We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Thursday, May 19, 2011

Spain’s Tahrir Square

Click here to access article by Pablo Ouziel from ZNet. 

This writer is an activist and a free lance writer who lives in Spain. It appears to him that his countrymen are finally waking up to see the necessity of fighting back against their ruling class.
As the country continues to implode economically, unemployment grows incessantly leaving one in two young people unemployed across many of the country’s regions. With many in the crumbling middle class on the verge of losing their homes while bankers profit from their loss and the government uses citizen taxes to expand the military industrial complex by going off to war; the people have begun to grasp that they only have each other if they are to rise from the debris of the militarized political and economic nightmare in which they have found themselves. Will thousands in protest become tens and hundreds of thousands? It is beginning to look like they might.