As I posted elsewhere yesterday re. Wisconsin and beating the Union Busters in the US:
As a former teenage Vietnam protester, I defer to the model of protest the former Soviet Block and Middle Eastern nations have shown work in this day and age: You can and WILL be ignored if you march down a street and go home.
You eventually win if you gather exponentially growing and diverse citizens around a government capitol building or occupy the main town square...and NEVER leave...but MULTIPLY for as long as it takes.
Solidarity NOW!
Shall we lock arms, and take a leap of faith, in solidarity, over the jump?
A litte background to explain perhaps why I coming from this particular POV:
Father was a Michigan Union Organizer and Deocratic Ward Chairman.
On all sides ours was a Union family, (both male and female,) all working in widget and foundry plants serving Detroit about 60 miles away on Michigan's Amtrack main switching station city: Jackson, MI.
Dad was a first-generation immigrant Irish Catholic from No. Ireland, County Derry. Mother was half African-American, half Native-American.
We were the only family openly practicing "miscegenation" in that burg.
In that town, in the Fifties, we were as odd at the freak show at the roving carnival.
My father was a pistol, and actually dragged me on his organizing rounds. Note: I was five years old in 1960. He fiercely wanted to instill in me, his first-born, an understanding of the asymmetric politics of indigenous occupied peoples, it seems, in retrospect.
Knowing the least of the history of Unions in the US you'll know workers got in the streets in the early part of the 20th century, and displaying amazing courage to effect change. They were beaten senseless in droves by company goons, and oft killed outright.
Bringing thing current to today, I've been thinking that we have to re-assess how precious we think we protesters are. Any reverse occupation by the people is dangerous and fraught with oligarchic violence against the citizen taking real action.
All the ex-Soviet Block and Middle East citizen occupations by the people did result in beatings, imprisonment, and deaths.
Just like America's early Union actions.
So...here's my question to us "educated folk" here: are we serious about risking it all for what we believe in, like Jefferson intended in all his language, as the pols are supposed to work for the majority and not the corporations and New Robber Barons?
I am dedicated to the Gandhi-King strategy of non-violent civil disobedience for as long as possible. It works. It's morally correct.
Only after 30 years of the phase one of civil disobedience might one step up to the second step I've been thinking: not a whisper of violence on our part, but moving to the willingness to sacrifice more than beatings and jail. To step it up to the level where our courage matched our convictions without regard to our lives...being willing to occupy a capitol grounds as a permanent rolling-shift encampment until justice prevails.
Even though that will force the overlords and oligarchy to goad the police/Nat'l Guard to decide whether or not they'll shoot on diverse average fellow citizens.
Do we really have the ability to channel the spirit of the original US Union Movement? Because that would probably flip the influence of our non-violent civil disobedience to a win.
So...do we have that ability to embrace the expression of ultimate courage for change, or have we become too precious in our own minds to ever consider acting like the IWWW or the Egyptians, and risk it all to put our country back on the track to true representative democracy and the spirit of American freedom (and those dedicated to achieving freedom world-wide?)
I'm interested how rapidly developments may have changed, or not changed, your former views...what say ye all?