The Story That Changes the World

WE WONDER HOW TO CHANGE THE WORLD and we often assume this means something huge and unattainable by mortal beings. "Changing the world" is a phrase for simpering, bleeding-hearts, and pleas from deranged protestors pounding at the White House gates. It's a puffed-up lyric from a Disney® flick, or a syrupy snatch of phrasing from a Michael Jackson song. It's not something we take seriously, perhaps, in our everyday, pragmatic lives. And I wonder why that is. I wonder why we feel that way.

MEXICO CITY — A group of about 300 Mazahua Indians briefly seized a water treatment plant on Mexico City's western outskirts Wednesday and temporarily cut off one of the main sources of water for the metropolis of 18 million people, the National Water Commission said.

The protest was motivated by demands for more government development aid, local media reported.

—chron.com

Here is an inspiring story. It reminds you of the Boston Tea Party, even. I wish humans as brave, committed, and self-motivated as the Mazahua Indians would not resort to petitioning a government (even by such effective means) and would just make their own way to self-rule and sustenance. But not everyone is like the Patriots who tore away from the British. However, in both cases, it seems the actor's deeds were necessary reactions to their own government. And if a supposed benefactor is killing off your means to live, what options are left to you? I suppose you could retreat. Or type something out in a blistering blogspotty blitz of benificence, hoping to spark change—although I'm not sure how many of the Mazahua Indians have a blogspot account or Internet access.

Perhaps that is why they took this unusual step of fighting—very practically—for their rights.

The protesters live in the watershed of the Cutzamala River in the high, pine-covered mountains west of Mexico City.[...]

In September 2004, the same group staged a similar protest, blocking chlorine deliveries but not stopping the water supply. They were demanding damage payments for reservoir overflows that damaged crops, as well as money for rural development projects and drinking water systems for their own communities.

—chron.com

You have to love those Mazahua Indians. And the original Patriots who stood up for their rights, despite the tyrannical laws that sought to oppress them. You have to love all non-hypnotized humans who remain close to the core of their power as intelligent, spiritual, self-confident animals. Heart, body, mind, community. All of it. Humans who have kept their sense and do not offer automatic deference to a building, a badge, a paper, a rule, or a gang that acts immorally and justifies it with verbiage; a human who knows Wrong when they see it, and knows Right when they know it. These are things that Zapata, Socrates, Jesus, Nietszche, Che, Dolores Huerta, Emma Tenayuca, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Thomas Paine, and Henry David Thoreau all understood and put to use in their own ways. But you and I are not like these people, perhaps. No, we are too often taught of great deeds and great thinking, and have been led to believe it is but "literature,"; safely enveloped in a "curriculum." They are "ideals" that can be discerned with a course in Great Books. You can be graded upon your understanding that you need no liaison or interpreter or controller, but then you leave that knowledge at the door. (Unlike those writers and heroes.) We graduate, and then we go find a clock to punch. And we punch it daily. Until there isn't even anger in the arm anymore. Just a tired habit. Our conversations in the workplace and in the street have little to do with anything we once read while sitting in school library sunbeams.

We need more stories for each other—and especially children—that remind us of our innate power as both dreamers and doers—and of the importance of banding together to act for Good. How many times have we seen a mass of people abused and exploited by the Few? How many times over does this play out in the world? It is easy to lose count. And the institutions in power and fed by our acquiesence are very happy to lose count. And to help us believe in our own helplessness and passivity and deference. And the time may be coming when we need to be able to reach inside ourselves and reference more empowering narratives.

If we really want to change the world, we need to start with the children. Not the corrupt cats already in office and already wed to a destructive and hypnotizing system. Not the scared adults who work backward, rationalizing all their consequences to support their desired actions. We need to get to the children, who have huge hearts, and able minds, and hands that are so powerful they will move mountains. In time. But first, these young minds need true understanding. Not brains that are crippled by advertising, installed desires, pharmaceutical fixes, fake history, and self-destructive lessons in abdication and hopelessness.

We have many well-loved and well-maintained fables that tell of a Superman, a Batman, a Spider-Man, a Neo, an Ahnold, a Peter Pan—a single amazing (male) hero, and I suppose this is very American. This hero often saves other people who cannot save themselves, and he can see beyond what those people can see, let alone do what they cannot do for themselves. I suppose this is very Neo-Liberal (and of course NeoCon, as well). These are the stories we use to prepare new humans for the combine; for the belief in a grand, exceptional hyperpower based on the almighty individual and his own uncontested view of the world and all that needs be done to maintain that mechanism.

But the Mazahua Indians acted together, and in the article I linked to, I see no Super Indian quoted. I see no Hyper Indian who sweeps down and saves the other wailing indians from their own fate. I see a group of people who knew they were being hurt by others. And who acted together to change this. The women and men in Oaxaca acted in concert and in the photos I've seen, it is simply a large, committed and empassioned crowd. The People always have each other and themselves. And leaders they choose to fulfill their own agenda. The idea in America is that we choose the leaders that do well for us. Not that we are but sheep to be shorn and eaten when convenient to the farmers who herd us.

We must—at once, and in tangible and concrete ways—turn our backs on the constant onslaught of television and subtle but widespread programming in America that sets up this wonderful crazy-making double bind teaching us both how special White Americans are and how stupid the human being (in general) is. Our popular ocean of media messaging does this by fashioning messages for idiots, by teaching us that we are filled with bland and crass material goals; that we are spiritually weak (or empty), that women need men to be happy; that men are half-human and half-jerkbrute; that both need each other and two degrees and six figures and a mortgage and their very own bundle of debt to be happy; that you are physically decaying every moment and in need of Big Pharma, the State, the Tube, the Taxman, the Good Book and the Big Daddy to hold you together long enough for you to do your part to adopt a starving African baby and teach it The Pledge of Convenience.

Watch some TV (I don't have it anymore): even watch some of your favorite shows or (especially Disney) movies, and really pay attention. The frameworks they are setting up using symbols, colors, names, and narratives are sickening. It's no wonder people grow up to be passive haters and followers, thoughtless saluters and secret racists destroyed by a thousand false lines of logic and time-release death in the shape of good product. It's no wonder we all go mad in this place. It's no wonder we sit around watching things crumble and darken, and do nothing but deny it. We do what we're taught we can do.

In late 2004, the government gave [the Mazahua Indians] almost $120,000 in damage payments, promised to build water systems for them and gave them grants for thousands of Christmas tree seedlings to plant for income.

—chron.com

How ought the story end the next time? To whom will you tell it? Will you listen, yourself?

---

Nezua Limón Xolagrafik-Jonez blogs as The Unapologetic Mexican and sometimes cooks soup for sick generals.

-