Interdependence Day potluck July 4, 2005

This year marks Living Earth's third annual Interdependence Day Celebration, a time to share the summer's early bounty with potluck dishes, home-made music, summer games, and friendship. No pseudo-patriotic rhetoric or "rockets' red glare" here?instead we'll celebrate our innumerable similarities and deep connections to each other and our reliance on community.

This July 4 will bring together folks from Living Earth's community with Veterans for Peace Chapter 72, Alliance for Police and Community Accountability, Community Language and Culture Bank, Christ the Healer United Church of Christ, and other activist and faith organizations.

American mythology makes a great ruckus about the notion of "independence" but on closer scrutiny, the whole idea is called into question.

Our history texts glorify the valiant break from England's tyranny, forgetting that a driving force behind the revolution was colonial tea traders' demands for high profits and unrestricted markets. The iconic American cowboy is one of the most independent, rugged-individualist characters ever concocted, and we seldom challenge that fiction with recognition of the miserable wages and dehumanizing working conditions endured, the common violence and short life spans of our erstwhile national role models.

Today we're stuck in a hellish war and ?independence? from foreign oil is the patriotic theme-du-jour. And it's also a handy buzzword to justify massively extravagant and dangerous nuclear development that will create unbreakable chains of radioactive tyranny for countless generations to come. What a great, liberating idea that is.

Given our history, it's no surprise that those who stand to gain the most have managed to sell the rest of us on the idea that our very fundamental mutual dependence is unnatural, undesirable and probably an un-patriotic and dangerous idea.

Yet, to depend simply means to rely upon, and the idea of interdependence suggests a mutually supportive condition that is at the heart of relationship, family, friendship, and community.

In contemporary use, interdependence has its roots in ecological models, where the symbiotic relationships of species and ecosystems offer elegant, efficient models where mutual support and enhanced opportunity are freely exchanged. Interdependence is basic to all constructive interactions between diverse, individually discrete yet actively cooperating systems. In this image we find the natural strength, beauty, stability, and possibility that are available when we are open to rich, diverse, complex and mutually-supportive communities and relationships.

So join us on July 4 to celebrate that radical, scary notion: Interdependence, with Cooperation, Generosity, and Goodness for All!