Stop Bitching

Stop Bitching, Start a Revolution, printed in white letters on a black T-shirt, grabbed my attention last Thursday afternoon, as I reached the corner of Seventh Avenue and Garfield Place in Park Slope. As I came closer, I read, in smaller letters under the slogan, www.zendik.org.

A tall young man was standing on the corner, holding up the T-shirt. I remembered the sidewalk vendor that a friend of mine and I had talked to this summer, a riveting encounter which came about only because my friend had initiated the interaction. "You need air conditioning out here," he had called out, on that excessively hot, humid day. Emboldened by that memory, I spoke to the young man on the corner, asking him how I could start a revolution. "That's a good question," he replied, which suggested that he had no ready answer, but he then proceeded to tell me what revolution he had in mind.

His revolution would be two-fold. First, it would change our relationship with our physical environment, so that we protect and conserve it, rather than despoil and degrade it. Second, it would change our social relationships, so that they become based on honesty and cooperation rather than on dissimulation and competition. The young man belongs to a community which works to promote these goals through outreach and through the example it sets.

His community consists of thirty or so artists and their seven children (he is the father of one of them), who live communally on a farm in West Virginia, where they grow organic vegetables and raise their own livestock and poultry. They are, as a consequence, "almost self-sufficient" with respect to their food, but they have no surplus for sale on the open market. The community's organic farming sets an example of protecting the environment. Humanity's intelligence and essential oneness with nature, the young man told me, both enables and requires us to be creative in husbanding the earth's resources, a notion that his community calls "creavolution." That term, he showed me, was tattooed in large letters on his left arm.

As for the more difficult task of changing the basis of human interaction, his community uses no money among themselves, and they reveal to one another their emotional and sexual concerns. This leads to some "hairy" conversations, the young man told me. It sounded like group therapy, but I held my honesty in check and didn't say so. Perhaps it is in fact therapeutic.

He towered over me, making me painfully conscious that, after gradually losing three inches on my journey from youth to old age, I'd shrunk to below-average height. He was blonde, with regular features and a thoroughly wholesome appearance, despite his long hair, tied back in a pony tail, and his thin beard, longer at the sides than in the middle, which created the effect of a pair of inverted diabolical horns.

I asked him if his community is associated with an organized religion. It's not, he told me. "My mother is a devout Catholic, and I love her to pieces, but on her wall is a plaque that reads, 'stay where you're planted.' As I was growing up this was for me a message of despair. Would I never leave this place, this way of life?" He seems genuinely glad to have left that place, that life, and to have become a member of his farming community. When I asked him when it was founded, he told me that "a Beat poet" established it 41 years ago. This surprised me because most Utopian communities are short-lived.

His youthful idealism was touching but also sad. His goal of protecting the environment is as admirable as it is urgent, but it is unlikely to be realized until we become dangerously closer to world-wide catastrophe. As for transforming the basis of human interaction from competition to cooperation, the goal of applying it on a large scale seemed to me to be hopeless. Perhaps it can be attained in small-scale, ideologically committed societies, like his commune, in which everyone is in face-to-face interaction, or in cases where it is necessary for physical survival, as among the Bushmen in the Kalahari desert. Exceptions are temporary, called forth by extraordinary events. Dorothy Day, the Catholic social activist, remembered the San Francisco earthquake, when people rushed out of their homes to help strangers in distress. Why, she asked, can't we live like that all the time?

Still, most revolutions begin with a small group of people, and it's a truism that to transform the world you must first transform yourself. The young man and his community were doing more than their share to repair the world. I would have liked to continue our conversation, but I was afraid that the raw fish I was carrying home in my shopping cart would spoil if I didn't put it into our refrigerator soon, so I thanked him, wished him the best of luck, and continued on my way.