The year is turning into High Spring. All of the world’s cultures tell a creation story to go with this steamy moment of green shoots and flowers and sex-drunk birds singing all night long. The most famous stories are the Chosen-People-into-the-wilderness and Christ-on–the-Cross stories, a journey into the unknown to the Promised Land and another ascension to “Father’s Mansion” in the sky.

This year the Promised Land is catching us from behind. We’re interrupted by a thousand gangsta tornadoes and a monster-from-the-depths tsunami, by nuclear fall-out and WikiLeaks and Arab teenagers unafraid of dictators the Americans left in place on their trip from pillar of fire to pillar of fire. Now a refreshing Spring-like confusion has overtaken us, about the role of our collective will, our modern competence…

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. We set out across the wilderness of America and the Garden of Eden was straight ahead. We were the Chosen People. We made a deal with an all-powerful God who would protect us from an America full of animals, and moaning, singing people who called out to each other with animal names. God agreed to tame the wilderness and kill our enemies.

We were the Chosen. We punched our ticket. We prayed. We buried our cigar box of dead presidents under the barn. The lonely war-god with his lovely dead son – they were supposed to defeat Appalachia, and the Ohio Valley after that, and the Mississippi and the Great Plains and Rockies and the Golden State and the Moon, but the Promised Land receded into the distance like a white whale the size of pixel. The pillar of fire that was supposed to get us home – the GPS was on the fritz. And then our Eden caught us from behind. It turned out to our surprise that the Promised Land was never in front of us.

The Promised Land caught us from behind because it was an inside job, the seeds and eggs and screaming birds. There is an Eden inside us, and we know there is. And to acknowledge this, as an ambitious American, is to start over completely, to defy Presidents and institutions and the religions that made the holy days like the Exodus and Easter a triumph over the wilderness. That roaring wild life, there’s no God violent enough to stop it. There’s no technology clever enough to stop it. The Promised Land catches us from behind, comes up our legs and into our heart and head. Even the Americans got the Holy Jiggly now -because its Spring.

There is a moment half-way through “Tweets from Tahrir” – the new tweet by tweet running quotation of the Egyptian Revolution – where the reader gets goosebumps. It’s when you realize, “I could do this. I could have my own personal Tahrir.”

The young people who ran up and down the honeycomb of streets around Liberation Square always found a way to return to it with more neighbors in tow. They solved a riddle that we all face. It’s a different riddle in Cote d’Ivoire, which is different than the riddle in Burma, and Orange Country, California, and the East Village of New York. But the riddle is there, placed there by old power – and every riddle has its solution, it’s freedom.

Here in New York, our riddle is armed and dangerous, the famous mix of militarized police, big money and high-tech marketing smiles. The riddle seems impossible. The last time we ran into public space and there were enough of us, we were resisting the Bush/Cheney convention of 2004, when we were arrested by the thousands and forced into old bus garages on the Hudson River. Even the local judges couldn’t get us out. The police had set up their lawsuit fund ahead of time.

That was 7 years ago. Ever since – the 1st Amendment Rights in the city of 9/11 have been traded in for a Hosni Mubarak-like idea of security. The Sphinx looks down at us with the face of a Beyonce and the body of a Rottweiler. Our progressive community resorts to doomed online petitions. We are resigned to watching the comedy routines of the Colbert Report, which is not much like direct action. Union Square, Washington Square and Tompkins Square, the three public commons in downtown NYC that were gathering places for social movements – are overwhelmed by corporate sponsors, wealthy gardeners, and Kafka-esque permit processes for gatherings of 20 or more.

But all those who face entrenched power have such stories – and worse. The riddle is always there, and riddles are solved. Our radical performance community – The Church of Earthalujah – now faces the Union Bank of Switzerland, the financier of earth extraction, the displacer of villages, the worldwide dark lord of toxicity. UBS takes the money of New Yorkers (and the wealthy everywhere) and blows up mountains, drills into aquifers, scrapes meadows into chemical vats. We have performed as angels, the choir with big white cardboard wings – in the UBS lobby across from Rockefeller Center, and we got arrested for Criminal Trespass. At our next court appearance on Tuesday April 19, we will gather on the sidewalk at noon, at 100 Centre Street in downtown New York. We will sing and preach and present our self-defense argument to the public. The “Necessity Defense,” in which our personal, physical interruption of the act of corporate violence is described by the plaintiff as the only alternative. And so we will face the riddle of another “green” but actually murderous company. Shout it, tweet it — see if the Sphinx blinks.

There were hundreds of millions of Kindles and Nooks frozen in death, stuck on one page – “Why America Slept.” You can say one thing about us, we were a species that scribbled, texted, hologrammed and burst a blood vessel of pixels in the final years. Every last atrocity was broadcast virally. By 2015, every consumer could make a major feature film with a gadget fitted to the hand. We could dial in our imaginary laughing audience for the sound track. If the revolution wasn’t televised, the end of the world was. Millions of movies would be found on mounds of corpses, still flickering in fingers and suitcases. Of the five known mass extinctions in the history of the earth, this was the only one where the dying species seemed to know what it was doing.

It was not a pretty sight, as so much of homo sapiens went down. By 2020, there was a bitter suspicion that a privileged few would survive with secret technologies in the higher elevations. It was a planet racing with high budget rumors as it died. The bitterness was even directed at the coyotes and cockroaches that poured through the front-doors of suburban palaces as families packed their SUV’s for the final drive. Yes, these millions of corpses had sour expressions on their faces – and still the question floated among us. Why did America sleep? The United States of America was supposed to be the hero. “Saving the world” was the plot for most of the movies in theatres in those last years. In fact, at the end, most Americans still believed that their habitual heroism was in full force. But by then, we were stumbling back and forth between virtual and actual worlds. It was a struggle to the death by competing dreams.

America was sleeping deeply, in a dream whose creators were hiding inside skyscrapers with smoked glass. One wonders – could we ever have looked critically at the heavily financed dream-state that became adopted as “normal living.” Normal living became horrific apocalyptic screaming media, cosmetic heroism, and left-over fundamentalist religions. This media was often produced by self-identified liberal environmentalists, while off-screen the air and water was utterly poisoned, with tsunamis coming in like big, consciously directed erasers. If only we had found a way to examine the waking dream by riding into it on the back of a strong counter-dream, like some artists did back in the 20th century…

The American dream turned out to be deadly because it sold tickets to a long series of apocalypses – they are the epitome of good (funny-scary) entertainment. Then, something went terribly wrong when dying spectacularly made good media – a diverting nightmare shall we say – but we could not go forward with ordinary living, where death has a natural place. The leaders of the dream, the captains of consumption and militarism – culturally silenced those who thought that death was a natural part of living. The special effects of mass death continued, while individual death was pushed into endless assisted living, and Americans slept on and on. We took our imperial eternity for granted. We shopped and bombed to push back the emptiness. We swiped the plastic for yet another amazing funny apocalypse. And then one of them, in mid-joke —-

On Black Friday/ Buy Nothing Day – we enjoyed our annual turn on national television, cutting into the heavy-breathing shopping reports with our alternative Christmas. A comment like “But if we stopped shopping – what about jobs? – what about the economy?” would ring in the air again and again.

Then we try to describe a quiet revolution that is already more extensive than anyone knows, a transition many of us are making to the realities of peak oil and climate change. Our solution is such a Norman Rockwell painting of a small town, or a Langston Hughes poem of a city neighborhood, with farmer’s markets, old shops and everyone knowing the first name of the person they are talking to… that the “revolution” we’re describing seems simply the good way to do things. Then the choir belts out “What Would Jesus Buy?” and we sing and shout until the producer gives us the slit-throat signal.

We do this every year and it’s not a bad life. But this year I do feel like singing “If You Don’t Know Me By Now.” Because there is – you noticed? – a dispiriting return to the corporate Christmas by many consumers. The myth of the single oil-based economy still glories in its unstoppable ads. On the international level there wasn’t a leader who explained during the recession that there was an alternative to it. Obama sure didn’t.

We are finally suffering from the consequences of the mind-bath of marketing. The psychic environment, the thousands of gushing products that we walk through, has altered are basic perceptions. Our “pattern consciousness” is shattered. We have come to believe the basic con-job of Consumerism, which is: “This product on the shelf has no past, no labor or natural resources history. The reality of this shiny package begins with buying it.”

Thus the emotional report of the shopping grosses last Friday – that it increased by 5% and that this is a stand alone American triumph. The fetish for the retail grosses… what a weird horse race! The Wall Street expectations are met, disappointed or surpassed and we are taught to obey the applause signs. But if our pattern consciousness hadn’t broken down, we wouldn’t act like we are outside of time. We would sense a history in these products.

We would see through the hypnotizing horse race to the real impact of Consumerism in the world. We would connect this kind of shopping to sweatshops, to the dying oceans, to wars for oil, to the silencing waves of extinction.

We would look down at our hand, hovering there over the counter with money in the fingers. How much power is in this gesture? Consumerism keeps this economy going, which is destroying life. This Christmas is selling everything.

And how deeply felt would be our recognition – that living sustainably isn’t just a political position. Will our children live?