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

Thursday, October 18, 2012

Post-Revolution Tunisia: Still Fighting for Rights

Click here to access article by Ghassan Saoud from Al Akhbar. 

After reading this piece you may be convinced, as I was, that the so-called "revolution" in Tunisia was a fiction invented and propagated by Qatar's propaganda organ called Al Jazeera. There was regime change, but no system change--hence, no "revolution". It was only the first step in what Tunisians continue to fight for: a real revolution.
The people of Sidi Bouzid do not approve of the term “January 14 Revolution.” In the town that sparked it, it is called the “December 17 Revolution.” That was the day when a man with a street vendor’s cart worth around 50 dinars ($33) set himself alight in Sidi Bouzid. On that day, as locals retell it, a group of angry people who had emerged onto the street from the Ittihad cafe joined with others in the western part of the town, and were filmed by a camera from the second floor of an overlooking building. Al-Jazeera called it a “revolution,” and so it became.
[The people of] Sidi Bouzid went out onto the streets that day, and has never gone back in. People there are surprised that the revolution should be linked to the day Ben Ali left power, as though the problem was only with him personally.