Chapter 9
“Hi, everyone.” Luke let out a yawn as he joined the others having coffee on the open deck. Walking over to Jo, he gave her a kiss before falling back into the hammock strung out next to her.
“Luke didn’t sleep too well,” Jo said to the others as she got up to order coffee for her and Luke from the young woman working the kitchen in the back. “We had a run–in with a tarantula last night. And it’s still in there. Or at least I think it is.”
Luke shot her a tired glare, and she grinned back at him.
“What are you guys doing here?” Luke asked no one in particular in the group of half a dozen men and women, all who looked to be in their mid–sixties.
“We’re taking a short break from our research,” a fit older lady said with a British accent. “We’re looking at the environmental impact of putting the canal through Nicaragua.”
“What canal?” Luke asked.
“Ortega is teaming up with a Chinese entrepreneur to build another shipping passage across Central America. You know, like the Panama Canal. They want to go through Lake Nicaragua because it’ll save them having to build a lot of the canal—” she started.
“But it’ll be a damned environmental disaster!” a large man with a tanned, shaved head and gray handlebar mustache said. “This isn’t just a canal going through the country. It includes a ten–kilometer buffer zone of land on each side of it that will also be wiped out. We’re talking about a maritime impact affecting the sea life at both ends of the canal, including turtles, whales, and dolphins, and in between it’s going to destroy wetlands and rainforests, some of them that are already protected. And it’ll affect dozens, maybe hundreds, of species of birds and mammals and reptiles, including many of them that are endangered. Not to mention all of the communities, indigenous and otherwise, that’ll be displaced.” The man’s face had reddened, and his nostrils were flaring as he looked around at everyone else.
“And on top of that,” the lady with the British accent said, “it’s going to pollute probably the largest source of freshwater in Central America. It’s hard to justify what they’re doing. So we’re here kind of undercover, trying to document as much as we can before they start building this monstrosity.”
“Ortega is selling it as an economic boom for the country,” a slim man wearing a white Panama hat explained. “So he’s getting a lot of support. Promising prosperity for the people and saying he’ll use the money to protect the environment and all that crap.”
“Right!” the big guy with the mustache said. “We’ve heard that before.”
“But it won’t be Nicas building the canal,” the man with the hat went on. “They don’t have the education or the skills or the equipment. The Chinese will bring in everything, and about the only jobs the Nicas will get will be those at the bottom of the pile. Grunt labor and not much else.”
“But it’s also going to really mess with the Nicaraguan culture,” another lady said, crossing her arms over her chest, her mouth twisted into a sour expression. “If they build this thing, it’s going to cut the country in half! It’s already hard as hell to get around Nicaragua because the transportation system is so bad. Now this canal is going to be a huge barrier to the local people who want to cross it. And a lot of them won’t be able to. So it’s going to break apart friends and families and communities. Within a generation of being built, there’ll be two Nicaraguas—one north of the canal and one south of it. And they’ll each start to develop their own culture and dialect and politics. But that won’t affect Ortega’s cut, so what the fuck does he care?”
“But even though a lot of people across the country support Ortega on this,” the lady with the British accent said, “the ones being affected by it the most, the poor who are going to lose their lands and be forced out, are really pissed. A lot of them fought for Daniel against the Sandinistas, and now they feel betrayed. So the violence Ortega used to get to power is now going to cycle around to haunt him. And he’ll be as brutal putting it down as any other dictator on the planet. Anyway, we’re going kayaking to give our minds a break. You’re welcome to join us.”
After Luke and Jo declined the offer and the others left, Luke reflected on what he had just heard. He knew the Nicas opposing the canal needed to develop a nonviolent strategy to gain greater support for their cause across more sectors of the population, but the myth of violence was still too entrenched in the country. They didn’t know any other way, and too few people understood that transformation is defined by the methods used to bring it about. The revolutionary cycle was still in place, and again, people were going to start disappearing, at least if they took up arms to oppose Ortega. And yet another time, Luke wondered if he wasn’t as naïve as so many people thought him to be.
***
After breakfast, Luke and Jo decided to take the day to heal. She had switched over to the ten–day meds for the parasites and no longer felt the need to terrorize everyone around her. But she was still feeling tired, and probably would be until she left the country in a few days. Luke still needed a day to recover from the dental work. Swinging in the hammock chairs on the small porch of their cabana, they could see the mountains of Costa Rica far in the distance.
“So how would we do this?” Jo asked, sipping her coffee. “I mean, I understand the part that some people from around the world are reaching levels of development where their values are starting to come together, where the divisions between us fade, and our commonalities become clearer. And if we can identify those values, we could use them to create some kind of document for guiding our actions in the world, something that states how we want our governments and corporations to conduct their affairs. But how do we actually accomplish this? That’s where I’m getting stuck.”
“I don’t know,” Luke said. “Somehow we need to create a platform in cyberspace. A site where our world’s highest thinkers can come together and put their ideas out there for the rest of us. We need a way to compare them and determine the most fair and reasonable and sustainable ways to structure the planet. If we do it right, anything that privileges one group of people over another should be obvious.” Luke felt that when people debated ideas like this in writing, it was a lot harder to cover things up or deceive people with eloquent speech. Inconsistencies, false premises, and attempts to shift people’s attention could be seen and countered more easily.
“So you need some techies. That shouldn’t be too hard.”
“I guess,” Luke said. “All of that stuff is beyond me. But the entire process of bringing forth these higher values, discussing them and adopting them, has to be transparent. People have to be able to trust that they’re not being manipulated. So we’ll also need independent watchdogs scrutinizing everything involved. That’ll probably be the easiest part of the whole venture, given the number of skeptics and naysayers in the world.”
“So we need a way to filter through people’s ideas,” Jo said. “And then we build the mandate you’re talking about. Right?”
“Right,” Luke said. “And maybe that’s where the beach club slash think tank comes in. But remember, this isn’t about dictating specifics.” That would be going too far, Luke thought. “We just want to shift the structure of power on the planet from a few people telling seven billion how to live, to us telling our leaders how we expect them to conduct our business. But they still need to have enough leeway to run our governments and corporations.” Luke felt the excitement welling up inside of him. He might not know exactly what he was trying to say, but he was on to something—an idea big enough and powerful enough and far reaching enough that it could change the world. And he knew he didn’t have to do it alone or even lead the process. He just had to get the idea far enough along that others could see it and take over.
“Run me through this, how you think it’ll work,” Jo said, feeling his excitement warming her body. He really believed in what he was doing. If anyone else had said stuff like this, she would have discounted him as a fucking nutcase, or worse. But Luke was starting to make sense, and his passion was contagious. Jo found that sexy as hell.
“Once we create the people’s mandate,” Luke said, “we put it up on the web in the major languages of the world. While most of us couldn’t come up with these higher–order ideas on our own, we can understand them. We can follow them. Just like the people who joined Gandhi’s campaign against the British weren’t at his level of spiritual development, but they were able to learn and follow his teachings.”
“And then somehow we enforce this with nonviolent conflict, right?” Jo asked.
“Yes. Along with creating the people’s mandate, we also have to teach humanity how to enforce it. They need to know what nonviolent conflict is and how it works. Then we develop our master strategy for using international, decentralized, local–based nonviolent action to enforce the people’s will.”
“How do you think governments are going to respond to this?” Jo asked.
“They’ll say we don’t have the right to assume ultimate sovereignty over the planet,” Luke said, “and they’ll try to stop us any way they can. That’s one reason why this has to be a global, voluntary, transparent, and decentralized movement. If we had central leaders, they could kill those people and shut down the process. But if we can get this people’s mandate out there in cyberspace where everyone is working off the same documents, then local leaders can rise up around the world as they’re needed, yet still be coordinated with everyone else across the globe.”
“Okay,” Jo said. “Say a big international corporation violates the people’s mandate in India by building a pesticide plant that pollutes the local river and hurts the people living there. How would all of this act out?”
“The premise is that multinational corporations are set up to continue operating around the world regardless of what happens in any particular region,” Luke said. “So while the people living in the area can try to sanction that particular plant, they can’t do anything about shutting it down elsewhere in the world. But if humanity takes the attitude that to hurt one of us is to hurt all of us, we can come together and beat them.”
“Go on,” Jo said.
“In other words, the first responsibility rests with the people in the local area,” Luke said. “They’re the ones on–site. It’s their job to sound the alarm, so the world knows what’s happening. And if their local efforts don’t succeed, then they ask for help from the rest of us. That’s when local campaigns in other countries where the corporation has facilities come into action, and the process keeps expanding until we shut down the corporation or they change the way they operate so it’s in accordance with the people’s mandate.”
“What about with a government?” Jo asked.
“We have a lot of case studies using nonviolent conflict against an oppressive government,” Luke said, “and a lot of activists around the world with experience doing so. But using it against an empire spanning the globe is going to take a different approach.”
“So let’s take an example. Say the United States targets another country for regime change, like the war on Iraq we all protested against. How could we stop it this time?”
“Most people would say that the responsibility for stopping the war rests with us, the citizens of the United States,” Luke said. “But we can’t do that anymore. Our government gets more of the support it needs to operate from the other countries in its empire than it does from us, the people. That means we would have to have help from the rest of the world. But their job wouldn’t be to protest our government’s actions like they did before; it would be to force their governments to withdraw their support for the United States’ plans to go to war.”
“I’m not following you,” Jo said.
“I mean the Spaniards would start a campaign to shut down their country until their government said no to war, and the French would do the same, and on and on until enough countries pulled their support for the war that our government couldn’t continue with its plans. We do this without asking for permission, and there can be no negotiation or compromise on the end result expected.”
“Isn’t that kind of extreme?”
“It would be if we were talking about a minority group trying to force its will on the majority of the world,” Luke said. “But that’s not the case; it’s just the opposite. This is about humanity protecting itself from a small group of people acting in their own self–interest at the expense of everyone else. This is about stopping criminal and psychotic behavior. We have no more obligation to compromise with these forces than we do with a psychopathic serial killer.”
“But a lot of the people still believe our government when it says we need to go to war,” Jo said. “Isn’t that grouping them all together?”
“Not really. Just because people are willing to trust their government, it doesn’t mean they’re psychotic like their leaders. They’re just misled.” Luke believed most people want to do the best they can, for others and themselves. “We also have a population that’s basing its decisions on information that isn’t correct. They’re being manipulated to support power and to maintain the status quo.” And he hoped that if people knew the truth, they would choose differently.
“But shutting down an economy means no one goes to work,” Jo said. “We don’t make money or have baseball games or whatever.” She was trying to wrap her mind around the consequences of a world using nonviolent conflict to control its leaders. “And what about essential services? Won’t people die if we disrupt the system too much? No matter what you call it, the result is also violent.”
“You’re right. There are consequences to using some of these tactics. But there’s a big difference between trying to hurt someone and someone being hurt as a consequence of using nonviolent methods.” Somehow humanity has to control the people running our world, Luke thought, or they are going to destroy us all—or make us wish they had. “I know these ideas sound crazy, even scary. But what else can we do?” Luke looked at Jo, trying to will her to understand. “We have a responsibility to ourselves and our future generations to create as free, fair, and just global society as we can. And we can’t just ask our leaders to change and expect them to do so; they think it’s their right to rule. And we can’t beat them with violence—that’s their game. Hell, we don’t want that kind of world anyway. So our only other option is nonviolent conflict. It’s both a way to fight without destroying our planet and a way to transform our world system.”
“A lot of people will think you’re a kook,” Jo said, getting up from her hammock and standing behind Luke to rub his shoulders. “And I might be one of them at times. But you have passion and vision, and you’re brilliant and full of love for the world, so as long as that’s happening, I’m there. Now let’s go inside and see if I can take your mind off the world’s problems for a bit.”
***
Buy, The Boétie Legacy, and a World in Peril, HERE.
“This one’s all for you,” Jo said with a smile as she began to unbutton Luke’s pants. “If you believe that.”
Luke pulled his shirt over his head and let it fall to the floor, and Jo pushed his pants down to his knees. Standing in front of him, she stared into his eyes and began cupping and massaging his balls with one hand while milking his cock with the other. Squeezing his shaft between her thumb and index finger, she pulled on him in long, hard strokes, feeling his body stiffen and hearing his breathing turn to short, quick gasps. Jo had learned from Luke not to be too gentle with a cock and that working one well took strength and perseverance.
Their faces only an inch apart, Luke’s legs began to shake as Jo leaned in and started to run her tongue over his lips, her eyes never leaving his. Within moments, she felt his balls start to tighten as his eyes lost focus and a low moan started deep in his throat. Working his cock until she sensed it was almost time, she dropped to her knees and dug her fingernails into the back of his sack, pulling down on his balls as she rammed his cock deep into her throat, her nose pressing hard against his firm belly. Grabbing Luke’s ass with her left hand, she pulled him into her and held tight, letting the spasms in the back of her throat work his head until he erupted in a long, loud groan, his hands holding the sides of her head as his knees buckled and he filled her throat with cum. Not letting him loose, Jo kept sucking as his body shook out of control, finishing him off as he fell back onto the bed gasping for breath.
End Chapter 9.
Bob
Buy, The Boétie Legacy, and a World in Peril, HERE.