6/28/12: Clashes between students and police in Santiago, Chile
What a powerful image. Fundamentalism is steadily being eroded across the globe, and the balance of power is indeed beginning to shift back into the hands of the people. All over the world, people are becoming more angry than fearful, and there’s a sense of desperation to these actions that is conspicuously absent from comparable movements here in the United States, one that I am as desperate to avoid as I am fearful of its necessity to effect real change.
As a nation, we’re so subtly insulated from the things we’re fighting against, as well as so divided by enormous physical distances that, to many of us, our struggles seem more unique to our own neighborhoods than to our national community. This fosters great divisiveness where there should be unity, and a cacophony of dissonant needs rather than a chorus of clear, strong demands. Without these things, we can hope to persevere for a time, but we cannot hope to stem, let alone reverse the tide of fundamentalist extremism here in America short of violent insurrection, where victory would not come without enormous personal cost.
Occupy: America, I’ll ask again: are you listening?
#ThaPink
