Posts tagged: activism
Klint Finley
Guernica interviews Ai-jen Poo, founder of the National Domestic Workers Alliance:
The project grew out of work within CAAAV, where many of the Filipina domestic workers who were organizing had worked in Hong Kong as domestic workers before coming to NYC. In Hong Kong, there are domestic workers from all over Asia, there are Indonesian workers, Filipina workers… It’s a multinational situation, and everyone works under a standard contract. There are set hours, guidelines, wages, and standards that are enforced. When the Filipina domestic workers came to the U.S., many were surprised to find so little protection and that in fact, domestic workers are excluded from a lot of labor law protections.
It was obvious to them that they couldn’t win better conditions alone, that they would have to develop a project with all domestic workers in the field. I had experience with multiracial coalition building and our organization already had that ethic, but the workers themselves also felt it was a natural next step to figure out a way to organize together as an entire workforce, which became Domestic Workers United.
Full Story: Guernica: The Caregivers Coalition
Interestingly Poo never uses the word “union” to describe the NDWA.
Klint Finley
Pamela Haag writes about a paper published last fall in the American Political Science Review about ending or reducing domestic violence against women globally:
Out of this herculean research effort, Weldon and Htun conclude that the “mobilization of feminist movements is more important for change than the wealth of nations, left-wing political parties, or the number of women politicians” in a country, according to the APSR press release.
The authors found that these vibrant and autonomous feminist movements were the first to articulate the issue of violence against women, mobilize political will against it, and catalyze government action. Other organizations, even those with progressive leanings, tended to sideline issues perceived as being only relevant to women. […]
This is heartening news. There’s a tendency to feel hopeless in the face of the Big Trends and the analyses of the violence and degradation against women as collateral damage of what feel like almost insurmountable “larger problems” and social pathology. For example we sometimes think of violence against women as mostly a by-product of economic development and educational opportunities, or lack thereof.
Conversely, there’s a consoling tendency to think that once these economic conditions improve, violence against women will diminish naturally, as a happy consequence of other social changes.
This research concludes that the work of individuals in civil society not only makes a difference, but makes the difference in comparison to other potential but more indirect levers of social change, such as having left-leaning parties or more national wealth. Write Weldon and Htun, the “effects of autonomous organizing are more important in our analysis than women’s…representation inside the legislature or the impact of political parties. Nor do economic factors such as national wealth trump the societal causes of policy making. Although these intra-legislative and economic factors have received a great deal of attention…they are inadequate to explain the significant changes in policies on violence against women. Civil society holds the key here.”
Full Story: Big Think: What Do You Know, Feminism Really DOES Work
Klint Finley
Becky Kazansky writes:
Through a mesh network first launched in November 2011 through a local nonprofit, residents after the storm were able to alert people to their needs over social media and check up on relatives. Access is limited and the network could, at the time, support only about 100-150 connections simultaneously. But in the wake of a disaster that created a new camaraderie in Manhattan around cellphone charging stations and free wifi, New Yorkers can appreciate that when the neighborhood goes dark, even a scrap of a link to the outside world is better than nothing.
Full Story: TechPresident: In Red Hook, Mesh Network Connects Sandy Survivors Still Without Power
Via The Doctor, a volunteer with Project Byzantium, a Linux distribution that includes mesh networking out of the box. The Byzantium team also helped out during Sandy, as noted in the article.
My interview with The Doctor is here.
See also: Government-less internets
Klint Finley
Salon reports:
24-year-old Portland anarchist Leah-Lynn Plante was imprisoned for refusing to cooperate with a federal grand jury. Like two other Northwest activists incarcerated earlier this year, Plante had not been charged or convicted with a crime but was nonetheless jailed for her silence.
Plante’s support network announced Friday that she was released from federal prison a couple of days ago after spending a week in solitary confinement. The announcement says that information is scarce and that Plante, having believed she would face 18 months behind bars, is too traumatized to speak to the media.
Salon: Grand jury resistor Leah-Lynn released from prison
Background:
The Stranger: Political Convictions?
Grand Jury Investigation Targeting Pacific Northwest Anarchists Dates Back to March 2
Klint Finley
These images may seem exhaustive, even redundant. But that is the point: across the world, from New York to Paris to Melbourne, designating entire encampments as trash was a common tactic of municipal governments and their police forces. The ability to designate, and then forcibly treat, another group’s possessions as trash is a show of power, and is particularly ideological in nature.This is just not a case of clearing areas as efficiently as possible. Even objects of obvious worth, such as libraries, laptops, backpacks, and kitchen supplies, were indiscriminately trashed.
Full Story: Discard Studies: Tactics of Waste, Dirt and Discard in the Occupy Movement: A Photo Essay
(via Metafilter)
And remember:
“Occupying” did not “Fizzle”. It was arrested, jailed, & repressed by a military police force’s fear tactics. We are still here. Everywhere.
— Occupy Oakland (@OccupyOakland) September 18, 2012
Klint Finley
Today, Hui is the force behind Guerrilla Grafters, a renegade band of idealistic produce lovers who attach fruit-growing branches to public trees in Bay Area cities (they are loath to specify exactly where for fear of reprisal).
Their handiwork currently is getting recognition in the 13th International Architecture Biennale in Venice, Italy, as part of the U.S. exhibit called “Spontaneous Interventions: Design Actions for the Common Good.” Closer to home, however, municipal officials have denounced the group’s efforts.
Even the urban agriculture movement is torn when it comes to the secretive splicers, outliers in a nascent push to bring orchards to America’s inner cities. While many applaud their civil disobedience, others fear a backlash against community farming efforts. And few believe their work will ever fill a fruit bowl.
LA Times: In San Francisco, a secret project bears fruit
(via John Robb)
Anonymous member Peter Fein deanonymizes himself in a video interview with BBC:
Anonymous ‘hactivist’ goes public on cyber protests
See also: My video interview with Fein and The Doctor.
Johnny Brainwash is an armchair activist and disaffected leftist. His past political activity has ranged from blockading logging roads with Wild Rockies Earth First to coordinating a state campaign for Nader in 2000, with lots of other stops along the way. He mostly organizes Discordian bullshit now, because when he fucks up, no forests get cut down and no one goes to jail. He blogs occasionally at Dysnomia and Shut Up You Are An Idiot. You can read his open letter to Obama-haters here and his follow-up here.
Klint Finley: I suppose you should start by defining what you mean when you say “revolution.”
Johnny Brainwash: Well, it’s one of those slippery words, like freedom or democracy, that gets used a lot of different ways. I’m assuming here a political and social aspect, and really focusing on what are sometimes called “social revolutions” or “the Great Revolutions.”
The basic definition for me is a rapid and fundamental change in not only political leadership, but also economic and social relations.
So the American Revolution or the various colored revolutions (like Georgia’s Rose Revolution) don’t make the cut, but the French or Russian Revolutions do.
True Story: Johnny Brainwash and his compatriots once, while in jail, went on a hunger strike because the guards wouldn’t feed them. It worked.
What made you decide to study the revolutions and their history?
I was an Earth First! activist in the 90s, and had been involved in various other causes as well. We talked a lot about revolution, but never had a solid foundation to build on. It was always based on the world as we thought it ought to be, but rarely took into account the world as it is.
When I bailed on that type of activism, I went back to school to finish my history degree with the pretty clear intention of learning how it had actually worked in the past. I’m drawing especially on a poli-sci class called “Political Violence and Revolutions,” but also on a broad range of other sources I’ve encountered both in school and out.
What are the essential conditions required for a revolution to take place?
Surprisingly, revolutions don’t typically happen when things are bad and getting worse. The classic phrase is “the miserable don’t rebel.” Revolution usually happens when things are getting better but not as fast as people expect, or when things were getting better and have now taken a dive. The key is the gap between reality and expectations. Obamanauts, I’m looking at you.
Also, a very important caveat: anything that meets this standard of revolution has happened in a society that is entering the modern world- typically transitioning from agrarian to industrial economy, and from rural to urban. So to some extent, social revolution belongs to the past. The models I’ll be talking about give us some good ideas of what’s important and what to look for, but I wouldn’t expect them to play out the same way today except in narrow circumstances.
Well then, what models are you going to talk about?
I’m drawing pretty heavily on Samuel P. Huntington here, so let me warn you that he’s a bad man. He did a lot of this work in the 70’s on behalf of the military dictatorship of Brazil, helping them forestall a revolution. But that meant he had to get his hands dirty with the details of history, and he’s always insightful, even when serving the dark side.
Huntington basically divided revolutions into two categories, eastern and western. The names are unfortunate, so don’t be fooled- there’s no real geography involved. It’s just that one is modeled on China and the other on France.
Eastern revolutions we can cover quickly and dismiss, since they’re not terribly relevant to our situation. These are the classic guerrilla uprisings, like we saw in China, Cuba or Nicaragua. They involve a revolutionary actor building its strength in the countryside until it’s strong enough to take cities, and ultimately to take the capital. Very exciting, but not likely to happen in our society.
Much more interesting is the western model, such as France, Russia or Iran. Typically this involves a long period of troubles or unrest, leading to the collapse of the ruling elite. Then others can step in to pick up the pieces. There’s typically a struggle at this point, and if the military or another faction of the old elite come out on top, you don’t get real social change. If a group with a different power base and a different agenda end up in power, however, you’ve got a revolution on your hands.
So that’s why you say the American Revolution and the “color revolutions” don’t count? Because the new powers were old elites?
Essentially, yes. The American Revolution, for instance, may have made some huge localized differences, such as in upland New England, but the big landowners were still big landowners, the wealthy merchants were still wealthy merchants, and the slaves were still slaves. Representative government wasn’t a big change, and no big changes occurred (on the large scale) in who was represented. We could say that a lot of big changes followed, but if it takes 150 years, it ain’t a revolution.
What about the Velvet Revolution?
I’m torn about how to view the various post-Soviet changes. A lot of them ended up with party bosses still in charge, but Czechoslovakia was a clearer change. There was a shift from state capitalism to market capitalism, but I’m not too clear on how much social change occurred.
What many of those post-Soviet changes had in common is that the waters are muddied by the absorption of the former communist states into the Western institutions such as NATO, the EU, etc.
Why do you say an eastern revolution unlikely to take place?
A couple of reasons. For one, the traditional model requires a large agrarian base, and all the angry farmers in the US just don’t add up to enough people anymore. More important is the simple question of military power. The only way a movement could grow strong enough to take on the paramilitarized surveillance state backed up by an enormous and well-prepared military is if it recruits its own military power from the army and the police.
I don’t say this is unlikely- in fact, it’s a more valid concern than it has been in decades. But by drawing on the institutions of power, it guarantees that it will not be revolutionary in nature. Just a different set of goons on top, and no more hiding behind veils of democracy or what have you.
Are there means by which groups can engineer revolutions?
Um… maybe. Like I said at the outset, the social revolutions are all a product of the transition to an industrial urbanized society. So we can reason by analogy, but there are limits to how far that goes.
I would say it’s important to look at Huntington’s western model and see how much we would be relying on stepping into a political vacuum. In that case, it’s a matter of organizing ourselves today for something that might not happen for a long time, and pursuing goals short of revolution in the meantime.
You can’t rely on calling up your friends in a moment of crisis. By the time the crisis occurs, you want to have a large network that is ready to go. The only way I know how to do that is to organize today for the things that are in our reach and don’t frighten people away from us. As the crisis approaches, we can ask for more.
Sooner or later, the choice may be stark enough that people will have to choose.
Are there any countries that are close enough to collapse to have a revolution? Mexico, for example?
Mexico is interesting. Close to collapse, sure, maybe. But who would step in to fill the vacuum? Maybe the Zapatista networks could carve out a region in the south, but I don’t know if there’s a strong enough revolutionary movement to succeed nationwide. The worst case is that the drug cartels end up ruling big chunks of the north.
Pakistan, now, that’s a whole ‘nother question. They’re still in the transition to urban and industrial, their government is in pretty bad shape, and there’s a revolutionary movement already taking power in some places the government can’t hold. It’s not the kind of revolution I’d want, but it’s certainly revolutionary.
Above: photo from 10th anniversary of the Nicaraguan revolution
What revolutions have been the most successful overall - the ones you’d most like to see emulated?
I’m careful about saying I’d like to see any of them emulated- the Terror was a logical outcome of the French Revolution, and similar outcomes can be seen in nearly every example. As an old lefty, I’m inclined to point out Nicaragua as a revolutionary state that had less of that sort of atrocity than most, but we never got a chance to see how things would play out there.
In general, revolution is always violent and bloody, and the violence is often indiscriminate. The older I get and the more I learn about history, the harder it is to close my eyes to mass murder. On the other hand, leaving our society as it is amounts to closing our eyes to massive indiscriminate violence as well.
I would like to spend more time learning about how the relatively bloodless colored revolutions work, knowing that they only happened with support from outside powers (like the US) and served only to bring those countries into the western institutions. But the use of civil society as an organizing principle might be of some use in making future revolutions less vicious.
Above: Demonstration at the Mayor’s Office, Freedom Square, Tbilisi, Georgia, 2003
Are you suggesting that radicals might be better off working within civil society to bring about change gradually rather than revolutionarily?
I think the choice of whether to commit revolution or not isn’t necessarily in our hands. It depends on material conditions. I suppose at some point we could work on bringing about a collapse, but trying that before we build the strength to exploit the collapse would be silly.
To me, the argument between revolution and reform is old baggage we need to get rid of. We don’t know what the world will do around us, so we should be prepared for whatever awaits. If we start organizing and find we’re strong enough when a vacuum occurs, then great, we’ve got a revolution. If we start organizing and find that the vacuum never happens, then we’d better do what we can with what we’ve got.
Demanding revolutionary action or none at all is simply hubris.
What do you think radically minded activists can do to make a difference in their communities or the world?
Well, I keep using the word “organize,” and I’m not sure it’s one people really get. We’re mostly stuck in the “activism” paradigm, which is very individualistic and focuses on people getting to express themselves. It’s egotistical in that the goal is for the activist to feel fulfilled, rather than to achieve anything concrete.
Real organizing means you have to work with people you might not have a beer with otherwise, and focus on what’s important to them instead of you. It means building an organization or a network that is capable of responding to events instead of building ad hoc groups for every issue.
If you’re thinking of revolutionary change, it means recruiting people who are not as revolutionary as you, and helping them become radicalized as their expectations of Obama are continually dashed.
It also means leadership, organization and discipline, three things that are anathema to many radicals with roots in the old “new left.”
Above: anti-fur activists
Can you point to any good examples of the type of organizing you’d like to see more of?
I’ve got a knee-jerk reaction to say the teabaggers, but without Fox News on your side, you can’t get the coverage that they did. And besides, it’s not like they’re winning or anything.
I have a hard time pointing to much that I like from the aughts, but in the 90s, the two most effective movements (and therefore those worth studying, if not necessarily emulating) were the anti-abortion crowd and the anti-fur people.
More broadly, I would set political baggage aside and study how the modern conservative movement went from the political wilderness in 1960 to the Reagan/Bush/Gingrich/Bush years that reshaped an awful lot of how the country is run. They had a genuine grassroots, combined with a slick political operation that invented a lot of our modern techniques of mass politics.
Do you have any other messages for would-be organizers before we sign off?
Be patient. You can build something that can fit into the flow of events, but no one can simply grab the world by the collar and issue demands. You need time to build, and you need time to understand. A good dose of humility helps as well- you’re not the messiah, and you’re not the only one trying to do good.
Finally, just stay grounded in the world. It’s good to have lots of theories, but nothing gets done until you’ve got some dirt under your nails.
Above: Kassiane giving the The American Sign Language sign for “autism.” The sign, which evokes the notion of “closed off,” raises issues in the neurodiversity community.
Kassiane, who prefers I don’t run her last name, is a neurodiversity advocate based in Portland, OR. She was born autistic & epileptic and has spoken at neurodiversity conferences around the world. She spoke to me via instant messenger. You can read her blog here.
Klint Finley: Could you give us a brief overview of what “neurodiversity” means, or at least what it means to you?
Kassiane: Neurodiversity, the word, simply means the whole variety of different brain wirings people have…from the different kinds of normal to the different kinds of not so normal. Then there’s Neurodiversity, the movement which is the shocking idea that people with non standard wiring are human and deserve to be treated as such without being “fixed” first.
What conditions may be included in the movement?
Autistic/Asperger people tend to make up the base of the movement, because we latch onto things so well, but we’re really inclusive…ADHD, learning disabilities, mental health issues, cognitive conditions like Down Syndrome, epilepsy, migraines, neurotypical allies, Not Diagnosed Just Weird…we’re accepting of pretty much everyone.
Is there a point at which a line is drawn between “neurodiverse” and disabled?
The 2 aren’t mutually exclusive. You can be different and disabled, but being disabled doesn’t keep you from being a human worthy of respect.
How did you get involved in the neurodiversity movement?
I was born autistic & epileptic, & being told I’m broken hasn’t ever gone over well with me. When I was 16 or 17 I read autistics.org and saw there are other people who feel the same way, and it was like “Hot damn! community! whee!” and it just snowballed from there.
Are you involved in any particular organizations?
I’m involved with ASAN-Autistic Self Advocacy Network, & have done several conferences for Autism National Committee.
Can you tell us about some of the activism you’ve been involved with?
Way back in the day at a big conference we petitioned to get a very abusive school kicked out of the exhibit hall of said large conference. Since the school in question doesnt believe in human rights it was big gesture, small step—we’ve been working to have them closed down for years.
ASAN has recently taken to picketing events that seek to eradicate autistic & other neurodivergent people, to show the public that eradication isn’t the only viewpoint. We’ve also done a lot of writing to congress and other important people.
I was also involved in the petitioning to have a teacher in Florida who voted a kid out of her classroom delicensed, though that’s all still pending.
Can you be more specific than “events that seek to eradicate autistic & other neurodivergent people”? What particular organizations do you think are problematic?
Oh, Autism Speaks. They totally need to climb a rope and let go. As do Defeat Autism Now!, TACA, and and Generation Rescue.
In what way do they seek to eradicate autistic people?
Prenatal testing to prevent us from being born, specifically. And then there’s the wackaloons who think it’s ok to kill us, who are always fun.
Who are the Wackaloons?
It’s a generic term that here means “person so far disconnected from realityland that I’m not sure how to deal with them” there are wackaloons in all those groups. They pop out of the woodwork when a kid is killed, or an adult, which happens far too often.
Gotcha. And so some wackaloons think it’s ok to kill autistic people who have already been born? What, as some sort of euthanasia? How common is that?
Well, this website is incomplete. And with every one of those in my memory, there were people defending the murderers. Not to mention the one I followed most closely in 2006 or so, where the whole town and even the newspaper were supportive of the killer.
Should neurodiversity be important to “neurotypicals”?
Of course.
Why?
I assume that a cookie cutter world is boring to you. And many people won’t be neurotypical forever. Besides that whole “civil rights” thing, which majorities aren’t always so awesome at.
By “many people won’t be neurotypical forever” are you referring to cognitive decline people experience with age?
Cognitive decline, head injuries, infections that affect the brain, neurological diseases, stroke…brains are fragile
Do you think the criminal justice system should treat people with an autism spectrum diagnoses differently than a “neurotypical” person?
It depends on the person, & on what they did. Like, if I go knock over the 7/11, I’m fully capable of knowing that’s wrong and of not doing it. But if someone has an irresistable compulsion to, say, go stare at fountains and gets arrested for tresspassing for staring at a fountain, their neurology may need to be taken into account.
Autism surely isn’t a get-out-of-jail-free card.
What do you think about use of the “r-word”?
Uhm. I hate it with the passion of 100,000,000 firey suns and have nearly gotten the shit kicked out of me on the bus for expressing this loathing.
To be honest I hadn’t really thought about it much before I read you ranting about it on Twitter a while back. But on further examination it’s weird how many people (myself included, unfortunately) would use the word without giving it a second thought, but would never defend the use of racial slurs.
Exactly! or they get all offended about homophobic slurs, but they throw around the r-word like a tennis ball. seriously? It’s not ok. It’s only remained ok because the people who it’s actually slamming are often unable to tell the ones using it to shove it.
It’s all about the power dynamics, & lack of creativity in insults.
What about using the suffix “tard” to create new slurs for specific groups (itards for Apple users, Paultards for Ron Paul supporters, etc.)?
That’s not any better. It’s not even creative. And it still comes from a place that says it’s ok to slam people who are cognitively disabled, and from a place that says “these people hold irrational to me beliefs because they’re cognitively impaired”
A year or two ago I read an article musing on the possibilities of creating pills that could temporarily “cure” or even *cause* autism. The basic idea is that someone born with autism could take a pill to become neurotypical at a party, or a neurotypical person could take a pill to become autistic temporarily to accomplish some particular task. Scientific feasibility aside, what do you think about such a possibility.
It’d be confusing in the extreme.
I couldn’t function in an NT brain, any more than you could function in my autistic brain. I’m USED to hearing and seeing and taking in everything and focusing on the details. Take that all away & for the duration of the dose, I’d be lost.
Give an NT autistic-like thought processes and perception, & they couldnt use the pattern recognition or hyperfocus or whatever…they’d be too busy looking for better earplugs and sunglasses because the lights are loud and flickering. Scientific feasability aside, there’s no way anyone would actually use it.
You can dual boot a computer. You can’t dual boot a brain.
More Information
The Autism Rights Movement article in New York Magazine.
‘By far the most dangerous foe we have to fight is apathy - indifference from whatever cause, not from a lack of knowledge, but from carelessness, from absorption in other pursuits, from a contempt bred of self satisfaction’- William Osler (Canadian Physician, 1849-1919)
“It may well be that our means are fairly limited and our possibilities restricted when it comes to applying pressure on our government. But is this a reason to do nothing? Despair is nor an answer. Neither is resignation. Resignation only leads to indifference, which is not merely a sin but a punishment”- Elie Weisel
“Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all-the apathy of human beings.”- Helen Keller
“The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.”- Plato
“The biggest conspiracy has always been the fact that there is no conspiracy. Nobody’s out to get you. Nobody gives a shit whether you live or die. There, you feel better now?” -Dennis Miller
“The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment”- Robert M. Huchins
“Is it ignorance or apathy? Hey, I don’t know and I don’t care”- Jimmy Buffet
(I originally wrote this to take a look at the apathy prevalent in our society today without intending to look at this as a ‘generational thing’ because it generalizes entire groups of unique individuals, but I discovered that in order to talk about the current situation it was necessary to go back in time and look at the sociological trends that got us here.)
Recently someone sent me a link to the famous article written by Tom Wolfe, ‘The ?Me’ Decade and the Third Awakening’. When it first came out it in the mid-seventies it caused quite a stir. So much so that it became the label for an entire group of young people growing up at that time. ‘The Me Decade’ or ‘The Me Generation’ went on to become the ‘Baby Boomers’ new title. ‘See me, feel me, touch me, heal me.’ Analyze me, listen to me, and talk to me, me…me!! After reading through the article, it occurred to me that Voltaire was right. ‘Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose’. The more that things change, the more they stay the same.
Some friends and I were talking over dinner when their 20 year old son commented on the attitude of some of his generation. He said that his peers are (and I quote) ‘very spoiled, selfish, and unrealistic about work and life in general. They tend to be self-indulgent, messy, and wait for others to take care of things. Some want a good paying job without having to be too inventive or work too hard for it, and many are foolish about handling money. Immediate self-gratification is expected and pursued. There is a tendency to blame others for things and many have to be rescued from their own lack of experience or incompetence.’
The youth of ANY generation has some of these qualities, so what’s different?
Much of the ‘Me Generation’ were the product of hard working parents who grew up during the Great Depression, and who fought and lived through WWI and WWII. Scarcity was the norm, and family and community were of priority. The future rebels of the 60’s grew up hearing about war and the enormous struggle to make ends meet in the quest for the ‘American Dream’. The anti-war protests, civil rights movement, sexual liberation, and other movements of the 60’s and 70’s, were led by a youth whose idealism and vision led them to believe that united together they could ‘change the world’. In essence this was correct. Many things did change, and some issues we’re still fighting for today.
The idealism and self-exploration of the sixties eventually morphed into the self-indulgent, narcissism of the 70’s and 80’s. Out of the communal focus of free love and equal rights for everyone, a scream for individuality and uniqueness emerged. New religious movements and psychotherapy became common place, and intense self-examination and hedonism became acceptable and encouraged. The mottos ‘Do Your Own Thing’, and ‘Do What Thou Wilt’ eventually morphed into disco glitter and glam, metal, punk and goth and ‘whatever turns you on’. ‘You create your own reality, baby. Go and get it!’
The advance in technology in the 90’s created a time of opportunity and optimism. With the ‘dot-com boom’, company mergers and spinoffs, and a fairly decent job market, the growth and expansion seemed limitless. Then suddenly, along with the event of 9/11, the ‘opportunities’ came to a screeching halt. The dot-coms went bust. Corrupt accounting practices were uncovered in large established companies. Many good paying jobs were outsourced or eliminated completely, and rampant corruption was found in the justice department, the political arena, business, financial, and housing markets, which left us little reason to hold on to such positivism.
In today’s social climate much of the idealism and self-indulgence of the past has now turned into apathy. The predominant attitude of today is filled with apathy, victimization, and what I call ‘I.D.G.A.D’ (‘I Don’t Give A Damn’ or I.D.G.A.S: ‘I Don’t Give A Shit’, if you prefer). And this isn’t limited only to the youth. Many adults fit this same profile.
What the HELL happened?!
For many people computers, video games, television, and cell phones take up most of their time and serve as a distraction to what is really going on around them. The rising cost of living and the dwindling of job opportunities have some people working two or three jobs just to pay the bills. Our Bill of Rights are being slowly stripped away by our government, ‘Big Brother’ is watching, and some people are so stressed out that they’re taking pills supplied by Big Pharma to put them deeper into zombie mode.
Take action and try to change things?
Who has the time, energy or motivation?
Lawsuits won by Big Business (which are intimately connected to our politicians and everything else) leave shareholders, disgruntled employees, and potential whistleblowers asking ‘why bother?!’
Information, communication and entertainment are an instant click away. The desire for attention and our ‘15 minutes of fame’ are satiated though social networking sites, forums and blogs. The disconnection and isolation the instant world has brought leave many people yearning for community. Which ironically leaves some people all alone with their computers and gadgets trying to ‘connect’; searching for some sort of validity through their virtual worlds.
In spite of the fact that technology has been used mainly as a tool for the expression and exploitation of ‘self’, there has also been an increase in people using it for creating a force to combat the corruption that attempts to blind, silence, and control us. With our rights to protest being threatened (and in some cases protesters themselves being labeled as ‘terrorists’), it’s time to ‘wake up’ and take back the power that we have to make a difference. To take control of our anger and what we’re doing in the virtual world and manifest it onto the physical. Can’t find the time? Take some time off from your networking sites, games, texting and T.V, etc. and get out there. Don’t like this message?
Frankly…I.D.G.A.D.
