it is unclear why we are still clinging to it, in theory, when we have lost faith in it. It falls apart quickly when we ask simple questions like -- around what exactly are we supposed to unify? If we indeed unify about any idea (aside from purely symbolic ones, like the flag), we are left with things about which there are profound conflicts -- things like the war, the Presidency, the electoral system, or the American way of life. Political speech-writers avoid specifics about what exactly we might be unifying to do.

I have heard often that it ultimately must be The Constitution around which all the divergent voices can coalesce. It would be cool if the government started following the Constitution. It would be nice to see the drug war stopped for violating the Fourth Amendment, the destruction of our environment stopped for violating the preamble, or the attack on Iraq stopped for violating the enumeration of powers. But, it is the Tenth Amendment which points out the most profound conflict with our current system. The sentence "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people," is simply incompatible with the influence of corporations and agencies like the CIA. Even the idea that "the people" or "the states" are on an equal footing with corporations and clandestine agencies is ridiculous. While we are imagining the possibility of uniting around the Constitution, there are forces setting our future in motion outside the reach of law.

There is an alternative, the idea that we need not unify around anything except mutual support. Chiapas, Mexico's indigenous Zapatista movement has introduced ideas of autonomy, consent, and community, which challenge the notion of "united we stand, divided we fall." There is no need for everyone living in the same town to accept the Zapatista form of government. Neighbors may well participate in different systems from each other. The decision to join a Zapatista community is one that is made by choice, not simply as an automatic function based on birth location, as in our society. The idea of autonomy is within the Zapatista way of life at every level -- in that participants in government are not paid, that the members are not taxed, and that community decisions are made by a consensual process where the whole community finds a solution about which they can agree. As a woman explains in the movie "Zapatista," autonomy is "the profound conviction that the answers are in us." To those of us who visit Chiapas from societies where we have been taught that the answers are being handled by "them," it is an experience without comparison.

Autonomy is not the same as separatism. It has little in common with groups around the world that want to secede into territories based on ethnic or economic boundaries. Rather, autonomous groups are based on communities and are welcoming to all who accept the basic ideas of mutual aid, mutual support, and ethnic, religious, and sexual-orientation inclusiveness. Basic community orientation is quite alien to us because we don't even know our neighbors. When I tried to explain this aspect of American life to some Zapatista children, it was not only disagreeable to them, it was actually incomprehensible.

One way to mark the relative strengths between autonomous systems and our globalized economic system is to focus on threats to sustainability. When markets crash, oil runs out, natural or man made disasters strike, North Americans might well starve to death, while indigenous in Chiapas grow most of their own food, and don't have these dependencies. But, even more than our food production, it is our ridiculous notions of national defense that push us to cling to a unified centralized source of power. We feel afraid to adopt more autonomous forms of government -- that China or someone will invade us. But the limitations of this assumption become obvious when we consider how the most powerful army in the world is unable to conquer community-based insurgencies, and the extent to which our consolidated power has made us a target. In many ways, people in much weaker countries feel safer than we do.