Maintaining Vigilance

Tangled up in the web of dividing lines that separates ‘being’ and merely just getting by. Max Horkheimer wrote that, “Anybody who doesn’t want to talk about capitalism shouldn’t bother to talk about fascism.” Memorial Day thoughts reflect decisions previous soldiers accepted before entering battle. The traditional soldier tended to be a man obedient to his father or fatherly figured commander. There was never enough questioning why should one fight on the behalf of older men in charge of a structure system that may just protect a small elite’s commanding height. 

A corrosive nominalism, where irresponsible fathers measure norms on sons’ obedience, echoes the ‘existence preceding essence’ of limitations. George W Bush following his father’s command and his father’s father’s command to plunder resources and wealth in oil, steel, and industrial might.  Somehow during the age of Prescott Bush, there were robber barons like Rockefeller, Carnegie, JP Morgan, and Mellon. Today, we still have robbers of wealth and careless leaders dropping soldier’s lives under the press for war and recession, known as Exxon, Mobil, Monsanto, and Goldman Sachs, et al. “While Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein makes an estimated $250,000 a day, regular Americans are losing their jobs and homes at the highest rate since the 1930’s … and yet Goldman Sachs used taxpayer money to give its senior executives a staggering $44 billion in mega-bonuses between 2008 and 2011” (Occupy Wall Street).  

This doesn’t seem right. “Narrow devotion of ‘corporate-economics’ forfeits responsibility for greed and self gain” and this is at the heart of today’s blind experience. Maria Mies emphasizes that to better understand human potential “a new perspective requires, first that we - step back, pause, and take a panoramic view of the reality that surrounds us,” - create a broader world-view that is not totalized by dominant groups, whether they be corporate, economic, religious, conservative, fundamental, socialistic, secular, racial, ethnic bias or especially patriarchal (Mies). Such hierarchal, exploitive polarized extremes limit larger inclusive human dignity. Not merely a singular universal but a hybrid complex of broad acceptances that allow one’s open ‘being’ in the world and not coercive obedience.

Ato Sekyi-Otu reflects that “the center of the World Capitalist system, historical materialism has officially shared Nietzsche’s sardonic claim that the idea of ‘common good’ is a catachresis” to hoodwink the masses (Sekyi-Otu).  The elite body’s use of war in order to strengthen their material situation and make gains at the expense of the people, such a public who tends to do the bulk of the battle, while the well-off sit in luxury, seems a memorial of lost energies. Activists and intellectuals have continually failed to awaken reason over patriotism and this will persist. How to convince soldiers on either side of the battlefield puzzled and emotionally drained Tolstoy, Gandhi, and others. Retired veterans have shared that story countless times when new soldiers run off to war disregarding the warnings of forgotten, homeless vets.

This is a crisis in spatial dichotomy, “a crisis in identifying forms of separation and subjugation, inequities and iniquities" (Sekyi-Otu).  The image of blindness that Ato Sekyi-Otu mentions in his study Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience notes Plato’s quote “The World of our sight is like a habitation in prison”. The color-line, the sexual-identity line, the gender-line: all are dark caves that hinder  and limit a more ‘subjective self’.  A maintained vigilance allows a continually changing of false ‘fixed positions’. Supremacy is outdated just as colonialism. Sekyi-Otu points to Merleau-Ponty’s body ‘spatiality’: Man’s being-in-space limited by visual and physical barriers: Blindness. Restless imperialism and greed is a for-itself dead end. It never accepted differences, only conquest. Coercion: “one cannot begin to compel another to use a space in a certain way unless he has already restrained the other from using space in alternative ways” (Sekyi-Otu).

When the ex-president of Liberia was sentenced this past week, May 2012, Charles Taylor finally admitted that he was guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Paul Yeenie Harry, a journalist for AllAfrica News stated, Taylor made the call in his first post-verdict special statement he read before judges of the Special Court for Sierra Leone Wednesday. He said he agreed with the judges' statement that the April 26 historic judgment reinforces the new reality that Heads of State will be held accountable for war crimes and other international crimes, that with leadership comes not just power and authority, but also responsibility and accountability, and that no person, no matter how powerful, is above the law (Yeenie Harry).

Taylor then boldly compared the crimes of George W Bush and how the ex-president of the US admitted to torture tactics. Taylor stated that if he was on trial for such atrocities then shouldn’t George Bush stand beside him on trial too? This double standard of an International Court proves its lack of global legitimacy.  

The failure of imperialism, alluding to Sartre’s reflection is the “privilege of seeing without being seen,” which is impossible. One cannot childishly rant out the negatives of one civilization without responsibly self-critiquing one’s own negative flaws. This alludes to Horkheimer and Adorno’s negative dialectics. Frantz Fanon, according to Sekyi-Otu, reaches for an  ‘abortive dialectic’, which is to say an epiphany of decolonization. For Fanon, “History, which is neither objective nor ever quite subjective, in which the dialectic is contested. The divided world of compartments would fair better without false compartments. The ability of sight hinders purity that leaves sight more blind than the physical condition. That is why the esteemed image of a ‘true’ justice is represented in the Greek statues of a goddess blindfolded.

Spatial positions of Decolonization are part of the drive to “step back and overcome totalitarianism in its many forms” whether it be corporate, economic, religious, patriarchal, or other. “Decolonization is the veritable creation of a new humanity. In this sense decolonization is an exercise in revolution of repetition” (Sekyi-Otu). Maintaining vigilance, as Trotsky promoted in a similar dialectic of ‘permanent revolution’ allows one to remain alert and ready from coercion. The use of Socratic questioning helps one remain stern and erudite. 

Why is it important to protest NATO?

In Chicago this past weekend, May 20, 2012, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has just wrapped up a two-day summit. The issues on the table for most public ears were issues ranging from the Afghanistan War, Missile Defense Systems, and Syria.

NATO is a relic of the 20^th Century Cold War propaganda. Depending on which history textbook and from which country students studied in, the relevance of NATO’s purpose for existence ranges from pro-democracy rhetoric to US puppetry over European nations to Soviet watchdog, from aggressor to savior. But the Cold War is over. World War II is over, but the ripple effects of World War II politics still scars foreign policy, especially since the war-industrial complex is a profit builder for corporate monopolies that dominate the weapon industry.

When the Cold War ended, NATO should have dismantled. However, rather than dismantling, NATO began absorbing and pulling in former Soviet blocked nations. Still to this day, Russia is nervous about NATO expansion.

Every time NATO drops a missile or a bomb they use the US military monopoly Lockheed and Martin products. Lockheed and Martin seem to irresponsibly profit every time NATO or the US enter war activities. They also tip their weapons with Uranium. Uranium may create a visual shiny gloss on its weapon sitting at the base, but when such a weapon rains down on places such as Kosovo, Bosnia, Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc, the immediate impact is sudden death to innocent casualties and the future impact after the explosion creates generational loss. Depleted soil, cancers such as leukemia, environmental and health impacts are still killing soldiers and civilians in each country that NATO has touched down on.

When NATO dropped bombs on Kosovo and Bosnia they killed as many people as the Serbian military leader Milosevich had in his genocidal rein. Soldiers who from either side cleaning up after the 1990’s conflict were exposed to high levels of radiation and many KFOR soldiers years after duty were diagnosed with leukemia when no previous family history to the cancer occurred. While soldiers received special attention, civilians who survived the atrocities of the conflicts continue to get ill with limited support services from NATO or Lockheed and Martin for the aftereffects of uranium exposure.  One can only imagine what will be noticed in Libya in the near future?

Since NATO is a Cold War relic intended for Europe, the relic should it choose to exist out of contradictions should have remained in its regional space. When conflicts in Afghanistan and Libya arise, these violent acts of war prove NATO’s true capacity for only adding fire and atrocities. Fighting fire with fire does not create speedy ends to conflicts, but instead historically increase the death toll and generational impact. NATO should not stray into areas that are outside its domain. This creates the image of imperialism and global policeman, not a humanitarian concern. If it chooses to be an exclusive club of capitalist align western powers, than it must remain in its initial domain.  Any involvement in Africa or greater Asia is a regional double standard.

On May 20, 2012, part of the protests of the NATO Summit in Chicago included Veterans Against War, an activist group, who during Sunday’s protest threw their medals of honor for serving in the Iraq War over the security fence of the summit reflecting frustration and disappointment. The symbolic act was a milestone in former soldier disillusionment with the conditions of war.

A month previous to the NATO Summit, Chicago hosted a more significant summit for world peace. The 12th World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates occurred in April 2012. At the summit key speakers included the Dalai Lama, Jody Williams, Muhammad Yunus, Frederik Willem de Klerk, President Jimmy Carter, and Mikhail Gorbachev.  One of the most reflective and important panel discussions included Willem de Klerk, who was the final prime minister of apartheid South Africa, Mikhail Gorbachev, the final leader of the Soviet Union, and Jimmy Carter. The message that these former leaders shared was that the world is in crisis and that great power has the opportunity to put away military might. They each have historically proven that there is another way to solve problems of violence than with adding additional force.

NATO could learn from de Klerk and Gorbachev. They each had been in the highest position of power in their respective regimes and saw a path to change history for more peaceful approaches. South Africa’s former leader worked with Nelson Mandela and knew that the oppressive force that controlled Southern regions of Africa, which included present day Namibia, could not continue. He could have chosen a path similar to former Yugoslavian leadership and chose a violent end; but de Klerk showed charisma and responsibility. He had the power at the time to make positive change and he did.

While William de Klerk found peaceful ways to end apartheid, former leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, chose an equally powerful means to achieve peace during the Cold War and did not resort to weapons of mass destruction. He took power and realized that another way was possible than to continue an oppressive system. At the Peace Summit in Chicago, Gorbachev spoke about the current need to change the global system that should be more inclusive. When asked about NATO he said "They should consider actually abandoning the whole project, not immediately liquidating NATO but gradually" (ABC News). Both key men are experts in seeing a failed system when there is a failed system in South Africa and the Soviet Union. Now both men see that the current state of the corporate global system is a failed system, and they believe another, more inclusive world is possible.

NATO is a relic from the Cold War and is outdated. It continues to get involved in conflicts outside of its own domain, and this does not necessarily lead to more peace; but instead, this has historically instigated additional atrocities adding higher unnecessary death rates, environmental degradation as catastrophic as Chernobyl, and risks the health of future generations with the continual push for violent means. The bottom line for NATO is the pockets of companies such as Lockheed and Martin who irresponsibly profit every time NATO drops US made bombs and missiles.     

Re-Capturing the Clear

The sense of ‘normal’ never positioned itself so limitedly as today. This is a continual retort throughout history; Helene Cixous, the Algerian French philosopher, pursues the ‘incomprehensible’. The more the globalized manifestation of a false ‘universal’ forced by extremist, conservatives, and the corporate branding of identity, the farther their clarity spans away from an ‘innermost sense of self’.

Along the lines of Edouard Glissant’s need for ‘Opacity’ and Gloria Anzaldua’s ‘Tolerance of Ambiguity’; the continual historic push to have to name all, brand all, and define all, seems a fundamental swallowing up of the unclear. Fear of anything that is misunderstood because religion, government, or big business doesn’t have a dime on it leads activists and progressive thinkers to push back.

The Sociologist Maria Mies best states that there is a current need to “re-create an innermost subjective human essence” that is expressed and preserved. In her manifesto Patriarchy & Accumulation on a World Scale, she promotes the idea that “Nature is always linked to its social dimension. Human nature cannot be understood if we separate its physiology from its history; … Women/men’s interaction with nature and each other” are historically bound not merely limited to a set mystified nature (Mies).  A false sovereign authority is obsessed with clarity, lines of separation, hierarchy, and exploitation: an unhealthy claim all end all.  

The radiation of Capitalism and Colonialism over the past two centuries has worn down the sense of ‘self’ outside of the parameters of false sovereign authorities. But this is not new. Neither Jesus nor Marx differentiated between male or female, heterosexual or homosexual, race, tribe, or background; and the interpretations that others claim to uphold to such revolutionaries have been put to improper use. What constitutes as ‘Maleness’ and ‘Femaleness’ are “not biological givens but rather results of a historical process” (Mies); History has drowned the essence of self as reality has shown that forces of might mass-against individuals.

 

Finding the words to reflect this, leads to intentional confusion. For some, there is a Holocaust Memorial in our souls. Nazism is no longer pinned down to a specific location. But it is ‘an idea of elimination’: a false sense of destroying life that does not agree with the aggressive suppressive shareholders. Fascism is not unique to a single gene pool. One must also remember that the Nazi genocide was not just a destruction of 6,000,000 Jews, but also included 20,000,000 Russians, hundreds of thousands of Muslims, Homosexuals, and Gypsies (Roma people), among others.  Fascism has existed in societies from the United States to Kenya to Japan. Any denial of this or justification for mass murder and injustice would be irresponsible.

Overcoming this historic acceptance of man’s nature requires an existentialism of the highest morality. The postcolonial intellectual from Ghana, Ato Sekyi-Otu, has found a positive approach to utilize Frantz Fanon in his Dialectics of Experience.  Ato Sekyi-Otu brings to the forefront Fanon’s statement, “To tell the truth, the proof of success lies in the whole social structure being changed from the bottom-up.” The theoretical revolt involves re-capturing forbidden spaces, oppressive bondage that has inhabited radically separate and unequal zones (Sekyi-Otu). This form of existentialism parallels Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. “Unleashing the human being” and releasing possibilities of human existence, which history has imprisoned in a Sartre-like fashion or nearly a Kerouac journey, can span away from false absolutes.

During the week of May 7, 2012 the United Nations Headquarters in New York hosted the Eleventh Session of the Permanent Forum of Indigenous Issues. Attending were voices from countless indigenous groups. The UN recognizes nearly 370 million indigenous groups in over 90 countries. Meeting with individuals from Sami in Norway, Lakota in the US, Australian Aborigines and Amis of Taiwan, one could see how much emotional stress still actively oppresses ignored minority groups. One woman from the Yupik community in northern Alaska, Vi Waghiyi, spoke of the continual irresponsibility of the US military and Environment Protection Agency (EPA) in allowing an abandoned Cold War military base to remain an environmental threat to the local communities, as the toxic waste pollutes the native lands on the St. Lawrence Island. Such negligence is global, and leads to continued tragedy.

In the past month, I’ve read three novels, Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy, Helene Cixous’ Promethea, and Assia Djebar’s Fantasia. One Nigerian and two Algerians, where one has spent her life mostly in Paris and the other mostly in Algeria. The romanticism of the self in a brutal world is reflective in the novels. The understanding here is that Superiority has indeed a weakness, especially the weakness of irresponsibility.

Helene Cixous’ novel runs along the contours of her philosophy about the ‘incomprehensible’. Her narration batters upon a duel between her self and her subjective self. She cannot embrace pure action without thought, nor can she stop at this time from Descartes-like self-reflection: “For the time being I cannot do without H (Helene). I do not yet have the mental courage to be only I. I dread nothing as much as autobiography. Autobiography does not exist. Yet so many people believe it exists. … When I say ‘I’, this I is never the subject of autobiography, my I is free. Is the subject of my madness, my alarms, and my vertigo” (Cixous).  The sense of a free self is just out of reach, a mindset that beholds an animal like a squirrel caught in the moment, because her sense of I is caught in the misleading enlightenment that has limited her action. She brings this sense of opportunity for the self to transcend historic and societal limits when the narrator exposes that the idea of woman-ness is just yet again another fabrication on her identity; “I would like so much to be a woman without giving it a thought. I would like so much to be free the freest of free women: so free that I would even be liberated from the painful sensation of being-liberated. … I would like to be so freely free that I would never even think to myself: ‘How free am I!’ because it is just something that I would be” (Cixous). Being-in-itself in a way so surreal or abstract that parallels Nietzsche’s dilemma, Sartre’s ad nauseam, or Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’.

Cixous’ ‘incomprehensibility’ and grasping of a self away from the social mechanism placed on individuals in a highly Western society is her solution to nihilism. Solving nothing, but the pondering inner battle of who am “I” outside of gender, race, ethnicity, and one-dimensional consumer desiring-machine.  Unlike Helene Cixous’ primarily self-internal reflection, the realism of Ken Saro-Wiwa and Assia Djebar’s novels thrust characters into the violence of history. Each individual character and author had been exposed to the harsh realities of Colonialism and civil war. The entire act of war and annihilation of life proved to be outside forces overtaking life to a useless end.

Ken Saro-Wiwa was a Nigerian novelist and activist. He was quite outspoken in his voice against injustice and corruption.  A member of the Ogoni ethnic minority, living at a time of British colonial end, the Nigerian Civil War, and neocolonial corporate exploitation of oil resources. Since he challenged the Royal Dutch Shell Oil Corporation publicly regarding the company’s reckless irresponsibility to the environment and the local community, the lack of clarity of his death points to the company’s stress on the government to solve the problem. The Nigerian government executed Ken Saro-Wiwa in 1995.

In his vivid novel, Sozaboy, Ken Saro-Wiwa reflects on the Nigerian Civil War. Like soldiers from Nigeria used for British exploits to fight in World War II, the stigma of imperialism had tarnished the diverse tribal culture of the West African region. The British used Indians in South Africa, Kenyans in Europe, and among other tactics, the character in the novel was convinced to seek a life as a soldier because the image of previous Nigerian soldiers used to ‘seek out Hitler in Burma,’ romanticized the image a soldier brought to his community. The sense of Self that the character was preparing for was based on lies, and hence his awakening to the irrationality of war taught him the lesson only too late. The character speaking in broken English, as the author’s specific intention used ‘rotten’ English to express the literature, notices the horrors of not just Civil War and British atrocities, but how the refugee camp is no life for anyone: “Because, true true as Zaza have talked, this camp is proper human compost pit and all these people they are calling refugees are actually people that they have throw away like rubbish” (Ken Saro-Wiwa).  

The harsh realities of the refugee camp in Africa are deeper than any philosophical theory. A sense of self cannot be imagined. The postcolonial reflection has not yet incorporated the ideas of refugees who remain in the camp indefinitely without opportunity. However, the incorporation of the sense of ‘self,’ struggling through apartheid and colonialism has been written down. Steve Biko noting Frantz Fanon stated: “the consciousness of the self is not the closing of a door to communication … we shall watch as time destroys his paper castles and know that all these little pranks were frantic attempts of frightened little people to convince each other that they can control the minds and bodies…” of others (Biko).

Assia Djebar’s novel Fantasia brings together the parallel controls of the French atrocities in Algeria alongside the oppression of Islamist men bullying Muslim women.  Her awareness of the self is trapped among quasi-freedoms, so her narrator must fight alongside both fronts. She notices the actions of the French against the Berber tribe not paying taxes or the corpses of the Ouled Riah tribe “laid out in the fresh air side by side, without distinction of sex or rank … denuded by the silence which enfolds them” (Djebar). 

Unlike Cixous, Djebar is oppressed via the immediacy of her surrounding reality. Away in Paris, perhaps Cixous had the luxury to escape the bloody battle. But for Djebar, she could not escape, “the silence of my solitary confinement feeds this monologue which is disguised as a forbidden conversation. I write to get a grip on these beleaguered days” (Djebar). The promise of freedom, perhaps a freedom that Cixous knew all too well, the pipedream for Assia Djebar’s narrator need to use the pen and write in order to get a grip on reality. “Algeria is a woman who is impossible to tame. A tamed Algeria is a pipedream; every battle drives further and further away”; just as the French attempt to tame Algeria; the Islamists, the Moors, and the Ottomans attempted to tame the women. Every limited exploit of identity led further and further away from a subjective self oppressed via history.

Yet even in the US in 2012 women are facing the backlash as Conservatives attempt to strip away the freedoms women such as Margaret Sanger fought for, and even to suppress the identity of homosexuality as a crime, rather than a human right. The recent backlash in the States reflects how far we have yet to come. A free sense of subjective self, an essence, yet to be defined echoes Fredrik Nietzsche’s “Human All too Human.” Cixous’ narrator in Promethea wants to imagine a world where one does not have to give self a thought because one would not have to imagine a self if it had not the fear that someone else would be imposing or exploiting another’s ‘will’. The choice is to simply just ‘be’ regardless of orientation.   

Thought and Disruption

The Russian psychologist Lev S. Vygotski notes in his landmark study Thought and Language, that a primary word “is not a straightforward ‘symbol of concept’ but rather an image, a picture, and a mental sketch of a concept;” for instance, the Russian word for tailor, his own example, stems from an older word for a piece of cloth, while the French and German words for tailor mean ‘one who cuts’. Vygotski also notes that such a predetermined meaning of a given word unites together when a child learns such a word without knowledge of the historic meaning. The diffused complexity of the word will only gain acceptance through combining the image with a collection of other resembling and contrasting images; for example, on television, the historic feats of Sesame Street had a continual series of clips, where four images were shown in four boxes, and the narrator stated one of these images was not like the others. Three images were of police officers and the fourth was of a firefighter. The collective of images helped the child learn the difference between the word firefighter and police officer. 

Thought development is determined via language.  This means that it is possible then to change how people think. Changing language and symbolic understanding can begin to make changes in thought. Ngugi wa Thiongo believes that this is also true in Postcolonial Theory. In his Detained, the author points out that “I am only a stammerer who tries to find articulate speech in scribbled words.” As well, the Tunisian, Albert Memmi in his 1957 reflections in The Colonizer and The Colonized on the painful and constant ‘ambiguity’ that comes with broken tongues, while the “intellectual lives in cultural anguish, the illiterate person is simply walled into his language and re-chews scraps of oral culture” (Memmi).  

The imbalances of inequality from hierarchy and hegemonic control prefer to keep those who are unaware of their strengths bogged down in un-verbal ignorance. In Kenya, when Ngugi wa Thiongo wrote novels, the government was slightly worried about his pen. But when he started to produce plays, the government was threatened. The format of a dramatic performance gave the masses the words and the visual collection to activate thought. As long as the masses cannot create thought, they will not activate power. Beyond the government of Kenya, the globalized international community has to face the growing control of corporations, especially the US corporations. As long as the majority of speech is within the limits of a computer, a brand name, a cell phone, a video game, or manufactured media and political language, people can be controlled within a limited parameter. Even with the US Amendment honoring Freedom of Speech, if one does not know the words to ‘speak truth to power’ he or she cannot articulate change. Individuals can say what they want to unless it involves speaking against the chosen system of control. It is easy to confuse ‘capitalism’ and ‘democracy’ if the words do not differentiate the two.

While Steve Biko articulated words of change to his fellow South Africans against apartheid and Assia Djebar articulated words during the French controlled Algeria, the image of privilege over others less fortunate were dictated through visual separation of white over black, French over Muslim. When the words of ‘colonialism’, ‘racism’, ‘inequality’, and ‘oppression’ create meaning because the thought comes from a language imposed through the actions, one can see how often power structures fear education.  

In 1932, the American preacher, Reinhold Niebuhr, in his book Moral Man and Immoral Society reflects on the notion of ‘ethical attitudes of a privileged class’. He brings up the clear dividing line that James Madison formatted during the early days of US independence. Declaring the ‘protection of different and unequal faculties,’ Madison made clear that inequality would perpetuate throughout US history (Niebuhr). Perhaps ‘apartheid’ South Africa has ended, and perhaps French controlled Algeria ceased for Biko and Djebar. However, the negative of oppressive acts does continue. The US military is still unjustly in Afghanistan and contracted out globally. Corporate power still finds ways to discredit critical thought.

Corporate power has a general objective and purpose. Herbert Marcuse knew this quite well. In his essay, Aggressiveness in Advanced Industrial Society, he states that the corporate purpose is “to reconcile the individual with the mode of existence which his society imposes on him. … It is necessary to achieve a libidinal cathexis of the merchandise the individual has to buy or sell, the services he has to use to perform, the fun he has to enjoy, the status symbol he has to carry in order … to exist in the society dependant on uninterrupted production and consumption” (Marcuse). The language provided in the context of images creates a thought structure, alluding back to Vygotski, where consumption is now the only language most individuals have grown to accept.

This fantasia of thought policing can easily be overlooked because the language does not speak with clear visuals. However, continually in the past year, vivid visuals of corporate lack of accountability have made it into the online media, and at times into the mainstream media; for example, the slimy pink substance in McDonald’s hamburgers and public school meats, the dissolved image of mice that vanish from Pepsi soda, the arsenic in apple juice and chicken, the recall of Pfizer birth control pills, crushed up bugs used to make pink smoothies at Starbucks, the environmental hazards now apparent to marine life in the Gulf of Mexico due to BP’s oil spill, and the list is growing.  There is a group of elite sitting above on a privileged pedestal. The 1% seem indifferent and careless to the struggles of the growing disparity in the economy. There are large corporations who continually benefit, rarely paying taxes, who seem to raise prices yet care not about the newly homeless.

All societies of the past perpetrated and perpetuated social injustice without meeting significant resistance from those who were victimized by the social system (Niebuhr). The visual of the word ‘Occupy’ is evolving into new categories beyond Wall Street. But the new language must become more than just childish stuttering.  There are words for ‘speaking up,’ can there be a visual? 

Teaching Inclusively

In a recent correspondence with a German Professor that I met at the Left Forum in March 2012, she presented me with an inquiry about the intellectual challenge of finding ways to get my students to critically go beyond basic concepts. The younger generations have been exposed to a far more manufactured understanding of history and reality under the tools of corporate technology: media, internet, film, and one can even bring in standardized tests failing to create critical thought but how to study to merely pass.

Getting my students to pull away from iphones, cellphones, computers, and headphones is an utter task. Working with international students, who may be in more affluent positions than their poorer counter parts from their own countries, have been exposed to the same manufactured bubble of the 'universal middle-class', which means they have as well not analyzed the role corporate development has exposed them to, this is a necessary task that may be neglected. 

In the classroom, I discuss a wide range of topics of global issues, whether they want to discuss the topics or not. Rather than being apathetic and ignorant of the topics, I at least make them aware of the issues, so that they are no longer ignorant. The next step is to go away from apathy. I don't know if it is possible in a short-term exposure of a single semester; but I have at least made my contribution to the academic scene by changing the voice of the institution regardless. 

I address a lot of Postcolonial Theory and enmesh it into my course work. Ngugi wa Thiongo, a Kenyan writer, discusses the idea of 'decolonizing the mind'; no more than in former colonies, but here in affluent western civilization, the masses need to decolonize their mind most from corporate 'manufactured consent' as Noam Chomsky calls it.

Students can only handle small doses of theory at a time, or it goes over their heads, just the same with most average individuals, particularly in the US. I think that in certain European countries, there is still a level of critical thinking, (from my overseas experience). But the US system nurtures 'infantiled adults'. The US system prefers childish adults who can be consumers for life, than mature adults who can solve real problems. Some of the key intellectuals that influence me at this time are Ngugi wa Thiongo, Edouard Glissant, Julia Kristeva, and Gilles Delueze. But the list is endless. Some of which appear significantly in my writing. 

In my discussion with the German Professor, I could see the similarities she mentioned in my own classes recently. In particular, my classes with middle-class economic level students at my one school are far more 'unmovable' at times. Many of these students care little about most things political or social. How to get them to talk about real issues beyond headphones, cellphones and entertainment is really tough. Visual aids, like documentaries work best. But there still remains a passivity.

More important, however, in my low-income multi-national classes with students trying to get beyond the poverty level, I feel like I am making the most impact. I have been bringing in essays written from all walks of civil rights and human rights the past two weeks. Some of the essays ranged from Martin Luther King on 'tolerance of oppression is immoral', Ngugi wa Thiongo on 'culture', Barbara Einheirch on 'maintaining the crime supply and the US prison system', and just the other day about 'Nepal acknowledging legally a third gender.' The class has been focusing on the Argumentative Essay, so by bringing in critical arguments, the students can see varying forms of presenting arguments.

I admit that my topics may appear risky and unconventional for some, yet because the syllabus required students to engage in the writing of an 'argumentative essay', I created arguments in class (yet I always respect all students right to stand by their argument and belief).  This session wasn’t to prove any one wrong or right, but to allow students to form an argument and support their position with facts, sources, and reflective analysis.

Some key moments in the class were when my class openly discussed the recent Trayvon Martin shooting in Florida. My African-American students were frustrated with racial profiling in the US. One of the male students mentioned that this could have been him. Later in class, I began discussing the 9/11 2001 attacks and how in the US since then, Muslim Americans have been racially profiled. One of the African-Americans, who earlier mentioned his anger at profiling, did not realize his own bias and mentioned how he still feared Muslims. Then my five Muslim students in class were taken aback and argued their frustration with his response. 

I began to slowly awaken some of the students bias, 'information is power'. I made my students aware that some of the most famous American athletes during the 1960's converted to Muslim teachings due to Malcolm X and as a protest to the Vietnam War. Some of the infamous athletes noted were Muhammad Ali, the boxer, and Kareem Abdul Jabar, the basketball player. This got the students curious to know more.

The following class we discussed the idea of 'culture'. Somewhere in the middle of the class time, one of my older students mentioned how 'women no longer want to stay at home and cook.' He had no clue how old fashion and outdated his response was, because my female students made voice and stood up. Even after class, my students were still discussing the arguments in the hallways. This is when I feel that I may have opened student minds and gone past the standard class time. When students continue to think about the topic after the class ends, then I feel I have started a lit fuse to ignite challenging ideas and social standards.

My last class may have been over the top. Since the previous class had ended on the gender note, between culturally imposed gender roles reflected by different generations; I attempted to discuss the idea of a third gender. The open argument and discussions were excited. Even for most Americans, the idea of societies having 'legally accepting Third Genders' as in Nepal and Thailand, challenges imagination. However, historically transgender, intersex, hermaphrodites, and eunuchs have been around societies since the start of human existence. Indigenous and tribal communities have had different roles for mixed-gendered individuals. Recently the United Nations' Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon made a great speech in March available on-line about protecting the rights of homosexuals and those who are transgender. The class discussion most likely did not change the most 'conditioned by normalization' terms, but now those students are at least aware and not oblivious. 

After class, one of my Muslim students told me she did not believe in such ideas, but when I discussed briefly with her about the historic role of Eunuchs in Islam, she did not know the history. Now she is aware, and she can search on the internet and find countless resources referencing the topic. If you give eager students who have an opinion, just a little bit of information, some of them seek outside of the class more data.  One may not have taught the student more than he or she had before class, nor have impacted them to think critically. But one can at least try to share information to create the possibility to think more inclusively.

Left Forum, Occupy Upkeep, and Moving Forward:

This past weekend was the annual Left Forum in New York City. 2011 was my first year attending the Forum, and my reflections on this year’s event ranged from high to low. In part to carry forward my admiration for Grace Lee Boggs, “in order to have a real revolution, we must have a revolution of our selves first.”

I am victim to my own limitations. I had higher expectations of the Left Forum this year due to the Occupy Wall Street protests, which kindled six-months earlier. One cannot expect the left movements to shift a paradigm so quickly. Even towards the end of the Forum, Occupy Wall Street protestors were chanting, “Out of the Forum and Into the Streets!” I didn’t see the entire mass of the Forum pick up and walk to the streets, which followed with renewal action in Zuccotti Park.  

Even my walking along the sides of the protest in observation was skeptical of mob mentality. It was obvious to see that the police were like vultures eager for any simple excuse to rush in and brush out the crowd.  One siren followed another and within a matter of seconds the vans of bullying police came to the park.

There is a space in the movement for all mentalities; early in the day at the Forum, I planted a seat in a crowded room eager to listen to Frances Fox Piven. Her now celebrity status in protesting circles is due to Glen Beck’s slandering her principles. Most people have even forgotten who Glen Beck is, because let’s face-it, he has nothing sufficient to say that will sustain past his television show. Frances Fox Piven has been an activist for over fifty years.  Her panel consisted of her, Nelini Stamp, Stephen Lerner, and Lisa Fithian. The session on Strategic Directions for the Occupy Movement had an overflowed audience.

The elements discussed were well understood. “We must imagine beyond what we already had,” because the illusionary economy and the social acceptable standards we once enjoyed are no longer available. We are learning that a “job should not be considered merely a charity from the corporate monopolies.” When the panel spoke their piece, the room opened to questions, and like a common practice throughout the Forum everyone wanted to say their two bits. How do we get past the shouting and the need for each hand to submit what they wish to be relevant?  The failure of my expectation at the forum was that we were all preaching to the choir.

Most of us have known for quite some time that a paradigm shift is necessary. Preaching to our selves and proving to one another, about who knows more than the next guy, is not the solution. Once you learn the strategy of the open discussion part of each panel session, you learn that it is unnecessary to compete for airtime. Frances Fox Piven said it best in the end, “if you feel the movement needs to focus on labor unions, or if you feel the movement needs to protest the Bank of America Share Holders meeting, or if you feel one form of action is necessary or another, go out and activate your concern. Don’t just talk about the strategy but go out and live the example. Each new action that is created becomes a part of the larger process to change.”

Beyond the Left Forum, the wave of dis-grunt and yet growing passion for resistance is real. This is a growing ripple effect that has to have its waves of moving up and down. It is an exciting time and at times quite frustrating. People want change but, like myself, I know it won’t happen immediately. It is a process. Skipping steps could cause skipped conclusions.

While at the Forum, I particularly enjoyed the session entitled: Occupying Gender: Occupy Wall Street Organizers Speak Out. Some of the panelists were Sara Zainab Bokhari, Melanie Butler, Suzahn Ebrahimian, Amelia Sabine, Leah Todd and several others. The panel supplied a crowded room with tools and knowledge about the numerous formats that exist in directions of the Occupy Movement, especially in regards to the inclusion of women and transgendered activists in the offensive.

Even within the shared marginalized space of the movement, there are different levels of feminism. The mainstream of society and even at times amongst the activists, individuals are fearful of feminism. This makes me recall the quote I recently read via Maria Mies: “Feminists are those who dare to break the conspiracy of silence about the oppressive, unequal man-woman relationship and who want to change it.” The ambivalence in any movement to not address this issue fails to understand the need of revolutionizing ourselves first. The Gender Occupy panel brought to light the Speak Easy Caucus, the W.O.W.  groups (Woman Occupying Wall Street), Step-Up/Step-Back, and other strategic angles to help the Occupy Movement.

New strategies that fractions throughout the movement provide are necessary and welcomed on a constant flow. Moving forward will take time and patience, even if much of the American culture harbors us to be impatient. My own limits leave me restless for more sooner. I appreciated the opportunity that the Left Forum provided as an outlet for frustrated progressive Americans, yet we need to go beyond the walls of the conference center. If protesting in the street like a mob is not your thing, there are multiple approaches and angles to take that don’t require rushing into tear gas. The utmost need is to make more and more people aware that they have power and should know that ambivalence and apathy are cancerous. One can tell this to people directly, but other more useful strategies can be more enlightening. Or as one of the panelist mentioned, “Fuck the Mainstream.” Go out and create the world you want to create.

Paulo Freire once stated, “Blindness rushes to failure … Take time to build clarity.” We make the road by walking, not by just talking.    

Re-Weaving Consciousness:

Drum beats and screaming chants are motivational tools to create collective action. Outside the subways from Washington DC to Paris to San Francisco to London and New York street musicians bang on all sorts of instrumental creations. Virginia Vargas, a Peruvian activist, states in her essay International Feminism, “Conditions are ripe for the emergence of new forms of political culture or, better yet, for countercultural proposals that challenge the neoliberal logic of power now extant at the global level and strongly influencing the local level” (Vargas).  With the current economic strain on the international market, now is the ideal time to press new economic and political proposals that may have been quickly shattered in previous decades.

The notion of “re-weaving” the social fabric that Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez projects in her anthology, Women Writing Resistance: Essays on Latin America and the Caribbean, parallels the ideal that Edouard Glissant promotes of “enmeshment”. The unraveling of the societal and economic fabric to unknot limited patterns is an enlightening force that will help create a more inclusive community and reweave the dynamic potential of a currently homogenizing failed consumerism.

Our communities must come to terms with our limitations and our obvious dependencies outside of them. From import and export of food supplies, oil, labor, to technological production, there is no longer a small town wholesome community in a local sense. Products made in China, oil from the Middle East, labor from Mexico, and food from Ecuador to Ghana, the American system is dependant, just like most nations in the 21^st Century. Unable to isolate from the Neoliberal economic and political might of corporate drive for unlimited profit, even if the small town conservative wants to close the borders from country to country, or state to state the means to survive are an oblivious reality until truth is faced with evidence. For example, when Alabama changed its laws on immigration, the backlash was a surprise to the state; illegal immigrant labor was a significant force in the agriculture industry. Without labor working the fields, for manipulative fees, the economy of the state has faced a significant decline. Being a Conservative appears to be merely suicidal today.

Upon waking up to reality, a new sense of ‘community’ needs to be addressed. The conservative small town is not a lone entity, and will not maintain its sense of self without re-evaluating its dependencies. Undo the fabric! Now is the time to reweave a more inclusive system that has a healthier economic, political, and subjective approach.  The Guatemalan activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Rigoberta Menchu believes in ‘community’ as an alternative way forward, and not simply a memory of the past. Community “is something dynamic. Identity is not just nostalgia for eating tamales. It is holistic and comprises all the integral aspects of culture” (Menchu). Our pasts are part of our identity, but in order to have a well-knit society tomorrow, individuals must do more than accept that this reality is ‘as good as it can get’. A new sense of responsibility for community must prevail.

Even more dependent on the global system, than the small town, is the apathetic city dweller. The urbanization of society has atrophied the sense of community. Neoliberal policies have nurtured a deep sense of ‘selfish’ tendencies. The “singularity of your experience should be allowed to exist, along with your own peculiarities, inconsistencies, and your own voice,” but the work of “infusing people’s imaginations with possibility, with the belief in a bigger future,” involves us overcoming the acceptance that humans are selfish and self-reliant entities (Danticat/Morales). Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez promotes that in order to overcome, we must be unafraid to open horizons, uproot dualist thinking, and undo artificial separations.

The progressive struggle to overcome obsolete paradigms is a survival necessity. Many individuals fear the unknown of what would replace the current system. But we already have a replacement that has been waiting to be fully activated for some time now. The United Nations, if given a significant opportunity to create a more inclusive community, would be a legitimate alternative. This would mean that governments and corporations would need to release their exploitive grip over the public. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights signed and ratified has the groundbreaking post-constitutional fabric to include human rights across borders. Unfortunately, without the most powerful nations upholding their already signed agreement, the UN has no feasible worth. By waiting for businesses and governments to allow a more legitimate UN, the UN has diluted with corruption in its waiting stage. Community support and involvement in addressing and cleaning up the UN system would create a healthier alternative away from the nationalistic system of today that ignores how interconnected we all truly are.

Neoliberal hegemonic powers will never allow this to happen peacefully. The World Trade Organization, the IMF and the World Bank continually allow corporate entities to remain indifferent to ethical standards that irresponsibly ignore the social impacts of capitalistic endeavors. So we must beat our drum louder and louder. The emergence of the ‘me culture’ have created knots in the fabric of society (Virginia Vargas). The American way of ‘selfish interests’ has to be altered or un-weaved to get the knots out.  Understanding that we must overcome “sweeping assertions” and immature egoism is an unsettling notion. But there is a connection between the personal lives we live and the world we create.  Louise De Salvo states, “We are the accumulation of the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. So changing our stories can change our personal history, and can change us,” if we create stories that balance our beliefs. We must create inclusive histories.

Creating an inclusive history is fundamental for survival. Changing our stereotypes can only be done, if we have the opportunity to step outside our safety net. For example, recently I spoke to a student who came from Palestine. We had an open discussion about history and life. When my student found out that I was Jewish, he was surprised. His experience of Jews, prior to our conversation, was mostly reflective of Israeli authority. Changing his stereotype was a moving experience. Not all Jews are Israeli and not all Israelis are Jews. Creating connections with individuals from multiple communities and multiple experiences allows people to realize that one’s experience with another person from a different background should not be sufficient enough to brand a universal truth. The more an individual expands the connectivity one has with others of different and dynamic backgrounds the more one's definition of humanity expands.

Gloria Anzaldua, emphasizes that “those who have been ‘pounced on’ may also have pounced on others,” and all of us need to be accountable for our behaviors, responsibilities, and privileges (Anzaldua). A new definition of ‘community’ must move from nationalism to internationalism, the linkages are far closer than most individual’s concept of daily life retain. The shirt one is wearing traveled through at least two countries. The silk from one, the labor to knit it together another, the store yet a third, and the soap to clean it perhaps came from a fourth location. Vargas notes in a speech made at the Third Feminist Dialogue in 2007, “ a new definition of democracy is necessary to make national, global, and subjective personal change.”  Especially during the farce of an American election year, when the choices designated to vote for are the least of the worst, a new definition of society and community must un-knit the knot in the weave. The pathetic choices presented truly reflect the limits of what can be hoped for in a façade of solution-ary rhetoric.     

              

Drum weaving is a rhythmical music dance that takes fabric in each hit to the pattern. Isolating knots and untangling them, gives space for more movement.