just woke up from a nap
with a dream on my mind that I luckily managed to summarized before the mists flarded apart to make room for my appartment to take shape.
That no matter what angle your social movement is coming from, you will have some overlap with other movements. There is the possibility to make common cause.
Writing it down, this makes complete sense. Social movements are reactions to a feeling of injustice and powerlessness. There is no way for the injustice you feel to be addressed by the current paradigm of governance, so you set out to bring attention to it through activism.
You will find people who either share your grievances directly, or who allie themselves with you out of empathy or recognition of your overlapping interests.
Even though we live in an era of identity politics - which has seen it's zenith, and is now in decline - the greatest source of injustice is not race, gender, or sexuality : It's class. It is wealth.
Inequality in the division of wealth has more impact on your health, happiness, longevity and feeling of connection and belonging than any of the identiy politics factors. Yes, the deaf have their own culture, and so do queers and muslims and everyone else - but the rich might as well be living on their own planet.
The rich have their own tax bracket. Their own means of transport, completely different contexts and expectations for concepts like food, healthcare, housing, childbirth, what it means to have a job, or to take a vacation. The rich are educated differently, and in a way that serves to maintain this segregation in a way no other group can: Not only do they influence the way their own children go to school: Their decisions and opinions matter to yours. To ours. To us.
We are impacted.
In Holland, people worry openly - thanks to media attention - about children going to Islamic schools. Kids are seperated by gender during breaks and have lessons about the Koran. Oh the horror.
meanwhile, access to a university education, once taken for granted by everyone, is becoming harder and harder to manage for those students not born rich. - and even there, you are being taught how to serve a bureaucratic system.
The only University teaching entrepreneurship is a private institution, with ten times the tuition of public universities.
(Just went on their website. They have a part-time class about energy transition. It was being sponsored by Shell and Gazprom)
Look, this is not even a topic I want to get into. As a humanity, we don't have time for this shit. We have a planet to reanimate.
Can we quickly agree that greed and exploitation is on the verge of proving itself to be the biggest suicide cult history has ever known? That we need to stop drinking from the plastic disposable cup and need to start coming together over the issues that threaten our survival?
Right. One of those issues is apparantly the fact that the wealthiest people believe that they can somehow spend their way out of ecosystem collapse, and that when the worst is over, only the richest 2% of people survive, at which point surely the planet will be able to sustain such a population in levels of hitherto unthinkable abundance; with even the merest of billionaires affording their own private Archipelago.
Or whatever else their endgame is. Can we pull the plug on that whole concept as soon as possible, while there is still time to get everyone on the same page? Like it or not, without them we don't have the command of the resources needed to steer this ship off it's collision course with the last remaining iceberg in this ever-warming ocean.
What is needed is indeed a revolution. Because that's what it means when the balance of power shifts abruptly and deliberately.
We need to 'seize the means of production', we need to tax the rich so fast, so hard that they won't be able to afford an escape plan, and we need to start cooling down the planet in a non-toxic way - and yes, we needed to do so thirty years ago, which Shell knew at the time , so why they're still funding educational programs about energy transition that focus on maximizing shareholder value at the expense of the planet is.. well, it would have been nice if that had been beyond me.
They don't care. And that's exactly why it's time to erect the guillotine.
