Suicide Bombing the Economy: A Manifesto

Posted by on Aug 6, 2014 in Environmental, Featured, Writing | 0 comments

Suicide Bombing the Economy: A Manifesto
Rise up you Conquistadors of the Useless and drop a bomb on the growth economy.
 
A climate change suicide bomb is self-abnegation that strikes at the heart of capitalism: it’s an intentional subtraction from one’s own place in the capitalist economy. It’s a downshift: a shift from full-time to half-time employment, or half-time to quarter-time, taking away from the life-sucking economy, creating lives set free.
 
 
Bomb the Useful: the consumer lifestyles which are destroying the planet. Praise the Useless: raising children, reading poetry, running trails, climbing mountains, playing music, making peace.
 
Fight climate change, reject denialists, including those too-clever environmentalists who trick us with mantras of green consumerism and renewables. A Prius in every driveway will not save us.
 
A climate change suicide bomb adds life to a weary system.
 
The American work ethic must go. It is part of the ideological scaffolding that supports the growth economy. We must learn to work less and play more.
 
Let’s undo the economy that is undoing us. Our obsession with the Gross Domestic Product is causing drought, floods, starvation, and the Holocene extinction.
 
Rise up you Conquistadors of the Useless. Don’t let them take your one, wild, precious life and planet. Let’s ratchet down the global economy one bomber at a time. 
 
— Nikolai Lash

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