The BA workers, the firefighters, the council workers, the post office workers, the NHS workers, the London Underground staff, the teachers, the lecturers, the students can more than match the French if they are resolute and imaginative, forging, with the wider social justice movement, potentially the greatest popular resistance ever. Look at the web; listen to the public’s support at fire stations. There is no other way now. Direct action. Civil disobedience. Unerring. Read Shelley and do it.
From August 11-17, the Zapatistas brought more than 1,500 people into their communities to attend the Escuelita Zapatista, the Little Zapatista School. According to a February comunicado by the EZLN, in a class entitled Liberty According to the Zapatistas: Autonomous Government I, “our compas from the Zapatista bases of support are going to share the little we have learned about the struggle for freedom, and the [the students] can see what is useful or not for their own struggles.”
In 21st century America, the few people who have experienced income gains are the executives and shareholders of firms who offshored their production for US markets, Wall Street which makes bets covered by the Federal Reserve, and the military-security complex which has been enriched by the neoconservatives’ wars.
Every other American has lost.
There’s an animal liberation meme making the rounds in which the image of a railway car loaded with doomed pigs is juxtaposed with this oft-quoted line from Dr. Helmut Kaplan:
“Our grandchildren will ask us one day: Where were you during the Holocaust of the animals? What did you do against these horrifying crimes? We won’t be able to offer the same excuse for the second time, that we didn’t know.”
Artists, like rebels, are dangerous. They speak a truth that totalitarian systems do not want spoken. “Red Rosa now has vanished too. …” Bertolt Brecht wrote after Luxemburg was murdered. “She told the poor what life is about, And so the rich have rubbed her out.” Without artists such as musician Ry Cooder and playwrights Howard Brenton and Tarell Alvin McCraney we will not succeed. If we are to face what lies ahead, we will not only have to organize and feed ourselves, we will have to begin to feel deeply, to face unpleasant truths, to recover empathy and to live passionately. Then we can fight.
How to become a mindless drone?
When I first became a raw vegan in my early twenties my main focus was to discover a high powered, clean burning energy source that would allow me to perform at a peak level in extreme sports. The raw vegan diet worked for me in that capacity beyond my highest expectations. But when I entered into my forties I noticed that I was aging though not as fast as the the other baby boomers around me.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has categorically refused in defiance of its own mandate to share evidence uncovered in Iraq that US military use of Depleted Uranium and other weapons have not only killed many civilians, but continue to result in the birth of deformed babies.
The relentless demonization of benefits claimants – smeared by association with the tiny minority who commit this kind of fraud – is pernicious in the extreme. Six of the UK’s largest disability charities (Scope, Mencap, Leonard Cheshire Disability, the National Autistic Society, Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB), and Disability Alliance) report that they are regularly contacted by people who say they are taunted on the street about faking disabilities in order to receive payments and are concerned that this could lead to hate crimes and violence.
Doctors have been crying out for help since at least 2010, when the BBC’s John Simpson was handed a photograph of a baby born in Fallujah with two heads. Women there were being told to stop getting pregnant. A 2010 study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health declared that some kind of congenital malformation was found in 15 percent of all births in Fallujah – heart defects being the most common, followed by neural tube defects.
In the real world, the most important task facing each of us right now is that of grasping that the absurd abundance of energy and resources that Americans enjoyed in the second half of the 20th century was anything but normal.
No sentient being is safe when “radicals” and “activists” are lining up in the name of making the fast food industry a more agreeable place to work. Of course the workers stuck at these jobs need help, but is anyone willing to think long-term? What kind of vision for the future are we promoting when we make it more palatable for humans to give their daily energy as a cog in an ecocidal machine?
