A tale of blind doctors and good illnesses
Staying there was not safe at all, because of the potentiality of the warplane’s return. I spent a total of ten minutes there; I felt during these minutes a severe exhaustion, I felt the heaviness of my body, the difficulty of breathing, the inability to think of anything.
Four heroes of today’s global alt-right – Assad, Netanyahu, Trump, and Putin – have emerged triumphant over the corpse of the Syrian revolution.
Neither Syrians nor Palestinians need us to teach them how to liberate themselves. They know what they need, and they know what liberation for them looks like. But can we help lessen the extreme conditions they live under so that they have the space to self-organize?
Beyond hopelessness there is a new kind of hope that opens up, which is a faith in the basic tissue of human existence, our connection to one another, our ability to persist in even the worst conditions, our ability to make joyful, meaningful, rich lives in the shittiest places.
If we combine the ideas of ending tax cuts for the rich and cutting the military budget, we would have all the money we need for all these things we need for our survival.
Seriously thinking about how to confront climate change exposes the limits of our political imagination. We have to begin by realizing where we stand in the longer arc of the Earth’s natural history.
There is no way that we can get out of the warming condition or prevent climate breakdown without destroying and terminating things that are dangerous.
The rescue boat is still a long way off, at least two minutes away. I can see through the spray of the sea that it is coming as fast as it can. But it is too late for us.
For all the money spent by the EU supposedly to provide services for refugees, it is the refugees themselves who are carrying the burden of the mental health disasters in the camps.
For migrants and their autonomous struggles, the factor of “race” is a social relationship through which “class experience” is made. Not the other way around. An internationalist leftwing counternarrative must take this as its starting point.
“People are stepping up to take responsibility in their communities and their own lives in a way that in my short life I have not seen. So yes, I absolutely think there’s a revolution going on here.”
It’s something I ask every cop I question: Is there a code of silence in the Chicago police department? “Oh, no.” Have you ever testified against a fellow cop? “Oh, no.” Have you ever seen any police misconduct in your thirty years on the job? “Oh, no.”
Beyond hopelessness there is a new kind of hope that opens up, which is a faith in the basic tissue of human existence, our connection to one another, our ability to persist in even the worst conditions, our ability to make joyful, meaningful, rich lives in the shittiest places.
It’s not utopia; it’s very difficult here. But there is the opportunity to come and learn from local people who know very much about the land and very much about the situation here, to study together, to build things together, to share knowledge.
