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...New Years Resolutions of your life -- if you dare: ---SNIP--- What we need to do, first thing, as a people, is cut off our identification of the “country” with its “leaders.” We are the country. They are the sham.
Second, we need to identify with all the people who have fought or are fighting against our thieving elites, free-trade buccaneers, and corporate marauders. Yes, we need to become citizens of the world and identify with the oppressed, for we, ourselves, are now -- can anyone doubt it? -- the oppressed.
Third, we need to turn off the television. We really do. It’s what gives us the illusion that we’re in touch with reality. Reality is elsewhere -- it’s in our now chronic economic insecurity, in our crumbling infrastructure, in the contempt and fear with which the world regards us, in our F for fake educational system, in our contemptible for-profit health system, in our burgeoning prison population, in our gasping-for-breath environment, in our Dickensian personal indebtedness, in the despair of our youth, in our defunct workers’ rights, in our shambling civil liberties. Do we really believe that a system of planned inequality that produces and selects its governing stooges will propose a candidate who will reverse the astronomical rise in inequality between rich and poor? Look, if there was money to be made by investing in hanging rope, they would hang each other. Crazy and evil they may be, but not stupid. We are the stupid ones if we continue to play globalopoly with them -- “support troops,” election paraphernalia, and all.
Fourth, we should stop feeling powerless. We’d still be working 16 hours per day (oops -- you do again?) if our great-grandparents all over the industrial world had indulged in despair. We should start thinking about strikes. That’s where our power lies -- in the work we do or withhold. Just think about it, mind you (although that would really be “sending a message”: a national strike in the US on Election Day). But, let us proceed one step at a time to reclaim our indentured political identity. Discover our history first -- a people’s history, not the farce they teach in the school texts. Find out who we were before we became indebted consumers. Read about the labor movement in the United States, say, up to the 1970s. Assert our dignity as the producers of this country’s wealth -- and much else that amounts to human progress. Realize that we are something worse and something better than we are told by the parrots in the media, the pulpits, and the schools. We are human, thank goodness, warts and all -- no more privileged to hate ourselves and our so-called “country” than anyone else. . . http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_2790.shtml ....................He is gone, but his legacy can be revived.
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