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

Sunday, September 9, 2012

Everything Won't Be Alright

Click here to access article from The Automatic Earth.
Looking around at those... around me - family, friends, acquaintances and random faces in the crowd of apathy - the level of complacency is so concentrated I can taste it, yet I can't even describe how bad it tastes. I'm not really talking about the understanding people lack about the numerous predicaments we face as a species - that's definitely there too... but what I'm talking about is even worse. It's the assumption that we can just go about our day to day lives, doing our day to day work, having our day to day fun... and humanity will eventually heal itself, no matter how bad the injuries sustained.
This is a cultural phenomenon that has infested the Western world....
The author then proceeds to examine contemporary popular cultural products that support this passivity. Of course, such products always go through the filtering process created by the directors of the One Percent. Those which are deemed problematic for this class get filtered out. Those cultural products that support their interests, or at least prevents any threats to their system of capitalism--the source of all their power and wealth--survive the filtering process and get rewarded.