If we stay the course, including accepting death as a possibility at the end of the line, then you have exercised the most potent aspects of non-violence. The willingness to die for what you believe in is the best measure as to the power of the tools that you’re using to strike a blow for freedom.
Harry Belafonte on, among other things, the importance of maintaining a policy of non-violence and the willingness to make the ultimate sacrifice in the struggle for social change.
Source YouTube
Matt Taibbi’s thoughts on the nature of Occupy Wall Street:
I’m beginning to see another angle. Occupy Wall Street was always about something much bigger than a movement against big banks and modern finance. It’s about providing a forum for people to show how tired they are, not just of Wall Street, but everything. This is a visceral, impassioned, deep-seated rejection of the entire direction of our society, a refusal to take even one more step forward into the shallow, commercial abyss of phoniness, short-term calculation, withered idealism and intellectual bankruptcy that American mass society has become. If there is such a thing as going on strike from one’s own culture, this is it. And by being so broad in scope and so elemental in its motivation, it’s flown over the heads of many on both the right and the left.
What both sides missed is that OWS is tired of all of this. They don’t care what we think they’re about, or should be about. They just want something different.
We’re all born wanting the freedom to imagine a better and more beautiful future. But modern America has become a place so drearily confining and predictable that it chokes the life out of that built-in desire. Everything from our pop culture to our economy to our politics feels oppressive and unresponsive. We see 10 million commercials a day, and every day is the same life-killing chase for money, money and more money; the only thing that changes from minute to minute is that every tick of the clock brings with it another space-age vendor dreaming up some new way to try to sell you something or reach into your pocket. The relentless sameness of the two-party political system is beginning to feel like a Jacob’s Ladder nightmare with no end; we’re entering another turn on the four-year merry-go-round, and the thought of having to try to get excited about yet another minor quadrennial shift in the direction of one or the other pole of alienating, corporate full-of-shitness is enough to make anyone want to smash his own hand flat with a hammer.
If you think of it this way, Occupy Wall Street takes on another meaning. There’s no better symbol of the gloom and psychological repression of modern America than the banking system, a huge, heartless machine that attaches itself to you at an early age, and from which there is no escape. You fail to receive a few past-due notices about a $19 payment you missed on that TV you bought at Circuit City, and next thing you know, a collector has filed a judgment against you for $3,000 in fees and interest. Or maybe you wake up one morning and your car is gone, legally repossessed by Vulture Inc., the debt-buying firm that bought your loan on the Internet from Chase for two cents on the dollar. This is why people hate Wall Street. They hate it because the banks have made life for ordinary people a vicious tightrope act; you slip anywhere along the way, it’s 10,000 feet down into a vat of razor blades that you can never climb out of.
That, to me, is what Occupy Wall Street is addressing. We want something different: a different life, with different values, or at least a chance at different values.
Source Rolling Stone
At the top of the city
in a glass-chromed room
an attorney assures the board of directors
that the corporation is the person
against which any or all action may be taken,
not against each and every director joint or several.
The multi-headed person exhales dry-iced victory
as counsel backs out the door
descending floor after floor
to wait for a cab in the cold.
Nearby, a breathing bundle of rags
sits on a grate of steam
and waits, just waits,
wondering where warmth went.
—Ruth Knight, “Persons”
As she often does, Naomi Klein cuts to the core of an essential issue. The Occupy protests comprise people of many races, religious affiliations, socioeconomic statuses, and nationalities. The protestors have a variety of grievances they would like addressed, but I believe, as does Ms. Klein, that the fundamental issue is one of values.
Most of the critical aspects of our lives have been commodified. Nothing is sacred and everything is for sale. Science, education, healthcare, war, and many other areas historically associated with either lofty ideals or primal needs have been co-opted by the ethos of big business.
At the same time, human beings have been marginalized and dehumanized, while, ironically, inhuman entities have been aggrandized and granted person-hood. The world is upside down and many are now prepared to begin addressing the issues required to restore balance to our lives.
Our values are the foundation of our society. They define the types of citizens we produce and shape the characteristics of the systems that ultimately uphold and regulate our civilization. Corruption of our values will necessarily result in the development of corrupt systems. This is the fundamental issue that lies at the heart of our discontent.
Change will require us to ask ourselves difficult questions. Who are we? What do we truly care about? What kind of world do we want to see for ourselves and our children? It’s not too late for real change to occur, but it will require patience, tolerance, open-mindedness and the will to sacrifice.
You’re here because you know something. What you know, you can’t explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.
- Lawrence and Andrew Wachowski
For many young people, traditional sources of security and stability have been swept away. Broken homes, pedophilic clergymen, inadequate educations and mercenary government representatives have helped remove the ballast from modern life. In response, Generation X and their successors have turned to each other for commiseration and support.
They know the truth. The confluence of myriad forces has engendered the creation of a new type of citizen, one that is acutely aware of what they are and the nature of the world they inhabit.
They realize that the current system is fatally flawed. They do not want to change it. They do not want to reform it. They want to dismantle it. Continue reading
“Let’s treat this beautiful movement as if it is the most important thing in the world. Because it is. It really is.”
We all know, or at least sense, that the world is upside down: we act as if there is no end to what is actually finite—fossil fuels and the atmospheric space to absorb their emissions. And we act as if there are strict and immovable limits to what is actually bountiful—the financial resources to build the kind of society we need.
The task of our time is to turn this around: to challenge this false scarcity. To insist that we can afford to build a decent, inclusive society—while at the same time, respect the real limits to what the Earth can take.
What climate change means is that we have to do this on a deadline. This time our movement cannot get distracted, divided, burned out or swept away by events. This time we have to succeed. And I’m not talking about regulating the banks and increasing taxes on the rich, though that’s important.
I am talking about changing the underlying values that govern our society. That is hard to fit into a single media-friendly demand, and it’s also hard to figure out how to do it. But it is no less urgent for being difficult.
That is what I see happening in this square. In the way you are feeding each other, keeping each other warm, sharing information freely and providing health care, meditation classes and empowerment training. My favorite sign here says, “I care about you.” In a culture that trains people to avoid each other’s gaze, to say, “Let them die,” that is a deeply radical statement.
Source Naomi Klein
William Deresiewicz expounds on the current state of higher education:
The policy may be extreme, but the feeling is universal. Most professors I know are willing to talk with students about pursuing a PhD, but their advice comes down to three words: don’t do it.
In the past three years, the market has been a bloodbath: often only a handful of jobs in a given field, sometimes fewer, and as always, hundreds of people competing for each one.
Instead of replacing retirees with new tenure-eligible hires, departments gradually shifted the teaching load to part-timers: adjuncts, postdocs, graduate students.
Less visible but equally important has been the advent and rapid expansion of full-time positions that are not tenure-eligible. No one talks about this transformation—the creation of yet another academic underclass. Continue reading
Can anybody tell me what’s wrong with this picture? Anybody? Anybody at all?
Across the L.A sprawl, D-FENS shares a series of darkly humorous interactions with thieving gang members, a pesky bum, a raging neo-Nazi and an unwilling shop owner — but it’s the scene with the smug fast food worker most people can relate to. The burger joint also provides a platform for him to express his woes about the dwindling quality of customer service and food preparation, but we know those things are a stand-in for his feelings about the decline of … everything.
Still relevant, still potent and still as frustrating as hell.
Source Cinematical
Do you want to know what power is? Real power? It’s not ending a life, it’s saving it. It’s looking in someone’s eyes, and seeing that spark of recognition. That instant, they realize something they’ll never forget… They owe you.
And all you have is scars.. Continue reading
Caveat: The phrase “they” is going to be used many times throughout this post. It is meant to serve as a placeholder, and can be substituted by any individual or group that fits the criteria described in the first few paragraphs. It is representative of a strategy, a set of behaviors that naturally extend from specific, core values that can be present from the most local, personal level, to the national and global levels. In all likelihood, you probably have someone that embodies these characteristics in your workplace, i.e., a painfully average individual that, while relatively poor in body and spirit, parrots the rhetoric of the rarefied elite that run the global economy, and hence, the world. Continue reading
I read this a few weeks ago and have been unable to forget about it. I’d like to think that anyone can be helped with the correct approach, but after ruminating on the controlled, deliberate prose of Mr. Zeller, I don’t think all the psychopharmaceuticals, CBT and genuine, human compassion would change the way he felt, would make things better. Perhaps as a culture, we need to redefine our mores on life, death and our ability to determine our own fate. It’s a very difficult read, so please proceed only if you don’t mind gazing into an abyss.
Source Gizmodo
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