Pamela's Blog 31

Published on Tuesday, July 7, 2009 by Nas2EndWork.org

“Ridley's Choice”

by Pamela Satterwhite

“Waking Up” assumed (and you know what happens when you assume) a shared understanding of the word ‘organize’...

…as if the media's dissection of our president's past meant we all could sort of...feel it...

But until fairly recently when rebellious souls followed their longing and found that hard truth, after probing and hunting and dizzying sick feeling, that this system is irremediably rigged for the few – made to manufacture want, division and damage, and big, ever-widening gaps – and that for the sake of one's soul, and for a chance to live larger, this system must be psychically renounced…

…until fairly recently when that hard truth hit you, somehow you knew you’d arrived at a privileged place, that required of you the responsiblity to consider sharing the tools, the missing pieces, the knowledge, the news… help others acquire what they needed to heal those psychic wounds, ponder bigger mindscapes, bigger horizons…bigger dissent.

But it seems that the responsibility to help pull others still stuck in the shallows into the boat of refusal is not only no longer generally embraced, but is actually no longer generally ‘thinkable’ – that it no longer exists as a possibility in the broad popular consciousness…

‘Politics’ has been systematically funneled down predictable, easily containable, paths for the convenience of the podrunks. The cats, amazingly, have been corralled. The use of the word as it was used by Malcolm or the Freedom Riders to mean putting bodies in streets and standing shoulder to shoulder with people and communities not necessarily close to oneself culturally or politically – people who have been dismissed from the halls of decision-making – has largely been taken from us as a general endowment…and we will have to take it back.

Because if you’re awake in the present moment you’re faced with “Ridley’s Choice.” Ridley is the character played by Sigourney Weaver in James Cameron’s Aliens who is asked to return to the traumatic event that scarred her and help others fight the thing at its source – a monster. She’d been badly treated by the folks who need her help and her first reaction is: “not my problem.” She’s carved out a compromise existence for herself and there’s no obvious reason why she should put her life on the line for people who don’t think about her one way or another.

…But…

…somehow…

…she was able to see that it really wasn’t about her…at all.

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Pamela's Blog 31

Published on Tuesday, July 7, 2009 by Nas2EndWork.org

“Ridley's Choice”