Critical Necessary Activity:

Edwidge Danticat, Tsitsi Dangarembga, and Cornel West are from three very different political histories but they come together in a unifying global community of select voices that have the courage to speak truth to power. Cornel West grew up in Sacramento, California during the heyday of the Civil Rights Movement. Edwidge Danticat grew up in Haiti under the Duvalier dictatorship and Tsitsi Dangarembga grew up in Zimbabwe first under the apartheid Rhodesian government and then under the Mugabe regime. In order for us to overcome the limited constructions of greed, success, and sovereignty, we must create a global social consciousness that brings together active members willing to remain heard and outspoken. 

Cornwel West recently questioned, “What will you use your success for? Never confuse success with greatness. … You trouble the water by being honest and candid about truth and justice in the world.” Troubling the water with speaking truth to power is one way to overcome the heartless sovereignty. Those who have used their wealth and success to manipulate the system are not great: the corporate elite of Exxon, Mobil, General Motors, General Electric, IBM, Coca-Cola, Monsanto, and the list is long. But the open public, who have been externalities due to the practices of these giants, are significantly more populous in numbers.

Edwidge Danticat in a similar reflection to Cornel West, and alluding to Albert Camus, believes that the artist, the writer, and passionate individuals must be willing to ‘create dangerously’. The Haitian novelist in her superb essay of the same title, discusses how through creative work, ‘we trek back to rediscovery’, we are ‘not just accidents of literacy’ but one’s who ‘keep things alive’. Each writer (and artist) finds unity with the more we create. Reflecting on Roland Barthes terms, ‘a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.’ We must unify through our outspokenness and “create dangerously, no matter how trivial our words may seem” (Danticat).

Writing about reality and the hazardous roads that got us to this passing are our responsibility as citizens of the 21^st Century, whether here in the US or in Haiti and Zimbabwe, or all other destinations overcoming destitution. The luxury of not knowing is irresponsible. When corporations like Monsanto poison the food supply with chemicals and genetically modified crops, we are risking a great crime. When elder Americans claim support for US Presidents, whether current or dead, regardless of their policies and how many masses of innocent casualties foreign and domestic they’ve decided not to protect, this is irresponsible; this is not just irresponsible, but an acceptance of ‘repressive tolerance’.  In Haiti, the only significant reason the island is extremely poor and unable to develop is because the super-rich elite in Haiti does not care about the human dignity of those who lack the means of subsistence. Though Robert Mugabe may have been a revolutionary, who overcame the apartheid Rhodesian government in the 1970’s, he has overstayed his support to his people, leaving the nation with a dictator and not a savior.

In October 2011, Tsitsi Dangarembga read aloud, available on Tedtalks on-line, her essay reflecting on "The Question Posed by My Cat”. In her passionate reflection she gathered knowledge from observing her cat’s behavior. “The antidote to the desolation in Zimbabwe,” as also seen in the US and abroad, “is that amongst our interpretations of greed and violence, is that greed, like violence, is a much graver ‘existential crisis’ than our limited definition.” While her cat has the capacity to learn when she is full and is satisfied, certain human beings seem impossible to know what is required and when they have reached enough.

“When you do not know where your next meal will come from, it is impossible to eat enough” (Dangarembga). Her cat knows she has had enough, because she has the ability to identify when she is satisfied. But human capacity to identify satisfaction is not just greed or gluttony, it is deeper, there is “a neurosis of not knowing what ‘enough’ means,” and it is essential to understand this neurosis in order for us “to redefine it”. 

In the 1940’s, at the brunt of World War II, the economist Joseph Schumpeter projected an idea of Creative Destruction. When the corporations and the banks get too big and overstay their necessity to society, they become obtrusive and in the way. When dictatorships and wealthy elite limit the growth of others trying their hardest to gain a sense of human dignity, creative destruction allows the exclusive dinosaurs and larger trees to creatively collapse so that other species and plants can grow.

The neurosis that allows greed to maintain control with use of violence or manufactured consent is certainly an existential dilemma. But Dangarembge believes global viability is graspable. Edwidge Danticat believes that we can awaken this rediscovery through creative risks, and Tsitsi Dangaremba believes that it is essential to understand this neurosis, so that we can move from a stage of “not I” to a stage of “We” inclusive.

As for Cornel West’s commitment to speak candid and truthful, he traveled throughout the past year across the United States on a ‘poverty tour’ trying to bring to the American attention that poverty is significant in the US. While mainstream media attempts to hide the divide of wealth in the US, Cornel West is addressing the imbalances beyond politics. He is not alone. Ralph Nader and Senator Bernie Sanders have also continually stated that if a financial or corporate institution is “too big too fail,” then “it is too big to exist.” Sanders states, “We should break these institutions up, so they are no longer in a position to bring down the economy.” If they are too big to fail, then the corporate powers need to be broken up, so as not to bring desolation to a larger population. This is true not just in the corporate and financial world, but in the general relations of sovereignty to the greater public whether in the US, in Haiti, in Zimbabwe, and nearly the most overshadowing obtrusive powers.

If the power system does not provide the opportunity for inclusive growth, nor does it provide the tools to obtain a neurosis that understands when enough is enough, then we as socially conscious individuals need to bring together active like-minded progressive voices to be responsible and ‘creative’ risk-takers, like West, Danticat and Dangarembga, who speak truth to power. 

Gloria Steinem, Leymah Gbowee, and Willie Nelson: Positive Social Pressure...

In the past week, former President Jimmy Carter has reflected on the preliminary success of the Occupy Wall Street movement, Fidel Castro has pushed in his new memoir that the world needs higher expectations on human dignity, Ralph Nader in a speech at Harvard Law School iterates that both the Obama and Bush administrations are guilty of crimes against humanity while the established congress does little to make such issues legislatively accountable, Noam Chomsky examines “America’s decline”; and Gloria Steinem has recently started a new social networking movement, entitled Women Under Siege. We are at a unique time in global history and social pressure is steaming at the valves.

Social Pressure is a driving force for positive and negative change. Social Pressure begins when a small group verbally, physically, and even in subconscious ways push others to act in ways they would not necessarily follow maliciously or even conscientiously.  Most of us have largely seen negative social pressure early in life when in school. Peer Pressure is a micro-level of larger social pressures. When students bully, intimidate, or judge other students the psychological effects can create enormous distress.

Such distress on a micro-level appears in Mim Udovitch’s essay A Secret Society of the Starving, the author reflects on high school female students encouraging one another to be anorexic, because they consider looking thin and sexy more hip and more important than eating healthy.  This small level of social pressure reflects the larger society excessive emphasis on women as visual objects. Even several years ago, an example of extreme social pressure in school levels led seventeen fourteen-year olds to make a pregnancy pact in Massachusetts, where they all pressured one another to get pregnant by any means possible. As Michel Foucault, the French philosopher, noted in his research approach, one must study the extremes of society at times in order to better understand the manufactured norms of society.  A pregnancy pact or hip anorexia, seem like extremes. But such means to social acceptance seem painful ways to belong.

Beyond the levels of school peer pressures, the pressures on image, identity and conduct are continually at odds with what seems moral and what seems inclusively hip. In George Orwell’s short story Shooting an Elephant, the classic author brings to the focal point, the colonial police officer in Burma pressured to kill an elephant that had run-off in a mad rage. By the time the British officer reached the elephant, the rage had seemed to pass; however, the villagers were excited to see a white officer shoot an elephant. Unfortunately, he had easily given into to social pressure to prove his manliness and his image of powerful imperial control, so he shot the elephant. The officer appeared limited to his accepted action. Afterwards, he did not feel any more accepted. Submitting to social pressure, in the end, did little for outside interests but a brief entertainment, and no one really cared about his emotional dilemma or the elephant minutes later.

Why submit to negative social pressure, as Orwell’s character had or the girls in American high school, when after submitting to such forces there clearly appears limited new self-assurances? In Gloria Steinem’s new project, which continues her life long commitment to women’s rights and human rights, she seeks to end the use of rape as a weapon of war. Nobel Peace Prize activists in 2011 had also committed the same determination at a summit in Montebello, Canada. Like Shirin Ebadi and Jody Williams, Gloria Steinem with the new Women Under Siege Project seeks to gain global attention to stop one of the most brutal crimes against humanity.

Gloria Steinem addresses in a recent interview with Lauren Wolfe that rape and war were not always co-existent entities. Rape as a weapon for war has significantly been a 20^th Century and today phenomenon. One of the earliest notions when an army pushed rape as a military strategy was during World War II, when the Japanese soldiers entered China, Korea, and other neighboring nations. The historic ‘Rape of Nanking’ was an extreme example of such policies during wartime.  However, the US soldiers were guilty of the same crimes during the Vietnam War and the Serbian’s during the Balkan Conflicts.

Soldiers whether ordered to commit rape or soldiers who choose to commit rape as a social pressure among other soldiers during war, as seen in Iraq and Libya, are submitting to negative actions that only reflect the contradictions of just-wars. Soldiers enacting rape as a weapon of war, accepting such orders without civil disobedience, is a clear example of malicious social pressure. Gloria Steinem and her project are attempting to fight such practices with the positive social pressure of gaining enough ear and voice to create legal actions to stop the practice. If landmines and cluster bombs can be banned from war politics, certainly rape can be banned as well.

  

Positive Social Pressure can be a significant tool to make established norms change to a more moral and ethical practice. Rather than Orwell’s officer bowing down to social pressure to shoot an elephant, groups such as Green Peace use positive social pressure to overcome whaling boats and the fishing industry. Green Peace activists put their lives into the frontline to step in when malignant practices hurt and endanger the environment for animals as well as the public.

Positive Social Pressure can also be pushed during wartime. In the violent Second Civil War in Liberia in 2003, not to be confused with Libya in the past year, Leymah Gbowee organized a women’s peace movement to attempt to end the war. At the time, the dictator Charles Taylor was enacting atrocities across the nation; little did the US Government admit until 2011 that Charles Taylor previously worked under the Central Intelligence Agency. Leymah Gbowee, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011, and her peace movement were fed up with the war, so they encouraged women throughout the nation, Christian and Muslim alike, to stage in nonviolent protests and participate in a Sex-Strike.  The Sex-Strike involved thousands of women refusing to sleep with any man until the war ended. Such acts of positive social pressure caused the war to surprisingly end faster than expected. This modern day acting out of the ancient Greek Lysistrata proves that there is a level of power that could be enacted through uses of Positive Social Pressure.

How can the acts in Liberia or the Women Under Siege Project be useful for those Americans and other high-Capitalist nations who are not in a war-zone or first handedly aware of their contributions to the globalized world? Most of the wars on foreign soil are directly connected to large Corporate interests in oil and other natural resources that wealthy nations are apathetically or ignorantly dependent upon at the expense of others: from Iraq to Vietnam, from Guatemala to Zimbabwe, et al. 

We have the potential to awaken our fellow neighbors to participate in Positive Social Pressure that would overcome Negative Pressures. For example, in the past week, the musician Willie Nelson and more than 300,000 American activists have sued the giant agro-chemical corporation Monsanto.  Willie Nelson’s new organization entitled “Occupy the Food System” attempts to use Positive Social Pressure to stop Monsanto from dominating the food industry nationally and globally.

Social Pressures, negative and positive, are imperative to human progress or human decline. We can choose to give into negative peer pressure and commit crimes we whole-heartedly wish not to accept, but accepting them we’ve become passive invisible voices. We must refuse to be silent. As Aurora Levins Morales notes we must work at “infusing people’s imaginations with possibility, with the belief in a bigger future.”   

Gloria Anzaldua, Judith Butler, and Ameena Mathews: Mix of Ambiguity and Shouting:

On the eve of turbulence where Syrian violence continues, Israel seems ever closer to bomb Iran, and Egypt has become more enraged, fear of war between worlds, clashes of civilization induced from a market out of control. But a common desire wants to push past greed and general sovereignty.

Gloria Anzaldua mentions the ideal ‘towards a new consciousness’, one that involves a Tolerance of Ambiguity, where the “borders and walls that are supposed to keep the undesirables out are entrenched habits and patterns of behavior” (Anzaldua, Borderlands). Violence is a pattern. Such patterns and habits that lock us in are the enemy within. “Rigidity means death.” Rigid war profiteers, capitalizing on perpetual confrontation over oil, resources, and objectivity of desire.

The inner war, the borders of self and other should be inclusive and not exclusive; “breaking down the paradigms” is the duality of transcendence. Anzaldua persists that the “First step is to take inventory…Just what did we inherit from our ancestors? … This step is a conscious rupture with all oppressive traditions of all cultures and all religions. … We must surrender all notions of safety, of the familiar” (Anzaldua). Deconstruct in order to construct. The “whole struggle is to change the disciplines and overcome the internal struggles.”

Frantz Fanon urges the opposite. He urges that violence is the only way to “explode the former colonial reality.” For such a struggle overcomes unknown facets, “as the struggle enfolds, the power of ideology is elaborated,” and a ‘spectacular of voluntarism’, overcomes the ‘obscurantist tendencies’ (Fanon, Wretched of the Earth).

Yet Ameena Matthews, working with CeaseFire.org, an organization in Chicago consisting of ex-gang members, seeks to ‘Shout at Violence’. Matthews and her co-workers attempt to re-direct gang violence away from brutal means. “Violence is a disease. It does not solve anything.” She continues in a recent interview with Stephen Colbert, “We as Violence Interrupters stop the violence from one person to another… We just get right in the middle of it because our goal is to save a life and be proactive not reactive” (Matthews).

Violence hurts the innocent.  Violence objectifies the value of human life. In Judith Butler’s reflections on the Subjects of Desire, a reinterpretation of Hegel, she states “Desire is in part a desire for self-reflection, and because desire … as a cognitive effort to thematize identity, Desire and Reflection are not mutually exclusive terms” … Desire is an ambiguous project of life (Butler).

Butler’s ‘ambiguous project of life’ moves along the similar route as Gloria Anzaldua’s ‘tolerance of ambiguity’. Butler reflects, “Identity is not to be forfeited simply because there is no guarantee of its success … both arbitrary and doomed failure, the striving to know one’s self to think the conditions of one’s own life, is a function of the desire to be free.”

“Desire can relieve human beings of their Consciousness of their own negativity” (Butler). To grasp what is lacking without the violent urge to destroy. “The Negative exists in us and we must come to terms with our own negativity in order to accept what we cannot control” (Butler).

This possibility to create anew, hopes to avow an advocated violence, but one fears today violence is inevitable because too many pattern-prone powerful interests cannot self-reflect on their own negativity, and do not have a tolerance of ambiguity.

Ameena Matthews shouts at violence, “You deserve to be loved!” Violence won’t solve the problem; it avoids the problem rather than being constructive.

But is this a Catch-22? Are we left either doomed to be objectified by the hegemony, or empowered to demand subjectivity? Still that is the point of ambiguity, the opportunity for the new unknown.   

Corporate Boundaries

While the headlines reveal that Pfizer recalls over 1 million packets of birth control pills due to a packaging error and dosage strength, McDonald’s publically tries to eliminate a pink slime in its hamburger meat known as Ammonium Hydroxide, and Pepsi disputes a lawsuit over a mouse found in its products with a reply that their products are too acidic that a mouse would have dissolved before reaching the shelves; corporate business continues with limited sweat and limited outcry. When will the majority of the public get active enough to stand up? At this rate, most likely never, because the public has been passive for so long they would not know what to do.

Back in October 2011, Pfizer had briefly made the news with their taxpayer USAID funded Depo-Provera vaccine for HIV used in mostly African nations, where studies reflected that the drug actually may have increased the risk of women and their male partners becoming infected.  Now with the massive recall of birth control pills in the US, one has to wonder, where will the line of negligence stop?  

C.L.R. James questions in his Mariners, Renegades and Castaways, how does a society of free individualism give birth to corporate totalitarianism and be unable to defend against it? Why is there a ‘modern inability to judge’? (James).  I ask myself those same questions today. When reading Ralph Nader’s newest book Getting Steamed to Over Come Corporatism, he reflects with factual evidence how reckless and corrupt our capitalist elites have gotten. His suggestion is that in order to overcome this we must build together to win. 

Herbert Marcuse in an essay entitled Struggle Against Liberalism in Totalitarianism states: “A total activation, concretization, and politicization of all dimensions of existence is demanded. The autonomy of thought and the objectivity and neutrality of science are repudiated as heresy or even political falsification on the part of liberalism. ‘We are active, enterprising beings and incur guilt if we deny this essence: guilt by neutrality and tolerance” of the negligence is our crime, whether we are oblivious or apathetic (Marcuse).

Myles Horton and Paulo Freire state jointly in their conversations between one another: “We Make the Road by Walking!” We don’t build anything if we remain tolerant of repression and oppression. We create history through participatory education.