CHE: “HOW LONG THIS PRESENT ORDER, based on the absurd idea of caste, will last is not within my means to answer, but it’s time that those who govern spent less time publicizing their own virtues and more money … funding socially useful works.”
IF WE WANT TO UNITE, it cannot be by overlooking differences that stab at people and stick in their throats and veins and bellies. This unity must come about by connecting ourselves through struggle; by working together to fight the iniquities that pit most of us against each other, and all so that one or two types of persons can ascend, unfettered, to the top of the heap.
ALEXIS PAULINE GUMBS: I understand why looking at that family and imagining them in the White House makes us imagine we might finally be at home. But I have to resist that feeling. If I pretend that home is something that the state can give me in the form of a good-looking “first family” without stopping its economic, invasive, nativist violence, then I deny us all the home in the making that I believe in today and every day.
KEVIN: The Cross Road has been on my mind lately. Not because I feel that our President-Elect, Barack Obama, is at The Cross Road in the sense of selling his soul to become President, or that he is “out alone after dark” in his new role as leader of the United States. Both possibilities are there, to be sure, but that is not what concerns me now…
MATTTBASTARD: Does it make me feel proud to see someone who reflects my biracial identity at the helm of the world’s most powerful nation? Sure—but what Barack Obama’s victory most represents to me is “an opportunity.” The margins of ‘possible’ and ‘impossible’ have been redefined. This ain’t about the man—never was.
JOSE VILSON: Barack Obama isn’t just a man in isolation or the man who’ll lead this country for the next four to eight years, but also a mass movement for that future, a bright one. Barack has overtly galvanized the country in his favor and has built a formidable youth movement that should keep this generation’s voice heard, but its soul intact.
A LINE OF THOUGHT going around today is the idea that while we all want change badly and see this election as heralding or potentiating important change, we are the ones who have to bring this about. And not just by participating in politics, but every day, in many ways.
SHOT WHEN I WAS WORKING FOR MTV and their Choose or Lose Street Team, here are three videos of Obama speaking here in Oregon. I feel very lucky to have been part of history in the small way I was, by hearing him speak and shooting these. The first video begins with people lined up around the block waiting for hours to hear Barack Obama speak. Just like the lines at many of the polls today.
CHANGE is coming for the world. Neoliberalism is crashing, Free Market Philosophies are crashing, Wall Street is crashing: All the mechanisms in place that are best at making the rich richer and the powerful more powerful and the poor poorer are collapsing. Posturing Palin is on TV telling the commoners they need to support the party of elitism, and Evo Morales is doing just the opposite.
There are simple ways to end so many conflicts today. We could stop seeking punitive measures in addressing human and natural reaction to economic imbalance and hardship. We could change our fearful, reactive, greedy, other-ing philosophies. We could focus on helping, giving, healing, growing—not bombing, fearing, hoarding, killing. Sadly, though, the powers that be do not want such a world.
WE CAN LET THIS ENERGY RESONATE AND RISE within us today. We can break free of oppressive thought, habit, or desire. We can choose, even for only one moment if need be, to return to the powerful and timeless and unexpendable core of energy that animates and motivates all peoples who seek freedom from tyranny, abuse, control, or harm.
NEVER FORGET. This is what many people say about September 11th, 2001. I say it, too. Though I’m not sure I mean it in the same way. Herein is a tale, including diary entries made from NYC during the WTC explosions, of the changes that those horrifically violent and altogether terrifying events inspired in me. They changed me forever, and in some ways, I would be unrecognizable to you now, had they not occurred.
ANYWHERE THE PEOPLE GATHER to express their voice, their government—be it communist, democratic or otherwise—will be infiltrating and disturbing the cohesion and strength of that voice, ultimately using violence with no hesitancy or remorse. The unsettling juxtaposition of profit, spotlight, and ignored oppressions will always cause this confluence of energy and tumult. This is our modern-day Olympic Games Carnival settling down uneasily into a world where war and class divides are hurting so many.
House of Nezua
the XOLAGRAFIK theater!
