John Brown 2012

-- By KippMueller - 16 Feb 2012

The World We Live In

I'm very insecure about my conscious indifference to the matrix we live in.

To see it play out, I don't have to look further than a day in my life. In the morning, I put on a shirt and pants made in a sweat shop somewhere in South Asia. I never bothered to research the conditions of those shops, but I know how it goes.

I lace up some shoes sewn by children and I walk to a local coffee shop to buy coffee. The coffee is made from beans which were purchased from plantations in Latin America that have extremely harsh, slave-like conditions for workers. I'll pick up a banana too. That one will be courtesy of Chiquita, also known for the wide selection of healthcare plans and lavish lifestyles they offer on their plantations.

Then I head to law school, where I spend enough money to feed villages, print enough paper to kill forests and dedicate endless hours to transcendental nonsense instead of building things and reaching out to those in need. I look at something seemingly trivial, like my lunch meat. I realize I just made a donation to Monsanto, a company that injects artificial hormones into our food, treats both human workers and animals in extremely inhumane ways, bullies small farmers to crush competition and poisons our environment with toxic chemicals.

Sometimes, in fact often, I don't realize it at all. And if I am thinking about it, I am too often consciously indifferent to it. Most of the time I think about it, recognize my indifference to it, and become saddened by it. Oftentimes, we talk about our "footprint". Our footprint goes well beyond a car we drive or a political donation we make. It's the day to day to day.

As for our "convictions": What about them? The guy walking down the street has a Che Guevara shirt. He got a great deal on it, because it was made in Vietnam. I'm not sure if he sees the irony, but I do. I talk about what I believe around school. To what end?

There's my convictions, and then there's my life. And I don't know to reconcile the two, but I'd like to find a career where I can answer that question. Recently, I found myself wondering what John Brown would do.

Who Would John Brown Be Today?

Would he be the guy in the Che shirt? Would John Brown drive a car, purchasing gasoline provided courtesy of Halliburton? Would he go to war with Halliburton?

Would he stand for every human rights cause one could stand for in this multifaceted, infinitely more complicated world than the one he inhabited? Would he be Malcolm X, Eleanor Roosevelt and Cesar Chavez all rolled into one?

Ultimately, I'm wondering whether John Brown could live in America today at all. He could subsist on food made locally and clothes sewn in America, but what about his tax payments which fund private militias in the Middle East which have slaughtered thousands of innocent civilians? What about the ground John walks on, stolen first during the genocide of Native Americans and second from the poor via eminent domain?

He needs a computer to hash out his plans, but the titanium in the computer was purchased from warlords and malevolent mining corporations in Africa. He sits at a desk made of wood from the Amazon, cut by timber companies that are displacing thousands of villages in Latin America and causing the extinction of millions of species.

I want to find John Brown today, but I don't know that he can exist at all.

My Modern Reinterpretation of John Brown

To live a moral life in the first world, sometimes I think you just have to pick your battle. After all, if everyone did, the world would likely be cured of its corruptions. Perhaps if John Brown were alive today, he'd periodically purchase desks made of wood cut in the Amazon, but he'd fight for worker's rights in Peru. And the woman next to him wouldn't be fighting for worker's rights in Peru all the time, but she'd be fighting to stop the timber companies from cutting the wood in the Amazon. And maybe, between the two of them, they could come closer to embodying John Brown in the 1850s.

Maybe the purity and absolutism with which John Brown fought for freedom isn't something a single person can replicate in today's infinitely complicated world, but rather an identity a community or even a nation could aspire to attain, together.

Or maybe I'm bullshitting. Maybe John Brown would sequester himself from all of this and fight the good fight. It could be that I'm simply rationalizing because I don't have the fortitude to give up my life - so I blame the world around me. Maybe John Brown wouldn't put on that shirt and those pants in the morning. Maybe he wouldn't pick up a coffee on the way to class.

But I'm not willing to give up on finding my John Brown just because I'm not willing to give up my life. The John Brown in me is a person willing to learn to align his life closer to his convictions. I'm not the man John Brown was. I can't say what I would've done if I were around in the 1850s.

I'd like to think I would've been by his side, and I want to live like I'm by his side in the world we inhabit today. I can't even answer the question as to whether I have the courage to live the life of John Brown, because I don't know what it would be in the first place. But I hope I'm always striving towards it.