To connect and organize with other people in your area, please start a comment thread (either in the 'Comments' below or on Facebook) and label it with your home town. If someone in your area has already started one, please join in the conversation. If you already have a network of concerned friends and activists, start your own public protest to raise local awareness.
For added motivation and focus, please check out these articles:
- 5 Tips for Saving the Planet with Sacred Activism
- Wisdom and Compassion Need to Become Action
- Sacred Anger: How to Work With Rage in Uncertain Times
- Activism and the Power of 108
- The Next Phase: Co-Creating a Thriving Planetary Culture
Facilitated by the induced dormancy of the First Amendment, the U.S. government today (as well as countless other western governments) is structured in a way that increasingly supports institutions over individuals. Under the Patriot Act, we can be treated as terrorists just for organizing against government policy, the Supreme Court decision of Citizens United gave corporations more ability to influence elections financially, and the U.S. police force is killing US citizens at alarming rates and in alarming manners.
Because of these and other emerging factors, we have to protest -- and we have to protest in an evolved manner, with the tools of information, empowerment, organization and -- importantly -- hindsight at our disposal. Why hindsight?
The Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011 (also 5 years ago in 2016) was a critical step in the process of confronting the oligarchy. It was powerful, as it represented a grass-roots discontent with what was, and still is, going on within the ranks of our institutions and social control structures. It threatened the status quo of oligarchical collectivism, by calling out its methods and beneficiaries, and rocking the boat of the 1% who profit from 'structuring' the 99%. And so, the movement was dismantled by authorities, from within and without. The Occupy Wall Street movement and the Occupy movements it spawned, were heavily infiltrated by members working for the authorities, not the movement. As journalist Chris Hedges stated with a wave of the hand, "That's not even a question." Its direction was lost to internal discord, and it was crucified by the mainstream media, who said that the Occupy message was not coherent.
And it wasn't. But it was real, and honest, and reflected the raw discontent so many of us feel with the corporate-industrial takeover of our world. And that's the challenge we face, as activists and truth-seekers in a culture of institutional rule. Our role is not only to highlight the problems we see around us (the negative), but also to expect to be attacked by media and still embody the clear end result we aim to create (the positive).
People, in general, are resistant to change, so a positive message of genuine change be communicated in balance. Moreover, the solution/positive must always be embodied in protests and other confrontations with institutions, so that the media can't easily portray a highlights reel of the negative -- the angry activist archetype -- in selective isolation. We've seen too many movements rise, become infiltrated and/or lose direction, ultimately becoming media roadkill. We have to know what we're up against and expect opposition, and, learning from history, we need mitigate the weaknesses in our own position -- by presenting a clear message, peacefully and fearlessly.
"Activism without spirituality is just an angry mob." ~ Bernard Alvarez
Forgive us, oh critics of the Occupy movement! Succinctly describing the sickness of the military-industrial complex and where to see its symptoms in a world controlled by the military-industrial complex is a difficult task. It's not easy to explain the complex politics (the practice of influencing other people) or the politics behind the politics, of the the prison-military-industrial-pharmaceutical-media complex. It's not easy to explain a society to itself; a society increasingly dependent on corporate and regulatory systems, where people are so afraid of change they will defend and uphold a crumbling complex of lies and rigged structures, and use the word 'truthers' as an insult, as if seeking truth were a bad thing and pretending there isn't an elephant in the room were a good thing.
Forgive us. But we've learned from hindsight. And we know what we need to do.
Peace by PieceEven the most intelligent leaders of the peace movement try to rationalize with the members of Congress, Senators and other political figures. They hope that by using rational arguments, they will be heard and their democratic freedoms exercised. But, the nature of institutional corruption is such that it closes ranks around its own corruption. Thus, playing by their rules and expecting transparency in return is futile.
Now is not the time to explain who knew, who might have known, who was at fault, and who might have been able to assist Japan to do something more about the ongoing radiation leaks. With a rising urgency to deal with this problem, now is not the time to push for answers to why Japan, the U.S.A. and the General Electric (GE) Corporation have achieved little but to apportion blame and impose controls to suppress information (instead of the radiation leak.) Now is not the time to question why Japan instituted a national secrecy law, specifically prohibiting the release of information relating to the ongoing nuclear disaster. Now is not the time to to ask why the Convention on Supplementary Compensation on Nuclear Safety does nothing to protect you, but specifically protects the nuclear industry from liability for its failures instead. Now is not the time to question why radiation-detection equipment was turned off in by authorities in the U.S.A. and Canada at the critical time: 0, and why the permissible radiation limits in foods and material goods were raised not long after.
Frankly, we don't have time to wait for those questions to be dodged, politicized and perhaps, one day, to be answered. As history has proven, this is a waste of time. And time is running short. We must take our message from the classes to the masses.
Now is the time to unite. Now is the time to raise awareness of these events. Now is the time to accept that we will never get a satisfactory answer from liable 'authorities'. Now is the time to expose the government and corporate institutions for their lies and the resulting environmental degradation of nuclear experimentation by extension all the energy oligarchies and all the tangential oligarchies worldwide that make up the 1%. Now is the time to clearly declare:
"We demand that nuclear governments and corporations of the world take legitimate and urgent action to end the ongoing disaster at Fukushima."
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
