( – promoted by buhdydharma )
Chris Hedges yesterday… just go read the whole thing. Jeebuz.
There is no hope left for achieving significant reform or restoring our democracy through established mechanisms of power. The electoral process has been hijacked by corporations. The judiciary has been corrupted and bought. The press shuts out the most important voices in the country and feeds us the banal and the absurd. Universities prostitute themselves for corporate dollars. Labor unions are marginal and ineffectual forces. The economy is in the hands of corporate swindlers and speculators. And the public, enchanted by electronic hallucinations, remains passive and supine. We have no tools left within the power structure in our fight to halt unchecked corporate pillage.
…
All reform movements, from the battle for universal health care to the struggle for alternative energy and sane environmental controls to financial regulation to an end to our permanent war economy, have run into this new, terrifying configuration of power. They have confronted an awful truth. We do not count. And they have been helpless to respond as those who are most skilled in the manipulation of hate lead a confused populace to call for their own enslavement.
He wraps:
I do not know if we can win this battle. I suspect we cannot. But I do know that if we stop resisting, if we stop rebelling, something fundamental will die within us. As the corporate vise tightens, as the vast corporate system begins to break down with fossil fuel decline, extreme climate change and the expansion of global poverty, even mundane and ordinary acts to assert our common humanity and justice will be condemned as subversive.
It is time to think of resistance in a new way, something that is no longer carried out to reform a system but as an end in itself. African-Americans understood this during the long night of slavery. German opposition leaders understood it under the Nazis. Dissidents in the former Soviet Union knew this during the nightmare of communism. Resistance in these closed systems was local and often solitary. It was done with the understanding that evil must always be defied. The tiny acts of rebellion-day after day, month after month, year after year and decade after decade-exposed to everyone who witnessed them the heartlessness, cruelty and inhumanity of the oppressor. They were acts of truth and beauty. We must take to the street. We must jam as many wrenches into the corporate system as we can. We must not make it easy for them. But we also must no longer live in self-delusion. This is a battle that will outlive us. And if we fight, even with this tragic vision, we will lead lives worth living and keep alive another way of being.
{bolds mine}
Amen, brother.
Damn, buhdy, I mean Thadius, just invite him to your new venue, when you make it. Think he’d come? heh. What are you gonna call it anyway … PutaForkInIt.com?
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….
and they don’t even know it.
They’ll never see it coming, till it hits them between the eyes.
One day, about 1985 or so, I picked up The Detroit News as I stopped into into a coffee shop on the way to work, got a coffee, sat down, spread the paper out, and at the bottom of the front page was a small article about a local McDonalds Restaurant whose manager had come in one day to open up, and found a plate glass window on the front of the restaurant shattered.
Inside on the floor was a brick, with a piece of paper tied around it.
He untied it, flattened it out, and read…
The European bank run begins two weeks from today on December 07.
When does the US bank run begin?
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and go work on another project for The Boss…. designing CD cover art for his next cd… and he wants it NOOOOOW! lol… title = “dharma”. ironic I know.
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for spotlighting this piece from Hedges… I just pointed to it.
while multi-tasking…
…of those who learned to resist in a new way:
…the native indigenous americans whom we shot, robbed, raped, infected and discarded to the worst dung heaps of worthless land we could find until we found that that land was, in fact, not worthless after all, but contined the most valuable (to us) resources. Then we stole this back from the land we had given them and left radioactve trailings to sicken them as payment???!!!???~~~
Oh, what a piece of work is the traditional white man! His soul is truly lost.
But we can resist as Hedges suggests:
…which one day may manifest! Thanks Lady L for posting this.
reminds me of my own thinking. Localized radicalized resistance, not with expectations of victory but simply because it is necessary to defy the machinery of exploitation, oppression and death. And the only ones who can offer that resistance are ourselves.
unpredictable. It will take great strength collectively to avoid behaviour that is narrowly focused on the pursuit of self preservation and security. We have placed symbolism above substance, and our lives reflect the same. We live in a world of representation. Our material goods represent, our voting represents, the unemployed represent, sacrifice represents, an image represents etc. etc. If we don’t get beyond this, we may lose ourselves. We need a long time out. Without a sustained, introspective, epochal experience, we may become but a legacy, the animal who inadvertantly hypnotized itself.
We cannot use language against ourselves. It is not reality. It is a tool for survival. If we use it selfishly and destructively, it will become a tool for extinction. The reality behind the symbol must inform our world, not the symbol itself. Is Hiroshima not the result of mind boggling confusion? And what is survival capitalism, but the residue of kings, popes, generals and bankers, a blend of hierarchical consciousness and priviledge, Versailles as Wall Street with the laboring masses identified as workers and laborers in a “market”. We have arrived at the time in history where the nuclear weapon has replaced the exclamation point and the dollar a pint of milk. We have outrepresented ourselves. Work hard to acquire the symbols, and the American Dream will come true.
And remember, bad people don’t like our way of life. We must protect it at all costs, even if it’s not real.
Jeebuz is right. I agree with his assessment of what is happening as far as the powers that be but think he underestimates ‘we the people’. He toughly pissed me off. I thought about it all day with a vague sense of dissatisfaction about the outcome of his story. I just wanted to slap him and say, get a grip, buck up. I don’t see anything as done finished and inevitable. Projections of reality where the forces in play are invincible are not real. Nothing is possible and everything is possible.
Our puny battles with the latest greatest empire of invincible scary ruthless bankster’s is not unique do stories . He seems to mourn his losses prematurely perhaps because he fights on the same ground using the same definition of now and what constitutes a win or a loss. I say his because this is written from a view that measures the winning by the route most traveled, the one he has taken.
‘We have no tools left within the power structure in our fight to halt unchecked corporate pillage.’
Duh, does he think that they would leave tools laying around for people to use to dismantle their top heavy bubble machine? These lefty radical wanker intellectuals, Hedges included are great at telling the dark tales of what’s gone wrong but invariably offer nothing as solution other then tiny acts of rebellion. People invent tools that’s what they are good at. No movement or revolution ever gets funded by the powers that they are fighting. We are not disarmed, people always bring their own spirit, tools, abilities and power to the ongoing story of change. It is not written by those who cannot see beyond the map the enemy provides.
I don’t know if you have heard of John Trudell, but he is a Native American (Sioux), former chairman of AIM and a poet and musician
I, and a few others, have been trying to say this for some time. There is simply no configuration of forces, no budding movement to counter the continuation and expansion of the corporate state. The state itself is now, in my view, as much the enemy as the corporations because it is the agent, largely, of the corporate elite–at least on the federal level. Not that there aren’t people in government that mean well–there are but they don’t have power they just have jobs.
The resistance must begin in earnest in little ways including, as much as possible, depriving the state of taxes and spending less money on luxuries and consumer goods. But most important we need to connect to deeper parts of ourselves so we can connect more easily to other people. It is the one-on-one situation that lends itself to the spread of resistance. And the resistance is not about sabotage or negativity it has to be about seeing our lives and this situation in a positive light.
We are on the cusp of something wonderful–a radical revival of humanity. I think many people feel uneasy about our situation and hunger for meaning. There will always be a great many people who want to live a Jersey Shore or other “reality” show lifestyles that emphasize the most stunningly shallow aspects of life but the best among us won’t tolerate that for long. We have to cultivate ourselves and sharpen our minds and expand our hearts and I genuinely believe we’ll see the sky open and the angels sing, so to speak.
http://discuss.epluribusmedia….
We need a revolution.