I woke up early and peered through the window. The sun was just rising. Not a cloud visible anywhere. Despite the glorious weather, I had a nagging feeling, embarrassed at the thought that the Amazon adventurer had done such a sloppy job of securing his tent. I slipped into my soggy clothes and crept out the door.
A breeze cooled the air, the sole remnant of the night's storm, as I picked my way back to the small field. When I got there, I froze. The tent had disappeared.
I stood gawking, wondering if somehow I had taken a wrong turn. The circle of yellow grass in a storm-flattened sea of green told me otherwise. Perhaps someone had already been there and dismantled it. But who? Why? My eyes were drawn to the shoreline far below. The storm had kicked up giant waves. A couple of ambitious surfers bobbed in the breakers. Then I spotted something in the fir trees near the edge of the cliff. A globe of nylon the color of my tent.
I hurried to it. Amazingly it was intact, on its side but still fastened to its frame. Cautiously I hauled it out and up the slope. Other than a slightly bent aluminum rod and a lot of mud, the tent seemed none the worse for its wanderings. I went about resetting it. This time much more carefully, giving extra attention to the rainfly flap. I returned to the house and found a bucket. Grateful not to encounter other participants, I filled it with water, lugged it to my tent, and scrubbed away the mud.
After finishing, I took a stroll along the clifftop path. The rain had brought out the scent of fir trees. I came to a wooden bench. The sun at my back, I sat down, faced the ocean, and thought about frailty. First, my own. I had ignored a key tenet of camping: Always anticipate the worst, expect a storm. As an EHM I had found it equally as easy to ignore the facts behind the myth of my job. I was creating an empire rather than making the world a saner, safer, more compassionate place, serving the corporatocracy instead of solving the problems of poverty.
Then I thought about the frailty of the Mitsubishi executive. Like so many others, he had refused to expect a storm, to anticipate that raping rainforests would ultimately destroy his children's futures. I guessed that he had convinced himself that some inventive mind would discover a way to postpone the long term suffering—solar and wind power, hybrid autos, hydroponics farming. He, like most of us, could find excuses.
Watching the waves crash against the beach in the distance below, I thought about how most of the people who attend Dream Change workshops or join our trips to the Amazon seem to take for granted that corporate executives are amoral at best, and evil at worst, and that the corporations are so powerful that no one can possibly turn them around. This too was a distortion, a type of denial that shifted responsibility away from us, the people; if corporations are omnipotent and their leaders evil, then there is nothing the rest of us can do other than accept their advertising and convince ourselves that we need more of their products.
RAN and its volunteers were changing the myth. They were telling corporate executives to use their inventive minds wisely and at the same time demonstrating to the rest of us that those executives are neither amoral nor evil, that corporations are not omnipotent, and that we are not impotent. They were telling us—executives and everyone else—that we must accept responsibility for our lives and the world we will pass on to our progeny.
When I rose from that bench, I felt inspired. The hot-tub meeting had opened my eyes to new possibilities. That day and the next I concentrated on talking with the attendees who worked for big corporations. As an EHM I had known such people—I had been one of them— and had taught workshops for them and had mixed with them at seminars and cocktail parties. The fact that they were at this conference indicated that they were open to alternative ways of doing business, but I had an even more specific set of questions in mind. I wanted to study them in a new way, to test a hypothesis. If the hypothesis was true, that most are decent people who desire to pass a better world on to their offspring and who welcome "interference" from organizations like RAN, then the implications were staggering.
I continued to test my hypothesis. In addition to talking with corporate managers, I also read studies conducted by others. I concluded that although among executives there are pathological personalities—people who have no regard for the life and wellbeing of anyone other than themselves—their numbers are small, probably reflecting those in society at large. Most executives care passionately about the consequences of their actions and about the world they will leave to their children and grandchildren. While it may be part of their corporate culture to fear the Randy Hayeses of the world, deep in their hearts, they welcome them. When an organization like RAN hangs banners on their headquarters, those executives give a very quiet sigh of relief.
Shortly after reaching these conclusions, I was hit with a number of personal crises: family illnesses and my father's death. I reduced my activities to the essentials—trips to the Amazon and workshops that had been scheduled far in advance—and set all other projects aside. Then 9/11 struck. After my visit to Ground Zero, I focused on writing Confessions and, following its success, on speaking tours. It was not until I took that 2006 flight to RAN's fund- raiser that I once again pondered the deeper implications of its campaigns against Mitsubishi and so many other bastions of the corporatocracy.
I realized during that flight that if we are to change a world ruled by the corporatocracy, we must change the corporations. The more I thought about this, the more convinced I became that Randy and his staff and their volunteers had hit on something huge. Those picket lines and banners were the contemporary equivalent of the crates of tea tossed into Boston Harbor. And you had to throw the tea before you could win at Saratoga.