[Note: I am attempting a regular feature for this space to encourage meaningful discussion leading to action. You may consider these brief passages in the context of the previous week's news if you like, or in context of the larger crisis of creativity.]
"Endless money forms the sinews of war."
---Cicero (106-46 b.c.e.), Philippics
"Speaking of costs and effects (the sole way of speaking that 'makes economic sense'), no other form of social control is more efficient than the spectre of insecurity hovering over the heads of the controlled."
---Zygmunt Bauman (1925-), Society Under Siege
"[W]e ourselves are no longer able to choose our problems. They choose us, one after the other."
---Albert Camus (1913-1960), The Rebel
"With all due respect for the undeniably pivotal role of corporate-imperial media mendacity and bias, I think Americans are running out of excuses for narcissistic and infantile indifference to the mass murder being carried out with their tax dollars and by their policy makers and allies. It strikes me that photographs, clips, and stories about the criminal carnage inflicted on Arab people and communities by the blood-soaked-butchers who rule the United States and its client state Israel are readily available to any moderately interested American who knows how to search the Internet, read a newspaper, or watch television."
---Paul Street
“American progressives need to wake up to the fact that they are just as big a part of the world’s problems as the Republicans, so long as they insist on living the American lifestyle. As long as they continue to thoughtlessly consume the world as if it were their birthright. All talk and no walk. Buying organic toilet paper and voting for evasive Democratic hacks just isn’t going to cut it, guys ... Here is what I consider the most important philosophical question anyone can ever ask themselves: ‘What is the question to which my life is the answer?’”
---Joe Bageant
“You want to know why we don’t rebel? We still think we have something to lose. That’s what’s stopping us. As soon as we realize we have nothing left to lose we’ll be dangerous.”
---Derrick Jensen
(Thanks to Mickey Z. for those last two.)
3 comments:
that last one sent a chill down my spine.
Excellent quotes...
In particular, "no other form of social control is more efficient than the spectre of insecurity hovering over the heads of the controlled."
Which relates well to the spine chilling quote by Jensen.
I wonder though, when we have nothing left to lose, will it be too late?
JOS: what makes you think it's not already too late? Everyone on this planet seems to have either dipped their fingers in the blood of others or landed on the wrong end of bullets or businessmen, we've rendered everything---food, air, water---poisonous, and the effects of anti-creative human ingenuity have spiralled out of anyone's control. Meanwhile, today Yahoo fucking News was pleased to tell me that hundreds of people are protesting in the UK...becasue some television show (called "Big Brother" without a hint of irony) is considering (can you believe it?) letting contestants back on. So yes, not only do we have nothing left to lose, but it is too damn late. Now let's get to work!
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