It doesnt usually get much more eloquent than this: …around the world, in puddles of resistance, in deconstructive spaces of indigenous reclamation, in sonnets of longing, more and more people are realizing that there is something fundamentally wrong about our globalizing civilization… ..People are awakening to the consciousness that progress and development, however sustainable, will not summon a world that works for everyone, and that no collective enterprise that treats the earth as fodder for some imagined growth project, creates urban centres and centrally planned cities of concrete and ash and do away with the very urgent human need for intimacy, converts wondrous work into jobs and artificial spaces of legitimized exploitation, homogenizes our unique cultural differences under the asphalted banner of globalization, drives human activity on the hegemonic lubrication of profit, entrusts decision-making to the ivory frameworks of giant corporations, big business and nation-states, and preaches to us the insidious idea that we are not enough, is worth sustaining…. ….we invented the modern ethics of philanthropy and poverty eradication to escape the need to change a money system that is fuelled by the very existence of poverty and scarcity; we created an industry of waste management that tempers our anger and numbs us to the fact that we abide in cradle-to-grave, use-and-dump economy, a behemoth that necessarily generates waste by silently celebrating planned obsolescence. … …The system is highly adaptable, accommodating our angst, ingesting our disenchantment, and blending it into a pasty distillation of Trojan slogans, easy T-shirts, convenience policies and nonsense syllables. The dialectics of resistance often reinforce the thesis of normativity we strive to transcend…. …It is perhaps time for a different kind of activism – not the one that is summarily concluded on the angry surface of a placard, not the one that is fuelled by the caricature of a bureaucratic class, and not the one that seeks to replace on tyranny by another – however benevolent. I would suggest that we think of this activism as a shared journey of reclamation …..We are reclaiming humility- a humble reappraisal of the limits and import of human agency in the grander narratives about a magical universe we inhabit, a universe that seems more intelligent, more conscious and more sensuously alive than we are; we are reclaiming our disenchantments, vulnerabilities and wounds- for they are silent town-criers pointing out pathways that we never considered possible; we are reclaiming our fabulous voices in all their flawed and broken imperfections – letting go of the need to be correct, holy or different; and most of all, we are reclaiming the other – our inescapable intimacy with the stranger, our alliance with our own contradiction. If this project of human reclamation does not lie at the heart of our contrived movements for a better world today, I fear we run the risk of perpetuating the very anxieties and ways of seeing we so assiduously resist today…. ..Perhaps the space between stories is an invitation to drop Ockham’s infallible razor, to let go of our linear rationalities and rectilinear assumptions, and fall headlong into the always mysterious festival of foreign light and dark that life is…. bit.ly/1ci9kU4
Posted on: Tue, 12 Nov 2013 18:39:52 +0000
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