The Cafe Society

I’ve been on a starvation diet for the last two and a half weeks. Today, after helping Wayne hang his art show at the Tucson Airport, I felt like breaking the fast. We talked about it a while and I said even though I was ready for solid food, I didn’t want to break the fast because I love writing the blog and supporting the fasters in a pro-active way. Peace messages were still coming through me, and so I didn’t want to let go and join the food world again. With war raging in the Middle East, there is even greater reason to fast for peace.

So, instead to getting a meal, I decided instead to get a smoothie. But I didn’t want to go to a health food store. I wanted something bad for me. I wanted caffeine. The addiction to artificially stimulation was rearing up again. It wasn’t a physical addiction that was pulling me, but was a psychological addiction. I’m not as strong as I need to be when it comes to will power, so I gave into the superficial, pleasure-seeking desire and went for it.

Such behavior was against common sense because I knew that while fasting caffeine and alcohol were not suppose to be on my list of beverages because they dehydrate you. Forgetting about good sense, we went to a coffee shop and I ordered a Mocha Supreme or something decadent like that with soy milk. After a few sips, my head was spinning from the caffeine high.

We live in a Café society. What this means is that people go to café’s to see people, to get a sense of community (even though they might not talk to anyone while there), and to get their next fix of caffeine. The café scene is not a healthy community nor is a real community, but it feeds into the addictive society. It’s not a free society because it is a commercial society. In cafes, you can’t really be political or spiritual. You have to follow the rules of polite consumer society and pay four dollars or so for the luxury drink, set there reading the paper or your computer scene, and drink it until it is time to leave.

In the United States there is very little civic society left. Most space is commercial space. Commercial space isn’t democratic space because someone owns it and it is usually a rich person. If you offend the owner, then you get kicked out of the space.

What I love about Access Tucson Community TV is that it is civic space. Anyone can get a show and air whatever opinions they want. It is truly a free speech place. If you want to say something that might be offensive or sexual, you can do so late at night when they permit such language.

On my upcoming show, Lovolution Village, I’m going to be able to say what I want to about corporate America or what I think about the “religious” right or Emperor Bush and the war in Iraq and not get my head chopped off or get censored by commercial sponsors. Maybe, after all these years, I have found a free speech zone. Maybe on Access Tucson I am going to finally, finally find a way to self actualize!

In Studio A today, I remembered the vision of futurist Peter Russell who believes that our technology has been evolving to the point of being able to become the “Global Brain.” With the right messages, ones that lead humanity towards more enlightenment on the road to building a network of arcologies, then we are going to be able to reorder the world in a peaceful way that brings diversity in unity. Teilhard de Chardin, said "Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world are seeking each other, so that the world may come into being."

Why this fast has been important for me is that it has allowed me to step out of being a hard core consumer for a while. It has allowed me see the illusions of our day to day lives in bourgeois American café culture. In order to make a lovolutionary stand against the American empire, we need to be free of all its trappings.