Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
We briefly mentioned the problem of hierarchy as the shared root of many systems of oppression in our first column two weeks ago. In this article, we want to expand on the meaning of hierarchy—a system of obedience and command backed by the threat of force—and ground it in history.
The global village has many similarities to an actual village or small town. Fellow villagers and small town neighbors are much more likely to know about each other’s personal lives (often including many of the intimate details) than those who live in a large city. As McLuhan wrote in 1962: “unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence.”
While there is no one park or town square that can accommodate 22.5 million people, which is the global refugee population according to recent UN estimates, public spaces can still play a key role in addressing today’s global refugee crisis.
Mobility, after all, is generally less important to people than accessibility. When we go somewhere it’s not the movement that’s valuable, it’s the access to something – a school, shopping, a workplace, a friend’s house or a park – that really counts.
Don’t you think that true security lies not in our arming ourselves to the teeth against other people — that is, in our disconnection from them — but in our connection to them, to the web of mutuality that has bound societies, small and large, for millennia?
When hitch-hiking, a certain irony is common: Time and time again, the authors’ of this post have been picked up by drivers who immediately instruct them that hitch-hiking used to work, but now is impossible.
Marielle was a leading light in Brazil’s Feminist Spring, a new generation of Afro-Brazilian and indigenous women fighting back against Brazil’s intensifying attacks against people of color, women, LGBT people and other oppressed communities.
Jannie Staffansson, a representative of the Saami Council, wants what Chief Deskaheh had petitioned to the League of Nations nearly a century earlier: sovereign recognition for Indigenous Peoples on an international scale. It would allow equity at the negotiating table—a level playing field to fairly deal with the consequences of a warming planet in the face of land grabs and natural resource extraction.
As we remember Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s life and assassination 50 years ago, there is much to reflect upon considering the current events, ranging from increased militarism from this administration to gun violence that includes police violence, mass shootings and the protests that have responded and pushed for deep freedom and liberation.
Misogyny is contempt and ingrained prejudice against women, the extreme version of sexism. Misogyny is also the warping of masculinity and strength into dominance and aggression. Boys are taught that to be a man they must be hard and unfeeling, that being sensitive makes you inherently weak.
And so the question of “what if London were to become a National Park City?” was born. What a great question. But not content to have just come up with a great “what if?” question, he has spent the last 4 years trying to make it happen. W
Our experience of love, care and belonging are formed by our relationships in the civil sphere, not by the state or the market. Our lives are subsequently shaped, battered and sometimes improved by the state and the market, but the primary formation of our unique selves and our values is the work of civil society.
