Hello friend. My name is Ricky Herbert and I’m running as a write-in candidate for U.S. House of Representatives in District 12 of Michigan.
The Times are calling, America.
If we don’t run we empower the fascist sharks to bite our legs off. So here we are, darlings. The American people have moved into the 21st century. American politics have not.
It’s time for over-the-top realness to wake the conscience of our nation. Polished, provocative ideas offered as necessary seduction.
This is a call to unify the tribes. Love is the uniform of our revolution. It’s time to strain the anger from our story, time to drain the disappointment.
We beat back fascism with a takeover of public space by ecstatic yes. Grief into Gasoline. Endless micro dispersions of wild yes to disband the status quo of no. Nonviolent political theatre. Bucketloads of peacefully acting up. Guerilla rebellion that invades all the space. The schools and churches and produce aisles of your local grocer.
It’s time to grind non-reality to a halt.
events
RSVP ClosedSat, Oct 10Oct 10, 2020, 8:00 PM – 9:48 PMhttps://fb.me/e/3p8KA78xg
RSVP ClosedFri, Oct 09Oct 09, 2020, 8:00 PM – 9:48 PMhttps://fb.me/e/3p8KA78xg
RSVP ClosedThu, Oct 08Oct 08, 2020, 8:00 PM – 9:48 PM EDThttps://fb.me/e/3p8KA78xg
27 EPISODES IN 27 DAYS, A CAMPAIGN FOR PUBLIC OFFICE
I'M RUNNING
TLDR;
To establish the Freedom to Express Dividend—a UBI to live your Why.
To launch Flitters—a government-funded gig network.
To guarantee means of production for all and outgrow the survival economy.
To end poverty by efficiently managing our abundant resources:
Inalienable Birthright 2.0.
To open space to collectively heal racialized trauma.
To realize reparations via means of production.
To end prisons and start creation-based rehab.
To end the war on drugs.
To materialize proportional representation.
To get people of color and other minorities into power.
To open an Express Your Mess University in District 12.
To upgrade public schools to model Montessori.
To make yoga, meditation & exercise classes freely available to all.
To open public facilities hosting free learn-by-doing apprenticeships.
To form the Department of Peace & Creation.
To get Big Corporate to pay for passports & first trips abroad for all.
To stop the pillage of our planet by legislating 100% sustainability by 2027.
To subsidize art & media emphasizing peace instead of machoism.
To open Now Studios—an expansive, community-owned commons.
To establish a new digital currency for discretionary goods.
To support new, wildly fabulous media that bridges the divides.
To get America off dirty coal and bloody meat.
To get hamburgers & pop out of hospitals.
To take down the Industrial Medical Complex.
To replace popping pills with holistic healing.
YOU IN?
work
We're not in this world to work.
We're here to connect with the natural world—to love, to create.
All our effort could reflect that belief.
Let's redefine our why for work.
Friends, for years I worked tirelessly for The System. My first job after graduating from The University of Michigan in 2006 was inner-city high school teacher in New York. It was there that the white curtain was ripped from my face.
The System has planted landmines that don’t detonate when certain white people walk over them.
I taught for two years, but in 2008 something in me died. That was the year everything stopped. The year I made the decision to opt out for good.
I got rid of everything and began again.
Have you ever resigned from a life that stopped making sense?
WHAT IS
WHAT COULD BE
9 TO 5
The System is designed to keep the majority poor. Poor is a fiscal reality and also Poor is a state of mind. Debt-mind keeps us running. Keeps us punching the time clock. Keeps us swallowing the fuckery of bad bosses and bad politicians and bad landlords and bad police.
Working away a lifetime to keep alive is tremendously bad medicine. Working to “survive” isn't noble, it's servitude to the rich. Trickle down economics has been a slow piddle on our head. Bills pile, to-do lists grow, everyone running faster, so little satisfaction.
50% of Americans make the same they made in 1970, when the average rent was $1,400, pills weren’t $5K a pop, and our kids didn’t need thousand-dollar smart phones to fit in.
Jeff Bezos made $15 billion yesterday. How much of that did you get? False belief in empty prophets won’t bring us profit. Until we know our why, we'll lust after the same ruthless power that hoards trillions offshore while millions remain homeless.
FLIT LIFE
Work is a treadmill and we can unplug the power.
The future is full of exited assembly lines. Folks setting down the human hamster wheel for good. We can mourn the notion of a free market and move on.
Hate your job? Quit. And the government's got you. Not so you can lay around collecting free money. So you can explore. So you can offer what you are, doing what you like—& get paid for it. Let's see what humans do without the obsessive need to work.
I'm running to launch a guaranteed Freedom to Express Dividend—A UBI to Live Your Why.
We can guarantee a ground floor from which all Americans can proudly walk.
IMAGINE
Your government is offering you a Freedom to Express Dividend
—$2,160 every month—
a UBI to Live Your Why.
What would you do if you didn't have to worry about survival?
What would you do if you knew that the government had your back?
I'M RUNNING
To establish the Freedom to Express Dividend.
To launch Flitters—a government-funded gig network.
To guarantee means of production for all and outgrow the survival economy.
To end poverty by efficiently managing our abundant resources:
Inalienable Birthright 2.0.
YOU IN?
RACE
Some people don't believe White Supremacy is a thing.
Much of my family does not believe white supremacy is a thing. Wrestling with this DNA, with the chromosomes inside my body, with the decades of conditioning and deep sleep—setting down the false narrative—estranged me from those I love. Growing up in an all-white, poor neighborhood one town over from Flint was a wild disorientation.
WHAT IS
WHAT COULD BE
INJUSTICE
A brief history of how we got here:
Thrusted Whiteness.
(curtain.)
1 in 3 African American men will find themselves in prison. We spend $80 billion locking up 10 million people. Half of all inmates are in for non-violent drug charges, meanwhile billions of dollars flow into the coffers of the Prison Industrial Complex and the White Cannabis Elite.
You can still legally enslave prisoners in America. Prisons are how the white man gets his slaves back. From our Sacred Constitution: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.”
The constitution doesn't mention women and had to add people of color. The entire narrative is all about the Straight White Man. Always has been. The question is, when will enough be enough?
HEALING
Repair begins with acknowledgement.
It's time...
To abolish for-profit prisons.
To release all inmates in on non-violent drug charges.
To upgrade the concept of rotting in prison for creative opportunity to find our Why.
To decriminalize all drugs and legalize marijuana.
It's time...
For reparations.
For proportional representation.
For more people of color in positions of power.
I'm running to establish the Department of Creation, Consciousness, Imagination, Yes, Mindfulness, and Movement.
Empathy takes comprehension. It's time we rally a love army without arms and walk into the dark. Frightening as hell, but we can refuse to fight and offer our picnic instead.
IMAGINE
You are a thirteen year old African American boy living in Flint. It’s cold so your hands are in your pocket. You’re sitting waiting for the bus because your mom doesn’t have a car. The police drive up and tell you to show them your hands and then they tell you to put those hands against the car...
This is thirty seconds of your life.
What are your ambitions?
What do you think your future holds?
I'M RUNNING
To open space to collectively heal racialized trauma.
To realize reparations via means of production.
To end prisons & start creation-based rehab.
To end the war on drugs & federally legalize marijuana.
To materialize proportional representation.
To get people of color & other minorities into power.
YOU IN?
EDUCATION
Frankly, being a high school teacher in the inner-city of NYC fucked me up.
(If the word fuck offends you, how do you feel about the billion people pooping outside, or the 1 in 6 children living in a war zone, or the 130 people that kill themselves every day? — It's time for over-the-top realness.)
Working in our education system undermined my belief in justice.
The education system is so broken that working for it as is actively invites our children into a burning house.
WHAT IS
WHAT COULD BE
AUTOMATON
Drilling linear minutia into people creates foot soldiers not free scholars.
Our education system is an evaluation of student's ability to memorize society's dominant truth. But Knowledge isn't pre-chewed. Obey is bad advice.
It is a twisted grooming this one-size-fits-all programming, the ritualistic hazing, setting kids up to feed into a singular system that can't have too many clever points of view. School is linear. Right or wrong. Pass or fail. Graduate or fall through.
We're letting our children believe they are broken because their minds don't work certain ways. Untold genius lies dormant under textbooks and powerpoint. But questioning The System is a nuisance to status quo. And so it is conditioned out of us from the start.
Billions live broke and broken—purposely left behind. It’s baked into the design. Navigating the tightrope treachery of Poverty Education is a devastation. But you don’t know until you know. And then you can’t forget.
Some doors only swing one way.
INDIVIDUAL
Express Your Mess University is a lifestyle.
Education as a debt-free barter.
A fully-immersive, choose-your-own-adventure space that redefines what it means to be educated. No teaching, no preaching, no pre-chewed food. Instead, perpetual first-hand account. Learning-by-doing-by-being. Flamboyantly hands on.
EYMU is One glorious complex. With a cafe and art gallery and theatre. Library, gym, classrooms, and garden. With space to contemplate, meditate and do yoga. With great halls, filled with sunlight.
EYMU is a high-vibes, multi-sensory space that is compulsively immersive. A chance to chase your curious. Built to your specification. Who are you? What did you come to earth for? We are briefly human, for the sweetness of it, to taste the love and loss of a mortal form. To experience the sun on our cheek. Not to follow rules or punch a time clock.
IMAGINE
Montessori schools go public.
You are in control of your own education plan.
You come up with your own syllabus, with support when you want it.
You explore and experiment as your passions and interests dictate.
What would you explore if you were given free time, resources, and support to explore your own curiosities?
I'M RUNNING
To open an Express Your Mess University in District 12.
To upgrade public schools to model Montessori.
To make yoga, meditation & exercise classes freely available to all.
To open public facilities hosting free learn-by-doing apprenticeships.
YOU IN?
PEACE
We fear The Other.
He is muslim. Looking straight ahead. Focusing on something with all his narrowed intent. Clicking this gadget in his hand and counting.
We just landed in Berlin, Germany and I’m exhausted hauling a massive backpack and my mind just goes places.
We’re on a subway train on zero sleep trying to find my host and this very stoic Muslim man is counting his prayers, but how am I supposed to know? America prepares you to fear. 80% of our coverage on Muslims is negative.
I am so worked up thinking he’s going to blow us up that I almost pass out. I make my husband Bubbles get off the train with me. When I tell him why, he can’t believe it. I know he’s hurt. He is Lebanese. Grew up Muslim.
For a week I replay the ignorance over in my head. My soft xenophobia. The bigotry I’ve worked so hard to root out.
WHAT IS
WHAT COULD BE
DOMINATION
1 in 6 kids live in a war zone.
Must peace really carry a gun?
There is no military solution for our planet. It is a fallacy of the phallus. A joke played by machismo.
This perpetual, ineffective practice of toppling dictators in the name of death corporations is asinine endeavor. The scars deepen and the core conflicts go unaddressed. War begets war. Peace begets peace. War will never stop war for long. History may claim victors, but it's a temporary fool's gold.
Every hour of every day America spends over $10 million on war. 64% of all discretionary funding goes to war. A trillion dollars a year—a million million. (Only 15 countries on the planet even have a trillion dollar GDP.)
And yet we dedicate just one billion bucks to peace.
That's 1,000 times more money to kill than to care.
What kind of enemies have we made for ourselves?
We have not had a single day of peace in my lifetime.
Not one day.
CREATION
set down your muskets
& save all your men
—wars shall be won
with paint, perspective and pen
America, we have been Perpetually Entangled in hostile war for 227 out of the 244 years since our founding. No nation believes we’re honestly a people of peace. So now we must show them. With every ounce of what we are, America, we must show them.
How?
-
We stop saying war is inevitable.
-
Passports and first trips abroad for all, paid for by Big Corporations. (We fear Over There so we go Over There.)
-
We get off our oil dependence by Going Green.
-
We cease meddling and tend to our own healing.
-
We validate their God.
-
Creators run for office.
How?
The Department of Peace & Creation.
IMAGINE
A person is walking towards you, someone who you have conflict with in your life. As they get closer, notice the sensations in your body—your hands, your stomach, your neck, your back, your legs. Now imagine their face scrunched up in disapproval, grimacing in dissatisfaction at something you just said or did.
Now imagine another person walking towards you. Someone you have a close and affectionate bond with. Again notice the sensations in your body. Now imagine them smiling approvingly, lovingly. You can almost see them emanating light they're so glad to see you.
How did your body respond to both situations?
I'M RUNNING
To form the Department of Peace & Creation.
To get Big Corporate to pay for passports & first trips abroad for all.
To stop the pillage of our planet by legislating 100% sustainability by 2027.
To subsidize art & media emphasizing peace instead of machoism.
YOU IN?
PROSPERITY
Is your best life a fight?
Transmute the wounds. Easiness is right. A casual seduction. The unbearably bearable beauty of being. Earth is hurtling across a flowing universe of plenty or lodged in cosmic drought, you get to decide. Design your world. Turn on; sing the secret songs that soothe your DNA.
I’m in the vortex! Leaning into the vibrational center of the room. Everything is coming in yes. Every morning I wake with the same audible ‘mmhm, yes!’ so the universe knows I’m into it.
Empty pockets mean nothing—
I am a magnet attracting, Now provides. Run your ear counter to what is said, old sport. What’s hiding in daylight? The good life is about capacity to receive the bounty. Like you deserve the oxygen. Because you do, Ricky. You belong. You’re enough. You deserve it. We all do — free-flowing golden nectar — Radical Conscious Ecstasy For All! It’s in our sacred contract.
WHAT IS
WHAT COULD BE
SURVIVAL
Capitalism is a tattered romance.
The richest three men in America own more wealth than the poorest 3.5 billion people on the planet.
In two hours, the CEO of McDonald's makes more than what the full-time, hamburger-flipping grandma makes all year.
Capitalism is pimping us out—how valuable is your time, commodified body?
EXPRESSION
Imagine the entire planet as shared public domain.
Space that can’t be bought or sold or bartered for a dollar.
Space that is all of ours and belongs to none.
The future is about minimizing private property and maximizing exceptionally fabulous, community-meet-commodity shared public terrain. Co-owned from the start. We all ought have birthright shares in the game.
I’m running to open Now Studios, a publicly-owned, pick-your-price global commons in every town & city in America.
IMAGINE
Imagine a publicly owned palace where you can indulge a $5 salad that was made with fresh vegetables grown by the community on the roof. 100% of your salad money goes right back into the public ecosystem to fund the space. You head up to the sixth floor to eat and are suddenly overcome with the smell of daisies because a dozen kids from the local school just planted 3,000 flowers donated by RuPaul.
What you think?
Write the world a poem-reply, darling?
I'M RUNNING
To open Now Studios—an expansive, community-owned commons.
To establish a new digital currency for discretionary goods.
YOU IN?
MEDIA
Like so many others, I grew up in front of the TV.
What a babysitter Scooby Doo can be. As a teen, I loved Mama’s Family and Jeopardy. I remember the ecstasy of dial up days and AOL. No one could have told me that I was being programmed. That I was being stripped of my ability to think and create. That all came much later.
WHAT IS
WHAT COULD BE
ALT
REALITY
Can you taste it? A general fuzz over everything? Conversations saying nothing, normalized by daily repetition. Airwaves flooded with duplicity and fabrication. Truth as a show of whoever plays on emotions the loudest. Ratings above all else.
Diving deep is too massive a trudge so the same dozen questions are asked on repeat. Bald-faced braggadocio anchoring our society of ghettos and glut.
PROVOCATIVE
PBS
Bless PBS but so few watch. It’s time we inject $100 million into a provocative public forum.
We need canopies of yes — generous experience versus jabbing inquisition. Laughter, intimacy, connection — then policy talk.
American society is starved for elevated, real-time creative conversations aimed at getting All The Other in the room to dig each other’s groove. Not pundits barking at us, not preachers and politicians feeding us the next line. Not our personalized vacuum of social media.
Enough caring about politically correct. This is about rapid evolution. Making waking irrefutable and sexy. Radical free speech is best employed by minds that work. Minds that thrive in the intersection, in the ligaments of difference, where there is no choice but to make room. Minds that maintain the expanded chest of a poet in this age of soundbite & decline.
Creatures that live in the mythical margins generate the converging conversation. Magical folks woke enough to host radical dialogue between disparate people.
I’m running for hip, inspired stimulation. For public forum that is gloves-off and forthcoming. Jammed full of creativity and drama.
IMAGINE
Three fabulous drag queens cavorting the Capitol, hosting an unthinkably exquisite talkshow called GET MARGINALIZED — cornering Mitch McConnell with an ultimatum, “Lipstick or legislation, Senator.”
Hello? Are you with me?
I'M RUNNING
To support new, wildly fabulous media that bridges the divides.
YOU IN?
CLIMATE
I grew up eating meat. I loved eating meat.
But part of the consciousness journey means reckoning with all of it. So five years ago I stopped eating meat. And one year ago I went totally vegan. I have no regrets.
WHAT IS
WHAT COULD BE
OVERCONSUMPTION
The average American will consume 222.2 pounds of meat this year. The lack of respect for animal life to eat this much meat is a testament to our indifference towards the grand-scale carnage across the planet.
The manufacture of one single hamburger is the equivalent to a 3.75 hour shower, 660 gallons of water, and 281 flushes of the toilet. A meat eater requires 20X more land to grow their food that will eventually become toilet chomp. Half of all crops on earth are corn and soy fed to animals raised for meat.
Replacing just ¼ of red meat consumption is the equivalent of buying everything 100% local.
TREADING LIGHTLY
100% renewable is obvious. Energy with zero emissions is obvious. Greenhouse gas at net zero is obvious. A carbon-neutral footprint is obvious. Energy-efficient grids are obvious.
Earth is a living organism. Our planet needs health just as her inhabitants do. Do you tell your heart to beat? Your lungs to fill? No. The universe provides for us. We owe earth some reciprocation.
HEALTHCARE
Mom is having a triple bypass on her artery blockages from too much red meat and sugar.
I go to the cafeteria while she is under the knife to get served hamburgers and coca cola. The loop pays itself. My mom is on a dozen pills, six of them for her heart. Six pills, one heart. What’s the kickback on all that racket, doc?
“Does it make rational sense?” I ask.
“It’s a standard practice of the industry,” says she.
“But does it make sense. Is the logic sound?”
“It’s a standard practice of the industry,” says she.
WHAT IS
WHAT COULD BE
POP A 911
Over 2,000 anti-depressant prescriptions are written every year for infants under the age of one.
1 in 15 of us will commit suicide. 45,000 Americans kill themselves every year. Hello, is anybody out there?
Big Pharma are the hottest dope dealers in town. Legal drug lords sucking our vitality, skipping off with our cash. Happily they murder. Prescribed opioids killed 72,000 Americans last year. Meanwhile weed kills no one and is illegal.
M4A
If you’re a heroin addict getting narcan three times a month because you overdose, guess what? You’re going to art therapy camp. You’ll work with your hands & swim in the bluest waters and make art. You’ll be in your body & work with shamans and eat vegan food and figure out what the heck you were born to be.
“I feel sick doc. I feel sad.”
“Take this.”
“What is it?”
“Don’t matter.”
“I can’t pronounce it.”
“Don’t matter.”
“OK.”
“Here’s your bill.”
IMAGINE
Sit comfortably and imagine a person walking towards you, someone who you have conflict with in your life. As they get closer, notice the sensations in your body—your hands, your stomach, your neck, your back, your legs. Now imagine their face scrunched up in disapproval, grimacing in dissatisfaction at something you just said or did.
What does that make you feel?
Now imagine another person walking towards you. Someone you have a close and affectionate bond with. Again notice the sensations in your body. Now imagine them smiling approvingly, lovingly. You can almost see them emanating light they're so glad to see you.
What does that make you feel?
I'M RUNNING
To get hamburgers & pop out of hospitals.
To take down the Industrial Medical Complex.
To replace popping pills with holistic healing.
YOU IN?