Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
– The Importance of Creative Protest
– Mike Davis: Ten Immodest Commandments
– The Revolution Is Love – video by Charles Eisenstein (author of “Sacred Economics”)
– Jan Lundberg: How bad or hopeful is our situation as a culture and species?
– Economists Say Europe Facing ‘Lost Decade’
– Eurozone Crisis Q&A
– Why Iceland Should Be in the News, But Is Not
– Resources for Understanding the Crisis in Greece
Three elements have made the global movements of 2011 so powerful and different. 1) the extraordinary capacity to include all types of people 2) the impulse to move beyond traditional forms of the protest and contention, so as to create solutions for the problems identified 3) the horizontal and directly participatory form they take.
In the second phase of these movements, the focus shifts from acts of protest to instituting the type of change that the movements actually want to see happen in society as a whole. The capacity to create solutions grows as the movements expand in all directions, first through the appearance of multiple occupations connected among themselves, and then through the creation of—or collaboration with—groups or networks that are able to solve problems on a local level through cooperation and the sharing of skills and resources.
– Growing Protest Repels Troops in Cairo
– Mellower Occupy Movement Grows in the Suburbs
– How is Occupy Wall Street “like” an API / Tim Pool acting as eyes and ears for thousands
– Occupy Maine and decentralization
– An Uprising With Plenty of Potential (Tea Party strategist, professors, Cornell West)
– Here’s what attempted co-option of OWS looks like (Glenn Greenwald)
– Lobbying Firm’s Memo Spells Out Plan to Undermine OWS
– Should the Occupiers Stay or Go?
– Awesome (lightshow on Verizon Building in NYC)
– Occupy and anarchism’s gift of democracy
– Occupiers: We’re Already Changing Politics
– OWS-inspired activism
– Corporate change of heart: “The Brotherhood of Man” (video)
Charles Eisenstein, the author of Sacred Economics, gave this inspiring talk to Occupy Wall Street, which is actually about growing “the bright side of the force”. This Star Wars inspired theme I couple with “the handicap principle“, which has a “bright” and a “dark” side; the selfish and the cooperative. Animals generally use just one of these forces in gathering acceptance and status, while humans are capable to use both or choose one. Or they don’t actually choose, they use the part of the force which is easiest to achieve within the current design of our societies. Unfortunately we have chosen to grow “the dark side of the force”, today growing these evil powers mainly through the ideologies of modernism and capitalism. As a result, community is almost gone.
The global demonstrations of 2011 both highlight the reality of economic system-failure and reveal its linkages to the crisis of resource constraints. The result is a measure of the scale of change needed over coming decades.
Something happened in September 2011 so unexpected that no politician or pundit saw it coming.
Sometime last year I read an article by a psychologist about the historical impact of a recession job market on college graduates and how the government needed to do something about jobs now because otherwise we would create a whole generation of young people who would break off from the mainstream and stop believing in the system. My first thought was “Why on earth do we want yet another batch of young people who believe in the system when things are so bad already. This, after all, is the exploitive, growth oriented system that was fleecing us all for every last dollar and natural resource.”
This is an emergency response to the destruction of the library at Occupy Wall Street, a clear attempt to destroy the education of passionate people who are tired of living in a deeply flawed system. Razing libraries and burning books has historically failed every time; this will be the most colossal failure to repress education in history, because the education will not be centralized.
[One of the 5 key books selected is “End of Growth” by Richard Heinberg]
We need to turn the “disadvantage” of seasonal down time to our advantage so as to be ready and able to push the Occupy movement much further, deeper and wider as winter becomes spring.
We need to come together, small group by small group, to begin the process of thinking things out. I’m suggesting that we start creating house parties, where people gather in people’s homes, to begin these processes.
