Open letter to casey’s students

There are a few things I’ve been wanting to say, but I’ve been struggling to figure out how. We’ll call it my “commencement” speech to you. You, your goals, your hopes and dreams have been funneled into a “workforce development” program. There are plusses and minuses to this. On the one hand, you are gaining useful skills that can pay your bills and offer you a viable livelihood and career path—hooray for that! But be clear: in this system, you are meant first and foremost to become the future Workforce, a term championed most loudly by those who do not actually do the work they are conscripting you to do. Those who make money off of every hour you work, every product you produce, every job you complete.

And at the very top of that stack of humans making money off of other people’s labor are the ones who don’t work at all. Those who pay their bills from the wealth they inherited, whose money has been making money off of itself since the day they were born, and whose wealth continues to skyrocket even as more and more ordinary people struggle to just get by.

They NEED you. They need you to be demoralized and desperate so you will work without question or complaint, to do the things they do not know how to do, to continue to add to their exponentially-increasing wealth. One way they do this is to make you think that the world is divided into 2 teams, and that your precious life belongs on one or the other of those teams, squaring off against the enemy on the other side. Are you Red, or are you Blue? Team Ford, or Team Chevy?

This is to keep you from looking at them. To keep you from scrutinizing their every criminal move.

They have unwitting emissaries all over among us: folks who consider it safer and easier to do their bidding than to imagine and actively enact a world where everyone is adequately fed, housed, and clothed and the earth’s systems upon which we all depend are balanced and healthy. We can – and we must – resist this short-sighted, limited story.

The next time someone names an enemy for you to rail against, ask what they themselves have to gain from you orienting in that way. Ask it right now of me. For I have a lot to gain from naming our shared enemy. I have the opportunity to gain comrades in imagining and enacting a more just, nourishing, and delightful world than the one we’re currently living in.

If someone tells you that the systems we live under are so rigid and impossible to change, look at the dandelion busting up the concrete and expand your imagination accordingly.

If someone tells you that the only way to have a healthy landscape is to douse it in chemicals, look at the forest with its network of mycelium and remember that life is fecund and brilliant and perfectly capable.

If someone tells you that you’re too small to make a difference in the world, look at the roots of the trees that etch minerals one by one from rocks in order to make life possible for the rest of us. Look at the amaranth in the field who can make a hundred thousand of its nutritious seed babies in a single season, each of whom in turn can do the same.

As Janine Benyus says, “We are surrounded by geniuses.” They can be our guides if we apprentice ourselves to them. 

When “the” news seems so dire, remember: they are trying to keep us panicked and afraid and anxious. If we are scared, their fortunes can grow. If we are desperate, we will fight to defend their wealth. If we are isolated from each other, they can control us.  

But if we look at our neighbors as allies and our neighborhoods as ecosystems, all of a sudden, we’re growing a different world.

If you see a hole, fill it.

If you have a dream, chase it.

Don’t fucking settle. You’re not meant to be a cog in a machine that funnels wealth and control into the hands of a few obscenely rich individuals at the expense of all living creatures and the planet we share.

Think for yourself. Ask the hardest questions you can think to ask. Let them guide you forward. Don’t grow stagnant. When someone tells you the community and ecosystem your heart desires isn’t possible, find those around you with imaginations active enough to share your vision, and come together to make it happen.

And remember—you don’t have to do it all. Each member of an ecosystem plays a special and important role. Figure out what you’re good at, combine it with what your body and heart love most, and do it.

I’m right here with you.