Archive for November 2011
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"All I know is that when I see white people regularly yelling at police officers then something good is happening. I know it is easy to be snarktastic, but why do it with the Occupy Movement? There are plenty of things to snark about that don't involve the oppression of the poor. Do yourself a favor. Be on the right side of history."
--W. Kamau Bell
Read the article here.
Matt Taibbi nails it.
Excerpt:
"What happened at UC Davis was the inevitable result of our failure to make sure our government stayed in the business of defending our principles. When we stopped insisting on that relationship with our government, they became something separate from us."
--Matt Taibbi
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Glen Greenwald hits the nail on the head. Here's an excerpt:
"The intent and effect of such abuse is that it renders those guaranteed freedoms meaningless. If a population becomes bullied or intimidated out of exercising rights offered on paper, those rights effectively cease to exist. Every time the citizenry watches peaceful protesters getting pepper-sprayed — or hears that an Occupy protester suffered brain damage and almost died after being shot in the skull with a rubber bullet — many become increasingly fearful of participating in this citizen movement, and also become fearful in general of exercising their rights in a way that is bothersome or threatening to those in power. That’s a natural response, and it’s exactly what the climate of fear imposed by all abusive police state actions is intended to achieve: to coerce citizens to “decide” on their own to be passive and compliant — to refrain from exercising their rights — out of fear of what will happen if they don’t.
The genius of this approach is how insidious its effects are: because the rights continue to be offered on paper, the citizenry continues to believe it is free. They believe that they are free to do everything they choose to do, because they have been “persuaded” — through fear and intimidation — to passively accept the status quo. As Rosa Luxemburg so perfectly put it: “Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.” Someone who sits at home and never protests or effectively challenges power factions will not realize that their rights of speech and assembly have been effectively eroded because they never seek to exercise those rights; it’s only when we see steadfast, courageous resistance from the likes of these UC-Davis students is this erosion of rights manifest."
--Glen Greenwald
I just picked up a cool new book, Visions of a Better World: Howard Thurman's Pilgrimage to India and the Origins of African American Nonviolence.
by Quinton Dixie and Peter Eisenstadt
Check it out.
"We are not going to allow any military industrial complex to control this country."
--Martin Luther King Jr. (1968, ten days before his assassination)
Bill Twist, Pia Banerjee, Lynne Twist, John Perkins, Drew Dellinger, Jon Symes. Here's a photo from the panel that followed the Awakening the Dreamer "Super Symposium." Yesterday's event was the unveiling of the newest version of the Symposium.
In 2003-2004, Drew was a key member of the team that developed and designed the Awakening the Dreamer, Changing the Dream Symposium. The Symposium has now been used in 60 countries, in 14 languages.
"The dispossessed of this nation--the poor, both white and Negro--live in a cruelly unjust society. They must organize a revolution against that injustice, not against the lives of the persons who are their fellow citizens, but against the structures through which the society is refusing to take means which have been called for, and which are at hand, to lift the load of poverty."
--Martin Luther King Jr. (1967)
Photo: by Matthew David Segall
"Let us keep the issues where they are. The issue is injustice.... Now we've got to keep attention on that. That's always the problem with a little violence. You know what happened the other day and the press dealt only with the window-breaking. I read the articles. They very seldom got around to mentioning the fact that one thousand, three hundred sanitation workers were on strike, and that Memphis is not being fair to them, and that Mayor Loeb is in dire need of a doctor. They didn't get around to that."
--Martin Luther King Jr., April 3, 1968
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