In New York, patriots are decrying a cultural center and mosque, slated to rise a few blocks from Ground Zero, as “a citadel of Islamic supremacy.” Sarah Palin is tweeting appeals to “peaceful New Yorkers” and “peace-loving Muslims” to “refudiate” the project “in [the] interest of healing.” Newt Gingrich is denouncing this “Islamist cultural-political offensive designed to undermine and destroy our civilization.”

At the Capitol, Republican Senators Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina are gunning to repeal the portion of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment that grants citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil. Birthright citizenship, adopted after the Civil War to enfranchise African slaves, distinguishes America from other democracies as a nation that recognizes it is built by immigrants.

In the White House, even as the Obama administration sues Arizona to overturn its law authorizing local police to demand identification of anyone who appears to be Mexican — er, undocumented — the president reaffirms his toughness on wetbacks and towelheads by spearheading a $600 million border-security buildup.

And here in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, we are being asked to help defend the besieged homeland. According to the Hardwick Gazette, a federal border-patrol agent paid a call to the Craftsbury select board to inform them the feds will be setting up mobile checkpoints on Route 14.

“It’s every American’s job to be alert as far as homeland security,” Newport officer Fernando Beltran declared. He clarified that the problem isn’t Canadians sneaking over the border but, in the reporter’s words, “aliens using Canada as a conduit.”

Ah, aliens. Local resident Dan Pittenger decoded this comment in his letter to the next week’s Gazette: For the 96.4 percent of other Vermonters “with pale skin,” he wrote, the checkpoint stops will be easy.

More’s the woe, then, for the Mexican farmhands whose toil is helping keep Vermont’s sinking dairy industry afloat. On the other side of the state, where most of the roughly 1500 undocumented laborers are employed, activists have moved a few town police departments to adopt don’t-ask-don’t-tell policies regarding immigration status — unless the person is suspected of a crime.

But cops elsewhere feel free to suspect people who look foreign and ask them for their papers. Hardwick’s practices fall somewhere in between. “We have a non-racial-profiling policy here,” police Chief Joe LaPorte told me. “Obviously, if people are committing a violation … and there is a question [of their immigration status] that may come up, we’d have to report that to the authorities. But if someone is just walking in the store, we’re not going to target people based on their appearance.”

State police decline to raid farms that might be harboring aliens (a crime carrying a 10-year sentence), and the agency has new antibias policies addressing racial profiling. But those regs fail to mention — much less prohibit — immigration interrogations. That’s because the state police sometimes back up federal agents.

These inconsistent practices and cozy relationships between state and federal enforcers send a clear message to the Mexican farmworker: Keep your brown ass out of public places.

Meanwhile, Officer Beltran assured the good people of Craftsbury that the feds trawling their back roads will create little inconvenience. “I don’t think it will affect a lot of people,” he said.

And therein lies the problem. For if the campesino’s invisibility protects his employer as well as himself, it also protects Vermonters from themselves — and the world.

Vermonters love localism. At the same time, in a state where “diversity” can be bought for the price of a samosa at the farmers market, they also like to think of themselves as socially tolerant. But as the nation grows feverish with nativism, this self-contained self-regard, no matter how innocent, will be strained. And as the local goes global, this tolerance will be tested.

Consider the following.

Scene 1: a wine-and-cheese party at a splendid hillside summer house in Greensboro, where Sterling College is cultivating friends for its experiential, “place-based,” environmentally centered education. The writer and college trustee John Elder gives a charming talk in which he comments that the tripartite frame inside which academics understand the world — race, class and gender — can be much enriched by a fourth category, place. He praises the idea of working within one’s biosphere. Will Wootton, Sterling’s president, continues on the theme of place, touting the students’ commitment and contributions to the college’s own community. Asked what experiential education taught him, an alumnus says he learned, among other things, “interpersonal relationships.”

While everyone smiles, it occurs to me that the community to which the 100 nearly all white, middle-class students are donating their talents, and with whom they are honing their interpersonal skills, is the equally white, increasingly wealthy, well-educated village of Craftsbury Common, in a biosphere of almost Edenic perfection: the high Black River Valley, lush in summer, snowy in winter, brilliant in autumn. And then I am reminded of the first time I heard a speaker — Kirkpatrick Sale, more than 20 years ago — promote the biosphere as the optimal sociopolitical entity. A woman shouted from the audience: “In my biosphere, they wouldn’t let me have an abortion.”

In other words, the fervent commitment to place, especially if that place is homogenous and happily situated, can insulate you from the struggles of race, class or gender, or the lack thereof.

Scene 2: the Hardwick Town House, where a good-sized crowd has gathered to watch “Silenced Voices,” a documentary by the Vermont Migrant Farmworker Solidarity Project, and “Neighbors,” East Hardwick’s Meredith Holch’s animation about her own relationship with the Mexican workers at a nearby farm. Questions from the audience follow. They reveal two things: concerned curiosity, and a general ignorance of an issue that could turn the next two national elections.

In other words, in a place like Hardwick, lately branded as Locavore City, USA, you might be lulled into thinking there is such a thing in the 21st century as a local agricultural economy and a purely local politics, and that all you have to do to better the world is join the town rec committee and eat your neighbor’s organic tomatoes instead of the ones shipped from Israel in Styrofoam.

You might get so pleased with yourself for acting locally that you forget to act — or even think — globally.

In a later conversation, Wootton distinguished between localism and place-based learning. The former, he said, “is about politics and attitude” and is sometimes ignorant — the idea, for instance, that Vermont could be self-sufficient. “We don’t make stainless steel,” he pointed out. “So, how are we going to cook all this good food?” The latter is an educational strategy: Students “stand in the stream” of local experience to learn universally applicable ways of thinking: “A college is a specialized universe whose job is not to be of a community but to take young minds and keep them for a while and push them back out,” Wootton said.

He defends Sterling’s focus on environment and agriculture while letting social politics “come up” in class or independent studies; a small college’s curriculum can stretch only so far “before it gets so skinny it disappears.” But does he connect this focus with his frustration in diversifying Sterling’s student body and faculty? I mean, an Indian American scholar studying the global inequities created by the genetic engineering of rice might not notice the difference between localism and an educational fealty to this little “place.”

Sooner or later, the global comes tiptoeing into your biosphere with foreign sand on its shoes. And on its tail follows a patrol car, blaring anxiety into your peaceful community. Nation-states will fight over the fate of “illegal aliens”; sometimes policy will be liberal, somtimes restrictive. But as long as capital keeps zipping wealth through cyberspace from stock market to stock market, laboring bodies will cross national borders to create that wealth.

Contrary to Officer Beltran’s promise, “it” will affect a lot of people, indeed, all people.

Our first responsibility is to know this. Then, to act on it.

How? Invite your local farmworkers to church. Persuade the town police to adopt consistent, immigration-status-neutral practices. Stage a demonstration when the feds park on the road. Push state and federal immigration reform in the opposite direction of Arizona’s.

And come out of your place. For those who choose to act only locally may be doing nothing more than tending their own gardens.

“The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep,” he declared. “But, America, I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there.”

Personal temperament alone cannot account for Obama’s combination of impatient ambition and imperturbable calm, self-confidence and humility. Rather, these qualities signal an understanding of himself as part of something bigger than the personal. He arrived in this place, he acknowledged in his speech on race, in the river of history, carried by a social movement of “Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part — through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk — to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.”

“Yes we can”: The operative word is we.

This comes as a huge relief after eight years of a regime that refused the lessons of history because it believed itself directed by supernatural forces and transhistorical values — our “good” against their “evil.” This delusion was embodied in the doctrine of the “unitary executive.” It emerged from the president’s mouth in an almost daily utterance: “I am confident.”

The operative word was I.

The Obama election — and, in no small part, the economic crisis — takes a wrecking ball to the Ownership Society, which defined patriotism as personal consumption and citizenship as commitment to one’s own home and family. The fresh air that rushes in now is the conviction that personal responsibility is not antithetical to collective obligation — realized ultimately in government — and that personal reward comes not from getting mine but from creating ours.

The decisive triumph of unity over isolation and bigotry rendered even more dispiriting the passage of anti-gay-marriage propositions in California, Florida and Arizona, along with a measure in Arkansas, clearly aimed at gays and lesbians, prohibiting unmarried couples from adopting children or serving as foster parents.

The victory of these homophobic measures was bad enough, but almost equally dismaying was the reaction from the media and many white same-sex marriage proponents: Blame African Americans. “Proposition 8 Exit Poll: Whites oppose, blacks support, Latinos divided, the Los Angeles Times posted on November 4, before all the data were in. Because African Americans had come out in huge numbers to vote for the Democratic candidate, the press immediately christened it the Obama Effect.

Resentment bloodied the gay blogosphere. “I’m not sure what to do with this,” wrote the sex columnist Dan Savage in a typical post. “I’m thrilled that we’ve just elected our first African-American president. I wept last night. I wept reading the papers this morning. But I can’t help but feeling hurt that the love and support aren’t mutual.

“I do know this, though: I’m done pretending that the handful of racist gay white men out there — and they’re out there, and I think they’re scum — are a bigger problem for African Americans, gay and straight, than the huge numbers of homophobic African Americans are for gay Americans, whatever their color.”

A handful? Huge numbers? As the African-American lesbian blogger Lainad put it, “Oh, please.”

The initial reports turned out to be wrong. In the end, polls showed the only race-sex group that did not support Prop. 8 was white women, who came out against it 53 to 47. Indeed, nearly 70 percent of African-Americans voted yes, across income, education, age and sex. African American churchgoers — who voted, like other regular churchgoers, overwhelmingly in favor — were encouraged by their pastors, who in turn were lobbied by the proposition’s promoters, largely white groups not generally known for their alliances with people of color.

The proponents also lied. A slick flier produced by Yes on 8 and mailed to thousands of African-American households the weekend before election day featured a photograph of Obama, wedding band on prominent display, with Michelle laughing in the background. The large-type quote read: “I’m not in favor of gay marriage.”

In fact, both Obama and Biden oppose gay marriage and have said so plainly. But both have also stated their support for extending civil rights of partnership to all, and both explicitly opposed Prop. 8. They reiterated that opposition after the propaganda went out.

I’m not going to excuse anyone who cast a ballot for homophobia, no matter what the reason. And, while I’m at it, I’m not going to excuse Obama for his socially conservative positions and decisions, including sharing a stage with mega-evangelist Rick Warren, a star on the Christian gay-conversion circuit.

Still, blacks made up just 6 percent of California voters. Even 70 percent of 6 percent is not enough to pass anything. Why is Prop. 8 their fault?

As DailyKos opined, fingerpointing will get us nowhere.

What will?

The answer is not the cloakroom deal making suggested by Dan Savage: I supported “your” guy, so you should get behind “my” issue.

The answer is solidarity.

In his speech on race, Obama asked his black sisters and brothers to “[bind] our particular grievances . . . to the larger aspirations of all Americans: the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man who’s been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family.” On election night, the president-elect broadened that circle of solidarity, calling in “young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled.” It may be the first time a president has pronounced the word gay, with respect and fellowship, in public.

If it was rare to hear such a rainbow-coalition recitation from Obama — whose own story belies the simplicity of any one of those labels — it is not because he is the first “post-identity-politics” candidate or “post-racial” black politician, as many pundits have dubbed him. (Apparently only politicians of color have to be either “racial” or not.) Read his books and you will discover a man struggling to embrace the African-American heritage that was, until his adulthood, mainly a matter of genes.

Rather, as Beck Young, a Barnard women’s studies professor, pointed out, Obama simply does not see race or racism primarily as a personal matter — and that is the only way the pundits, especially the white Republican ones, can see it. Obama is interested in institutionalized inequality. And, though he constantly talked about the middle class, the poor recognized in his rhetoric something no one dared name, except as a smear: class struggle. This does not make Obama pre-, post- or extra-identity politics. It makes his campaign, like Martin Luther King’s, a movement for more than civil rights: a movement for justice.

Ironically, the campaign that ran away from race and only surreptitiously allied itself with the left has moved the left’s antiracist politics from the margins to the mainstream. I suspect President Obama will have more trouble dealing with the left part than the antiracist part.

But the mainstream was already moving. Young and first-time voters cast their ballots for Obama two to one. In California, they opposed Proposition 8 by the same margin. Minorities who had voted Republican voted Democratic in significant numbers, and minorities will soon constitute a majority of the electorate. As the main protagonist of American politics, Joe the Plumber, RIP.

If some racial minorities do not yet recognize sexual minorities as legitimate members of the polity, then there is much work to be done. “This victory alone is not the change we seek. It is only the chance for us to make that change,” declared the president-elect. He exhorted Americans to “summon a new spirit of patriotism, of responsibility, where each of us resolves to . . . look after not only ourselves but each other.”

Call it patriotism. Call it solidarity. It is discombobulating to contemplate the two entwined. Still, like Michelle Obama, this is the first time in my adult life I have felt proud of my country. And when I look at the beautiful face of the first Kansan-Kenyan president, that pride moves me to relinquish blame and resolve anew to look after my fellow Americans — even those who are not yet ready to look after me and mine.

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.

At Passover, celebrants read the Haggadah, which tells the story of the Jews’ slavery under the Egyptian Pharaoh and their Exodus out of his land. They’re in such a hurry that they don’t even let the bread rise — hence, matzoh. The cliffhanger comes when they’re standing with their toes in the Red Sea, Pharoah’s army is galloping behind them, everybody is kvetching to Moses — “What, there weren’t enough graves in Egypt that you had to shlep us all the way out here to die?” — and, just in time, God parts the waves to let the Chosen People pass, then closes the sea over the pursuing bad guys. Very Indiana Jones.

After this harrowing escape, the Jews meander to Mount Sinai to pick up the Ten Commandments. Then they spend 40 years wandering around the desert, eating manna and trying to figure out how to get to the Promised Land.

Forty years have passed since 1968, that breathless year when it felt as if the waves had parted and we’d arrived on the other shore. Our seder group has been celebrating Passover almost that long — 30 years, give or take a few. Every year we’ve asked the traditional questions: What does this old story have to do with us? What is slavery? What is liberation? How can we end slavery and spread liberation around?

This year we agreed that present-day slavery could be read in the photograph on the front page of The New York Times of a Haitian child in a dirty pink dress standing atop a garbage heap, searching for food. The accompanying article reported that rising fuel and food prices are depriving the world’s poor of even the staples — wheat, rice and corn.

Meanwhile, the Pharoahs are fat and happy. According to other Times articles in the same week, hedge fund traders are cashing in on the mortgage crisis (George Soros ended last year $3 billion richer), and the still exceedingly wealthy are building chateaux and flying their friends around in private jets for weekends of revelry.

The Promised Land appears farther away than ever. At our seder table, we admitted to feeling enraged — and also depressed, overwhelmed, even paralyzed.

I’ve been thinking a lot about why progressive activism feels so hard these days. If your aim is to change the big stuff — in this case, the inequities of global capitalism — you may feel that you’re doing nothing to better people’s lives right now. You want to improve that Haitian child’s lot — so you send money to some relief fund. Then you wonder if the only life you’re improving is your own. You’ve momentarily assuaged your guilt, but gotten no closer to changing the big stuff.

If we frame it another way, however, there may be a way out of the conundrum.

Many younger activists — Gen Xers and Millennials — avoid this stuck feeling by not sweating the big stuff. As one Gen-Xer told Time magazine, “We don’t want to change things. We want to fix things.”

So, if Boomer red-greens — socialist environmentalists — believe they have to overthrow capitalism to end global warming, because global warming is a result of capitalism’s intrinsic need to grow, many younger greens believe that capitalism, and the creativity it fosters, will solve global warming.

The young build windmills — and scoff at their elders for chasing windmills. At a discussion of cross-generational organizing I recently participated in, Kim Fellner, a Boomer and lifelong community and union organizer, quoted a Gen-Xer who dismissed the century-long struggle for socialism: The Soviet Union is dead, he told Kim. “Why waste your time” trying to overthrow the one economic system that’s got any resiliency?

To which the writer Alix Kates Shulman responded that maybe the fault lines aren’t formed so much by age as by an embrace — or a rejection — of utopianism (whose name, for the ’60s generation, was socialism).

Rinku Sen, 40, executive director of the racial justice think tank Applied Research Center, concurred. She’s not a socialist, she said. ARC doesn’t even call itself “leftist” — not because it isn’t, but “because it doesn’t mean anything to our people.” Unwilling to wait around for — or believe in — the Revolution, Rin is especially interested in “public-private” collaborations and in projects where people can “take our demands directly to the corporations.” Both, she feels, can make a social and economic difference now.

Rinku told us about an organization of immigrants that is eliminating the profiteers in the massive capital transfers between immigrants working in wealthy countries and their families back home. The new scheme has immigrants holding on to the remittances that ordinarily go to companies like Western Union and pooling them. The “Million Dollar Club” — on average, 350 immigrants — decides how to invest the money. Their funds will be managed by “socially responsible” businesspeople.

Another private-public hybrid is the community benefits agreement (CBA), a contract between grassroots organizations, often composed of poor people of color, and developers coming into their neighborhoods. The locals try to get guarantees of jobs, affordable housing and public transportation or other environmentally rational infrastructures from the developers. The developers, who need community board clearances and permits, use the CBA to show they have local support. The only government involvement might be the contracts law that governs the agreements. Indeed, some are only unenforceable side letters of intention.

The efforts of young fixers are often accompanied by the rhetoric that people can be trusted more than the government. The remittances project is a direct redistribution of wealth, bypassing the state. The CBA is supposedly a redistribution of power, again sans state intervention. What they actually demonstrate, however, is confidence in free enterprise, if not in the big corporation, then in small businesses such as the guy running the remittances fund — or those it will invest in. A question immediately arises: What about democracy? Who makes the decisions — voters or CEOs? Who enforces them? At our discussion, Rinku was quick to say she and ARC aren’t anti-government — they’re for regulation and state-sponsored redistribution of wealth through progressive taxation.

But can power be gotten with fixes, and without the consolidating mechanisms of government? If those fixes depend on the largesse of private business, I’m skeptical. It’s got to be a heady feeling for the local community organizer to sit across the table, negotiating a deal with a billion-dollar developer. But what happens when the developer backs out of the CBA?

That’s what is happening with Atlantic Yards, a $4 billion, 22-acre complex in Brooklyn, including a basketball stadium, a Frank Gehry office tower complex, and luxury housing. After initial united opposition from the neighborhoods, some dubiously representative community groups peeled off and signed a CBA with the developer, who promised that 50 percent of the housing would be “affordable” (at prices unaffordable to people with the borough’s median incomes). Now the recession is scaling back the project; housing is postponed until further notice. Local officials are on their knees asking for a moratorium on demolishing houses that won’t be replaced with new apartments.

The City of Burlington is in a similar situation with the developer of the new Courtyard Marriott on Battery Street. The company has reneged on part of the original plan, to build 13 affordable housing units. By law, the Westlake Development Project must contribute money to the city’s Housing Trust Fund to compensate for the housing it’s not building. By law, builders of new projects must include either affordable or “inclusionary” housing or pay into the fund, and the city has recently increased the mandatory per-unit contribution. That’s the way to go: Get a law. Still, across the country, community and social-justice groups are finding that it is up to them to hold developers accountable, even when statute requires corporate responsibility.

Frustration with utopian visions — and with the state — almost always ends in smaller local fixes. “Take our demands directly to the corporation” was the cry of the anti-globalization movement 10 years ago. Desiring to pass over the nation-state, which they viewed as a weak, docile servant of capital, anti-globalizers proposed in its place a vaguely organized grassroots control and redistribution of the resources.

When that idea turned out to be too big and idealistic to manage, much anti-globalization energy found its way to the creation and defense of local economies: small businesses making artisanal cheese and neighbors eating it. Now, I’m a big fan of the local bleu cheese being made in my Northeast Kingdom neighborhood. But meanwhile, global industrial agriculture is running the show. And, in part because of it, the Haitian child is starving.

I could go on. But I’m not here to dis fixes — because, heaven knows, we need plenty of them. Equally important, when they work, they not only solve an immediate problem but also supply the emotional element without which any organizing effort founders: optimism, the by-product of tangible results. They’re just not enough.

Fixers also need a vision of where they’re going. It might not be the same one as their parents’ — but they need one. Because without a vision, you never know whether your fixes are moving you forward or backward. If your vision is a world with minimal growth, the CBA that enables the mega-development, even if it’s tossing a few jobs or homes off the top of the tower, is counterproductive. Tangible results, moreover, should not be mistaken for power; they just mean you solved a problem for your adversary. As soon as you become the problem, you’re expendable — selling hotdogs at the stadium or working as a chambermaid at the Marriott, and living an hour away.

In the end, fixers and changers need not be in conflict. They may simply have different temperaments, and these may be generational. All that self-esteem building at school and positive reinforcement at home may have made the children of the Boomers more content. They don’t hate authority as much as their elders do. Unlike their parents, they don’t want to kill their parents. At the same time, they are members of a numerically smaller generation facing much larger problems. So they’re both confident in their abilities to accomplish something and humbler about what they can accomplish. As for capitalism, they don’t want to burn down the house they were born in; they’d like to renovate it — with recycled materials and flea market furniture, and good taste, of course.

But there’s one thing everyone can learn from the old — and I mean really old. During those 40 years in the desert, the Jews weren’t just building sand castles. They were consolidating themselves as a people — envisioning the Promised Land and committing themselves to a set of shared principles, a kind of map to get there. The Ten Commandments are a utopian document if ever there was one. Maybe they weren’t the best at practical action (“How many Jews does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”), but they were building a movement. Projects, one by one, don’t empower. Movements do.

So here’s a proposal: Changers and fixers, let’s start a coalition. Meeting place TBA. Manna and beverages will be served.

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.

As a kid in the 1960s, I went to a camp where competitive sports were viewed as mildly distasteful, if not explicitly frowned upon. Sure, we gathered in the evenings for rowdy bouts of “Capture the Flag.” On hot days there was “Sink ’Em,” which involved attempting to deluge or capsize the other team’s rowboat while madly bailing your own — mostly an excuse for unfettered splashing.

But this was not an institution that divided campers into two antagonistic nations on Day 1 and recorded all activities as battles in a summer-long color war. No, no, no. Ours was a Quaker camp. We were pacifists.

My Jewish communist parents transmitted a similar suspicion of sport. No one who’s faced one of us over a Scrabble board would accuse the Levines of shrinking from competition. Yet I was given to believe that sports were the exercises of a goyishe-industrial complex, overseen by CIA paramilitaries, training American youth for Cold War hostilities.

So at camp I learned to canoe like an Abenaki and swim like a trout, and at home I was riding a two-wheeler by the age of 5. But where I come from, the physical — especially when dressed up in uniforms and organized into teams — was political. More than that, sport was bad politics.

Then, as an adult, I moved to Vermont, where the entertainment afforded by snow, mountains and lakes far outshines almost anything you can do indoors. In short order, I rejected the family religion and was born again, a jock. I still get nervous keeping score playing volleyball; those Quakers ruined me for anything resembling a race. But if a genie offered to transform me either into Nobel Prize-winning Toni Morrison or Raisa Smetanina, the female world record-holder for 10 Olympic medals in nordic skiing, I’d have a hard time deciding.

Sport, for me, has ceased to be an alien cult whose rites involve sweaty jockstraps, arcane statistics and the ingestion of mass quantities of bubbly beverages and salty foods. I still view it as political — along with a growing list of human endeavors from sex to shopping — but I’ve started to think that athletic competition might be a force for good.

A lot of people feel this way, or at least they feel that international athletic competitions are a venue at which good can be demanded. In recent memory, hardly an Olympic Games has passed without some major political demonstration. In 1968, American runners Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised the Black Power fist from the winners’ podium to tell their own country, “Stop the racism.” In 1980, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, fully a fifth of participant nations boycotted the Moscow Olympics. From 1964 until the end of apartheid in 1996, the International Olympics Committee banned South Africa from the Games.

Through all this I cheered for the activists. Had I been alive in 1936, I’m sure I would have stood with the labor unions and anti-fascists calling to keep the U.S. home from the Berlin Olympics, which the Nazis were touting as a showcase of Aryan superiority.

If the Games were marred, even canceled, as a result of the disruption, so be it, I believed. They were, after all, only games, expendable in the cause of righting the great wrongs.

So I was surprised by my own reaction this month, when Steven Spielberg withdrew as artistic advisor to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, in protest of what he sees as China’s failure to intervene sufficiently in ending the genocide in Darfur. Lay off it, Steve, I found myself thinking. Let the Games begin. What was happening?

Perhaps I felt fatigued. After all, no Olympic political act has ever caused its target to change. The most spectacular example of this intransigence was the Israelis’ response to the Palestinian terrorist murder of 11 of its athletes in Munich in 1972: They assassinated the terrorists. Depicting these events in a feature film in 2005, Spielberg transmitted the message that violence begets violence. This time, he’s obviously acting on the belief that nonviolent protest can end violence. The Chinese replied predictably, with self-justification: China can’t solve Darfur alone, and Darfur is a minor skirmish anyhow, they say. But I agree with Spielberg about nonviolence. And political critique, justified or not, is almost always met with defensiveness — that’s no reason not to make it.

Another Chinese rebuttal — this one made more by citizens in the blogosphere than by the government — represents a more compelling argument for keeping politics out of the Olympics. Spielberg is a hypocrite, his detractors say. Why doesn’t he protest his own country’s failure to send peacekeepers to Darfur, or the U.S. occupation of Iraq?

Indeed. Why single out China or South Africa, the Soviet Union, Israel or the U.S? Imperialist invasions, dangerous ideologies, human-rights violations — were the IOC to expel the doers of all these evils, we’d be left watching Finland compete against Bhutan (and I’m sure some reader will apprise me of the wrongdoings of these apparent innocents, too).

The same thing that makes the Games a bully pulpit also militates against exploiting them as such: Everyone is there. Patriotism is scarcely absent at the Olympics — you’re reminded of this each time a medalist stands on the podium wrapped in her country’s flag, weeping to the strains of its anthem. But nationalism is the opposite of the Olympics’ purpose and value, which is to bring allies and enemies together to compete in a fashion my parents could not fathom — peacefully.

I started out saying that sport is political, then proceeded to argue that the Olympics should be free of politics. So let me begin again. The Olympics are inevitably as political, not to mention as corrupt and commercial, as every other interaction of individuals, institutions, nations, power, prestige and money — witness the doping scandals. In that sense, all we can do is try to keep the Games as clean and transparent as possible.

But sport is, in another way, more profoundly political than any statement anyone can make at any Olympic Games in any country. The political message of sport — the political energy of it — originates in the same place as all social movements do: in the heart, the body, and the imagination.

I’m not just talking about the swell of humanism that watching a great athlete inspires. That feeling we have watching the fastest-ever, 1000-meter runner burst over the finish line, or the perfect-10 diver slice like a scalpel through the pool’s surface — this isn’t an Italian or a Kenyan but a man or a woman, an extraordinarily talented and honed human body. It’s a good thing the 1936 Olympic boycott failed to materialize. Because, of course, it was in Berlin that Jesse Owens, the African-American track-and-field star, took home four gold medals. In Berlin — in Owens — humanism beat fascist eugenics like, well, an Olympic long-jumper beating me.

But you don’t have to think we’re all the same under the skin to believe it’s worth getting together to run a few races (and let’s face it, the Kenyans are faster than the Italians). So there’s another emotion, perhaps even deeper — more personal and less abstract than humanism — that makes sport the exemplar of what politics can be.

Sport is fueled by the insane belief that we gravity-bound flesh machines can fly, that mortals can be gods. What a piece of work is man, sport says, so infinite in faculty! This is a political sentiment.

After decades of disappointments and defeats, politics has become the art — or business — of the merely possible. So wan are our hopes that when a man comes forward speaking in beautiful sentences yet promising little more than the defense of a shrinking list of liberal reforms and the temporary prevention of global annihilation, we exalt him as a visionary.

Meanwhile, in gyms and on tracks and ski slopes around the world, athletes are imagining the unimaginable — the higher jump, the more graceful turn — and then applying all their intelligence, discipline and effort, and then some, to making their visions real.

Sport is the art of the impossible. It is Utopian. This is why, now more than ever, we need sport.

Steven Spielberg — who has created intergalactic friendships and tragic clones, depicted The Color Purple and the Holocaust — is a genius at imagining utopias and dystopias. The man who named his company DreamWorks — and we along with him — should apply the lessons of Hollywood to the Olympics, in Beijing or anywhere else on this cruel and contested Earth: We need spaces to imagine the unimaginable, to dream the impossible. Dreaming is the most political act of all.

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.

The news was on our side. CNN polls that week showed support for the war at an all-time low: The number of Americans in favor had halved since 2003, while those strongly opposed doubled. Six in 10 believed Bush lied to get us into the war. Most people wanted Congress, not the president, to direct war policy.

The Democrats were pulling their caucus behind a withdrawal plan, in spite of a precarious majority in the Senate. And Bush was feeling the heat. On Monday, he would go before the American people to “plea,” as the press universally described it, for patience. His podium was set before a portrait of Teddy Roosevelt on a rearing steed. But on the front page of The New York Times Tuesday, Little George’s ink-dot eyes and wobbly-straight-line mouth made him look more like Charlie Brown on the pitcher’s mound than the Rough Rider on San Juan Hill. You could almost see a thought bubble blooming above his head, reading, “Sigh.”

And yet I didn’t feel like marching. What good would it do? I thought. Born in 1952, as the Korean War dragged on and the hydrogen bomb was being tested, I marched — or was pushed in my stroller — to Ban the Bomb. Vietnam followed close behind, then Cambodia, Desert Storm, Afghanistan — not to mention all the conflicts for which America supplied the arms and the advice and let the bodies of other nations fall.

As I laced up my walking shoes and filled my water bottle, I tried to bring a lifetime’s blur of peace marches into focus. Still fresh in memory was February 15, 2003, when a half million poured into the streets of New York, the mounted police unable to corral us into “free-speech” pens. That Monday, I opened my email to a cascade of jpegs. Along with us, 30 million people in 800 cities around the world had cried out, “No War in Iraq!”

A month later, after a Take Back meeting, we watched the bombs of Operation Shock and Awe falling on Baghdad. The TV screen was that now-familiar weird green of nighttime desert videotape; the explosions were silent. I remember thinking that to viewers tuning in after a gory evening of prime-time entertainment, it wouldn’t look so bad.

•••••••••

This time the demonstration was small, a couple thousand in New York, perhaps three times that in Washington. Some things had improved, notably the attitudes of New York’s Finest. One cop recited the route through a bullhorn as if he were a United for Peace & Justice marshal: “We march up Sixth to Fifty-Seventh. Then we turn right and go to Second Avenue . . .” At Fifty-Seventh, another officer cheered us on: “Only 11 blocks to go! Burn a hundred more calories!”

The evening news programs carried short clips of the events. The next day, the Times ran a tiny item in the Metro Section. And Bush reaffirmed his commitment to staying the course. If we pull out, he threatened, a “contagion of violence” will “engulf the whole region.”

Why march?

Some glimpse in the recent terrible news the signs of better news to come. After all, Iraq’s unremitting chaos has turned America against the war. Marxists used to call this “heightening the contradictions,” a process by which the desired end — back then it was proletarian revolution — is supposedly hastened; in other words, worse is better.

I tend to think that worse is worse, but in this case it’s hard to say what’s worse and what’s better: Saddam’s totalitarian tyranny or today’s Hobbesian anarchy? A partitioned Iraq, each region suppressing women and freedom according to its own interpretation of scripture, or an endless, fruitless American occupation, the “long war”? All are evils, some greater, some lesser.

Maybe I’m demoralized because I fear that the president is right. If we leave, we abandon Iraq to self-immolation. We may simply be betting, perversely, that if we stay, the same will happen: a bloodbath, only with American blood and treasure in the mix. Calling for peace, tout court, the left appears to be as much in denial about the aftermath of our withdrawal as the Bush administration was about the aftermath of our invasion. We don’t want to admit that U.S. policymakers can do little more now than make of a monumental catastrophe a merely enormous one. The Iraqis know this better than anyone, and they are as confused as anyone: In an ABC-BBC poll, half said they oppose the occupiers’ presence in their country, but only 15 percent want us to pull out now.

••••••••••••

So why did I march? The child of activists goes to peace marches as an adult raised Catholic goes to mass: ritually, whether she feels like it or not. My mother, who was there too, always told me that if we did not march, things would be even worse than they are.

Sometimes she complains, as I do, that the message is too complicated; the media images can’t sum it up. Some-times, like now, I wonder if it’s too simple. Still, the message must be sent: No. We do not consent.

It’s the message a group of pacifists sent last week when they sat in at Congressman Peter Welch’s Burlington office, demanding that he oppose the Democrats’ bill to fund military operations in Iraq while imposing deadlines for withdrawal. These seasoned activists knew that the vote would be complicated for Welch. To oppose the bill would be to side not just with antiwar progressives but also with anti-withdrawal Republicans. The activists must have known, too, that immediate withdrawal could not pass the House, much less the Senate.

Welch voted for it, and the protesters condemned him. But their message went deeper; its provenance and future are longer than this appropriation, even than this war. They were rejecting all the options on the table, because none was good enough.

What is to be done? It is not, in the end, the job of a protest placard to spell out a policy plan. So I carried my poster — Take Back the Future for Peace — and, alas, I will carry it again and again.

I marched, and not just because I’m afraid of what would happen if I didn’t. I marched to tell the world that we must create more to choose from than greater and lesser evils.

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.

Amateur porn stars with Amazon Indians.

I refer to Fuck for Forest, the brain- (and bod-) child of a pretty, young Norwegian couple named Leona Johansson and Tommy Hol Ellingsen, who describe their project as “concerned humans” who “use their sexuality and love to direct attention to and collect money for the earth’s threatened nature.”

Fuckforforest.com, founded in 2004, is an “ecological porn site.” It recruits tree-hugging exhibitionists to donate photos and videos of their pleasure-taking, signs up subscribers at $15 a month, and sends the proceeds to rainforest conservation and reforestation efforts in Ecuador, Costa Rica and Brazil.

For a site dedicated to wild nature, FFF is pretty tame. Skinny, pierced and tattooed white people cavort in leafy settings. The occasional vegetable is introduced, as is mild fetishism. In one video, Leona in a blue wig employs an enormous leek to flagellate another woman. On the homepage, a woman in a gas mask kneels before a floating chainsaw. It’s all rather . . . Norwegian.

But Fuck for Forest is also an unprecedented hybrid. Leona and Tommy probably don’t know it, but their project represents the bridging of a historic divide between two political discourses, two heretofore separate spheres of activism. If we are going to save the Earth, it’s a gap worth closing.

On one side of the divide are the discourses of desire — the politics of sexual liberation and personal freedom. These are the values of the Age of Revolutions, including our own, with its inalienable right to pursue happiness. For better or worse, they’re also the values of capitalism, with its confederate desire, its promise gratification, and its job to cycle the two in endless escalation.

On the other side are the discourses of restraint, where environmentalism resides. Here, need — as opposed to desire — and limited resources are assessed; a just and sustainable balance of the two is sought. Economically, restraint is closer to socialism than to capitalism, or at least to regulated capitalism than to unfettered free markets.

If the pleasure people’s Utopia is Dionysian, the restrainers’ is Apollonian. It seeks satisfaction in rational moderation, and in saving some for later. Sustainability is by defintion a principle of delayed gratification.

There are aesthetic differences between the two, as well as a kind of culture-nature divide. Broadly speaking, the pleasure politicos embrace technology, fashion, the contemporary arts, media, speed, novelty. The restrainers prefer the rural; they like slow processes, durable, old things, things that are born, not made. John Muir, co-founder of the Sierra Club and widely seen as the father of American environmentalism, found spiritual and emotional succor in nature. Like many of his successors, he had less use for the products of human imagination. “One day’s exposure to mountains,” he wrote, “is better than a cartload of books.”

Neither side is monolithic or doctrinaire. Indeed, pleasurites are often critical of the consumer economy, especially its inexorable imperative to grow, obsolesce and discard. But they also take in stride the contribution that commerce makes to culture and community, identity and sexuality. Transpeople, for instance, are not above shopping the surgical and pharmaceutical mart to create bodies that match their self-images. And activists like FFF, the casual heirs of category-smashing movements from Pop Art to pro-sex feminism, regard as academic the lines between commercial and fine art, or porn and erotica.

For their part, some of the most sophisticated restrainers — such as Adbusters or Reverend Billy, whom I wrote about last month — humorously, even affectionately, twist the tropes of the mainstream media and use it to get the message across.

But there’s a strain of moral environmentalism that would throw the baby out with the gray water — that is, the imaginative, juicy, fun aspects of consumer culture with its devastating consequences. For such people, it’s not enough to love your bicycle; you have to hate your TV, too. It’s not enough to buy less and buy green; you have to condemn the whole enterprise of shopping as a crime and a sin and look down on shoppers (yourself included) as advertising-addled, instant-gratification-addicted zombies. Substitute a cartload of DVDs for Muir’s cartload of books and you get the gist.

So it was into this little DMZ that Fuck for Forest innocently stepped. There they discovered . . . a market niche! Green wankers! In its first year, 2004, the site raked in $100,000.

Then FFF got stranded on one shore of the divide.

No mainstream environmental organization would take their money. WWF (formerly the World Wildlife Fund) in Norway and the Netherlands declined. “[W]e cannot connect our brandname and logo to certain sectors of industry,” read the latex-protected prose of the latter. A San Francisco reporter calling American environmental organizations for comment on FFF met with “terse brushoffs.”

You could charge the envirocrats with plain prudery. Giving them more credit, you could countenance their worries that some constituents might consider FFF a pack of exploiters, even sexual assailants of women. But sex itself, even sexism, was probably not the whole of it (for one thing, many of FFF’s models are men). Nor could these organizations have honestly objected to hawking product. After all, WWF Netherlands was defending not its principles but its pocketbook — its “brandname and logo,” metaphor of both.

Seems to me that what made FFF’s lucre so filthy was the site’s cheerful marriage of sex and money. While Tommy and Leona were trilling about nature (sex) teaming up with nature (forests), their critics saw the commercial exploitation of naked bodies and the commercial exploitation of rainforests as a cynical alliance: Both despoil sacred nature for profit.

In response to these snubs, FFF expressed bemused exasperation. “What is morality when people are destroying the world?” Tommy asked the San Francisco reporter. The real obscenity, his comment suggested, is the rape of the emerald forests. But, good at getting it up again and again, FFF trekked south and found warm welcome among biologists and indigenous activists laboring to save both the nature and culture of the Amazon. Maybe these new beneficiaries are more relaxed about sex. Or maybe they just can’t afford to be picky.

Who’s right? In one sense, both. The important tension between the two — restraint politics focus on the public good, pleasure politics on the rights and desires of the individual — is almost three centuries old. And it’s not about to dissolve. That’s because it’s the tension at the heart of any live democracy.

But let’s not create conflicts where none exist. Some things are a matter of morality, others just of taste. I can compost my vegetables and still love watching “Deadwood.” You can titillate me with tits and ass and also move me with seed conservation. Go to FuckforForest.com. Get off on the picture of two bare butts ascending a tree. Pause for a cup of fair-trade coffee. Then spin another kind of fantasy gazing at the picture of a straw-hatted farmer tenderly planting a seedling.

POSTPONED: Environmentalist Bill McKibben and Judith Levine will have a public conversation about activism across the two-discourse divide on February 14 at 4:30 p.m. in Middlebury College’s McCardell Bicentennial Hall, Room 220. Free Info, 443-5355. POSTPONED UNTIL WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 21. CALL FOR INFORMATION.

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.

One commitment you made was, literally, to move your body out of the room and into the street, voices and fists poised for raising.

It still thrills me to be on the barricades, inside a beast of many bodies. So I signed up to join United for Peace & Justice’s September 24 march on Washington to end the Iraq war. The papers might report a crowd a tenth its real size, the TV news give equal time to the 39 counter-demonstrators. The government would likely ignore us. (Leaving town, Dubya averred that everyone is entitled to his or her opinion.) But we would have an effect — a crucial one, now that fear and disaffection are the Bushies’ best weapons.

If nothing else, a demonstration tells its participants they are not alone. The people united shall never be defeated. Solidarity forever. This knowledge enables them to make those slogans true.

It can’t happen online. Howard Dean and MoveOn’s Eli Pariser claimed during the 2004 elections that they’d invented a virtual political community unlike any in history. When it came to mustering the teams and tabulating the canvassing sheets, though, live kids and union members did it the old-fashioned way.

After the elections, I attended a MoveOn “meetup,” where little groups across the country watched a computer map light up with other meetups, then watched Eli talk, then voted on what to do next (repair voting machines? save the environment?). There was no way to discuss how to accomplish anything. Eli would get back to us.

And from time to time, he drops me an email, to which I respond, or not. MoveOn turns out to be a communications tool, not a community. And in what community it does create, activism is like online dating. No hard feelings.

As for the former cyber-candidate, he can still be found on the web, making wishy-washy statements for the Democratic Party.

On September 24, I didn’t make it to Washington. My group, Take Back the Future — about 40 writers and artists from New York, my part-time home — boarded a reserved Amtrak car in Penn Station at 6 a.m., alongside a clutch of Queerleaders from Burlington.

At 6:15 we budged — 10 yards — then backed up. Every half-hour after that, a conductor offered information, much of it contradictory, about faulty wires in the tunnel, repairs, consolidation of trains. Each dispatch ended with the assurance that we’d be on our way in 20 minutes.

The Queerleaders took out their garbage-bag-plastic pom-poms and cheered (“U-G-L-I! They ugly. Uhn-uhn, they ugly! G-R-E-D! They greedy. . .”). Someone called Amtrak on her cell and learned that a power line was down in New Jersey, halting all southbound travel. This was news to the conductor.

A rumble was rising among us. Factions were arranging car rentals. Our affinity group, which in various incarnations had marched together for 30 years, needed to act.

At 9, I stood on a seat and tried to quell rumors of a conspiracy any more sinister than the Repub-lican Party’s to overthrow the U.S. government by privatizing it out of existence. By 9:10, we had consensus. The Amtrak people, through no fault of their own, couldn’t be trusted. More delays were inevitable. We’d reach D.C. in time to catch our train home.

By 9:30, with our bagels wrapped and signs in English, Spanish and Arabic retrieved from the overhead racks, we had disembarked and started organizing. Some of us talked up the would-be protesters in the terminal. Others called the press. The Queerleaders ducked into phone booths and emerged with pink hair and pleated skirts.

By 10, 60 marchers were on Seventh Avenue and 34th Street, chanting, “Money for trains, not for war!” Shoppers stopped, drivers honked. The New York Times sent its guy, NBC its gal. Writers for The New Yorker and London’s TLS were on our train; they took out their notepads.

That night, NBC gave us equal time with the 300,000 anti- and 39 pro-war marchers in Washington. Next day, the Times ran a photo of our signs and a quote to the effect of “Money for trains, not for war.”

“Joining” MoveOn or another online activist group is like using an Apple computer or wearing Nike shoes — what brand manager Douglas Atkins calls “joining a brand.” The brand sends an email promo, you type in your name, press Send and, presto, you’ve fulfilled your civic duty. An auto-reply arrives, thanking you for your opinion — a receipt. The “community” is as big as a consumer demographic, and no bigger than an email box.

Hannah Arendt wrote about the oikos, the forum in which speech becomes “deeds.” The web, we are told, is the forum of the future. But too often, online speech swallows itself; it can’t emerge as deed. In a train, a terminal or on the street, bodies meet to act. This form may seem to take us back from the future. But, on the ground, we can seize the day — to take back the future.

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.