Affluent Acceptance of the Flawed

There is something to say about the growing difference between the 20^th Century Man and 21^st Century Human. The crisis in the 21^st Century is a byproduct of the 20^th Century and the self-seeking consumption of the later 20^th Century greed. If we have learned anything from the first ten years of the 21^st Century, it is that even if one wants to deny history or accept history, one will not avoid the primary drive for human dignity. We must leave the affluent Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama mind frame, a clear conditioned identity of the previous century, out of the next eighty-eight years. If we are to survive, we will have to demand more of ourselves than what our previous generations have nurtured us to accept.   

Upon entering the 20^th Century, human rights were limited to the few. Exiting the 20^th Century, the world was ready for and demanded more. But we have leadership still trapped in 20^th Century mentality. 

In the remaining years of the 21^st Century, we will need to exceed man’s mainstream understanding of power, politics, and wealth. It will not be easy and it will unfortunately be a violent struggle. We will have to exceed our understanding of history and of the idea of nationalism. Whether we want to fight the changes, accept it, or ignore it; the next decade will push us to face reality inevitably.  As 2011 draws to a close, it has proven to be a year of igniting dynamite.

Some individuals engulfed into the American belief system, who whole-heartedly accept certain scenarios, may believe that as an individual if he or she does not personally exploit others, is rich through the means of hard work, and focus primarily on self-initiatives, that they will succeed. When educated individuals say that you cannot blame the rich, you cannot blame Capitalism as a system, or that you cannot blame Corporations, these individuals have a point of view. We cannot blame them for the limits of perception we have been indoctrinated into. There are some strongly positive views that are associated with self-reliance and hard work.

When debating and discussing the issues with others, many individuals take a stance of repressive tolerance, claiming that throughout history man has been violent, repressive, sexist, racist, and manipulative. These givens allow people to accept that it will always happen, and if it doesn’t happen in their own neighborhood or their own nation, then others will have to face the repression from their own governments or corporations. However, larger and wider historical fact has shown that we tend to ignore that our way of life has openly accepted our government as a corporate interest that represses other nations and other governments, who repress their own people just the same.

In his memoir Mute Soliloquy, Pram Toer, an Indonesian novelist imprisoned in his own country throughout the Suharto regime, a military dictatorship the CIA helped in its grasping of power; Pram Toer states: People seem to think that ‘freedom’ is in the interest of the downtrodden and the oppressed and forget that freedom is also in the interest of those who purloin and repress. But what are the interests of those people ‘across the sea’ who control the world’s capital? He notes that many times people who do not get involved in discussing politics are often unaware that it is not that they aren’t political, they are, but they are so accepting of the system that they flaunt aloofness to their repressive tolerance of a politics they grudgingly own.

As I keep coming back time and time again, Amilcar Cabral, the Guinea- Bissau freedom fighter toted, before the Portuguese hunted him down in a similar fashion as the FBI hunted down the Black Panther activists in the late-sixties, “Do not confuse the reality you live in with the ideas you have in your head.”

One of Cabral’s main theoretical approaches that he activated into his revolutionary movement was the idea of Unity and Struggle.  This included a development of a people’s culture, a political moral awareness, and an internal alarm to when we are supporting an indirect domination. He notes that our “leaders and responsible workers have to have courage to struggle constantly against all the temptation for opportunism. The path of struggle is never an easy path, but there are many among us who have a tendency to seek the easy way out”.

As Barbara Ehrenreich discusses in her book Bright-Sided, the ostracizing of negative criticism of society is continually avoided in America; for far too long the one-sided positive thinking approach pushed through Reagan economics and Clinton economics has undermined America so that we claim to blame the youngest generations for laziness, lack of initiative, and having life too easy, but the parents of their generation were just as indoctrinated into a bright-sided blindness. “It is not enough to cull the negative people from one’s contacts,” and if information about factual reality beyond opinions is carefully censored, “Why retreat into anxious introspection when there is a vast world outside to explore” and much to be done to make necessary change? (Ehrenreich).

“What you see is what you get!” This is not good enough for the 21^st Century. Our vested interest into Output should not be about quantity and profit, but a drive to go beyond the illusion of national security.  Intellectuals like Cornel West and Paulo Freire uphold the importance of an individual’s ability to continually question. One does not have to be an intellectual to have critical thinking skills. Being a devil’s advocate in a debate or a discussion, when that individual cannot go beyond the games of self-amusement will not do. Have a passion, uphold your passions, question your passions so that you can understand them better, and then create the means to make others aware of this zombie-like behavior. Repressive tolerance is not an acceptable answer, work for change. 

Edouard Glissant: Postcolonial Theory Can Help Occupiers Fight:

Theoretics from Postcolonial Writers can be helpful tools for the current Occupy Movement in Western Nations. Edouard Glissant of Martinique has some significant strategies that could enhance the need for society’s necessary mental alterations. With a fresh expansion on the definition of history and self-reflection, we can expand our parameters that the corporate elite and mass acceptance hold us to. 

Edouard Glissant emphasizes the ‘enmeshment’ of history. Through the opening between threads, we can re-write history from a multiple voice and not merely limit history to only be written via the winners of wars. “From the tracks left yesterday and today, mixed together,” we can begin to understand that the Cold War was not merely just those nations favoring Democracy versus those favoring Socialism. Our understanding of the world through post-World War II politics was never in actual reality Western Capitalism versus Soviet-ism. The Cold War was a limited definition of history, but in truth it was where colonialism attempted its best to suppress the rising needs of human beings in far off regions with alternative lifestyles, ideologies, and beliefs, but who had natural resources, profitable exploits and a labor force easily usable for the next century gains.

Why bring the Cold War into all this? In a recent interview between Tariq Ali and the film director Oliver Stone, Tariq Ali reminds us that, “History never goes away. History is always present. You may not know it, but almost everything that happens is related to something in the past. You cannot understand the present otherwise” (Ali).  While most of us have been brainwashed to think the Cold War was merely stopping the spread of communism worldwide, it was not. It was a struggle of – Occupying – and the forces of the corporate elite pushed market value interests into every corner of the globe for oil, tin, rubber, water, minerals, cheap labor, and more.

Glissant states in his Caribbean Discourses, “The struggle against a single History for the cross-fertilization of histories means repossessing both a true sense of one’s time and identity: proposing in an unprecedented way a revaluation of power.” 

History is always present. However, limiting ourselves to a single definition of history, whether reflections on World War II or the Cold War, ignores the majority of the human race and their genuine ambitions for human dignity and respect after the colonial era, which did not end during World War II nor during the Cold War. Waves of independent movements have been shattered in the last seventy years.

Along with the need to enmesh history with that of the larger diverse voices of the globe, Edouard Glissant empowers the need for Opacity. This quality of making the body and mind impervious to rays of false light obstructs the negative elements that attempt to limit definitions to refined one-dimensional textbook answers. He supports the need to keep perspectives, insights and accepted norms hard to understand. A blurry spot, like Helene Cixous’ use of incomprehensible reflections, maintains a semblance against false definitions. Opacity, like Enmeshment, assists in the re-evaluation of power. 

Glissant states: “There is a contradiction between lived experience through which the community instinctively rejects the intrusive exclusiveness of a single History and an official way of thinking through which it passively consents to the ideology ‘represented’ by its elite.” This lack of comprehension is strength, not flaw, “Ambiguity is not always a sign of some short-coming” (Glissant). Mainstream media has for the longest time in the United States assisted in the passive manufactured consent.

The Opacity of the Occupied Movements allows the definition to continually be open to change and growth. When media and foreign policy experts limited the civil unrest in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya to the terminology ‘Arab Spring’ they anticipated that the movements had a clear historic beginning and a clear historic ending. In a wider understanding of History, these events in such nations are far from over. 

Just this week, protests in Cairo have gotten more and more intense. After getting rid of Mubarak but keeping the military in power was only an inevitable delay to the continuation of the outcome needed to break from the power structure that limits democracy. Libya’s challenges have only just re-started after the end of Gaddafi. Now the blurriness of the road ahead will be just as challenging as capitalists seek to gain dominance over a larger public domain.

Democracy’s bottom line is people. Socialism’s bottom line is people. But Capitalism’s bottom line, whether it be in the hands of the government or private interests, the bottom line is profit and segregation of the haves, the have-less, and the have-nots.   

Glissant proposes: “The question we need to ask will not be ‘Who am I?’ but rather ‘Who are we,’” and the important thing is not the reply but the question. It is a question that will require no active reply. It is not the negation of history when one assumes an answer. The answer is always changing and never universal. 

Another great Postcolonial writer, Ngugi wa Thiongo from Kenya, suggests the notion of ‘decolonizing the mind’. What the Occupy Movements need to express especially in western nations is our own ‘decolonizing of the mind’. In Thiongo’s novel Wizard of the Crow, he emphasizes “breaking the Totality where man and women must fit within the Western ideal” of consumer capitalism. Numerous times throughout the novel, characters are faced with a mirror where they have to come to terms with the perceptions they have of themselves and then in order to transcend, they must go beyond the individual’s self and the world that he knows of. Some characters sought illusionary solitude, and others sought political protest.

Unconnected to Thiongo, but still applying to his novel, Glissant states, “The relationship between history and literature is concealed today in what I call ‘the longing for the ideal of history’ … this obsession with finding the primordial source toward which one struggles through revelations that have the peculiarity of obscuring as well as disclosing” (Glissant).  

We are not single beings in a single enigma; those who are caught up in the closest proximity to the capitalist ideology have the hardest time looking in the mirror. Occupiers need to ‘decolonize the minds’ and going beyond the park matures our protest to a new nonviolent organizational level beyond romanticizing history (as with the original tea-party in the Boston Harbor). Many of us are doing just that in the opacity of the moment and in the movement. Next we need to send that message outwards to the passive masses to begin understanding a great enmeshed history beyond the borders and within the borders of the US, and beyond the notion that ‘we are what we are’ is unacceptable if limited to how the elite define us since their gains from World War II do not encompass the depths of a larger occupying notion: beyond economics, beyond borders, and beyond accepted perceptions.  

OCCUPY WALL STREET: Now Going Beyond:

In every organized movement there is a time for solidarity, sharing information, discussing the dialectics, and nurturing the group’s identity. One of the next big hurdles of the Occupy Wall Street protest as well with any fresh new movement is to expand beyond the inner circle. Organizing the voices so that the multitude of ideas speaks beyond the park. Going beyond the park involves introspection, expression, and activation.

At times in the park, one may find that they are discussing the similarities and the shared energies of those around them, and this is a great way for us to overcome our alienation. Yet perhaps we get frustrated at why the larger center of the population is too comfortable in their luxuries and more so comfortable in their lack of luxuries these days. In the park the conversations begin to feel as if we are a collective of understanding, outside the park up the streets of Broadway and Times Square, and up the east and west side of Central Park, over into the suburbs in Jersey, too many remain naïve and distracted to realism.  How can we expand past the park and bring in more diversity and a more shared-drive away from passivity?

In R.D. Laing’s Divided Self, a pivotal psychology study in the 60’s, Laing talks about overcoming ‘ontological insecurity’, which entails overcoming depersonalization and overcoming ‘engulfment’. This is where the activist reinstates: “I am arguing in order to preserve my existence. I am not arguing so that I have the pleasure of triumphing over you.” This is not a competition of who knows more information. It is a will to preserve our survival on this sinking ship of capitalism. We must start with introspection, looking into ourselves to overcome.

In Judith Butler’s Undoing Gender, Butler, from norms to politics, reflects that “norms seem to signal the regulatory or normalizing function of power, but norms are precisely what binds individuals together, forming the basis of the ethical and political claims” … teaching unacceptable restrictions and historical reinterpretation is necessary; “Our bodies relate us against our will from the start. I deny this to preserve my existence” (Butler). Overcoming restrictions to the norms of the body, Butler denies the accepted norms to preserve her sense of self.

The introspection that Laing and Butler suggest, clearly separate from one-another, allows us to look at ourselves mentally, emotionally, and physically to suggest perhaps what we have limited ourselves to and what society has limited us to is not enough for me or you to reach a healthier higher potential. The psychologist Karen Horney emphasizes that if we do not overcome our personal neuroticisms, then our neuroticism will control us. We must overcome the petty distractions that divide one another and our society. 

Caitlin Hewitt-White has discussed that “there seems to be an assumption at work that if we are fighting the ‘system’ that is oppressive, then we are somehow ‘non-oppressive' by virtue claiming to be ‘outside’ of the system. None of us are immune from the grasp of patriarchy, racism, and homophobia. The implications of thinking that we are immune can dangerously affect participation” (Hewitt-White). We are products of the system too. We have to learn to reflect before acting in order to know which action may take us towards the healthier outcome: the path of the tortoise or the path of the hare.

This reflectability helps us also through modifying our language as William S Burroughs emphasized expanding and altering our language will allow us to speak and to deny our impulse to normalization tactics. Not just restraining to correct one another’s grammar, but to add new inflections so that we stop to think about the message being said. “The first stage in such an evolution is the dissolution of boundaries: geographical, psychic, and physical” (Burroughs). We must exceed our sense of citizenship to go beyond thinking merely patriotism. Our problems are global now and we must be responsible beyond the limits of borders and language. We must exceed the limits that have indoctrinated our mind to thinking within someone else’s elite imposed parameters.

Education is a significant tool to introspection and activation. Bell Hooks in an interview with Cornel West implies: “I think that the major dilemma is the way professionalization within the academic limits those of us who want to speak to broader audiences” (Hooks).    

Deborah Rosenfelt puts it, “Education is the key to social change… Schools can become vehicles for indoctrination … I want to stress this problem of bias because scholarship is supposed to be as bias-free as possible. We will look at all questions and issues from as many sides as we can think of” (Rosenfelt). Her point is that teachers may be significant voices in our education but we must all question our teacher’s, the good ones and the negative ones, we must question our teacher’s assumptions, just as much as we must question our own assumptions, because we are all products of our system. “Skepticism is essential to continued growth and a balanced perspective” (Rosenfelt).

Grace Lee Boggs nurtures this introspection with reflecting outwards; “We urgently need to stop thinking of ourselves as victims and to recognize that we must each become a part of the solution, because we are each a part of the problem.” She continues, “We need much more than reform. We need a paradigm shift!” We need a shift in our educational paradigm and a shift in our own mental paradigm.

Some suggestions for this paradigm shift, Charles Hampden-Turner promoted in Radical Man, include: 1) Promoting anxiety tolerance, dialectic and synergy. We need to learn to tolerate our anxiety of the unknown, and realize that we do not need to control every situation and every outcome. The current anxiety does not need to be solved in an immediate fashion and the instability allows us more time for self-reflection and self-interrogation. 2) Integrating feedback; if we can share and extend our reach and gain feedback from continually diverse outlets, we will be able apply constructive feedback to current and future projects. 3) Snatching meaning from the absurd. By being incomprehensible at times, in a Helene Cixous fashion allows us to challenge our limits to concrete. We do not need to make demands or place a leader at the frontline. Having absurdity on our side allows us to not be limited to determining definitions.

   

Being able to accept comfort in the unknown and the abstract leaves an open potential that is not common in the conformity of those who need constant determination. “Developing men and women must rebel against some features in their environment and transform incoming messages into personal, meaningful synthesis. Conformity and obedience have crippling effects on development” (Hampden-Turner).

Historically, activists in the 1920’s and 1960’s left the academic world and entered jobs within the factories to educate the working class. Activists who want to awaken the working class could get jobs in schools, construction, and other personal unexpected occupations to begin hard discussions with those Americans that are too busy working to know what is going on outside conformity.  Bell Hooks emphasizes that through critical listening and reflecting, we begin to teach our selves and others to transgress. Transgression is an important tool for the challenges we face.

As a movement, Occupy Wall Street must expand and broaden its base or fear atrophy.  Activation can be as simple as going to local open mike-nights, bring prose to override the self-loathing poetry… Get a job as a teacher and encourage students in a way that does not prepare them for a standardized test, but prepares them for questioning and critical thinking… Expose students to history outside of the textbook… Crash self-help group sessions and lead the discussion away from self-gain to community power… We need to be more than just echoing parrots…  When a homeless man begs on the street in uptown for cash, direct them to Wall Street telling them there is food and shelter there.

Practice sit-ins. Go to homeless shelters. Go in groups on the subway, in restaurants, in stores, and on corners of the street and create intellectual discussions between your selves and in a way product-place the Occupy movement for those listening. People are always eaves dropping on other people’s conversations, and if you discuss the economy, politics, news and activism, we are sure to get people to hear something.

One doesn’t need drugs as in the 1960’s to alter one’s perspective. It is not easy to establish responsibility within the masses and the youth’s self-seeking pleasure principle. Crossing social and personal boundaries into communities we may not normally walk through will tamper the system.  We must remain open. Openness, honesty, as well as overcoming the reactionary quick fix that creates violence, flexible organizing are important, and finally having the maturity to recognize that it is okay if we do not know all the answers will allow us to keep growing.

  

The WORLD BANK and the DJINN of Development:

The mythological djinn, also known as the genie in the lamp, is a classic folklore character with magical powers to grant all those who summon him to get their most cherished wishes made real. The World Bank is an international financial institution that provides loans to developing countries. The hidden meaning behind the myth of the djinn was that after the individual made his wishes there would always be an underlying flaw in the contract that created more harm than benefit. The thin line of agreements and unexpected outcomes of the World Bank loans can very easily be compared to the djinn’s tale.

When a nation chooses to accept a World Bank loan, the conditions for the loans require governments to strictly embrace the Neoliberal political economic ideology, which allows corporations from the wealthiest countries to take over the financial and commercial trade decisions. Many common suggestions that the World Bank proposes for governments are to set up dams, move the city center, build stadiums, construct roads, privatize water sources, and numerous other tactics. When financial experts from wealthy nations go to developing nations and suggest to them how they can build their wealth quickly they ignore environmental risks, cultural depletion, and sensitivity to quality of life outside the monetary value.

In many ways, the quick road to development is as malignant as the djinn’s granting of wishes. Dam projects as seen in India have caused massive amounts of displaced citizens. First the dam floods a valley where indigenous groups have lived for centuries and when the lake is formed, those who once used the rivers freely for generations find the land now privatized and their basic human need for water unaffordable. The Yacyreta Dam in Argentina, the Chixoy Dam in Guatemala, and the Manantali Dam in Mali are just a few World Bank funded dams that have had sharp social and environmental reprecussions.

In developing nations as in Bolivia and Ghana privatizing water supplies devastated local groups. In country’s like Malawi, where the majority of the population cannot find basic needs, food and clean water is scarce, projects that built a stadium and moved the city centre of Lilongwe were only beneficial for a small minor percentage of the population compared to projects that could have reached out further to the public’s needs. Deforestation in Brazil has led to massive flooding and environmental degradation.

Yet the significant financial repercussions from a developing nation accepting a World Bank loan is that the country is in perpetual debt. This fairytale of happily ever after becomes a never-ending story of trying to raise enough funds to pay back loans that most developing countries cannot possibly balance making large payments and sustainably, while being socially accountable, develop at the same time. So corners are cut and the poor populations are the first to be neglected, displaced, or swindled. A good wish that goes significantly wrong, especially to those who are considered expendable to the government and the rich.

In conclusion, if the djinn of the developing world were to have never granted loans to developing nations in the first place, most likely those large-scale global ecological and social crisis would have been avoided, developing nations would have resorted to their own grass-roots and self-reliant choices, and would not have borrowed when they couldn’t have afforded to do so. Be weary of what you wish for. Develop with hard work and not the quick easy fix, and do not trust a djinn in a shiny gold lamp even if it sounds like a good idea.     

  

Ukrainian Activists: FEMEN: Feminist Storm:

One of the key activists groups making notoriety this year has been the Ukrainian FEMEN. This group of radical female voices has recently made the headlines going to Italy and protesting Berlusconi and the Pope. Earlier in the year they reflected solidarity with the women in Saudi Arabia, who pushed civil disobedience through driving automobiles where it is forbidden for women to drive. FEMEN made headlines again this year when they protested the controversial trial against the former Ukrainian female Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko.

FEMEN is a unique activist group that has challenged the authorities continually this past year. What makes the activist group stand out most is their shocking tactic of protesting topless. For a feminist group, this can be seen as contradictory. But in deeper analysis, this very tactic could be why they have made so many headlines in the world press.

Regardless of fighting topless, the Ukrainian activists have a message. They want to stop sexism and the objectification of women not just in the Ukraine but also from Saudi Arabia to the Vatican. Like Code Pink, they refuse to be ignored during political debates and spectacles. Perhaps FEMEN utilize their bare essentials to strip away the false image those in power parade around.

Does protesting topless strengthen or weaken their cause? From Norman Mailer to Erica Jong to Susan Sontag, the body in the 21^st Century as in any century prior is a distraction. The tactic here seems to be a tool to enhance attention to their causes. In the Ukraine where prostitution and sexism have been on the rise since the ideological change from Communism to Capitalism, the activists are using their bodies to shock the masculine establishment from merely looking at women for pleasure. They are fighting the macho male image with their own sort of She-Hulk reflection, a defiant stance. While Vladimir Putin can run on the beach bare-chested to show off his manliness, these activists are reflecting their own equal opportunity to push their aggression and anger towards a sexist system.

Perhaps the reason FEMEN fight topless can be compared to why the Zapatistas in Mexico fight with ski-masks. The native groups associated with the Zapatistas from Mayan descent during their defiant acts against a manipulative government wore ski-masks in order to be seen. When they aren’t wearing masks, they have continually been ignored. The government and elite disregard them as primitive and able to be pushed aside. So the Zapatistas stood in solidarity with masks to overcome the disregard. Perhaps the FEMEN activists, tired of being ignored as clothed women, disregarded for their gender in making decisions regarding politics and their own body, chose to make noise without any flashy dress or humble attire.

Tired of the expression ‘be seen but not heard’, the FEMEN activists, whether in aesthetic and 'a priori' or literal statements, use the tactics that they feel suite them best because it is an extreme expression of discontent that goes beyond flesh and the superficial cultural bias of gender, which gets in the way of hearing one another to overcome corruption and manipulative obstacles. They make those in power uncomfortable this is because those in power must either cover them up for indecency or face their own indecency in their treatment of the opposite sex.  

Inevitable Iran: Catch-22 Nuclear Ambition

The edge of the glass towards conflict between Iran and its enemies is getting closer and closer. News this week has Israel callously considering bombing Iran. The US propaganda machine is pushing for the conclusion of the Ayatollah regime. The Catch-22 for Iran’s Nuclear Ambitions have led to a no doubt that they cannot turn back now because other signifiers in historic context reflect any which way but lose.

Iran has been in the US oil interest eye and government foreign policy since the 1970’s revolution that surprised the western hegemony. Before the multi-faceted revolution, the Shah was America’s favorite oil dictator. Before the Ayatollah usurped the face of the revolution to merely extremism, the revolution had diversity and alternative potential. But like Stalin and Napoleon, the leadership that followed suffocated the very potential of new opportunities.

Fast forward to the post-9/11 world where the chicken-hawks of Bush and Cheney pushed the US into unprecedented wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Since the first air strike into Afghanistan, Iran had to be at the edge of their alertness. With the following entry into Iraq, I would say that Iran had already anticipated that if they wanted to maintain a secure safety-net they had to seek nuclear weapons. Why?

Firstly, any country with a hostile military invading two countries that border it in the north and the southwest would be very agitated. For example, if some army were to have invaded Canada and Mexico, the US would not just patiently sit in between a rock and a hard place. Iran’s neighbors were being crushed with weapons from a foreign power with no anticipation to halt attacks until oil fields and natural resources were divided up to Halliburton and other corporations. 

The only true reason the US military went into Iraq was because those at the very top clearly knew due to the heavy sanctions and past sales to the very dictator that Saddam did not have nuclear weapons. Unlike in North Korea and Iran, Iraq's nuclear ambition was never as transparent. That is a given.

Secondly, if Israel, Pakistan and India all have nuclear weapons and the international community was unable to stop them, why would Iran be any more of a threat than even say China and Russia or the US for having the weapons? Isn’t one of the key Amendments in the US, the right to bear arms? The right to seek a weapon for self-defensive measures seems praise for the American way. This defensive mechanism saved China and Russia during the Cold War so that the US did not bomb them as done onto Japan. Clearly double standards are apparent. The parent and teacher that says ‘don’t do as I do, do as I say’ leads through example, never through words, and the message is taught through the action. So Iran is not ignorant and can see that countries like China and Israel were able to acquire the power, which once received stopped outside interest from overriding into national sovereignty.

Thirdly, Iran cannot turn back from seeking this power at this point for two key reasons: two lessons learned from Libya. One, after 9/11 Libya sought to negotiate with the United States and dismantle its nuclear ambition. In a 2006 Amnesty International Report, the organization noted the strides Gaddafi had made in working with the US and Italy to change its image from terrorist supporter to international poster child of change. Eventually we would learn he was outsourcing torture for US renditions, as Wikileaks noted. The lesson Iran clearly learned, don’t change your tactics because your aggressors will not be genuinely friendly.  That is where the second lesson from Libya has played out.

If one negotiates and changes their tactics, there are no assurances. The oppressed opposition in Iran is eager to have more human rights, more civil rights, and more basic freedoms. As in Libya, the first sign of unrest and instability would be a key opportunity for the Western powers to enter in and destroy the national hegemony. Though the support for the freedoms and democratic hopes of the people are the political rhetoric for assisting Libyan and Iraqi people, those with the real power in the corporate elite truly only want the oil resources.  If Iran changes its tactics now, they would only allow speculators to find propaganda to enter.

If Saudi Arabia had nuclear weapons, the US and other nuclear powered nations would not protest. Saudi Arabia is a dictatorship that oil interests can deal with. But Iran is too independent, just as Libya has been.  

Iran has everything to lose if they seek nuclear power, and they have everything to lose if they do not seek nuclear power. The Iranian people want to overcome oppression. The supportive humanists in more open societies want democracy and justice to prevail.  The capitalists are greedy enough to want to find any means necessary to reclaim the control over the oil under Iran’s soil that they once had at their fingertips under the Shah. This Catch-22 only gives Iran an inevitable conclusion. It is only a matter of time how history will be played out. Most of us hope that the changes will be achieved with the least amount of violence as possible. 

Overcoming Alienation:

It is very easy to isolate oneself at this time and avoid necessary issues that affect all walks of life. From population boom to global warming, from economics to stagnant politics due to corporate fear of a healthy evolution without the need of capitalism, we are in a roadblock in society and coming to terms with what is actually happening in the world, not just in the United States, but everywhere that has now been extended into the postmodern world is mentally challenging. Alienation is a way in which individuals avoid involvement, and it is a means in which the power structure eases the opposition, leaving power strong and individuals lost in a sense of hopeless cynicism. Alienation is a distraction, which is avoidable through practice.

Quite often to avoid the outside world, people resort to technology, and technology is getting more and more sophisticated to keep people isolated. Though many individuals listen on their headphones, iphones, cellphones, and more for distractions or they watch the same shows on television or cinema, this bond between us is still rather superficial because we are still alienated from our true expression. It is a secondhand experience. The secondhand experience of watching on a screen or listening to a recording rather than in real life activation, only gives partial fulfillments. We have grown to like our solitary solution.

We may be unaware that this form of alienation still has the element of technology from a corporate source dictating to your subconscious that these are one’s only choices.  Our choices are being limited through the technology that we use to escape. Prior to the 20^th Century two significant figures come to mind who had dealt with alienation in quite different ways: Walt Whitman and Karl Marx. Rarely today do we see such figures with presence, physically with their thick bulging beards, and mentally with their reflections on life.

In Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, there is a famous section noting “Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore,” and while 28 men bathe joyfully beside the shore one-woman alone way in the distance cannot join them. She emotionally yearns to join them. She even visually in her imagination places herself in the crowd of men actively bathing. She wants to join them but is limited. Her social role, her location, and her own mind limit her from running to join the group. She could have defied all limits and faced the backlash, but she could not take the leap in the same way that Rosa Parks in the 20^th Century refused to go to the back of the bus.

For Walt Whitman poetry was a means for individuals to overcome their isolation and share with their common neighbors the emotions and yearnings that they think only they can understand and no one else. Yet the bonding power of poetic theory is revolutionary in the sense that reading out loud one’s internal voice shares the resemblances that we have in common, which we would not know we have in common, if we do not share our voice. Limiting one’s listening through technology creates a one-way transmission: television, radio, etc. However, reading aloud or talking out in a group setting allows multiple transmissions.      

Karl Marx was aware of the limits of the industrial capitalist society, where the bottom line for society is production and profit. In such a limited bottom-line dimension, humanities and human rights are only luxuries for those who can afford it. In a Capitalist society, there will always be the haves and the have-nots. In Whitman’s poem, the have-not is the woman, who is watching the men from the shore. In reflection those countries where capitalism is the most extreme and most demanding, individuals are the most alienated from their fellow men.  Alienation is the leftover parts of man that the production mechanism of society cannot fully profit from.

In the 20^th Century, Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze’s work expanded on where society has evolved since Marx’s knowledge of alienation began. They note in their work, particularly in Anti-Oedipus, that capitalism controls people in three significant ways, through 1) politics, 2) economics, and 3) subjective control. In regards to politics and economics, the corporate elite controls who has the political power and who controls the movement of money. The third notion is the very fact that our Subjectivity can be controlled through how we learn to see ourselves. Far too often today in the 21^st Century, we reflect on our personality through the clothes we buy, the brand names we consume, and the music and movie label we akin to.  Associating yourself with such means of capitalist control, whether we are conscious or unaware of the matter, we are still being controlled through dictation. “I’m a PC, or I’m a Mac, or I am a Pepper (Dr. Pepper)” can still leave us highly alienated from other aspects of human potential.

In a parallel reflection to Guittari and Deleuze, bringing in Marx and Whitman’s sense of alienation where poetics and revolutionary theory mesh together, Herbert Marcuse characterizes how individuals have been limited through the current social contract; “Individual’s awareness of the prevailing repression is blunted by the manipulated restriction of his consciousness. This process alters the contents of happiness. … With the control of information, knowledge is administered and confined. The Individual does not really know what is going on; the overpowering machine of education and entertainment unites him with all others in a state of anesthesia” (Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization)

This joint ‘state of anesthesia’ is what we see today in a generalized apathy towards politics, the mass acceptance of consumption to the point of degrading the environment and degrading our own bodies, and we are not using our senses to protect ourselves anymore. We are not using our eyes or our ears to really see and hear what is happening, and when we do see it or hear it, we accept the hopelessness around because we have been restricted consciously of our options, as Marcuse has said, through our education and our entertainment outlets. We become cynical and alienated masses that have been passively lead into a great hole. The corporate elite wants you to retreat, like the woman on the beach in Whitman’s poem, and just fantasize about escape and true happiness, rather than embrace a higher sense of reality. You tend to be limited in options if you cannot afford to pay for material luxuries. But the material escape, the financial escape, is only a part of the anesthesia process. Real happiness is beyond this alienation and confined limitation imposed on us.     

Julia Kristeva calls this learned sense of helplessness and hopelessness as the ‘maladies of the soul’. This symbolic castration of our intellect and our social means of communicating within groups to overcome our alienation requires hard questioning of the world as we perceive it. In parallel, Lyn Hejinian, uses poetics to alter our perception, in her book The Language of Inquiry, she notices, “When the term realism is applied to poetry, it is apt to upset our sense of reality. But exactly the strangeness that results from a description of the world given in the terms ‘there it is’, ‘there it is’, ‘there it is’ that restores the realness to things in the world and separates things from ideology” (Hejinian). An evolving poetics is also a poetics of scrutiny, and we must not only speak out to those in power, but have the ability to scrutinize these false ideological controls in our life that make ill-logical sense. For example, when we look at money, we say “is this just paper; is it really more important than the blood I bleed to earn it, spend it, and consume it?”  

Using poetic inquiry like Lyn Hejinain or Walt Whitman is one solutionary step to take. Using philosophical questioning like Julia Kristeva and Karl Marx is a similar yet different solutionary approach. Both solutionary approaches require using one’s eyes, ears, and critical thought. These steps bring us closer to a revolutionary process to move away from the stagnant alienation that we face in today’s world.  Speaking out loud and sharing your emotions and reading poetry, letters, singing, or dialoguing breaks up the monologue our technology feeds us from its one-way transmission.

On a humanist psychological level, Carl Rogers brings a third solutionary step. He emphasizes in his On Becoming a Person, an individual must move towards a trust in one self, move towards an acceptance of others, accept the unpredictability of life, increase openness of experience, and take risks. Such movement away from defensive mechanism of isolation and movement towards the pole of openness, self-actualizing allows one to come closer to an inner self that has not falsely been determined through limits of fashion and the stage-directions picked up from camera and screen branding.

Today more than at any other time in history the tools that the corporate elite use to maintain control over the vast population locally and now globally are ever more complex with technology at their fingertips. However, that very same technology is at our fingertips as well, as we share our poetic, psychological, political, and philosophical insights. We have the tools imbedded in us to revolt, but we have to now sink deep inside our alienated consciousness and find them. We must continually ask hard questions, reflect on our observations in poetic and philosophical ways, and seek active ways to communicate with each other beyond the computer and beyond the shores.  

Angela Carter, Julia Kristeva, and the ‘Masquerade of Reality’:

In a new study from the University of Michigan psychologist Terri Conley, the findings reveal that women and men are more alike than most are willing to admit. This has even become clearer through Conley’s study on sexual behavior. Like the Kinsey Reports in the 1950’s, the new study reflects on details much of society has already known, but just has not confessed. The study from Terri Conley entitled, “Men, Women, and the Bedroom” demystifies the traditional claims of differences that are not innate and specific to gender. This is not the first time mainstream ‘accepted’ definitions have been disproved. Limited perceptions are classic to mainstream acceptance, yet their very actions prove to differ from their speech towards sexuality and psychology. The very masquerade of reality that the philosopher Julia Kristeva and author Angela Carter have dealt with throughout one another’s respected oeuvre gain resolve with Conley’s new statistical findings.

In Julia Kristeva’s Black Sun, she reflects primarily on the subject of melancholia. Within society’s masquerade of reality, when it comes to depression and melancholia, there is a ‘learned helplessness’ that has inhibited the population. For example regarding sexuality, she states, “One cannot overemphasize the tremendous psychic, intellectual and affective effort a woman must make in order to find the other sex as an erotic object” (Kristeva, pg 30).  She notes that the cathexes in social bonds between men and women are found through aesthetic substance, and that an individual must visually create an attraction that supersedes natural instinct in today’s culture. She states: “Literary creation is that adventure of the body and signs that bear witness to the affect … the semiotic and the symbolic become communicable imprints” over choice and action (Kristeva, pg 22). One’s perceptions of sexuality and perceptions on sadness, in respect to depictions in the Black Sun, tend to be too often generalized with false perimeters. “Sadness is the fundamental mood of depression … Mood is a ‘generalized transference’.” Yet the institutions of psychiatry and even psychology blur the borders of clinical melancholy with excessive prescriptions dependent on drugs and Freudian definitions.

In likeness to Kristeva’s theory, the Surrealist novelist Angela Carter embodies in her fiction the “dangerous pleasure of demystifying the individual self” from the role-playing masquerade of reality. Carter’s characters, in her novels Shadow Dance and The Magic Toyshop, whether it is through shadow puppets or individuals toyed with like objects for play, find their treatment disheartening and nearly helpless in a world limited to false institutions.

The characters of Angela Carter’s two novels react to their depression or emotions in different ways and they find that the very predicaments, which follow them, in a sense, within society are determined where ‘women are not born, but made’ or even further, ‘humans are products of their society’. Their predetermined emotions, sexuality, and rules begin to crumble the more each character comes to terms with actual reality.

Depression, like madness, either due to obvious or metaphysical reasons, with regards to subjects who may merely have a different temperament than accepted norms, becomes a means for society to control individuals. Historically, confirmed perceptions of ‘accepted norms’ have been decided through church, therapy, and especially today through film and media. Sexual norms and psychological norms have been limited throughout history, but with more and more outlets of influence, certain elites try to control our emotional reactions and our physical activity. However, prohibition did not work for controlling alcohol, nor does it work for sexuality. When it comes to depression, the power of drug companies seems to hope to control human alienation as well.

Freud was never able to understand the concept of female in a social context let alone in a psychology context. Yet this did not stop the greater Western society to use his definitions to maintain the psychiatry industry, which is now usurped via the pharmaceutical industry. Sigmund Freud was the benchmarker for 20^th Century sexual and mental politics. However, long before Freud, back in the 18^th Century, Marquis de Sade reflected on a different analysis of human politics. Angela Carter was a strong admirer of Sade.

In Angela Carter’s analysis on the ideology of pornography entitled the Sadeian Woman, she states: “The bed is now as public as the dinner table and governed by the same rules of formal confrontation. Flesh has lost its common factor; that is the substance of which we are all made and yet that differentiates us. It has acquired, instead, the function of confusing kind and gender, man and beast, woman and fowl. The subject itself becomes an ‘object de luxe’ in these elaborately choreographed masques of abstraction and of alienation” (Carter, pg 146).

How can one grasp the world outside of the conventional limitations, when the real world is beyond conventionality, but culture has simply been misguided over the centuries? In parallel to Kristeva and Carter, the poet Marianne Moore, described by Cynthis Hogue, used poetry to “eschew conventionally feminine identifications” that masquerade positions constructed through contradictory fabrications, and her texts “indeed fray the orthodox views she quite literally scraps,” instead Moore stitches new fragments to create new ways of knowing, new truths, and new identities” (Cynthia Hogue). Like Marianne Moore, Kristeva and Carter break down the false parameters of understanding psychological, social, and sexual identity. In Kristeva’s Black Sun, she uses the notion of seeing and going ‘beyond the looking-glass’ referring to the infamous Alice in Wonderland motif. In Carter’s novel, A Passion of a New Eve, the main character goes through countless forced transformations from male to female to male and back to female. When the story nears completion the entire concept of gender has been twisted and eschewed that one can no longer keep track of the changes, creating a new paradox of identity.

The displacement of systematic personal projections and role reversal leads Sue Roe to compare Carter’s work with that of the Surrealist, Leonora Carrington, who she quoted from My Mother is a Cow, “To be one human creature is to be a legion of mannequins. These mannequins can become animated according to the choice of the individual creature” (Carrington). Nowhere in society has the masquerade of reality taken place most than in the modern and contemporary expectations of sexual politics. Hampered realization through depression and selective routes leads to internal and external acts that often do not pass over the illusion but leads to new illusions or delusional non-meaning. “I am that which is not.” Sublimation requires additional energy to overcome the obstacles rather than lead to depression for not living up to a false standard.

In Ally Foggs, Gaurdian article on Terri Conley’s findings ‘Forget Mars and Venus: There is no great sex difference’ (October 25, 2011), Foggs reports on the finding that though the myth that “men think about sex more than women is confirmed, they do, about 18 times a day as opposed to 10 for women. But men also think more about their other physical needs too, such as food and sleep. The authors point out that this is in keeping with models of socialization where females are raised to worry about the needs of others more than their own” (Foggs). Yet these minor differences are highly generalized and there can be no universal.   

Foggs confirms Conley’s report, stating: “Fundamentally, what Conley et al are claiming does seem to be true. Gender differences in sexuality are not immutable and are certainly affected by the social environment. They're also remarkably small.”

Terri Conley reflects the importance of her study on-line in the faculty profile of University of Michigan, she confirms: “Gender differences in sexual experiences and attitudes are among the largest gender differences demonstrated empirically. My goal is to understand the socio-cultural reasons for these differences and to determine situations in which these prominent differences are absent. Currently, I am examining the large differences between women and men in preferences for casual sex. Two main explanations for these differences are a) pleasure or anticipated pleasure in casual sexual experiences (expectations of pleasure seem to be higher for men than for women) and b) stigma against women engaging in sexual activity” (Conley).

Conley’s findings are not dramatically huge or rather new under the sun. However, the findings strengthen with research the definitive voice that both Kristeva and Carter have been expressing for decades that gender difference is highly fabricated through cultural conditioning. Society and cultural norms nurture sexual and emotional behavior in unconscious and conscious ways. Many times, these forced or fabricated illusions society force onto men, women, and those individuals who do not align with either gender or who align with both genders can be alienating. This alienation can lead to depression, where yet another institutional code book attempts to control or prescribe limited metrics on individual choice. What Angela Carter and Julia Kristeva attempt to do in their reflections and abstractions are to challenge the eye and the mind on the social cultural limitations and to create a new identity. Will the masquerade of reality be overcome leading to a more healthy reality? One cannot be sure. It will take a lot of energy. Going beyond the looking-glass is a good first step. One cannot create utopia through force.    

Russell Peters: Bringing the World Together through Comedy

In a stadium in London, Russell Peters comes on stage with a velvet jacket, jeans and sneakers. His Attention Deficit does him well as he scopes the audience for material as it comes at him. In the crowds he finds people from nearly every background imaginable: Irish, Saudi, Iraqi, Chinese, Spanish, Senegalese, Indian, and countless more from all regions of the globe. He may be the only comedian who can bring people together to laugh at and laugh with one another from all ethnic possibilities.

No topic and no background can avoid Russell Peters ability to reflect on our cultural differences, our flaws, and our idiosyncrasies in the contemporary world. His style of humor reflects the third important task that Cornel West describes in his book Democracy Matters, which along with the ideal of Socratic questioning and prophetic witness, the tragicomic hope. His fearless speech to discuss all politically incorrect topics brings to the front the “ability to laugh and retain a sense of life’s joy” (West). Humor, like jazz, can free the stress against inhumane injustice.

Russell Peters is the epitome of what Cornel West would call “the profound tradition to inform and embolden the struggle against the callous indifference of elite and empirical injustice.” However, Russell Peters uses humor as his bold tool to entertain the diverse masses. He feeds off of the reactions and language anomalies of those he comes across throughout his continual world tour.

At one time in his performance on the London stage, he discusses how in London the use of the word cunt is commonly used and not at all used in the same context as it's most commonly used in North America. His analysis on how certain words in a cultural context when pulled from one context to another can easily change the way an audience perceives a word. In a parallel of juxtaposition, like Eve Ensler, Inga Muscio, in her book, Cunt, reclaims the word, which was once a term used for the Indian goddess Kali, who was independent and powerful. In her manifesto, she strives to transform the context of the word to re-instate its initial power rather than insult. Her emphasis is to know one self, love one self, and express one self.

Russell Peters makes us all take a long look in the mirror and in a far connected way with different approaches than Inga Muscio, he pulls us to appreciate and laugh at our differences that make us all significantly unique and yet quite similar.  

Awaken, Occupy the Rural, Suburban and Urban Decline:

In perhaps a cynical delight harbored within ideals to rupture an awakening, the decline of the American system has been evident for those critically aware since the beginning of the Neoliberal experiment. The visual evidence of the decline reflects the limitations of the capitalist ideology.

Firstly, the American Rural dependency and bullying from the corporations particularly Wal-Mart and Monsanto has limited the one-time American ideal of independent farmers and business owners. Throughout the rural wasteland, coining the voice of T.S. Eliot, where the decline from one phase of societal evolution passed to another, and hyped progress hailed industrial technology, yet trapped dependency on big business farms left seed owners to be dominated through property-rights from usurpers of pesticide, fertilizer, and grain. Yet on the other rural path, where small towns throughout the countryside once had independent grocers, butchers, tailors, bakers, and more, now they have been put out of business. Wal-Mart has made ghost towns out of self-reliance.

Secondly, the American Suburban decline reflects decadence too often. Apathy and indifference to the reason for much of the luxury; a throw-away society of consumer goods most often from resources taken from overseas, put together from overseas, and when discarded without clear where, gets dumped in fields, landfills, and wastelands. Commercial realism consumed with materialism that unfortunately is dependent on the goods from elsewhere. For when imports or exports cease due to the economy, most cannot fend for themselves on sustainable gardens, clothing that isn’t sold in the shopping mall, or gathering the raw material to rebuild their wants that have been trucked in from rural and other natural areas: Home Depot, Staples, Lowes, Gap, Banana Republic, and more. Always taking, and yet forgetting to give back to the ecological cycle, there is little to assure clarity before it is too late.

Finally, the Urban areas, even more dependent on food from outside the city limits, has left the poor little choice but to assume inflation is a pay or starve choice. Made passive or divided against one another poor verses poor, hard working cop versus hard worker or unemployed while the elite remain apart. The middle class has always been a fortunate wall between the haves and the have-nots. Convinced that joining the armed service would be their only escape route, they are left to fight wars for someone else’s benefit. Ill health insurance or ill health seems reason enough to feed depression with alcohol and other vices to strategic marginalized streets. But the city is more akin to Baudelaire than T.S. Eliot. Child of giant cities, we as citizens are convinced that it is better to be infantile adults consumers for life than to be critical thinking developers of a better structure.

The Urban, Rural and Suburban wastelands may not awaken without significant leaders who are beyond politics. Organizing is prime. Organizing like Cesar Chavez in the fields or Grace Lee Boggs in the city. Spontaneity is of the essence. How can we see if we do not open our eyes? How can we think if we do not use our brains?  

SOURCES FOR REVOLUTIONARY INSPIRATION:

Albert Camus discusses the difference between a rebel and a revolutionary. He notes that a rebel is merely challenging authority as a means to identify himself as someone making noise. The rebel image needs the authority as a means to create a fashion statement. However, a revolutionary is someone who wants to change the system completely in order to make a better system, and a more inclusive system.

Unfortunately, most revolutions have had leaders that entered after the initial actions of change and usurp the potential of the revolution. This happened with Napoleon and Stalin. Other revolutionary leaders, like Mao, passionately fought in the revolution only to get corrupted due to the nature of power once gained. Other significant leaders who pressed passionately for change died before they had the opportunity to prove their true quality of post-revolutionary pedagogy.

During Ho Chi Minh’s early years, he contacted Presidents Wilson in 1919 and Truman 1945 to help bring independence to Vietnam from the French in the similar spirit of the American Revolution. Both Presidents in their perspective time, snubbed him and without compassion disregarded the notion that the Vietnamese would want freedom too. The reactions only directed Ho Chi Minh to embrace socialism further and to eventually be certain Communism was the only means to overcome colonial hubris and capitalist greed, ideological double-standards and the contrast of who democracy is willing to protect and who not.

Gandhi opted not to seek a political position in the independent government of India, because he felt that he could reach the people without predetermined posts designed from prior oppressors. Politicians tend to replete their promises and perhaps fail to honor their initial will. Falling back into the same leadership roles of those who oppressed the public before independent change has merely reflected new wine in old bottles.

In particular, the revolutionaries who impassion me most at this time in my research and thoughts are still Emma Goldman, Mother Jones, Rosa Luxemburg, Tina Modotti, and Louise Michel. There are many others. However, these five women had an edge we can still learn from. Two of which were considered the most dangerous women in America at one time. 

Mother Jones’ famous cheer was “Pray for the dead, but fight like hell for the Living!” She not only wanted to liberate women from patriarchy but she primarily fought with the labor movements to liberate men and women from the exploitive chains of a growing corporate elite that dictated over the mass public. In the society of her day and today, regardless of gender she invoked that all forms of slavery including those in capitalism, if not especially, were negative and unjust. “You don’t need to vote to raise hell!” (Autobiography of Mother Jones).

Louise Michel admits that her revolt went beyond the silent pity of suffering, “My revolt against social inequalities went further. I grew, and I have continued to grow, through the battles and across the carnage. It dominates my grief and it dominates my life. There was no way that I could have stopped myself from throwing my life to the revolution” (The Red Virgin).

Like her predecessors in the US and France, Rosa Luxemburg in Germany was adamant about change and just action in a society where workers were manipulated through the elite capitalist class. The suppressive system continually reflected that legislative reforms and electoral political party change would be insufficient and misleading. Embracing the “element of spontaneity” and spontaneity was not just referring to “instinctive action as a conscious direction” but on the “contrary, spontaneity was a driving force … because revolutions do not allow anyone to play the schoolmaster with them” (Reform and Revolution).

No one single individual is the key to a revolution. During the spontaneous act of revolution all fractions are significant elements in the chemistry process, only after the revolution if alertness and awareness are put down do faces takeover and claim or usurp the leadership role: Lenin in Russia, George Washington in the US, and the Ayatollah in Iran. A singular face to a revolution drowns out the multitude reasons for the necessity of change. Then the repetition and resemblance of ill-pedagogy steps in: new wine in old bottles.

The artist and revolutionary, Tina Modotti, as an Italian immigrant to the US and active in the struggles of the working class knew that art and revolution complemented one’s internal force with his/her outward dissent. Yet as her most common quote would reflect, “I cannot solve the problem of life by losing myself in the problem of art.” Her art would come secondary to her commitment to society when it was necessary to fight.

Emma Goldman was no stranger to the creed that Tina Modotti followed. “It is the obligation of each of us to make human equality a reality, starting in our own lives,” Emma Goldman states, and during her time and our time “Industry is the ceaseless piracy of the rich against the poor.” Her intellect noticed how “under the present conditions the antagonism of economic and social interests results in the relentless war among the social units, and creates an insurmountable obstacle in the way of a cooperative commonwealth” (Anarchism and Other Essays).     

Sources for revolutionary inspiration, high and wide, remind us of how far we have yet to come in the continual struggle for uploading human dignity to each individual  who is unconsciously unaware. Overcoming the resemblance of new wine in old bottles, one hopes that enough voices can speak out so that eventually society learns from history and so that revolutions do not fall ill to similar patterns.   

In the Spirit of Nonviolent Resistance:

Of course today is the birth date of John Lennon, now I am not one to harbor on the idea of birthdays and instead believe every day is worthy enough to celebrate surviving. But as Lennon imagined a utopia of peace and prosperity, he was not the only one to do so. He had some of the most dedicated and courageous warriors for peace on his side. For the cowardly are the ones with tanks and guns, but those who fall in the tradition of nonviolent movement, they are the strongest of wills because they believe in another way possible to solve the problems than harboring continual aggression.

     

Like a never-ending track medley, where the baton of resistance hands off to the next strong enough to learn from the preceding march, civil disobedience carries the torch. The first voices to be recognized as prophets for peace were the leaders of today’s religions: Abraham, Buddha, Moses, and Jesus. These voices lived their ideal of nonviolence to such an extreme that they influenced billions of souls over the past three millennia.  Don’t kill, don’t harm another, and love all as equals.

When the ancient Egyptians exploited and manipulated the Jews, Moses did not fight back, he gathered his people and walked away into the desert escaping from slavery. They resisted and yet did not return with violence. The ideal of civil disobedience during the Romantic Era and after the Enlightenment was significantly discussed in the ideals of American Transcendentalist writers Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. While in the southern states, Harriet Tubman escaped from slavery and began the famous Underground Railroad.

An admirer of Thoreau, moved by his beliefs, sought to write letters to soldiers in his own native land. “You are a soldier. You have been taught to shoot, to stab, to march. You have been taught to read and write led to exercise and reviews; perhaps have been in a campaign and have fought with the Turks or the Chinese, obeying all orders. It has not even entered your head to ask yourself whether what you were ordered to do was good or bad” (Leo Tolstoy, Notes to Soldiers). Tolstoy had sought to enlighten soldiers to use their courage to put down their weapons and consider why it was necessary to obey orders that permitted them to kill.

Thoreau and Tolstoy had an admirer as well, and the young Hindu lawyer found instant karma; “All terrorism is bad whether put up in a good cause. Every cause is good in the estimation of its champion. … In other words, pure motives can never justify impure or violent action” (Mahatma Gandhi). Gandhi went beyond the writings of the two idealist authors. He activated on the ideals and made them into a reality. He moved millions of people in India alone to overcome the British Imperialism. Walking throughout the countryside and the cities, refusing to pay false taxes, as Thoreau had done in the US, and bringing people together to make enough noise to rattle the establishment.

Yet before Gandhi had shaken the world of identifying resistance through other means, a significant Women’s Suffrage activist in the United States in the first ten years of the 20^th Century did just as Gandhi but sooner. Alice Paul picketing the streets and obstructing traffic with her fellow Silent Sentinels in 1917 brought to the government’s attention that it was due time to grant women the right to vote.  Alice Paul along with Ida B Wells and Lucy Burns were not merely going to walk away. They were going to stand up to the government and make sure that women were noticed.

As Albert Camus, another contemporary of Gandhi, reflected, “Yes, Man is his own end. And he is his only end. If he aims to be something, it is in this life” (Camus). Camus, a French Algerian, was aware that if people choose to act violently they most often end in violent ways. If one chooses to act a life of peace and motivation, nonviolent and resistant they will be enthralled throughout history as saints for a cause. Unfortunately, like Gandhi who died via the very means they abhorred, the act of violence is a constant vice of society. But these individuals even aware of this fate would live on through their legacy and inspire others beyond their mortal time.

Martin Luther King Jr. was significantly influenced by Gandhi’s message even after Gandhi had passed away via violent means. The end did not justify the life experience of talking truth to power. In his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail, King promoted: “The purpose of our direct-action program is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than a dialogue” (MLK); regardless of the physical threat, the Civil Rights Activists who marched with King chose to act peacefully when they knew that their oppressors were brutal. Though he lost his life for his cause, King represented a quality of leadership during his time and today.

Perhaps religion plays a part in the leadership of those who seek nonviolent means or perhaps it is a spiritual discipline that enacts courage and strength. Regardless of religious faith, the universal value of human life has individuals from all religions who have activated the approach of nonviolence, just as individuals from each religion have acted violently due to misreading the message of prophets. Gandhi’s Muslim counter-part in Pakistan and India Gaffar Khan moved thousands of people to not seek brutal means to reach independence. Gandhi’s disciple Mridula Sarabhai as well would seek justice in Kashmir as she dedicated her life to promoting human dignity. The Dalai Lama, Martin Luther King Jr. Aung San Suu Kyi, and others from Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, Arab and Hindi traditions pushed the prominence of ethical messages that the founders of such religions encouraged.

Somehow politicized fractions, greedy for power and control lose the underlining message of religions: do not harm or exploit your neighbors. Responsible leadership with responsible teachers is vital in the education of future leaders and to overcome the double standard of defining what it means to be civilized.  Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educator, whose famous book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, underlines the emphasis of responsible teaching: organizing, consistency, boldness, unity for liberation, objectivity to understand otherness, and critical thinking, which involves having the ability to ask hard questions.

“Problem-posing education, as a humanist and liberating praxis, posits as fundamental that the people subjected to domination must fight for their emancipation. To that end, it enables teachers and students to become Subjects of the educational process by overcoming authoritarianism and an alienating intellectualism; it also enables people to overcome their false perceptions of reality” (Freire). These false perceptions are hopelessness, skepticism, helplessness, and victimization. Education can help us overcome these false precepts. A moral teacher, like Martin Luther King or John Lennon, or Cesar Chavez, tends to teach the best lessons outside of the classroom.

Cesar Chavez followed the lessons from his predecessors and utilized organizing tools to bring his fellow Hispanic American farm workers together and overcome exploitive working conditions in California throughout the 1970’s and 80’s. His organization known as the United Farm Workers, worked with local communities to unify and maintain pressure on the exploitive farm owners through peaceful means.      

Does ‘power come from the barrel of a gun’? Is it the only way to break class structure and confront the establishment through violent means? Can getting organized and fighting back for one’s rights merely be interpreted through brutal acts? These men and women mentioned throughout the essay beg to differ. True strength comes from the actions and reactions one takes in life. As John Lennon sang for imagine world peace, some audiences could not imagine the idea other than in a fairytale. However, the footprints left in history from such responsible leaders felt that leading by example would continue to motivate this constant struggle to protect dignity.

In 2011, several leaders on the streets across the globe have chosen to follow the lessons of nonviolence. In Chile, Camila Vallejo, at 23 years of age, motivates and strengthens the student protests. She preaches nonviolence, and has connected protestors throughout the university system to stand up for the right to a better education. One form of protest that has been used is known as cacerolazos­ – banging pots and pans, making noise to overcome the police brutality, and shouting slogans of resistance.

In Syria, Razan Zeitouneh, 34, utilizes journalism and peaceful protests to shed the message that the people of Syria are tired of an oppressive government; and though the Assad dictatorship atrociously kills its own dissidents, Razan Zeitouneh and her fellow citizens continue to resist.  She states, “If we didn’t believe that we will win, we wouldn’t be able to bear all this.”   

As well as in Yemen, Tawakkul Karman, 32, has shown leadership in the face of military force to overcome abuse via peaceful means. Her fellow protestors and her organization Women Journalists Without Chains, carries onward against unnecessary tactics by powerful elites, in order to make necessary democratic reforms.

Camila Vallejo, Tawakkul Karman, and Razan Zeitouneh are potentially the next great teachers to follow the tradition of nonviolence to lead the world from the current paradigm of limited hegemonic fear to the open sharing freedom with the multitude. The legacy that Thoreau taught Tolstoy, Gandhi taught Martin, and Lennon sang to the hippies, lives on, while those in repressive power at previous times are only remembered for their crimes against humanity. How will you want to be remembered? Which form of leadership moves you in your heart and which moves you by the fist?