Nas2EndWork "Pamela's Blogs":
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Blog 1: "You Know How I Know You're a Slave?"
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Blog 2: "Where the Hell is Vasquez When We Really Need Her?"
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Blog 3: "How Do I Con Thee? Let Me Count the Ways...Or: What Is 'Individual Freedom'?"
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Blog 4: "Is It Never Too Late to Be the Parent I Should Have Been?"
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Blog 5: "Are We Innocent When We Dream?"
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Blog 6: "To Enlarge the Realm of the Possible"
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Blog 7: "Bury the Corpse!"
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Blog 8: "Just Say NO! Make Coke the First Corpse to Go!"
Blog 9: "Compassion Always Comes Too Late"
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Blog 10: "To Live and Die a Slave?"
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Blog 11: "Crime Is The Flip Side"
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Blog 12: "Rocket Science Ain't Rocket Science"
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Blog 13: "The Fuck-It Factor"
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Blog 14: "How Do You Organize (Our World) Without Hierarchy?"
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Blog 15: "Eating What The Earth Gives Me"
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Blog 16: "When You Become A Voice Of The Voiceless"
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Blog 17: "You Got To Sucker The Corn Or the Ears Won't Be Worth Nothin'"
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Blog 18: "Packaging Our Children For The Podrunks"
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Blog 19: "The Good Livers"
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Blog 20: "Is There Such A Thing As "Voicelessness"?"
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Blog 21: "Brandon Terrell Jones"
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Blog 22: "Our Real Work"
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Blog 23: "Gennenice Chapman Johnson"
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Blog 24: "What Is Your 'Theory of Change'?"
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Blog 25: "The Plum Tree"
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Blog 26: "Wholism Is A Health Issue"
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Blog 27: "Who's Loving You Michael?"
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Blog 28: "Getting Busy"
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Blog 29: "Depopulation"
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Blog 30: "Growing A Mass Movement"
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Blog 31: "Ridley's Choice"
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Blog 32: "Children Of The Technology"
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Blog 33: "The Devastated Earthscapes From Lawrence Summers' "Logic""
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Blog 34: "How Do We Grow A Mass Movement?"
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Blog 35: "We Have To Make A Loud Noise"
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Blog 36: "The Phoenix"
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Blog 37: "Wind-Blown Seeds Need Roots"
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Blog 38: "Embracing The Plural"
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Blog 39: "Round And Round And Round We Go But Not Merrily"
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Blog 40: "Unplugging"
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Blog 41: "Thank You Sandy From Petaluma"
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Blog 42: "You Got City Hands Mr. Hooper"
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Blog 43: "Letter to Michael Reynolds"
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Blog 44: "The Last Civil Rights Movement"
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Blog 45: "The 4 R's: The Ruses Used To Rend Us...Race, Religion, Reason, and Recognition - 1"
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Blog 46: "The 4 Ruses - 2"
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Blog 47: "The 4 Ruses - 3"
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Blog 48: "The Responsibility Of The Intellectual"
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Blog 49: "The Hidden Malevolence: AKA Michael Moore's Dilemma"
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Blog 50: "Wading Into The Muck Of State"
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Blog 51: "Seeing The Communal Alternative"
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Blog 52: "Becoming The Function"
Pamela's Blog 44
[In Progress...] First draft published on Tuesday, October 6, 2009 by Nas2EndWork.org
“The Last Civil Rights Movement”...
The "last civil rights movement" indeed!...when we embrace across the categories...freeing human energy from slavery.
“There's a scene in Avatar I really like..." **
(Discussed also in OTheRLogs 26 [09.09.09], and 32 [09.21.09].)
Below: “The Last Civil Rights Movement” (Part 2) * insists that now's the time to show the power-drunk that that "joke" on us...(this unknown pile of centuries)...don't float on the great sea of popular solidarity....
by Pamela Satterwhite
Richard didn't care that "black folks don't like Country." He wore cowboy boots and a Stetson hat and played his Merle loud. We rolled our eyes and shook our heads, my girlfriends and me, when I was a child...and marveled at the mysteries of human diversity.
But as I drove "the loneliest road in America" I played my Country loud.
I'd already cleaved to the harmonies but with Time all mine, the stories could unfold like a multi-colored rose. First one layer. Then another.... Emotionally so complex.
My favorite was called (I think) "Old Red," about a man with a plan...a man who would definitely understand that "planning is everything."
And then there was one (I didn't catch the title) about a woman who's mother had no choice...but to sell her.
That one broke my heart.
Also noteworthy: "A Long Line Of Losers."
Folks who know about hard work and hard times tell a lot of the same stories, have a lot of the same kind of pain.
Not long ago I heard an interview with a Chicano comic who said that when he found himself in front of cowboys instead of Mexicans, all he had to do was change "Mexican" to "redneck" and the jokes worked just fine.
When we-who-do-the-work grab hold to the same rope we pull together awesome...
...the critical thing is to 'give a hand'...
...'have a heart'...
...care about your brothers and sisters who wake up to 'trouble'...roll with it all day long...and fall asleep thinking about it...
In Waking Up I attempted to make a case for the "the power-down implications of the right to shelter." Now that I'm "experimenting with the Bedroom Vehicle" I'm feeling it...I'm definitely feeling it.
...feeling the senselessness, the insanity, of imposing completely unnecessary hardship on so many in order to preserve the sanctity of 'privilege.'
To the podrunks, our only purpose is to serve "the market." By their lights, if you're a wanderer you have three potential "purposes": cannon fodder, prison-slave-labor, or cautionary tale – and these "purposes" preclude promising solutions...for this manufactured problem.
How much money, do you think, does a City allocate to keeping this Cautionary Tale Of The 'Homeless' all healthy and blooming? Has anyone done the math? – totaled up the police time and "homeless services" and "mental health services" and "welfare costs;" and "social work services" and "sanitation work services" and "housing stipends" and "food stamps" and...
...And how much money, do you think, would it take to claim abandoned land, pay for the bulldozer, cart in the tossed tires and empty cans, craft a contract so Michael Reynolds can send architects and trainers, invite those willing to take part in building earthships and growing food to bring their hands to the project and the land?... [See :"An Initial Stab At A Power-Down Plan," and Wading Into The Muck Of State]
In a recent blog from the road [...see OTheRLog 20, Wednesday (2), 09.02.09] I asked: How do we help the planet restore itself to balance without moving beyond a system defined by the relentless pursuit of "imbalance?"
The reality is...the only way to achieve balance, for the planet or for ourselves, is to stop feeding Death and move on...to Freedom. If each of us lives in balance, then the planet can live in balance...
"Gross disparities in access to the goodies" is the "planetary imbalance" I'm waiting for all the environmentalists to embrace.
We have to consider what leads to "imbalance" – in human inter-relationships no less than in our relationship with the planet. Ultimately there is no difference between our predations on each other and our predations on the earth, as we are earth...
We on the Left are fond of pointing out the hypocrisy of the "Right-to-Lifers" who care about human fetuses but not human children condemned to hunger or social chaos, or human adults slaughtered in resource-wars...or by the state.
But if justice were miraculously to reign tomorrow and human freedom proclaimed...if we were all free to contribute our gifts freely, without compulsion (because there is enough for all, and it's only the lie that there isn't that has turned us against each other)...
...if, within our individual lives – if within our freedom – we were free to "power-down," all the divisions would fall...including the division between human activity and planetary health.
This next, last step to wholeness – human evolution and liberation – that unifies humanity, that frees human energy from the constraint of maintaining 'Division' – the great artificial barriers between us – necessarily means we will be living in balance / harmony / Oneness at last on the earth.
* “The Last Civil Rights Movement” (Part 2)
** “There's a scene in Avatar I really like...”
There's a scene in Avatar I really like....
Jake and Neytiri have just joined their lives...and bodies...and are sleeping in the forest...
...although asleep, he, of course, is also eating good food...enjoying good conversation...laughing with his 'family members'...
...Anyone observing...and perhaps he himself...would say he is "happy"....
...However at the very moment he is enjoying his "happiness"...in reality a bulldozer is plowing its way through the world of that other 'family' he's chosen....
...But he is completely oblivious to their suffering....
'Asleep'...he is small....
...When he suddenly awakens...he is 'big'....
...Those words sound so simple, don't they?...'small' and 'big'?...
...but applied to the soul they contain universes of meaning....
...I think about this question all the time...
"...what leads to the need to claim full power?..."
...that question has been coming up for me big-time today...
...Today I see it's the same issue...reality...being examined by Samuel Butler when he says:
Young people have a marvellous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances. Even if they are unhappy – very unhappy – it is astonishing how easily they can be prevented from finding it out, or at any rate from attributing it to any other cause than their own sinfulness....True [they] will probably find out all about it some day, but not until too late to be of much service to them or inconvenience to [this system]. (Samuel Butler, The Way Of All Flesh)
Because his heart was already engaged he could leap to action immediately. He already knew and loved his brothers and sisters...saw their continued existence tied to his own...
...They weren't abstractions...they were real and tangible...
...and for him there wasn't any distinction between 'him'...
...and 'them...
...So what leads to feeling that outrage he felt?...
...It's the thinking at all they're trying to forestall...
Rightly or wrongly, in a quiet way he believed he possessed a strength which, if he were only free to use it in his own way, might do great things some day. He did not know when, nor where, nor how his opportunity was to come, but he never doubted that it would come in spite of all that had happened, and above all else he cherished the hope that he might know how to seize it if it came, for whatever it was it would be something that no one else could do so well as he could. People said there were no dragons and giants for adventurous men to fight with nowadays; it was beginning to dawn upon him that there were just as many now as at any past time. (Samuel Butler, The Way Of All Flesh)
Ernest resolved at once, as he had fallen so far, to fall still lower – promptly, gracefully and with the idea of rising again, rather than cling to the skirts of a respectability which would permit him to exist on sufferance only, and make him pay an utterly extortionate price for an article which he could do better without.
He arrived at this result more quickly than he might otherwise have done through remembering something he had once heard his aunt say about "kissing the soil." This had impressed him and stuck by him perhaps by reason of its brevity; when later on he came to know the story of Hercules and Antaeus, he found it one of the very few ancient fables which had a hold over him – his chiefest debt to classical literature. His aunt had wanted him to learn carpentering, as a means of kissing the soil should his Hercules ever throw him. It was too late for this now – or he thought it was – but the mode of carrying out his Aunt's idea was a detail; there were a hundred ways of kissing the soil besides becoming a carpenter. (Samuel Butler, The Way Of All Flesh)
The only thing worse than being a black man in America is being a white man in America...because he's segregated too. (James Baldwin)
Or...the more conscious update: "The only thing worse than being a "poor man" in America is being a podrunk...because he's segregated too!"
In "Crime Is The Flip Side" I say that we all do the same work...Division Work....
...This work starts (after the stunting of hearts...that happens in most families...to some degree)...when we take to heart the injunction...we well internalize from every institution (they're all modeled on 'coercion') – excrescences of "the system" –
– i.e., "to win."
School in the U.S. teaches us...
...to fear our brothers and sisters...
...that the idea of "good fellowship" is but a myth...
...and that the only 'good' is...
..."to win"...
That this is a lie must be exposed...
...by any and all who are ready to go...
...forward to "what comes next"...
...which is also going back...
...to our original wholeness.
..."to win"...
Imagine if we replaced it in influence in our minds with...
...
...
...do you hear it?
...
...
...listen again...
...
...
...do you hear it now?
...or maybe feel the waves...
...the pulses...
...the...
...can't you almost float on it?
What stands in the way of our simply 'being'?
...not "performing"...
...not "proving"...
...not "doing"...?
Well, of course, we all know, we're not free...
Yet we could be...
...if we were willing to embrace across the categories...
...which means...abolishing them...
...which means...when they tell us "to win"...we have a finger to show them.
The "last civil rights movement"...is claiming the right to be whole...which means 'large'.
"What leads to the need to claim full power?"
I've been thinking about those words (see OTheRLog 18, 09.01.09).
I look at the half-lives we lead...
...and notice, over the years, how those who live 'large' so often disappear...
...but above all I see – in our lives of illusion, mired in confusion...
– the fear of seeing reality.
No surprise there...the rewards for limited sight are everywhere...
...and the penalties profuse when you choose to use...
...those special glasses that give you access...
...to your wholeness –
–...a.k.a., "the masses".
I think when folks hear "masses"...
...they hear "an absence of particularity"...
...or of special 'talents'...
(...like the ones they're abundant in...)
...when...
...in reality...
..."the masses"...is just "you and me"...
...in all our magnificent specificity...
(which we'll see once we're free from that clumsy bludgeon...that tiresome iron... "class-ness" –
– economic categories kept stout...
...while our souls are flattened out...
[There's a bigness here...
...I'm finding it hard to get near....
It's everything we "know" as "true"...
...the divisions we've come to feel...
...almost as a "material reality"....
How to expose the insanity...
...of all the categories?
...linking 'Passive Obedience'...
...to our allegiance...
...to the divisions between us?
I've argued here they interconnect...
...through our need to be 'seen'...
...created by this non-culture-of-invisibility....
(...imposed by 'Passive Obedience'...)
...the need to be perceived...
...as "outstanding"...
...to stand out as "special"...
...clearly distinct...
...from all the 'others'...
...who barely think....
So Passive Obedience is the original crime –
...forgetting our souls...
...as we scramble for...
...'superior' roles...
(...a "distinguished" "Faceless Functionary"...
...to internalize...)
– only when it's been exorcised...
...and our "healthy eye" can see behind...
...these phony roles "power' imposed...
...will the elements of material freedom all fall in line....]
This next, last step to wholeness – human evolution and liberation – that unifies humanity, that frees human energy from the constraint of maintaining 'Division' – the great artificial barriers between us – necessarily means we will be living in balance / harmony / Oneness at last on the earth.
"Human evolution and liberation"...the next, last step...may more accurately be thought of as completing a circuit...
...a spiral dance of renewal...dissolving divisions
....(it's hard to maintain 'em...in momentum...)
...renewing us...when it almost seemed that podrunk schemes had been the end of us...
...but we woke up....
...and saw the games they were playing....
...dangling carrots to some...
...calling others 'dumb'...
...pummeling us with "crises" to numb us....
To refuse stunted lives...
...and choose instead to organize....
...is to realize...
...'freedom's' always in reach...
...as we are everything....
...If for one day we filled the streets...
...held hands...
...sang...
...beat our drums and proclaimed...
..."slavery days done!"...
...Just one day...
...just one...
...and this nightmare would begin...
...its inevitable end....
And as "the state" withers...
...so do "citizens"... ****
...our need for "rights"...
...falls by the wayside...
...scattered bits of litter...
...swept in...
...the "burn-it-bin"...
...so we can be "human" again.
As John Trudell says, it's time to evolve....
We don't want to end up staring at the same old pain in new suits...
...we want a freedom we can recognize...
...every morning when we open our eyes...
...a freedom we feel in our bodies...
...that says "sleep!" when we need it...
...and "dance!" when we feel it...
...and...
And though this moment will be fresh...
...it will also be the fulfillment of a deeply felt wish...
...to have again a very old freedom...
...which is also a reverence for our plant and animal friends.
(The 'lion' that lays down with the lamb...is human.)
Now some may not come to that degree...
...but it's our individual responsibility...
...to listen to what all Life needs...
...in proportion to the sensitivity of our hearing...
...which grows exponentially once we're free.
The discouraged believer in "good fellowship," Souvarine, in Emile Zola's Germinal, speaks bitterly about the vitiation of the value "fraternity"..."the hope of...a new society based on work in common."
"Yes, that's what you all want, you French workers – you want to find a buried treasure somewhere and then retire to some corner and live on it in selfish idleness." (Emile Zola, Germinal)
Our options (selves) have been systematically narrowed to what "the system" needs...
...over the course of centuries....
...How do we learn there's more to us than...
...following orders?...
...How do we mourn the loss...
...of that kept hidden?
...i.e. our place in the web of life?...
...We have to begin to see...
..."the system"...
...objectively...:
...a colossal energy-sink...
...a voracious mouth...
...a destroyer of dreams...
...a deceiver....
This blog thanks Douglas McGrath for the glasses he crafted, bearing witness to these two unseen: Perry Smith and Truman Capote.
And while countering homophobia may be the key motivating factor...
...I can't help but suspect the presence of a broader "bearing witness," in defense of a more common dismissal....
There's a moment in the film when Capote confesses that "all my mother ever wanted was to be a Park Avenue lady, which isn't easy when you're in Alabama with no money."
We each of us have our particular versions of "the dream"...
The whole of class society is but a factory for crafting false needs out of manufactured invisibility.
So when Capote says, late in the film, "life is painful. It's the one experience that unites rich and poor"...he's not being honest...or perhaps just unconscious...or both...
...because what really unites the unseen is invisibility...and the many hoops that we're all told to jump through....
(But must we? must we?)
'Chronic invisibility' is the film's secret theme. Capote is indignant at one point because the man who murdered presumed to call his writing "unkind""
I have never...Imagine being told the work lacks kindness by a four-time killer....My writing is dispassionate and unsentimental but I wouldn't say it's 'unkind.' I never thought about it in those terms exactly....What a thing to say!"
But in saying it, Perry offered good fellowship...showing Capote how far astray he'd wandered in his "system-stoked need to be stroked."
Deeper and deeper down I've gone, like Emile into the pit, and there at the bottom looking up at me is Miklos Nyiszli, in Auschwitz. His have been the hardest eyes of all to see through – those unimaginable horrors he bore witness to, so that all of us may see that it is indeed 'for us', in these times, to end the ways of the death-defined.
The purpose he crafted for his life: insure the world would see the full extent of the insanity (of class society). But I argue that the Grand Schemes of sadists – the earth-haters, life-debasers – far from being aberrations, psychopathic abominations, are the logical conclusion to the "intellect"-based exclusion of the few from the manual work that (we're told) the many must do. And that it's time now to reclaim us from the Death Maw that presumes to name us, who call us peasants, call us slaves, call us coal to fuel their flame, while our own fire sputters out (which they could give two shits about.)
(from: Wading Into The Muck Of State)
Recently, ** the libraries disgorged Infamous from its vast collections, and deposited it on my television set. I was amazed to see it sitting there.
Had I not already viewed Capote about the very same event in the very same life?...and that had seemed thorough enough.
Truly, Hollywood must be obsessed with the man...or the event...or both.
I thought back to when I'dread In Cold Blood as a child. I recall only one strong impression from it: Capote had described the two men who'd committed the acts of violence...with compassion....
This came as a shock to the child that I was. Was there not, as my mother had drummed into me, "bad" and "good"?...with the point of life being the renunciation of the one and the diligent striving towards the other?...
How was it, then, that this man Capote could so intermix them? ***
...or could it simply be that he was representing...and that "being an artist" means "bearing witness"?...
Is not bearing witness the work that must be done to exorcise the ghosts of division...and return us to our original wholeness?...
"Being an artist" means feeling...and then expressing what you feel...which is, in its essence, bearing witness. (From The Communal Alternative.)
This is certainly what grabs me about Infamous.
One communal thing we're doing is the libraries. (The idiosyncrasies of the branch choices in DVDs are like the idiosyncrasies of the villages we will be.) In one branch I've found an excellent collection of recent foreign and domestic jewels directed more out of a love for reverie- than revenue-streams. I wish I could claim the luxury of reviewing them here (especially the film from Iran, Border Cafe).
But there's one I must say something of, for the thoughts it pushes to the fore: The Grey Zone. Because it's hard to watch I imagine few will see it. It offers the difficult work of bearing witness...
...and then mulling what the witnessing means....
...Because there is no ‘distance’ in this ‘work of witnessing’...between the do-ers and the done-to...because we are all One...we're forced to look at what we've come to...what we've come to be...in all our fragmentarity.
...what does this "appeal" mean in practical terms?...given our colossal "system"-stoked need to be stroked?
(...in progress towards "figuring out" how to adequately convey that we only exist in relationship with "the all of it"...The Communal Alternative.)
(in progress)
We need to expand the civil-rights struggle to a higher level—to the level of human rights. Whenever you are in a civil-rights struggle, whether you know it or not, you are confining yourself to the jurisdiction of Uncle Sam....Civil rights comes within the domestic affairs of this country....When you expand the civil-rights struggle to the level of human rights, you can then take...Uncle Sam before a world court....Civil rights keeps you in his pocket. Civil rights means you’re asking Uncle Sam to treat you right. Human rights are some thing you were born with. Human rights are your God given rights. (Malcolm X, "The Ballot Or The Bullet?" speech given 3 April 1964)
** I am beginning this on 03.09.10. Why do I feel like Edmund scratching on the dark, dank walls of his prison cell?
*** From the sublime to the ridiculous I leaped...from Capote to "murder mysteries"...therein hoping to find...the explanation as to why such an egregious violation of native good fellowship somehow manages to exist...finding unsatisfying morality tales...nothing close to the complexity of a Truman Capote.
© Nas2EndWork (the NEW)
[The discussion here elaborates on: Children Of The Technology, arguing that the plans of 'power' are to "tweak the noticing" of the academy-trained...to twist it up so they won't see us (the earth)...and to insure that any trusted with 'the keys' find the four walls of their cell "comforting."]
I think we've arrived at the moment in our collective human story when the work of everyone is to feel. Recall Gustav Landauer...
[Gustav Landauer] defined as the task of the socialists and their movement: "to loosen the hardening of hearts so that what lies buried may rise to the surface: so that what truly lives yet now seems dead may emerge and grow light." (Erich Fromm, The Sane Society)
...But I think "being an artist" means "bearing witness," ...and that there's no greater calling when our earth, and ourselves, are in such distress...
.
..."Being an artist" means feeling and then expressing it, which is, in its essence, bearing witness...
...a.k.a. really living....because to be truly alive means to feel. (This is explored further at: What Is Our Responsibility To Others?.)