Resist Every Day
Here in the Pioneer Valley, we’re graced with a diverse array of small, independently-owned shops and galleries, cafes and restaurants, theaters and performance spaces, and a variety of other invaluable services that lend character to, and contribute mightily to the tax base of, the communities in which they operate.
Any one of us could rattle off the names of a dozen places we love, businesses that make our communities unique and lively, nooks and crannies we can’t imagine having to be without, places we gather in to nourish our bodies and spirits, to celebrate, mourn, love, and live.
Last Wednesday, a longtime patron and friend, who teaches Economics at a local university, stopped by to pick up his order. From a distance, his face covered with a mask, he shared his perspective on the economic shifts and challenges we’re all undergoing as a result of the pandemic.
His message: increased automation and the procurement, warehousing, and distribution capabilities of the most powerful corporations to service people’s needs via the internet will supplant the Mom & Pop businesses we all love so much and depend on to enrich our lives with their unique personalities.
“Two years from now,” he said, waving toward the cafe, “places like this aren’t going to exist.”
It’s not that we’d never thought about Amazon’s world-wide takeover of all sectors of retail and fast food’s iron grip on dining; who isn’t aware of it? But the conversation was jarring nonetheless. Today, we wonder: is it possible to fight this trend or is our friend right? Will we—and businesses like us—really be gone within two years?
A stray article—written in late April of this year—underscores the sobering nature of the topic: fast food is doing great in response to the pandemic (https://www.nrn.com/fast-casual/early-look-impact-coronavirus-restaurant-sales). Think drive-through burger joints and pizza delivery chains; these businesses already have infrastructure in place which has allowed them to continue operating while small restaurants and cafes have been forced to furlough staff and close.
But fast food shouldn’t be what we’re turning to right now, for so many reasons.
Here are just a few:
Fast food makes people sick, literally. It’s loaded with animal fat, trans fats, sugars, salt, and chemical flavors, colors, and fillers, all of which contribute to obesity, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, dementia, and heart disease (https://academic.oup.com/nutritionreviews/article/71/5/310/2460221).
Fast food chains create a gargantuan market for meat products, the production of which ravages the climate and causes undue suffering in the lives of countless millions of animals, world-wide, every year (https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0165797).
Fast food restaurants, even those that franchise to local owners, take money out of local economies, pay little to no tax, and don’t pay their employees a living wage (https://ourfuture.org/20131016/fast-food-with-a-side-of-poverty-and-what-it-costs-us).
There’s a banner that hangs above the counter at Cafe Evolution, an old bedsheet painted with a giant owl—its wings a bright blue background overlaid with golden forearms and closed fists, and brilliant green sprouts—surrounded by an urgent message: RESIST EVERY DAY.
People often ask what it means. Sometimes we’ll reply, “What does it mean to you?”
Most of the time, though, we explain how the banner came to be.
November 9, 2016—the day after election day—was a hard day for much of our country, and, certainly, our local communities were grieving. People came to Evolution for lunch, their faces empty, their bodies slack. They looked shell-shocked. When they tried to speak, they cried. It was a day of terrible uncertainty and fear, worry and dread, feelings we at Evolution shared. By the end of the day, we felt exhausted and defeated.
“How are we going to get through this?” we wondered.
About a week later, a local artist named Denise Ann Beaudet showed up with a banner in her hands, asking if we’d like to hang it in the cafe. As she unfurled it, we felt hope rise and our spines straighten. As soon as we hung that banner above the counter, we had our answer: we’re going to stand in this one place and do our best to help other people. Because that’s the best of what humans do. There’s so much we humans haven’t figured out yet, but when we are helping each other—helping all beings to live their best life—we shine.
So, we’re going to do our best to be here to help you through this immeasurably difficult time of uncertainty and worry, loss and grief.
We’ll be here to affirm for ourselves how good it feels-how fully alive we are—when we’re helping others.
And we’ll be here to say: Resist the tyranny of corporate dominance, resist hopelessness in the face of powers that seem too large to conquer, resist complacency when it threatens to steal your vitality, your passion, your inventiveness.
Fight back.
Resist every day.
*Endless thanks to Denise for her inspiring, wise words and images