All the analysis of the violence in the world seems to occur with the complete removal of human activity. It seems to exist purely as a form of speaking over people, a game of chess with no pieces, a world with nobody in it but foreign policy experts and talking heads.
It’s always a real struggle for the left to successfully tackle oppression within its own ranks. But when we do it, our movements gain, every time, from the deeper understandings that emerge.
There is the potential to create an international solidarity network based on basic principles that most people believe in. But you have to listen and not be dicks.
We need to reorganize the whole physical infrastructure that we live in, and some aspects of our everyday life, so we can power our existence with the wind and the sun. Outside of that: since this degree of transformation is necessary, we can make it really egalitarian.
Rural voters are being stoked to feel anger and outrage at a mythical coastal elite exploiting them and enforcing federal regulations on them. They’re being told by rightwing media that this is all some kind of conspiracy.
Does your society say you only owe good behavior to people who are part of the same racial category as you? Or the same gender or sexual category as you? Or only people who are citizens of your country and everybody else be damned? Focus on enlarging that circle to humanity itself.
The Thanksgiving myth makes light of Indigenous people’s very real historical traumas. It depicts the only authentic Indians as frozen in time at the moment of contact. It blinds Americans to the existence of Native people in modern times and to the ways Native people have resisted the colonial apocalypse for centuries.
What happens when people camp together, sleep together, and are not in a rush? Well, they talk about all kinds of things. They establish forms of solidarity through conversation.
If the relatively small number of refugees can be used today as an excuse for restricting freedom of movement, building walls and impenetrable borders, increasing the powers of the security state, and fomenting divisions based on race, religion, or national origin, what will tomorrow bring when the effects of climate change and ecological collapse cause vast movements of people around the globe?
Neoliberals were not only clueless about the extent to which markets never really worked the way they described in their ideal. They were also clueless about the political, social, cultural, and theological ramifications of a radically marketized world in which we have not justice, not democracy, but only winners and losers.
