It’s sexy. It’s urgent. It’s explosive. It’s coming. Get your mind out of the gutter. It’s not your premature boyfriend, it’s Power Shift ’09.
What is Power Shift you ask? It’s over ten thousand highly sensualized students converging on Washington. It’s a vision of putting America to work again by combining climate change and economic renewal and building the systems that can sustain a livable future. It’s the fierce urgency of now.
We roll at 1:00 p.m. on Friday, February 27, and come home for supper on Monday, March 2. Saturday and Sunday we kick it with rock stars, corrupt politicians, motivational speakers, mad scientists, over-sexed professors, under-sexed preachers and bizarrely-sexed activists. On Monday we gather outside our Capitol Building and sway ominously.
Last year 12 Wes kids went down on Power Shift. This year we want to send 54 people down on Power Shift.
You’ve seen “An Inconvenient Truth,” you’ve read the stats. They are positively disturbing. It’s a lot easier for me to think about Bharatanatyam and getting laid than 2050. It’s easier to read Sophocles and Plato than UN climate reports. But behind the abstract intellectualism and glitzy social life I’ve immersed myself in, there is that deeper itch that calls to be scratched. The little voice that nags at me on warm February days, it pipes up awkwardly when I read snippets in the Times about unprecedented wildfires and droughts in Australia or California, it occasionally asserts itself dominantly in surreal yet oh-so-real apocalyptic dreams, it gets appeased by big words from Barack yet waits expectantly for real action. Stuck in the back of my head, it’s that graph of CO2 versus time, lurching ever higher into uncharted territory. That feeling that every day the world gets a little crazier, more people with more power and it’s gonna be in our lifetimes that we either work out some big issues or get smacked by a callous universe.
The universe deals in action and reaction. Consequences. Crappy seeds yield crappy fruits. Failed crops cause famine. I look up and for a moment the world seems real, unimaginably real. The voice in my head nags on because ultimately this reality forces us to pick sides. With every action we cower from or embrace responsibility as we create consequences.
Power Shift ’09 is about taking these consequences seriously, consciously picking sides and believing in both our collective and individual agency.
Check it out and find out how you can get involved or hit me with questions (mbukiet@wes).
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