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

Friday, December 23, 2011

The Real I-Revolt Apps of the Arab Spring

Click here to access article by Emad Mekay from IPS News.
So here I am, an Arab journalist in Silicon Valley, where four out of every four people I meet believe Facebook invented the Arab Spring. Three more weeks here and I may start to hallucinate that Mark Zuckerberg was a Cairo-slums native named Hassouna El-Fatatri, who rotted in a Mubarak prison for advocating personal privacy rights.
It appears that the Empire's media executives do not like to report on opposition to their satraps and stooges all over the world; but when a people finally refuse to tolerate them and risk their lives to protest, what do the Empire's media managers do? They credit Western technology. Those dumb Arabs could never do such things by themselves. (sarcasm)

The reality is that these courageous Arabs inspired the young, and not so young, people in the US and other Western countries to finally stand up and say, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it anymore!"
at
Labels: ,