We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

The Revolution Begins at Home: An Open Letter to Join the Wall Street Occupation

Click here to access article by Arun Gupta from The Indypendent. 
Instead of one to two thousand people a day joining in the occupation there needs to be tens of thousands of people protesting the fat cats driving Bentleys and drinking thousand-dollar bottles of champagne with money they looted from the financial crisis and then from the bailouts while Americans literally die on the streets.
Real democracy can be a messy affair, but there is no shortcut to it. The only alternative is what we have witnessed during the past 10,000 years (which is less than 2% of human existence)--class rule by priesthoods, warrior castes, landed aristocracies, and now capitalists.  

During the past 100 years this latest version of class rule has culminated in horrific global wars, crimes against humanity, economic collapses, and environmental destruction. If the evolutionary experiment of the human race is going to succeed depends on those of us now living. We have a choice. We can simply resign ourselves to class rule, indulge in a detached cynicism, descend into debt servitude, tolerate more wars, experience more police violence against citizens, and stand by and watch our planet become slowly uninhabitable.

Or we can stand up and say, "no more!. We will not allow you to destroy us and our planet. We will live with dignity, equality, and in harmony with each other with our universal home, our planet Earth."