Teaspoon
It never seemed likely to me that I’d be here, doing this. Somewhere among the wars and the disasters, between the rise of the far-right and the impending encroachment of climate change, it made sense. There are ideas, hopes which have stewed away in isolation for too long, and should be given voice. There’s a wider conversation to be a part of. Talking about myself feels self-indulgent, and it probably is, at least a little. But if you’re here, reading me, it only seems fair to set a few things out to begin with.
So, the name.
It’s a story from Pete Seeger, an activist and musician of last century. Picture, if you could, a big seesaw. On one end is a basket, half full of rocks. On the other end is a mostly empty box of sand, which we need to fill. All we have are teaspoons. Every time we fill up our spoon with sand, and carry it over to the box on the seesaw, it leaks and drifts away, and not even a teaspoon-full of sand finds its way in. It looks, and feels at times, like a hopeless cause. People have been trying to fill that box with spoonful’s of sand for thousands of years. But we keep going, because every day more people join, there’s ever-more recruits to the teaspoon brigade. And we believe that one day, the box will fill up enough, and the seesaw will tip all at once. The critics will be shocked, incredulous, and ask how it could have all happened so fast; and the answer will be us, with our little teaspoons, over years and years.
Pete would ask listeners, who are you going to be? A member of the Teaspoon Brigade, or an onlooker, criticising and doubting until the moment finally comes? A teaspoon of sand isn’t much, is barely anything, but it’s so much more than nothing.
Singer/Songwriter Pete Seeger. Source: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/jan/28/pete-seeger-dies-aged-94.
At our current moment, there’s no shortage of reasons for despair, for cynicism, for rage. But despair leads to apathy, and cynicism is acceptance, and rage is powerless without action. At times when the world seems to be coming apart, when our politics are dominated by selfishness, violence, and naked cruelty, hope and kindness are acts of defiance. We should resist, must resist, the powers and systems which alienate and maim and kill, but truly rejecting those systems means also rejecting their narrative: that it is the cruel, the violent, the ones willing to do whatever it takes who get power, who have the right to shape the future. If we are to be an army, let be of a different kind of these. If we are to challenge, resist, and refute power and empire, let us not in doing so become so desensitised, dehumanised, that we forget what animated us to begin with. Compassion, empathy, love, kindness, are not weaknesses. They are strengths.
There are politicians, leaders in our world today who seek to destroy human culture, who don’t care what happens to our well-being as long as the right numbers go up. There are men hijacking the foundations of religion and faith, denying any contradiction between the Word of peace, mercy and forgiveness and a project of extreme violence and hate, claiming hate to be a virtue. After eighty years of effort, fascism has returned to political life across the world, and most every powerful nation on earth has its homegrown far-right movement. At the same time, it has been accepted that some, or even many, of us might die and suffer in the coming climate catastrophes, and that has been justified so long as it ensures nobody loses their privileges and comforts. All of this is revolting, disturbing, and should animate us for change. We shouldn’t lose hope because we don’t have much, it’s just a sign we need to join the fight today.
If there is one positive which can be said of an era of calamity and crisis, it is this: as one thing shatters and breaks, the opportunity comes to build something new. It is possible that as the Imperial Project of the last 500 or so years breaks down, something worse will take its place. But it’s also true that in this moment of collapse, we can begin building a better future, a better world. We shouldn’t forget that in the utopian, sci-fi future of Star Trek, humanity first faced utter disasters and world war, before accepting that to survive and flourish, a new way of being had to be embraced. Our current world is profoundly unequal, and is built atop centuries of violence and dispossession. If this is when and how it falls apart, let’s make something beautiful in its stead.
So, what is my hope for this, humble little piece of the online world?
With luck, it will be a place to give voice to some things which have been kept inside for too long. Thoughts and convictions on where humanity has been, on how and why we’ve ended up in the moment we have. My (perhaps somewhat informed) view on those awkward dinner table topics, like religion or politics. Thoughts on what that better world could look like, and which people out there we should listen to, the ones who understand things better than me. Let this be a place for that voice to be heard. Maybe it will resonate in you too, in which case I can only hope you join me with your teaspoon, and get to work filling that box with sand. One day, the seesaw will flip.
The Teaspoon Brigade 