” … there’s something about consumer capitalism that both traumatizes us and then offers us a lot of comforts to stay quiet and silent and to just keep our heads down and keep sort of slightly stressing about keeping our jobs going and so on.”
—Gail Bradbrook on today’s DemNow!
I feel you Gail. Yes. Keep the pitiful gravy train running, don’t rock the boat, pay those bills on time and consume according to your cherished identity with whatever is left over; and if there’s none left over, charge it and enslave yourself just a little bit harder.
Meanwhile, ignore the fires and the floods. Keep up with your Facebook. Write a story about your dog. Live a life that is a vicious lie and wonder why you need drugs to get through the day or night, and don’t expect your murican health care plan to cover them either.
It does make my heart glad to see people rebelling against the lie. It will definitely be too little and too late. But some few will die proud, and I will do what I can to align myself with them, to become one of them, if only in my sweet fever dreams.
The children know and that’s why they’re not scared of wicked words like socialism. They’ve lived their whole lives marinating in the alternative. It’s not working out. You don’t even have to be autistic to see it. You just have to be willing to stop being willfully blind.
“When you get on the street and block it, people start to have a conversation about this existential situation that we’re in. When we say ‘existential threat’ what we mean is we’re in an apocalyptic situation. You have to use biblical language to talk about what it means to be in a sixth mass extinction event. And that’s the only way to get that information over to people — that I understand, anyway — is to be disruptive.
And when people say, ‘Well, we agree with your message, but we don’t like how you’re doing it’ my general answer is, like, ‘If you’ve got a better plan, tell us’. Because, literally, we’ve tried all the other stuff — writing to our MPs and our politicians and doing petitions and going on marches. I don’t see what else there is, other than getting on the streets.
And frankly, as this crisis worsens and we face things like food shortages — you know, the academic term actually is ‘multi-breadbasket failure’, when across the planet either droughts or floods mean that the farms can no longer produce enough food. When we’re facing that, and, literally, people are fighting over tins of beans in the supermarket, people are going to wonder why more of us weren’t on these streets in these times …”