Here’s the idea: an online journal dedicated to first-person narratives of the lives of the trampled of the world. It’s kind of like the antithesis of travel journalism. Or else travel journalism meets Studs Terkel’s Working.
I’ve been inspired by the Occupy movements going on around the world, but there’s been one aspect that I can’t quite get out of my mind: how can people who’s minds have been so heavily shaped by the evil institutions they are protesting against be expected to forge alternative solutions in the future?
In May I went to a Deep Green Resistance meeting with a bunch of social and environmental activists and one thing really stuck out to me: while their idealism is admirable, when it came to envisioning the post-revolutionary world, debates broke out in a vicious, competitive way that so fully resembled the capitalist values they’re fighting against, that I lost all faith that they could be trusted to form anything other than a carbon copy of the old system. When it’s in your bones...
I don’t know. I’ve given up. Everywhere I look seems so full of corruption. All narratives I hear of history are cyclewheeling repetitions. The environment is being systematically killed. Small victories for one side or another leaves the essential issue untouched.
Sometime I feel so much love in this world. I’m reading Infinite Jest, written by a truly depressed human being, but somehow still bursting with love for everything that exists in this world. It gives me hope. But then I look towards everything that could be worked for and I lose that hope.
I’m working with Dr. Mohja Kahf, a Syrian-American professor at U. Arkansas to spread the word about prisoners of conscience in Syria, nonviolent protesters of Assad’s regime who have been jailed arbitrarily and for the most part, tortured. This is the world we live in.
I want to live in a world in which people don’t get tortured. In which streets are safe and people can live as they choose. The capitalist system is so synonymous in our minds with “Freedom” because, I assume, the phrase ‘free trade’ that the realities of its by-products are either overlooked or interpreted as not so bad. More people have computers and access to products from around the world. True. More people work in horrendous conditions in factories than ever before. Also true. Country sides in every country are emptying of people, who are moving to cities to live and try to work in slums. Culture is dying in the face of homogenization. Everything is getting standardized, happiness levels are plummeting. A few people get extremely rich, but the rest of the world (people, culture, the environment) are getting extremely poor.
The environment is dying in the name of this consumerism that leaves few people any happier. Community feelings are melting to violence and suspicion.
In the midst of it, there’s nothing that I want for myself. I don’t want to be rich or famous. There’s no job I specifically want to do (except novelist and I’ve been trying at that with poor results). I just want people to suffer less. I want to suffer less. I suffer because of guilty conscience. I feel incredibly capable, but like I’m constantly treading water, killing time. Until what? I don’t know. Either I start acting or the world ends.
In the meantime, I’m broke. I have a little money, but Citibank is about to steal most of it because of an account I forgot to formally close, which went from me having a little money in it to me owing over $500 on it in god-knows how little time. And banks like that wonder why people hate them so much.
Can I say that I hate banks? I see red when I think of banks. Just like Andrew Jackson...the guy on the 20.
Human rights lawyer; journalist; shaman (healer); fiction writer; revolutionary (member of the Free Syrian Army)...these are the jobs I want to work. They’re all essentially the same job.
So my idea: Revoyce Productions. Travel around to the far reaches of the world and collect stories. Stories of oppression: the effects of 21st cent. globalization on the lives of the common people of the world. I want to collect their stories and make them available to the world. Imagine a website where you enter and see a map of the world. You click on the country you’re interested in and a list of all the narratives from there in the words of the locals pops up and you can learn what it’s like to be from somewhere. The stories can be color coded according to topic – environment, politics, legends, medicine, violence, resources. Anyone who is struggling can tell the story and others can read it and if they are so inclined, offer aid.
I keep asking myself, what are we working for? The best answer I’m able to come up with is to kill tyrants and let people live how they choose. Of course I’m not so naive as to not realize that that’s kind of how it’s always been and the world we live in is the summation of choices. Everybody’s choices. But somehow it seems like most people are living in incredibly oppressed circumstances.
2 comments:
"how can people who’s minds have been so heavily shaped by the evil institutions they are protesting against be expected to forge alternative solutions in the future? "
Don't you have a philosophy degree? Isn't the entire history of philosophical conversations, western or otherwise, nothing except attempts at this? Have you considered maybe it is just YOU who is intellectually lazy?
I do kind of have a philosophy degree, though it's too pointed to be a degree in philosophy in its broadest sense.
You're right, anonymous commenter, that the history of philosophy is to some extent this question. I guess I'm asking it lets just say as a reiteration due to the fact that Benjamin's 'Angel of History' is yet to provide me with a comforting answer.
And yes, I have considered the possibility that I'M intellectually lazy (I'm lazy in other ways too, not just intellectually...you should see my 'To Do' list: more backed up than a port-o-potty at Burning Man), but I don't think it's JUST me. I think a lot of people suffer from this affliction. In a large part because the course of history rarely follows the projected designs of intellectualism.
I thank you for your comment and keeping me on my toes.
Post a Comment