Cspan will never be the same. [inaudible conversations] all right. We want the earth and we want it now. Need a little humility here. We want the earth and we hope the earth wants us. Greetings, everyone. Im reverend billy from the church of stop shopping. [cheers and applause] aye written a book called the earth wants you. Im honored to launch this book here on our nations capitol, the festive swan of corruption. Amen. But in which i have so many friends. And we come back to this place again and again, dont we . With with our strongest fear est change alluyah. Somebody gives me a changealluyah. Come on now. Tonights story starts 2011. [cheers and applause] Liberty Square residents. There was a woman standing in a bench, it was the ultimate speakers corner, you could jump off and start your preaching at any moment, you know, that was part of the electricity. This lady jumped up on the stone bench, usually wall street workers have their brown back lunches and she stood up there and she said, our elders are speaking of this, that there will come a time very soon when the earth will need to cleans herself, to balance herself and she will rise up with great force and the the people rise up with her and they will live, she will rise up with grace first but if people dont rise up with her, then they will no longer be there. We will be gone. This is a prophecy from debra white given to us at tacoty park. First in additions people. I met her again at the climate talk in paris, preaching the same way right in front of the artic. Napoleon turned over in his grave, amen. That is, i believe, and the community that i represent, i wish the chior was with me right now. We all believe that this is a time when the earth is our teacher, the earth is our government. The earth is our culture and the earth is our economy. [cheers and applause] the earth is our revolutionary leader. Somebody give me hallellujah. [cheers and applause] [shouting] i believe that the earth is a living bin, how radical is that idea . The earth is a living thing. The earth is not just living, the earth has moods, has health problems, has strategic thinking, has relationships, the earth, the earth is communicating to us with her mother, tornadoes that give birth to 30 tornadoes that damn to daughters or sons plains. The earth is communicating to us, the tsunamis, the bones are turning under the earth as well, the extreme earth has tripled since 1980 and theres a reason for this. Its not just some sort of cold scientific reason, theres a living reason. She is communicating with us. Amen shes instructing us. Shes saying, get with it. She needs us in this room to be radical americans again. [cheers and applause] amen amen we have we have made tremendous guiding, risky, dangerous, Visionary Campaign of change, lib, civil rights, peace rights, womens rights, im talking gender rights, immigration rights, weve had many weve had leaders, friends that sacrificed the heroism, we are enjoying here in this amazing, here on 14th street, we are just we cant help it, we are taking for granted a level of freedom. We may have donald trump, we may have rudolph giuliani, we may have vladimir putin, weve got lots of people who wouldnt want us to be here, right, amen . But we are in the Langston Hughes room. We have people who have given their lives for our freedom and now the natural scientists are telling us that in 2100 or 2080, i keep reading the newspaper accounts, do you read the little stories that are on page 6, do you read them, theres some study that comes out its about oysters or whales or bacteria or its about polar bears, its always coming from the earth. The earth is speaking to us through the Natural Sciences who dont speak very well, carl segan is dead. They dont speak very well but they try to tell us what is going on, dont they . They do the best they can, and New York Times on page six some where, page eight. Its in the corner there. And for years those articles would float in the back of the newspaper and there would be a little phrase and it would be after 2100, we dont know what will happen. There was a suggestion that there was horizon awaiting us at 2100, anybody know what im talking about . The costal cities will be gone, the shapes of the continents will be different. The earthquakes and sun tsunamis everywhere. The deserts would be where there are jungles and uninhabitable and that civilization would be over in 2100. And then something changed, that to 2080, 65, 45. I just saw an amazing summary of a paper that was led by dr. James hanson in which 30foot seas were estimated for 2050. Any parents here today . Any parents here, any grandparents here . Amen. We are projecting the life span of our offspring, our loved one, we are wondering what will happen. We have always enjoyed science foiks fiction, but now we are living it. We dont know exactly how to do that do we . Here we are, what is this . This beautiful cabaret, here we are, you have an elvis impersonator. Whats going on here, we are in the room together. If we pull our camera into space and look back at this little room, we are just a space time moment, amen. We dont amount to a hill of beans. Here we are, its my birthday. All right. [cheers and applause] not so special, excuse me. Its just its just here we are and we are surrounded by an apocalypse and manifests as racism, it manifests as war, it manifests at computerized drones, it manifests as laws against marijuana and our desires, our imagination, our dreams. Its coming in at us in many different ways and basically we the progressive conscious, the stranded people out here, we dont exactly know what to do. We havent really knew what to do for many years. We have our heros but a lot of our heros died 30 or 40 years ago. We dont quite know what to do right now. We have to learn the language called earth. I would like to talk to you just a moment about the effort that a small group of people that im a part of we are in from all over the world, i would like to talk about the kind of life we are living, amen. We dress up like extinct animals and sing in a band and we get arrested and go to jail and try to sweep and then we come home and we get some real sleep and then we get up and we dress like extinct animals and we get out of the subway to another bank where we meet and hand out investment information. We meet the stop shopping singers there and we are put in handcuffs, we are put in jail, maybe just a few hours but maybe two days and three days and we face the judge and we promise one or the other and we go home and ready to go banking, we shower and we start investment, can you believe ubs is bankrolling that coal and more extinction reports and we dress like another threatened kind of life and we sing in bank lobbies and parking lots and drive through police rooms and we preach inside a circle of faces who loathe us or maybe just start tickling or they are stunned with thought and we hand information on earth crime sponsored by their money and we stay too long and we get handcuffed and we go to jail or maybe we just get a warning in which case we do more research after returning home and we love our loved once, we do laundry and ignore the bills and then we are exhausted and we fall asleep and we dream, we dream a rain forest, we dream of prairies, we dream of coral reefs and we dream of Alpine Meadows and then we wake up and we dress up like extinct animals and we get on the subway and meet the other stop shopping singers and then, what, this got giant gold, orange paper mache on their heads. We are going to Jpmorgan Chase and we are going to sing in the lobby and we are going to interrupt all the wells management conversation thats going on because we are distinct animals today, we are extinct, we are extinct. In Jpmorgan Chase. [cheers and applause] a preacher always has his sweat flag. [applause] to signify that we are working so damn hard to save your souls, children. All this hard work and we hope that as the plait comes by you, you contribute generously. We are working hard in our church. Im sorry, we have some people from West Virginia today. I didnt mean to cast disbursements on anybody, amen. Im not proud to be politically incorrect, amen. It just happens because im such a thug. Will we survive the the choir. [singing] will we feel the hell in this shopping list. Neighbors fade into the super mall. The oceans rise but i i must buy it all. [singing] whats happening . Im in a its a shopacolipse. Im depressed. I got the blues. Im feeling down because why, because i shop too much but thats not really the problem. [laughter] its that damn convenient amen. [cheers and applause] watch out for convenience, children. Watch out for convenience. Convenience is the devils little helper. Be careful. Be careful. I think some of the people here today are just i have a feeling youre not careful enough. I think some of you you might have thought you were ethically shopping. You might have thought you were carbon trading, dont you know thats bull shit . Amen. [cheers and applause] Ethical Shopping, children, is a lie. It doesnt would recollect. It never worked, the earth replies to Ethical Shopping with 200mile an hour winds. [cheers and applause] amen. Amen, brother. [laughter] no more shopping. All right. This chapter we are reading from a book which is called the earth wants you. Yes you recognize that that the earth wants you . Yes im stealing a phrase and adjusting it to my own advantage from the world war i recruiting poster, uncle sam pointing at you, a really mean white man that is pointing his fenger and wants you to go to world war i and die. Amen. Let me tell you what happened to the boy that is survived, they came home to shopping, some academics claim that is when Consumer Society began. They came back and they discovered lots of advertisements in which middleclass looking people surrounded by appliances and clean, you know, underwear, they they were doing things in advertisements in which their arm puts were raised up and exposed, it was the beginning of the idea that your body stinks. Mustard gas and guns and what have you, whats happening, you stink. [laughter] amen. Thats consumerism. Anybody who has seen those advertisements during the super bowl when be all you can be is a video game, you know what im talking about. Consumerism and militarism has become the same thing. Peacealluyah. [applause] in the church of stop shopping we are concerned with story telling, we are concerned with naming how language is being used to create environments where we find our meaning. I would like to read to you now what is the name of this storm. Our Little Family lives near the Atlantic Ocean in brooklyn. Im writing in early 2013 about three months after hurricane sandy, now, another big storm is spinning out of the sea and everybody is pretty jumpy. I shoveled snow for an hour this afternoon feeling the wind begin with a slow growling. And then i climbed the steps to our apartment where my partner and almost three years old lina have come back early from the city, checking food provisions and flashlights, but is tonights storm all that dangerous . We bring up satellite pictures of this storm and, yes, it looks like a hurricane. It looks like a white circular saw the size of new england. Cutting the coast. It has that eye, that eye looking at us from the center. There is a difference with this new winter storm, the National Weather was surprised that it had lost the naming rights by some mysterious sleight of hands to the Weather Channel with it ads, graphics, meteorologists, the Weather Channels anchor that we are watching tonight hes a blond, smiles at us from the computer screen with the satellite shot of the hurricane over her shoulder like shes taking a selfie with a 10,000 hiroshima storm and why should she give any particular regard to this storm anyway, her bosses named it nemo. Nemo after the clown fish, im exciting that memory in the people who have seen the movie. Theyre swimming around, oh, yeah, hallellujah. That 3d block buster from pixar was the animation was created by the studio that was founded by steve jobs and marketed by Mickey Mickey mouse. Mickey mouse is the antichrist. [cheers and applause] whathappened . [laughter] we are in the Langston Hughes room. I love this place. I love this place. [cheers and applause] after finding nemo grossed almost a billion dollars worldwide, most families with children were left with a vivid memory of dazzling coral reefs, shark chases, and kidnappings by goofy scuba diverring, divers, voice of Albert Brooks wins fish dory voiced by ellen degenerous. This movie and with hail and dooms of snow reports coming in from massachusetts, houses and cars and people disappearing under the whiteout. I go down and shovel once more by the light of the lamp, but then i give up, i peer into the flurries thinking, hmm, do you realize that youve been named after a billion dollar clown fish . [laughter] you know, theres something in the grand violence of a really big storm. I get the feeling this storm was talking to me like, nemo. And then i went over to what i call Climate Change mind. Theres something fishy about the storm, the strange thunder is the order of have vanished fisheries and cause striped bass into the accelerating darkness. Their heads are full of nemo. The fish are dying. But the memory we have of the fish, our memories are becoming commodified. Im one of those people that these are much deadlier because of us. To you, yes . Yes yes [applause]. Of course. Of course. Your pauses like of course, of course, of course. But i suspect that i am one of the progressive type was still at heart someone a skeptic i must be, what i done for this win, what if i if i done for this storm, this preached coral from the caribbean is drumming the side of my house. I keep my guilt and abstract. It is so easy to believe the Climate Science but then go about our digitized day with extreme weather and consumer culture, have in their desperate fight to the death as if it is all some sort of battle that is separate from us. Its not separate at all, is it. No. It is in our bodies. This song and dance fishes swimming in our eyes and ears, it it is telling focus group tested groups on screens in the palms of her hands. I am getting spooked by this ghoulish soundtrack of the storm. I think i better stop standing here with my shovel, maybe i better go inside finally, later that night i asked the question, who owns the Weather Channel anyway . Who owns that thing . Those happy jabbering people with the apocalypse behind them. Good guess. Comcast. The largest media conglomerate in the world does comcast on cspan . No, okay. Woo hoo. All right. Weve dodged a bullet people. Comcast, the largest media conglomerate of the world, owner of mbc, timeworn, theme parks, much of the highspeed internet among the top lobbyist in washington, washington, you mean k street and Net Neutrality in one of the biggest investors in comcast is capital, mitt romney,. I am your golden retriever on the cage in the roof of your car. The 40 Million People in the storms path have had nemo our National Geographic shark porn for the macho australian guy who got killed by the stingray, what has your should become to us . What we think of when we think of the ocean . When we dont have a super storm hitting us from the ocean what are we thinking . The giver of life. Of the giver of life, thank you. This person right here your soul has been saved. The ocean was the media for millions of years. For our ancestors, can we ever get back to the thrilling drama that the ocean really is . If we are capable of outmaneuvering pixar and disney, comcast and nbc, and escape into that beautiful storm of c like, we would find that evolution of 500 million years of cathedral of effervescence interdependency, amen. And how did that become a vast crime scene . What is really happening to the ocean really comes to we will be in a state of shock. We will have to, right now respond to an emergency. Well have to redefine what being alive is. Or what being a human being is. We will know that well have to become radicals again. Radicals again. Ocean the lou yeah. She thinks he hears voices and the grambling thunder and she becomes afraid. Shipping comes over to pop and she asked me, what is the storm saying to us . Why is this storm angry . Have to take a moment you know because i want to know the answer for myself to. Well rita, the storm has been coming here for a long time and we dont even know where it started its coming from way past coney island and we, we forgot about it and we were busy, we were watching movies and now she is here and she is going from town to town and city to city and she is shouting out her name so we should listen. [applause]. [inaudible] the reading would be good to change. [laughter] maybe a little real maybe, maybe a little jesus love . Somebody youre going to buy me a drink . No, hallelujah. Its a miracle people. When we start accepting that the earth is a living thing, that the earth is talking to us, we take on the whole world in the group of people in my community, where from all over the world, and wherever we are from we have singers from south asia, we have singers from africa and south america, wherever we are from, we have Indigenous People where we are from. And we compared notes of course the United States has a particular history of slaughtering and enslaving in the earth culture people, the First Nations people are the people who never stop believing that the earth is talking to us and the earth is speaking to us and the earth is our economy. They never strayed from that idea. We, however 300 years ago we got a divorce from the earth. Then he see there is a series of steps, the industrial revolution, the european colonizing empires, and then all the way up to the new, your latest app. Did i created an awkward silence with the phrase your latest app . Some of you got here and thought your latest app. Im not afraid of gilts. I was raised in holland michigan, and i know all about guilt. In the church, we we are in recovery from fundamentalism. [applause]. So we have people recovering from hinduism, islam, we got your catholics