Writing in my journal from Brighton, UK, a grand version of Coney Island. The ocean in the window, choir groggily awake now. Last night in Hastings we had an ecstatic chxrch show with the Stop Shopping Choir; got the Standing O… but we didn’t have an encore song ready.
Our message (my sermon) urges the UK audience to wonder about these little monuments that direct them everywhere, which they never think about and barely notice, I am speaking of the orange highway cones, with the iridescent priest’s collars…”traffic cones” as they call them in the UK. As a young man I collected them in my green van… I would steer close by the cone I was hunting and reach down and grab it around the neck, pull it thru the window and whip it over my shoulder into the back of the van where it would roll to a stop in front of hundreds of cones I had previously pulled from the on-ramps and highway shoulders…
I spent much of my 20’s driving around with hundreds of fluorescent cones in my van, with no Idea why, serving vague desire. Meanwhile my knowledge of the fundamentalist church of our time, Consumerism, was growing until finally I knew that my odd addication might serve a purpose.
What role do these highway fixtures have in our lives? The cones are set side by side to create an imaginary wall. There is no wall but consumers obey without thinking and are funneled from freeways toward the big box full of products, where with their credit cards they service our violent economy, that makes hurricanes and wars… By upsetting something as minor as the littlest traffic director, breaking its toy military formation, a
revolution might unfold.
Re-arrange the cones. Take the drivers the wrong way they drive unwittingly out of the big box store’s on-ramp down through a forest into a valley below. There the motorists are enticed by naked musicians in cone-costumes. They park, leave their
cars forever, dance off through to a new peaceful world.
Moral of the story: We don’t know what it will take to stop the climate catastrophe. We haven’t found it yet. Let’s look everywhere for a way to stop this great machine; there must be a weak link there somewhere. One approach: Pull out and re-direct some part of the machine that they assume they can never disobey, like a highway cone, like you and me…
much love
Billy