Second: Where I live - and probably where you live -- metastasizing subdivisions are bringing cumulative impacts on the air, water, and wildlife, blithely ignored by developers and our local planning commission. And suggesting that the neighbors appeal bad planning decisions when they approach near their doorsteps is a tough row to hoe. Surely, they say, we have no say in the matter because we live more than 300 feet from the proposed subdivision. It's a rule, isn't it? Isn't that the way things are?

Third: In California, our last two aging nuclear power plants are fighting to continue going on their non-disposable nuclear waste-dumping way. Surely we will have no power if the plants are shut down, leaving us eating cold beans in the dark. Surely there's no way to avoid giving the utility what it wants to keep its aging physical plant going -- replacing defective generators, an operation with a projected cost of $800 million that would be the equivalent of throwing a new battery into a 1986 Chevy Impala on the assurance that nothing else will go wrong or need replacement for the next 20 years. Surely we must continue to go along with the established order of things, and the construction of new nuclear plants, because there is nothing else for it.

Fourth: Our local alternative weekly paper has reviewed the documentary "The Corporation," playing in town this week. We learn that the film is acerbic, scholarly and enlightening...but, surely, the reviewer sighs, "corporations are nestled deep and safe inside the American psyche.... If you already know about the sociopathic nature of corporations, why would you need to see this film? Maybe it's the 'Fast Food Nation' effect: Everyone read it but we all still eat McDonalds."

These four things are about the ways we learn to think about the way things are.

But, in fact, you do have a say in the matter if the planned development next door will wreck your life.

It is, in fact, the massive subsidies propping up the oil, coal, and nuclear industries and starving alternative energy development that create the impression of no choice and tell us we must cling to dinosaur power. If those funds went instead to R&D on wind, solar, and biomass energy production, in combination with energy efficiency programs and conservation, the allegedly irreplaceable power generated by aging nuke plants becomes eminently replaceable (see "A Million Solar Roofs by 2010," http://a4nr.org/articles/solarroofs) and the terrible threatened consequences of its loss blow away.

And if, after seeing "The Corporation," you want to go beyond "eh, whaddayagonnado?," ask the Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy (www.poclad.org) for a copy of their draft model legal brief challenging "the U.S. government's gift of constitutional powers to property organized as corporations." Learn about the 78 Pennsylvania townships that have banned factory farms. "When people live in a culture defined by corporate values," POCLAD notes, "we stop trusting our own eyes, ears, and feelings. Our minds become colonized;" whereas "valiant and persistent organizing has bettered the daily lives of millions, instilled confidence and self-respect, and transformed communities." POCLAD has begun a fight to determine "who may wield the Constitution against whom," a struggle for the assertion of rights that is likely to take at least as long as the one that began on the day Rosa Parks decided she was tired, her feet hurt, and she wasn't giving up her seat on the bus to a white man despite a massive system of laws and customs that all told her about the way things are.

Surely, it's funny when a soft drink commercial intercuts the famous "I am Spartacus" scene with a "which one of you lost this bottle of Pepsi?" gag. That scene was perhaps the greatest statement of collective action ever managed by a mass medium -- the brief victory of the spirit of a freed people -- but surely it's no big deal to recast that scene as a sales pitch, turning it into a lying contest among individuals competing with each other in their lust to consume the marketer's refreshing beverage. And it really is no big deal: The copywriters, embedded in the same culture as the rest of us, are just holding up the mirror they've been given. We recognize ourselves. We laugh. Because that's the way things are.

Dalton Trumbo, the original author of that scene before Pepsi's bright young ad men found a kicky new use for it, also wrote about the Spanish Civil War, the 1930's fight against fascism and for a free republic based on the ideal of community, a stand made by a few thousand individuals of conscience. Looking back on it from the depths of Joe McCarthy's America, Trumbo concluded in a long letter to a colleague:

"Barcelona fell, and you were not there, and I was not there, and perhaps if we had been, the city would have stood and the world would have been changed and better. But we were here, and here together we remain, and our city won't fall, and if it should, better that we lie buried in its ruins than be found absent a second time."

The lies we are told are not the truth we feel. By being alone and resigned and helpless -- cornered in the elevator with a CEO advancing, then spending the rest of your life trying to calibrate and get along, sedating your rage or letting it blast forth at the wrong targets -- certain interests are served.

They are the interests of The Way Things Are. There is a reason why we are taught to be alone, resigned and helpless. But we're not. Somewhere, we still know that.

Andrew Christie is an environmental activist in San Luis Obispo, CA