Giving a damn

From: "D.J. Kropotkin" <djkropotkin@hotmail.com>

Last Sunday I went to the BioDevastation demonstration in Boston.  It was a really beautiful scene.  Bread and Puppet was there.  So was the Church of Euthanasia.  There was some conflict about that.  I felt torn, because I love so many people from COE, but I do think a lot of their messages are divisive.  Still, I feel that just like Circle, the BioDiversity movement is better with you!

I was going to write an email about activists working through consensus and not stepping on each others toes.  I was going to write about everyone having a chance to their moment in the public square, a chance to be heard without being shouted down.  I was going to write a lot of other bullshit that seems more like the product of yesterday's indigestion than anything productive.

Instead, I would like to thank every one of you.  COE.  Bread and Puppet.  Loners.  Hippies.  Anarchists.  Everyone who came out.  Everyone who cares.

Some time ago, I went with Jed and Zalika to see Arlo Guthrie.  Arlo played a song that night which he dedicated to some friends in the audience who were Viet Nam vets.  Arlo said he never expected to be friends with those guys back when he was an anti-War protester in the Sixties.  Back then he thought the world was divided into Leftists and Rightists.  But later, he said, he came to realize that there was a much more meaningful distinction - the one between "people who give a damn and people who don't."  People who give a damn will try to do something to make the world better, to further something larger than just themselves and their own self-interests.  People who don't--the silent majority--do nothing.  Arlo said he had come to respect people he disagrees with who at least care more than people he agrees with who don't.  More and more, I feel the same way as Arlo.

So whether I agree or disagree about population or polution or alien abductions or corporate greed, I salute every one of you who is trying to make this world a better place for all of us.  The love we in Circle share and the diversity of our points of view are strengths we should never underestimate.   In too many ways to detail, we are beautiful together.

Peace, Love and Respect.

Josh Putnam
A.K.A. D.J. Kropotkin