Part III What the F*ck are we going to do?
While we do have to imagine and visualize a better future -- a task integral to all important political rebellions in history -- we do not have to imagine the solutions and mechanisms by which we may move toward this vision. Those solutions and mechanisms already exist. We merely have to join them. As many days of the week as we can, it is incumbent upon us to grow these political spaces, to hit the streets, to educate ourselves and one another, to unleash a storm of righteous indignation so eloquent and enormous as to surround and frighten the corporate establishment and its idols bearing down upon our future. It is not that complicated. You just have to know where to go. We do know where the most important places to go to engage in this battle for the good exist, for nothing short of the survival of the human species -- if we are willing to accept the reality of climate change and nuclear weapons (see my last piece, "We got Next").
Millions upon millions of seats just opened up in the rebellion. It is a moral obligation for us to take them.
In the words of Arundhati Roy in her great essay, "Confronting Empire" in her book War Talk,
"Our strategy should not be only to confront Empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness -- and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we've been brainwashed to believe.
"The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling -- their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.
"Remember this: We may be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them."
Below is a list of what I'm calling the "political spaces" that we must enter. Learn about them. Join them. Every day that you can. Tell your communities about them. Donate money to them. Put your body in the streets and on the pipelines with them. Bring them up in as many of your conversations as you can. Think of them not as movements, which have an arch and fall, but as ways of life, to be passed down from generation to generation. The solutions do exist. We can join them or we can be complicit in crushing them, and along with them, ourselves and our children. It is that dire. We are this at risk. We can accept the realities of perpetual -- and possibly nuclear -- war, ecocide, and economic instability as emergencies that must be addressed immediately, as many days, months, years and centuries as we are able to address them. Or we can accept these realities as our fate. There is no longer any time for incrementalism.
Black Lives Matter
Veterans for Peace
Boycott Divest Sanctions
The Green Party
The alternative journalism wave (Counterpunch, Truth-out, Truthdig, OpEdNews, Democracy Now!, The Intercept, The Young Turks, Tom Dispatch, Common Dreams, and others like them.)
Green Peace
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