A Watershed
Metaphor for These Times
By Susan C. Strong
I first heard of the watershed metaphor applied to social change back in the 1990's. At that time, co-intelligence pioneer Tom Atlee drew my attention to a little book called Shifting: Nature's Way of Change, by Paul Krapfel. Here's a very abbreviated version of the watershed metaphor: high up on the mountainside of a watershed there are a lot of tiny little rivulets. When it rains, they fill with water, and then that water creates little streams, then bigger ones, and finally real rivers. At last, they all flow together into one huge river, the one that flows by a great city near the sea. As the water swells that big river more and more, it starts to flood the city. Then the people there say, "Where did that flood come from?" We never saw it coming!"
We all know in our bones that this process of grass roots revolution is really how change comes to America. The question for us is what is in that "water" that suddenly "floods the city," surprising everyone there. I say it needs to be a growing awareness that what's wrong with America is the way corrupt corporations rob and poison us all to feed their own bottom lines. Sure, we need campaign finance reform, we need the Democrats to straighten out and fly right, and Republicans to do the same. But none of that will ever happen until this country really understands that corrupt corporations are playing a "let's you and him fight" game with both parties and the public too. Our problem is a particular mob of corrupt corporations that keeps everyone busy fighting each other while they, the corporate titans, get away with murder behind the scenes. Literally.
How does this agenda fit with a watershed metaphor? How do we put a "corporate wake up" into the "water" Americans drink? Everywhere at once, friends. High up on the mountains in the "rivulets," in the "streams" of the foothills, in the "rivers" that run through the plains, and finally, into the big "river" that floods the city.
We need our own Common Good Agenda for America, but we also need to clearly identify who is really trying to stop us from getting it. We the people will need to take a lot of actions everywhere to make that part highly visible. It will have to happen all over the country, in the grass roots, and at every level of our society. That means publically exposing who is getting what from every Congressional, state-level, and local decision or proposal. What corporate agenda is being served, at the expense of a healthy, prosperous America? Who is getting bought off? As the latest Quaker Action bulletin (Fall 2014) from the American Friends Service Committee puts it, we need to "put people before profits," and that means "holding corporations accountable," as well as the corporate flunkies in Congress who do their bidding.
Think it
can't be done? Well right after the election Bill Moyers reported about the progressive
slate in Richmond, CA, that finally beat the big money campaign by Chevron
in what was previously their company
town. The progressive message? "Richmond can't be bought." Well,
that phrase needs to go even more national and then even more local again now,
right back down to those little "rivulets" everywhere.
Why back down to the grass roots? Because an anti-American corporate agenda has
rooted itself deep down in our own communities everywhere. Another good example
of a successful campaign to back them off comes from Albany, CA, where the
University of California, Berkeley has long had an experimental farming plot,
the Gill Tract. Expert soil analysis shows that the land is best Class I farm
land still undisturbed in the urban Bay Area. The university has long been in
bed with big Ag, GMO producers, and pesticide-laden farming, to the detriment
of sustainable, organic agriculture, as well as the new urban agriculture
trend. Not long ago UC had decided to
turn the Gill Tract over to developers to build a supermarket and condos for
seniors. But a group of local activists calling themselves Occupy the Farm
began a "farm-in" on the land; they were there day and night, planting
vegetables, watering them by hand with containers passed over a cyclone fence
when U.C. turned off the water supply. After a long struggle, Occupy the Farm
won the right of local citizens to keep doing some urban farming at the Gill
Tract, and U.C. set aside some of its development plans, for at least ten
years. The whole story is well documented in a new film, Occupy
the Farm, which is now in selected theaters
nationwide. (For more examples of successes like these, check out YES!
Magazine, where they focus on the good
news.)
These are just a few examples of course, but they are good ones for the way
political change really happens. We need
to send our message to the corporate dupes of every type in all of our
governments, Blue and Red, local and national. Let's show them they won't be
able to get away with taking payoffs for abusing the American people anymore,
because we are going to expose corrupt corporations everywhere we can. We need to show them all that they had better
support a Common Good Agenda for America, and run like the wind away from the
corrupt anti-American corporate agenda. Let's make that kind of "river" rise everywhere in America the
Beautiful.
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