if it is going to be Idiocracy...
I'm going to be Joe
If this world is going to imitate the 2006 movie Idiocracy, I’m going to be like Joe (a.k.a. Not Sure).
If you haven’t seen this Mike Judge film, do yourself a favor and give it a watch. Funny, well-written, well-directed and well-cast, it features Terry Crews, Dax Shepard and our Lady, our Queen… Maya Rudolph.
Idiocracy starts out with Joe (Luke Wilson) as the most average guy working in the basement archives of the army, being chosen – due to his complete average-ness, he is the MOST average on all fronts – to be frozen in a military cryogenics experiment.
The experiment doesn’t go as planned.
Joe wakes up 500 years later and, due to enshittification (thank you Cory Doctorow for this perfect new word), the world is very backwards – mountains of trash everywhere, passive-aggressive and then hostile ai-kiosks selling Carl’s Junior, an “automated” hospital with a dangerously low-IQ staff, everyone wearing Crocs and disposable athleisure-wear, no one drinks water (as it is associated with being “from the toilet”), but everyone drinks a Gatorade-type drink called Brawndo, and so on.
I won’t re-tell the whole thing – it’s a funny movie and unfortunately, now, it’s funny because it’s true.
Anyway… my point is that Joe - renamed Not Sure in error by an ai-ID-tattooing machine - with his average intelligence, is able to help everyone on a large scale. And more importantly, even though he and Maya Rudolph’s character Rita are playing chess while everyone can’t even get their checkers on the board, in the end, they use that advantage to lead well and harm none.
So, as we enter our real-life version of Idiocracy, I’m going to be like Joe. I’m going to share the “average” wisdom I have and try to make the world better.
If I see people watering plants with Brawndo, I’m going to suggest we use water instead.
I am going to name things so they can either: come into being, OR don’t become normalized.
I am going to read books and connect with future-forward people and learn true things about the world that the future-now-ai-internet will not offer up in even after the most careful searching. I will continue to storytell, and share whatever “average” wisdom I have access to. I also will continue to practice my earth-presence-spirituality, cross-checking my ideals with the energy of all things.
And then I’m going to come and be with the people and plants and animals of this world. I will keep returning to the collective; that needs me and needs you too.
Those of us who have read The Handmaid’s Tale, 1984 and The Parable of the Sower know how all of this could go.
Those of us who are still able to visualize generative, healthy futures for people, plants, animals, fungi, the elements, space, air, water, land and energies, MUST.
Those of us who know that plants don’t “crave electrolytes” as the “government” in Idiocracy claim, must say clearly – give these plants some water.
The revolution gets more irresistible every day.
Until next time,
Jess
p.s. today is the last day for 25% off Books with code FEB2025.
SPECIAL NOTE:
Sky Fusco (Lordcowboy) is continuing the MAGICAL Tune In, Drop Out space (sliding scale $20-$30/month). This is not a paid ad or anything, I just suspect that many of you that are here would like it there too. Here is my personal description of my experience in the Tune In, Drop Out space so far…
Imagine you are a cowboy.
You’ve been out on the range for a while.
You know leaving town (Instagram) was the right thing to do, but under the stars a person gets lonely.
One night you see the warm glow of campfire.
You ride up and those circled there welcome you.
Together you tell stories, laugh and share silence.
All hearts present and accounted for.
That’s what Sky Fusco’s Tune In, Drop Out is like.
- Jessica Snow
“What’s an ethical teacher look like?
One who only teaches a medium they have pursued seriously with time and effort.
One who authored their own materials for teaching.
One who has connections to the community that the craft is based in.
A great teacher won’t teach you to be exactly like her, she will teach you how to teach yourself how to be exactly like you.”
- Lise Silva Gomes, Craft & Practice: Meditations on Creativity & Ethics
“Sometimes… and hear me out… it’s beauty and love and tenderness that move us? Shouldn’t the beauty of the world be enough to jolt people into protecting it? I want to make art that will reach the people, that will move them. This reminds me of what Todi Cade Bambara once said about making the revolution irresistible.
That’s the work we are being called to do right now. There’s a legacy here, let’s remember that when things get ugly outside we must make art that helps us move toward where we need to go. I need less lamentations and more imagination about the beautiful bounty of our Earth. We can’t liberate ourselves if we can’t liberate this Earth. Our liberation is tied to the liberation of land and water. It’s true liberation from capitalism. True liberation from greed. This is deeply entwined with both a free Congo and a free Palestine.
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The revolution is going to happen with more sacrifice, but daily sacrifice. More space for friends, for your community, for your comrades, and more generosity in general.
Give more of your time, your energy, your resources. Push yourself to new boundaries. Learn skills that you can share with your community. Feed people, feed your friends. If you have money to give, give it to your local communities, do rent strike work or get to know the houseless folks that live around you. I’ve joined a mutual aid group and every month we choose a bunch of GoFundMes we want to donate to. I have less money than I’ve had in a while but I always buy my friends art. I always try to support the work of people and artists I admire. I become a paid subscriber to newsletters as often as I can, and I buy zines, books and all kinds of things to support comrades and orgs I trust. It’s hard out here. We need each other. What is revolutionary is how you live your life. Stop pontificating and just do good. Be good. Commit harder to the people around you. Stop lying, stop making excuses, stop talking shit. Just be a good person. It’s not hard.
We need each other. Never forget that. Make art that keeps that in mind. Make art that protects everybody. Make art that fights for a better world. We need you.”
“Likes are that element we all know is bullshit, though we all check incessantly. The like was a revolutionary invention, with the capacity of spreading brief love, in the brief shape of a brief heart. But it turns out, the like is not free of politics. We may press like because we truly like something. But we also deal with likes as if it was hard drugs; I fix you, you fix me. Sometimes we like something out of pity for the person who posted it. Or we like it falsely, to keep the status quo of a friendship. Or to make ourselves excel from other people in front of a potential client. Sometimes we even like tragedies, only to say “I saw this, I hear you”. So it’s not that simple as a liking gesture, and it’s not devoid of ethics.”
“I’ve long accepted a certain truth about becoming an artist: it is more about becoming than what that becoming becomes. Because artistry is a state of always becoming. There is no such thing as having arrived. There is no magnum opus. The power of an art object lies less in its aesthetic value than it does in the alchemical processes it has undergone to become what it is. What dark and heavy matter was sublimated into a fine, inviting mist? But more importantly, how?”
- Buggy from Uglies
"Look, America is no more a democracy than Russia is a Communist state. The governments of the U.S. and Russia are practically the same. There's only a difference of degree. We both have the same basic form of government: economic totalitarianism. In other words, the settlement to all questions, the solutions to all issues are determined not by what will make the people most healthy and happy in their bodies and their minds but by economics. Dollars or rubles. Economy über alles. Let nothing interfere with economic growth, even though that growth is castrating truth, poisoning beauty, turning a continent into a shit-heap and driving an entire civilization insane. Don't spill the Coca-Cola, boys, and keep those monthly payments coming."
- Tom Robbins
“It’s clearly a crisis of two things: of consciousness and conditioning. We have the technological power, the engineering skills to save our planet, to cure disease, to feed the hungry, to end war; But we lack the intellectual vision, the ability to change our minds. We must decondition ourselves from 10,000 years of bad behavior. And, it’s not easy.”
- Terence McKenna
"Our survival won't depend on political or economic systems. It's going to depend on the courage of the individual to speak the truth, and to speak it lovingly and not destructively. It's saying what you really know and feel is the truth, in all directions. Our greatest vulnerability lies in the amount of misinformation and mis-conditioning of humanity."
- Buckminster Fuller
“A more visceral way to understand the imagination is as a clear or clogged channel, not unlike your intestines. When you feed yourself with junk ideas, become bloated with ideologies, create chronic constipation from identity fixations, and infest yourself with the parasites of media hype and its addictions, you cannot expect the nourishing flow of creativity to flow easily through your being and blush your life with its radiance. Nor can you expect to easily become as a hollow bamboo for the Goddess to play her tunes, as a hollow bone for the Great Spirit to sound his whistle. No – what is needed is to flush the system and repopulate it with the flora of rich archetypal perceptions and Divine visions. What is needed is imaginal hygiene!
Imaginal hygiene is the inner art of self-managing the imagination, to defend it from forces that compromise, pollute, colonize, shrink, and sterilize it, and to cultivate those that illuminate, expand, and nourish it. I feel knowledge of this and its application is essential to the story of human survival into the 21st century. Its practice is necessary for us to cultivate the visionary clarity and strength needed to achieve the great personal and planetary transformations that increasing numbers of us are being called to perform, for the capacity to transform is in direct proportion to the capacity to imagine.”
- M.T. Zen
“The soul is like a wild animal — tough, resilient, savvy, self-sufficient, and yet exceedingly shy. If we want to see a wild animal, the last thing we should do is to go crashing through the woods, shouting for the creature to come out. But if we are willing to walk quietly into the woods and sit silently for an hour or two at the base of a tree, the creature we are waiting for may well emerge, and out of the corner of an eye we will catch a glimpse of the precious wildness we seek.”
Parker Palmer
Join us in the Friday space for two pieces of audio that you can center your practice with each week! See below for comments from the Sun Gem meditation last week - there’s space for every feeling - you’ll laugh! you’ll cry (in a good way)! xo Jess
