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

Monday, November 5, 2012

This Will Be The Last Last Election With American Naiveté

Click here to access article by Kourosh Ziabari from CounterCurrents

The author who is an Iranian journalist attempts in this interview to learn about US "democracy" from Linh Dinh, a Vietnamese-American writer who has an international reputation mostly as a critic of US foreign policy. Dinh concludes the interview with this prediction:
As this country collapses economically and socially , the number of disillusioned and enraged Americans will swell, but the government is prepared to counter any unrest with a militarized police force, and laws that allow it to arrest and even kill anyone deemed an enemy of the state.
This election will be the last with American naiveté about the true state of their government still relatively intact. After November 6th, promises will be broken, bombs will be dropped, heads will be cracked, and scales will fall from the eyes of even the most thick-skulled among them.