Chris Hedges: The Last Gasp of American Democracy
We, like those in all emergent totalitarian states, have been mentally damaged by a carefully orchestrated historical amnesia, a state-induced stupidity. We increasingly do not remember what it means to be free. And because we do not remember, we do not react with appropriate ferocity when it is revealed that our freedom has been taken from us. The structures of the corporate state must be torn down. Its security apparatus must be destroyed. And those who defend corporate totalitarianism, including the leaders of the two major political parties, fatuous academics, pundits and a bankrupt press, must be driven from the temples of power. Mass street protests and prolonged civil disobedience are our only hope. A failure to rise up—which is what the corporate state is counting upon—will see us enslaved.
Henry Giroux:
No, let's just reform the system. Let's work within it. Let's just run people for office. My argument would be, you have one foot in and you have one foot out. I'm not willing to give up the school board. I'm not willing to give up all forms of electoral politics. But it seems to me at the local level we can do some of that thing, that people can get elected. They can make moderate changes.
But the real changes are not going to come there. The real changes are going to come in creating movements that are longstanding, that are organized, that basically take questions of governance and policy seriously and begin to spread out and become international. That is going to have to happen.
To say the very least, one is to develop cultural apparatuses that can offer a new vocabulary for people, where questions of freedom and justice and the problems that we're facing can be analyzed in ways that reach mass audiences in accessible language. We have to build a formative culture. We have to do that. Secondly, we've got to overcome the fractured nature of these movements. I mean the thing that plagues me about progressives in the left and liberals is they are all sort of ensconced in these fragmented movements that seem to suggest those movements constitute the totality of the system of oppression that we are facing. And they don’t.
[The emphasis is mine]
El Fenómeno De Las Canicas
Sometimes I think about this challenge this way: I imagine a guy standing over there; just one guy. There are 100 of us standing over here. Behind the guy there are plastic buckets, each holding 100 marbles. The guy picks up the first bucket of marbles and spills them on the ground, and each one of us runs every which way trying to grab one of the marbles; we bump into each other, and that causes some to argue. At the precise moment when all 100 of us have finally retrieved one marble each, the guy picks up another bucket of marbles, and spills them on the ground again, and we all disperse going after them... After this happening 50 times, someone suggests, "Hey, there are 100 of us here, and this guy is only one person. Why don't we stop going after these spilled marbles, one at a time, spinning our wheels, spending all our energy, and instead go and stop him from spilling the marbles?" There is a look of astonishment from many in the group, and some yell out loud, "What the fuck are you talking about? Are you crazy?" As the guy spills another bucket of marbles... And on and on and on we go.
Image credit: Joe Mabel
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