One Thumb Up! (And a New Form of Anarchism)

Not my thumb!

Ah, the Universe sometimes has a sense of humour. After resolving last week to become an "Earth Mama" in 2013, I started the year off by spraining my right thumb on January 2 in a fall while skating backwards (or trying to skate backwards, to be more correct). 

I'm right-handed. Have you ever noticed how much we use our thumbs, especially the one on our dominant hand? Some say it's our thumbs that make us human! In palmistry, the thumb deals with a person's will. According to palm reader, Comte C. de Saint-Germain, "People with large thumbs [that's me!] are governed by their heads, and are more at ease in an atmosphere of ideas, rather than in one of sentiments. They judge things better by reflection than by acting on the spur of the moment." 

The good sir knows me well, as I am indeed a thinker, not a doer. So becoming an Earth Mama is (a) put on hold until my thumb has healed and I can pick things up again, and (b) really going to pull me (kicking and screaming) into my discomfort zone. But for now, at least, I get a reprieve!

So I took advantage of not being able to do too much and spent two and a half hours with our young climate activist friend this afternoon, sipping chai and discussing our shared feeling that a lot of people — including former activists — have turned their backs on the climate change struggle. In just the past week, I've had four friends basically tell me that they're "movin' on" to other endeavours (peace, planting seeds of love, "deliberately living and feeling with appreciation"). Those are all tangentially related, but if there's no food, there's no peace, no love, no sense of appreciation. We all need food. 

But we also talked about government and corporations and other political woes. (Did I mention I'm an ideas person?) And we think we coined a new phrase! Corporate anarchism. If anarchism is a belief in the abolition of all government, then corporate anarchism explains who, exactly, has done away with our governments, abolishing any wisp of leadership from our elected leaders.  So we're actually living in anarchy ("a state of disorder due to absence or nonrecognition of authority"), because corporations don't recognize any authority but their own.


p.s. I just looked it up ... turns out we didn't coin a new phrase. Others are already talking about corporate anarchism online. Darn!