Many years ago, I had an opportunity given to me unexpectedly. I saw it like I was being granted a little nepotism when I moved to Oregon but suddenly, there was simply nothing there. Where I had expected being able to walk into a job, on arrival, there was simply no job to be had. And to say the least, it was kind of a shock to be sort of thrown out of a moving car like this unexpectedly. But this rather shocking experience led to some interesting decision making on my part. And being a creative person, I took up busking.
So what I did for a while was simply to place myself at a place where there were a lot of people around and played guitar asking people to throw some money in my guitar case. I had a specific repertoire and some tricks that made people happy. It was not an enormous financial success but I didn’t starve and for sure, I met a ton of people and I had a lot of fun. In fact, I probably enjoyed this period of my life as much or more than anything I’ve ever done.
And as you might expect, I also learned a lot about the world, about forgotten people; people who are living on the fringes of society or even worse, the wage slaves who live right in the middle of it but in a completely unhappy and miserable way of life. And I understood for the first time in my life that the world was made up of prisoners who really have no opportunity to enjoy any real social mobility or experience freedom during their lifetimes.
But in the years since this time, the world has not gotten any better for people who are not born with a silver spoon in their mouth. Political administrations have become more and more strict and even more brutal. In the Republic of Belarus, it is now actually illegal not to have a job; it is an arrestable offense that comes with the possibility of jail.
Even beyond this particular example, there does not seem to be many variance available other than working for for-profit enterprises, enterprises that usually take no notice of the garbage they create or ecological damage they do. The world is geared toward the industrialists and the profiteers and not for people or for the environment.
In 2020, I wrote about a million words in a project called The Upcoming Elections. The project consisted of about 270 essays about modern politics, the Trump presidency and the Democratic candidates vying for office. It was also about my life here in Belarus and the Belarusian revolution, covid, social and economic problems of the region and my own decisions to engage in certain spiritual activities, practicing minimalism and enjoying a vegan diet.
In 2021 I put this project together, in 2022 I wrote about food, veganism and this year I am writing Utopian literature.
The vision for the Green 2021 project is to create a series of businesses, heavy on manpower but with a light ecological carbon footprint. I want to fund and start up as many small businesses as I can that depend on human labor rather than machines. And I want this to remain local so that there are no additional transportation costs.
It’s also about raising literacy, creating new ideas and and perhaps offering some hope against the destruction of our planet.
There are of course a million more ideas out there but the number one theme is ecology first, people before machines, community before wealth and bikes before cars.
There is an old Russian adage that goes that you should want a hundred friends more than $100. The green 2021 project hopes to put legitimate money in the hands of as many people as possible as payment for work done for pro ecology, pro community and pro humanity projects.
The world has become a rather dirty place. Global warming is a fact and each of us has to do our part to make things right. It is time to go green and stay that way.
Adam Goodman,
January 19th, 2021