trauma and burnout: learning to tend the inner flame

While I was blogsurfing the other night, I came across this interesting post by Invisible Voices. The post is written in response to reading part of the book Aftershock by Pattrice Jones. I want to highlight one section of the post:

I wouldn’t have ever described myself as someone dealing with trauma, and my activism tends to be low-key, low-risk. Yet we all deal with the repeated trauma of facing what goes on in this world, to humans and non-humans, as we work to enact change. It doesn’t have to be something as obvious as being beaten by the police or rescuing animals at our own peril to put us in the position of dealing with trauma. And burnout.

I haven’t gotten far enough to know yet everything Pattrice will talk about or recommend, but I know one thing I’ve learned in the past six months is that taking time off to rest, and even to simply do nothing productive, is important for me to be able to keep going. Tonight I learned, by taking an unplanned nap, that the tension headaches I’ve been dealing with for a couple of weeks might simply be related to the fairly constant sleep-deprivation I let myself suffer.

The bottom-line is that we have to take care of ourselves to be able to keep fighting for the animals, human or not.

This is right-on and very important. As a person who has been dealing with the trauma of childhood sexual abuse, I want to affirm the truth in the statement that “we all deal with the repeated trauma of facing what goes on in this world, to humans and non-humans, as we work to enact change.” While people’s individual traumatic experiences make a massive difference in their lives, I think that it also true that, in this society, we all face the trauma of our disconnection from and destruction of the natural world. Ignacio Martín-Baró, the founder of Liberation Psychology, wrote that certain acts of violence “affect a whole population, not only as individuals but as social beings in a social context. Social trauma affects individuals precisely in their social character; that is, as a totality, as a system. What is left traumatized is German society or Palestinian society, not simply Germans or Palestinians.”

where do we go from here?

I’ve been blogging this week about the World Economic Forum which is currently meeting in Davos, Switzerland, taking the opportunity to reflect on the current state of “globalization,” corporate domination, and resistance. Yesterday, I quoted briefly from the essay Walking: We Ask Questions written by the the Notes from Nowhere Collective. (If you have the time, I would highly recommend reading the entire essay.) I want to discuss this essay more, and use it as a springboard to ask the twin questions, “Where is the global justice movement now?” and “Where do we go from here?”

The Notes from Nowhere Collective charts out the history of global justice movements, arguing that “the first round is over and… the slogan first sprayed on a building in Seattle and last seen on a burning police van in Genoa, “We Are Winning,” is coming true.” While they wrote this several years ago, it still appears to be relevant. Their claim that “Western capitalism’s “crisis of legitimacy” in the various ways it wields power – from economic policy to military might – expands exponentially every day” is supported by current analysis. Writing about what comes next, they go on to say that:

The second stage of the movement will be harder than the first. It’s a stage of working closer to home, a stage where mass action on the streets is balanced (but not entirely replaced) with creating alternatives to capitalism in our neighborhoods, our towns and cities. A politics which moves between construction and conflict, based on longer-term visions, where we seek to construct alternatives that will sustain us into the future – and yet remembers that any true alternatives to capital will throw us into conflict with the system and that we need to strategize continually to defend ourselves against it.

Yet returning to our neighborhoods, we must not fetishize the local, retreat into subcultural ghettos, nor forget that we are the world’s first grassroots-led global political project. We must not undo the global ties that bind us together in a world-wide network. These powers cannot be fought alone, or by single factions. They will pick us off one by one if we attempt to do so. And our resistance still needs to be as transnational as capital, as financial speculation, as climate change, as debt, as corporate power.

from the horse’s mouth

Jonathan Schmidt, the very person in charge of the program for the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum (currently being held in Davos, Switzerland), offers us his analysis of “the shifting power equation” in the International Herald Tribune. To be precise, he has a co-author: Howard Davies, Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Schmidt and Davies begin their column with this paragraph:

A few short years ago an antiglobalization coalition severely disrupted a World Trade Organization summit meeting in Seattle and began a wave of demonstrations against the institutions seen as being “responsible” for globalization. At the time, most of the protests centered around the perceived inequities between North- South economies. Western corporations were thought to be gaining a disproportionate share of benefits of globalization. That kind of disruption seems less likely in 2007. And full frontal attacks on globalization seem distant memories.

I find it ironic that they begin by stating that the 1999 shutdown of the WTO meeting in Seattle happened a “few short years ago” and end by claiming that such “full frontal attacks… seem distant memories.” This rhetorical strategy is designed to make it appear that resistance to corporate domination is already irrelevant. It may also be designed to obfuscate history; as the saying goes, a long memory is a radical thing. Nevertheless, it is clear that there is no massive mobilization at this year’s World Economic Forum. Where is the global justice movement?

a beginning, but not an end

This is my second post about the ongoing meeting of the World Economic Forum. William Greider asks, in his recent column for The Nation, could we be seeing “The Beginning of the End for Corporate-Led Globalization?” He focuses on the possibilities for reform presented by the new Democratic majority in the United States Congress, asserting that “this Congress offers an encouraging opening for opponents of corporate-led globalization to go on offense.” Such a focus makes his analysis of limited use for those who seek deeper transformations. At the same time, I am of the opinion that it is not always helpful to view reform and revolution as polar opposites. Certainly it would be good if a bill were passed that “bars imports produced under internationally defined “sweatshop” conditions and holds companies accountable for using forced labor or denying basic human rights to workers, including the right to organize.”

Greider’s column also points to the core questions underlying struggles over corporate domination. He quotes Charles Kernaghan, who works with the National Labor Committee, describing a “distorted sense of values… [under which] the label is protected but not the human being, the worker who makes the product.” Will we continue to value property over people?

“the shifting power equation”

The World Economic Forum (WEF), which has been described as “a big cocktail party for the global corporate elite,” starts its annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland tomorrow. This year’s meeting has a theme rich with potential for subversion: “The Shifting Power Equation.” Now is a good time to reflect on the current state of “globalization,” corporate domination, and resistance movements. Pro-corporate commentators are doing just that. I invite you to take this opportunity to reflect and analyze for yourself, whether that means dissecting the corporate propaganda, educating yourself about current realities and histories of economic domination and resistance, having such conversations with people in your life, discovering/creating a vision of another world, or starting to do the work of creating that world.

I’m going to be blogging about this topic all week. In this first post, I’m going to begin discussing the relevant media stories (both corporate and independent) that I’ve seen.