Mountaintop Removal's Ending?

What are we thinking about when we shop? Are we responding to a primal need, and is that need being exploited for profit?
Back in the cave days, we hunted large animals despite the danger they posed, and the brain developed systems to help us cope with the risks involved. It seems to me that  the brains response to these situations was (is) to either ignore the danger outright or develop a logic system that allows one to do so in order to  get the job done. Does this sound familliar? Have advertisers and their ilk already found the "switchs" that make us keep shopping? Did they find them decades ago? Are we being "farmed"?
What kind of system attempts to weave gluttony deeper into the fabric of human nature? Cannibalism, figuratively and possibly literal at some point, is the logical outcome. Economic cannibalism is openly preached in the midst of our flourishing society. Imagine if these values get passed down to our great-grand children-people who are going through environmental and social catastrophe- will they act with patience and compassion in the face of adversity?

 You said it, SeaQ.  Advertisers and their ilk, as lackeys of the boardroom and Wall St. villains with the curly Q mustaches (or not....) are certainly fundamental to the psychosocial system and its consumer market fundamentalism.
     It's pretty nightmarish to contemplate.  I had two Burger King burgers the other day, first time in years, though I did think of Better Burger's three outlets here in NYC.  My consumer karma's pretty good, all things considered.  Still, in conversation with some friends/acquaintance, I hardly had the wherewithal to create the conversational node of sustainable refuge.  I did mention the concepts of carrying capacity and sustainable yield, so that's something.
     In later conversations this week, I have mentioned credit unions and Green Century mutual funds shareholder activism.  The Rev and the Church are major angels in a battle with many fronts and collegial platoons, thinking of Michael Franti's song, "Rock the Nation," "...nobody want to sing a little bit out of tune, or be the backbone of a rebel platoon...."
    The only alternative, in my view, is to create a mindset in which a person seeks to understand the alternative economic and cultural approaches and to create circuitous thought processes which integrate current consumer cultural norms and icons, and then redirects the thought back to the alternatives.
      Thus, the cannibalism inherent the likes of Exxon and Shell, and here Chase and, say, Peabody Coal, will not be left as iconic images to which we are entirely beholden, even in activism.  The corrupt judges and politicians, as servants of various corporate executives and their sociocultural system, in West Virginia or Wyoming, are then counterposed to our purchases of green power, through ConED, or better yet, through NYPIRG's Fuel Buyer's Group, or better still, through a local seller.  CitySolar, for example, is local in NYC.  The Mt. Pleasant Solar Co-op in Washington, DC, one of two co-ops there, along with a variety across the country, are efforts not unlike numerous examples in Europe.
         The U.S. Social Forum, moreover, is coming to Detroit this June, with prep groups meeting at Bluestockings periodically.  I'll be doing a presentation at the Park Slope Food Co-op on May 15, and going over William Greider's book, The Soul of Capitalism, as well as showing a video from a past WSF.
         SeaQ, I'm a big fan of the evolutionary perspective, and I guess you're on to something thinking about our hunter mentalities.  I think the key boils further down to the group dynamics.  "The Hand that Feeds You" is probably major in this, as a symbolic and experiential condition.  Corporations have been leveraging mother earth's abundance with their appropriation of science, psychology, and democracy.  
       I think those of us who perceive the injustice have to perceive the economic alternatives in health food stores that represent a passage out, to an alternative.  Health food stores, even chains like Health Nuts or Whole Foods, link us to food, our bread and butter, our daily bread, our meat and potatoes.  From there we have choices, like Green America's Green Biz pages links and Green Festivals and Food Co-ops, or Book Store Co-ops like Bluestockings, which represent the parallel universe, the mustard seed, that we can nurture in the material world with the consumer dimension that every urban consumer is obligated to follow, mostly.  From movies like Low Impact Man to Bamako, and Michael Moore to natural food restaurants and juices and sodas, we don't need to hate every consumer choice.  With Ralph Nader and the Green Party in mind, Rev Billy and the Choir in our souls, we can then think about the Chase and Peabody Coal realities with a place for the despair and rage to go.
         No?

      

Man, your arrest making the news is the best, short of a total halt of strip mining. Br'er Rabbit gets arrested on Easter Sunday — Love It!!

Thanks for the kind words, Mark. Detroit is my home town in a  sense, so if  you need any survival tips or places to see, message away.
It's true that many people create Jungian caricatures to love, rage against, and fear. However, I agree that it is more effective ( for some of us at least) to recognize that the basic motivations of a Jamie Dimon are not dissimilar to that of any other person. We need to demystify those who control the world's resources and wealth; they must lose the aspect of the dragon before we can deal with them through large popular movements. While many activists and non-activists alike see through this veil,  its also  true  many people think something along the lines of  "What can I do against a megacorp or its powerful  board?" This is what I like about the Rev. Billy Show- it plays with the idea of archetypes and helps us to question their reality. Is the Rev. really a rev.? No...well kinda..hmmmm...Is Jamie Dimon some sort of neo-royalty? Yes.....no.....kinda....Is Chase "real'  in the same sense that you and I are real?
How do you fight a "person" with no body? By going after its food source of course-the minds and souls of human beings. That is the real target. Convincing people to "lay down their tools" until we get the change we need is the most effective strategy in my opinion.
What works for me is being out in nature; it affects the way I view time, and through that, it alters my view of the present. Getting people out of cities and into rural areas would have a dramatic effect on our perspective as a culture.
We need to recognize that, at least here in America, there are so many hands clamoring to feed us (in one sense or another) that we, as individuals, can choose which one does, or we can choose to feed ourselves. We don't need to be  enslaved by our tribal instincts, regardless of the forms they take.

"Man's achievment is to have created a world of the mind, of the intimate imagination, which is as real in its way as any actual country on the map. Sir Karl Popper, in one of his most important papers, calls it ‘the third world,’ or ‘world three.’ The first world is the objective world of things. The second world is my inner, subjective world. But, says Popper, there’s a third world, the world of objective contents of thoughts. Teilhard de Chardin calls this third world the noosphere, that is, the world of the mind." - Colin Wilson

The Coal River Mountain mentioned in my writing above is the site of the mining accident that took place yesterday.  Whitesville, West Virginia, the closes small town tot he "Performance" mine, property of Chase's customer, The Massey Energy Co., is exactly the site of our mountain soil sample that we took back to the lobbies in NYC.  The site was picked for its symbolism by local dirty coal activitists, "Climate Ground Zero."  But it's a lot more than symbolic now.  That's an interesting question, how our rhetoric and symbolic gesture and imagery crosses over into literal action.  The coat mine beneath our feet blew up and 25 people died there. 

Savitri and I have been in birth center at St. Vincent's in NYC, where our daughter Lena was born this morning.  The old hospital doesn't have wi fi, so with our miraculous drama going on in the foreground - we also had this sorrow waiting in the windows, on the highways we could see from our hospital room, where you can see the Holland Tunnel entrance that takes us to Appalachia...   I appreciate the thoughtful writing by Mark and CQ and it does feel like we're in a pause before returning to the lobbies of Chase and the hope that the world can be a better place for our daughters and sons.

---rev