Frrggrrl

Let's talk about petunias.

Petunias (specifically hybrids of Petunia x atkinsiana) are commonly sold in temperate areas as annuals. You buy them, they last through the summer and perhaps into fall, but by the time winter's first freeze hits you've likely already pulled them out of the garden because they won't last until spring.

But in their native range in tropical and subtropical parts of South America, they are perennials. They can withstand heat that might cause other plants in your garden to wilt, and they persist in spite of the challenges year after year. They aren't inherently weak or short-lived. We've just been putting them in the wrong conditions, conditions for which they haven't evolved or acclimated.

If you're struggling today, feeling like you aren't good enough, think of this: perhaps you aren't in the right conditions, either. Maybe you're being subjected to pressures you weren't prepared for, and maybe these are conditions that anyone might have trouble with. But you have your strengths, too. It's not your fault if others expect you weather freezing cold when you do best facing the rigors of a hot, muggy, tropical summer afternoon.

We want a plethora of options to choose from; a thousand pictures of a possible society, knowing that none of them will be what we end up with, because no plan survives contact with reality and no plan need be followed completely.

But we know, with surety, that curiosity is absolutely the path towards a better world.

How will anarchism handle building safety? How will we respond when harms occur in our communities? How will we defend if some colonial power arises elsewhere and seeks our end?

These are not challenges to anarchy, nor are they critiques. These are the living questions we must always answer, imperfect as it will be, and always be striving to imagine new futures of.

Treat every question in good faith. Sit with it. The person who wants to ensure there is still medicine for their kid in the anarchist revolution is not your enemy, they are your friend, who is worried about their needs being met.

To me, this is why we must be utopians. We must truly believe that if we explore our options enough, we can do this in a way that is best for everyone. That it is possible for us to leave no one behind. We must believe it and we must act on it, with our intellectual labor of theory, our creative labor of envisioning, and our physical labor of building the future we want to live in, through our minute, specific, helpful, and curious daily actions.

I was today years old. That is disgusting.

No Child Left Behind is one of the worst things to ever be incentivized in schools. It was signed into law when I was 14. Reading Rainbow was my show as a kid. LeVar Burton played a big part in why I became an avid reader to date. The joy of it. It's an adventure around the globe and through different time periods without stepping on a plane or time machine.

Children parrot behavior. In grade school, I always wanted to read the same amount of books as my teachers (50 books) and managed to double that each year. Before No Child Left Behind, book fairs and Scholastic catalogs were a serious matter like your grandma's Fingerhut catalogs. Libraries were (and still are) a wonderland.

This concentrated schools and other education programs entirely on those tests, especially schools with students who were already struggling, at the cost of art and music programs, home economics and shop type programs, and any in depth exploration of pretty much anything that wasn't on the test, which were pretty narrowly focused. Reading Rainbow was a relaxed encouragement to be imaginative and curious. It didn't teach kids the answers to questions on the test. So it didn't make the cut.

This widened the gap between public and private school educations significantly, because students in public schools learned mostly how to regurgitate information, while students in private schools learned how to understand it, analyze it, think critically about it, and apply it - in short, if you could afford to go to private school, you still got to have agency over your education. And sure, many public school teachers were dedicated and still taught their students more than the curriculum demanded, but they were under a lot of pressure and scrutiny and their hands were often tied. Many of them couldn't sustain the effort it took (and how little they got paid) and changed careers. Meanwhile basic necessarily skills disappeared when arts and non-academic budgets were slashed into oblivion - you used to be able to learn how to sew, mend, cook, budget, do woodworking, fix a car (hell, build one), paint, draw, do pottery, and so much more in elective classes. What's mostly remained is performing arts programs, which struggle to continue existing, but since you can charge admission to performances they've had a better chance than shop class and home ec.

You have no idea what it's like to have watched all that happen under the Bush administration and now see the second emerging generation of young people who were deprived of the education they deserve and don't understand critical thought or media analysis. Those of us who are old enough to remember the Bush era are frustrated, but not at all surprised to see how reductive and binary fandom discourse is, or that critical media analysis has diminished significantly and turned into fandom discourse instead (ie. that being a child during the "what you feel is more valid than facts" Bush administration has led to the second emerging generation of people who struggle to separate their personal feelings about a piece of media from the idea that fiction is social commentary, who struggle to understand nuance and are more concerned about judging others for their even slightly divergent political views than about what makes for effective activism, or that fandom has become a way for people to judge and condemn others).

You have no idea how terrifying it is to have watched No Child Left Behind unfold in your early 20s and have thought "this is going to lead to generations of kids who will be ripe for manipulation by propaganda" and to now watch how hard it is to get Gen Z and Alpha to understand the ways they're being manipulated by fascists. Believe me when I say the very real purpose of forcing education to focus on tests instead of knowledge was to create generations of people whose brains are trained at an early age to accept information unquestioningly. That's what I see when people reblog screenshots without sources and base their political opinions on tumblr funnymen.

I want to talk a bit about anarchism this week, because I got a lot of questions about this over the last few weeks, so, let me explain this a bit.

Because I meet often with the prejudice that anarchism is somehow violent and edgy. But technically speaking it is quite the opposite. Anarchism is most of all based in mutual aid, and community, not violence.

The most common misconception about anarchism is, that the core philosophy of anarchism is "no rules". But this is not the truth. The truth lies in the name of the philosophy of course. The word anarchism comes from Ancient Greek anarkhia. Which means "without a ruler". And this is the central part of anarchism: anarchists do not believe in rulers of any form, and also oppose all sorts of hierarchies.

As such, anarchists usually are for people directly getting a say in making decisions that would affect them. Usually not even by a majority vote, but by consensus. Meaning, that anarchists as a whole will discuss everything a whole lot.

They also oppose any system that puts some people above others. Anarchists oppose the patriarchy, because it puts men and masculinity over women and femininity. Anarchists oppose any form of white supremacy or any other form of racism, that supposes one ethnicity stands over the others. Same goes with things like ableism, queerphobia, and even things like childism.

The anarchist ideal is that all people should be free and equal.

This is also why anarchists tend to oppose nation states and the concept of borders, as given that the different nations have different standards of living, and the main reason is, that some nations have a lot higher standards in this regard is that at some point they exploited the other nations. Basically, if you are born in France, or Germany, or Sweden, your chances to have a good life is a whole lot bigger than if you are born in Congo, Afghanistan or Russia. And given that countries right now can just decide that people from other countries cannot move into their country - given them an unearned power over how good those people get to live - this is wrong as well.

And of course anarchists in general also oppose the police and the justice system, given that police, and judges once again are standing above people and hold power over them that they will often abuse.

Now, will anarchists use violence? Yes, absolutely. But only to defend themselves and others from persecution. Like most leftists ideologies anarchists will also mainly direct their violence against objects, rather than people. Unless those people are actively in that moment harming people.

In general the ideology underlying anarchism is: "People are at their core good, and if you allow them enough freedoms and enough resources for them live, they will be constructive members of society."

Basically, anarchism is the opposite to any form of authoritarianism. People who do not believe in anarchism say, that people at their core are violent and will harm others, which is why we need to control and punish them. That is the thought anarchism disagrees with at large. Though of course there are different schools of anarchism in regards to how to then build a society.

Because technically - and I will speak about this later - anarchism was the way humans have lived for most of human history. But of course this will have challenges if used on our modern system.

Today I want to talk about one Solarpunk-thingie, that kinda annoys me - and has to do with a lot with how real-life politians deal with talking about technology and especially energy technologies.

And this is the following fact:

We already have the technology! This is not some SciFi shit!

See, the issue within the politics tends to be, that a lot of folks go: "Oh, yeah, we would LOVE to go renewable. But right it is not possible! Once the technology gets there, we will totally go 100% renewable!"

And basically a lot of Solarpunks online are also waiting for the technology to get there. Again, there is sadly a big group of folks who technically love the aesthetics of Solarpunk and also generally the idea of a Solarpunk future, but do not engage with it over it. And they usually will also wait for technology to get there.

But it already is.

Let me talk about it.

We can produce enough renewable energy

In a way I get it. If you are not working in any fields related to this - and do not follow science news - you might just not know how fast the renewable energy field is moving right now. 10 years ago, yes, a lot of countries would have been able to go 100% renewable, but not all. It depended basically on the climate and environment. Partly because the photovoltaic (what most people call solar, but us engineers use solar for something a bit different) cells were just not as efficient in certain climates. And while the mix of wind and hydro power could do A LOT for many countries, it could not for all.

However, that was mainly before China really pulled all the stops for their research. No, it is not only China, but holy shit, China's research in terms of photovoltaic is insane. If you follow this, you basically will see a new breakthrough - often from China - every couple months. And by now, the efficiency of photovoltaic is insane. Sure, it might not make sense as the only source of energy in places were you basically do not get any sunlight for half the year, but outside of that? It is so darn good.

Other than that, we are really darn good with wind energy (which to my opinion is still the best way of producing energy) and hydro energy.

Don't get me wrong: We can totally improve those things further and further. But we can absolutely power the world on renewables right now. We do not need fossile fuels right now!

We can build climate-friendly transport!

I will remind y'all once more: Electric cars are definitely better than gas powered cars, for those people and situations in which cars are needed. (Read: For emergency services, certain forms of service work who need to transport stuff outside of the rail network, and probably also some people who live very isolated for certain reasons.) However, they are still cars and suck for this reason, if you do not REALLY need them.

Still, we are fucking good by now in building electric cars and for those scenarios where they are needed. Heck, by now in my city pretty much all public transport runs electric, including the busses. And no, they are not tram busses.

And yeah, turns out, we figured out how to build railways more than 200 years ago, and we figured out how to electricize them in 1881. Yes. 1881. 18 in the front. Almost 150 years ago. Sure, back then we were not that good with it, but we managed to build one for intracity transport that worked - and worked for long.

Yes, admittedly, there are some forms of transport that right now we might indeed need fossil fuels for. Right now, we have no method to fly planes and helicopters in a way that is both mass-producable and renewable. And the same is with transcontinental transport via the ocean.

Yeah, sure. We can technically just go fully low tech and just sail. That works. Heck, while it is about half as quick as modern ways to transport over the ocean, it is feasible. However, we just cannot move the amounts of cargo we might need to move with sailing. There are people figuring this out (partly through creating much better sails that work for MUCH BIGGER ships) but yeah, we are not there yet.

Still, a) a lot of the intercontinental stuff we technically do not need to transport (most of it is using cheap quasi-slave labor to save money), and b) that should not stop us from just doing sustainable on-land transport which we can do.

We also know how to build a better society

Now, a lot of the folks going for the Solarpunk aesthetics rather than philosophy are quite often very mistrustful of both anarchism and communism - or heck, just socialism. They often have drunken the capitalist cool-aid of capitalism being the "only system that works". But here is the thing: It doesn't.

Sure, there are versions of capitalism that would work a whole lot better than the Chicago-flavored one, but it will never really work - especially in regards to saving the environment. I talked about that a lot before.

But here is the thing. We know how it works better. We know how to build a better society. We know how to make economics work better. We know how to make better schools. We know how to build better cities. We know how to prevent at least a lot of wars. We know how to make society safer for kids. We know how to make healthier families. We know how to make medicine as a system work better. We know it all.

Heck, we have known how to make schools that are better in every way since the early 20th century - so more than a hundred years. This proposed school system since has been proofen time and time again in studies to be better for kids, and better in terms of education. But do we use them? No.

Again, politicians love to go: "We would love to change things, but we do not have a better system." But it is not true. We know how to do it better.

Same with the police and prison and stuff. We know how to do it better.

But right now, a) a lot of the stuff works in the favor of those who hold most power (aka the billionaires), b) a lot of people just do not like the idea of changing stuff majorly (which makes politicians who want change unpopular), and c) politicians also would need to fund the change - and that is going to be hard.

So, yeah. Change would be hard.

But it is not because we do not know how to do better.