Revolutionary
mricardot - I'm Greatful
For the room-lighting smile
For the mind that always think[s]
For preventing a second Great Depression
For the humor
For bringing the number of women in the Supreme Court to 3
For making the White House the people's house
For 1.1 million jobs created in 2010 alone, more than the entire 8 years of George Bush
For The Penny Ice Creamery in Santa Cruz, California
For the love of people
And family
For the First Lady
For Health Care reform
For leaving the past behind
For the world loving America again
For quietly and calmly dealing with crisis after crisis, even if not being responsible to any of them
For being so cool
And fierce
And curious
And imperfect
And not giving a damn
And compassionate
And an inspiration
For saving the auto industry and at least 1.4 million jobs
For loving the troops
And understanding the horrible price
And bringing 100,000 men and women back from Iraq
For facing the most difficult and loneliest job in the world with grace, dignity, honesty and guts
And despite all the hate, pettiness, racism, corruption and immaturity around, still being the most progressive and 'for the people' president in decades.
Amirib - BE BLESSED! !!!
After The 8 Years Of The Bush/Cheney Disaster, Now You Get Mad?
You didn't get mad when the Supreme Court stopped a legal recount and appointed a President.
You didn't get mad when Cheney allowed Energy company officials to dictate Energy policy and push us to invade Iraq .
You didn't get mad when a covert CIA operative got outed.
You didn't get mad when the Patriot Act got passed.
You didn't get mad when we illegally invaded a country that posed no threat to us.
You didn't get mad when we spent over 800 billion (and counting) on said illegal war.
You didn't get mad when Bush borrowed more money from foreign sources than the previous 42 Presidents combined.
You didn't get mad when over 10 billion dollars in cash just disappeared in Iraq .
You didn't get mad when you found out we were torturing people.
You didn't get mad when Bush embraced trade and outsourcing policies that shipped 6 million American jobs out of the country.
You didn't get mad when the government was illegally wiretapping Americans.
You didn't get mad when we didn't catch Bin Laden. You didn't get mad when Bush rang up 1 0 trillion dollars in combined budget and current account deficits.
You didn't get mad when you saw the horrible conditions at Walter Reed.
You didn't get mad when we let a major US city, New Orleans , drown.
You didn't get mad when we gave people who had more money than they could spend, the filthy rich, over a trillion dollars in tax breaks.
You didn't get mad with the worst 8 years of job creations in several decades.
You didn't get mad when over 200,000 US Citizens lost their lives because they had no health insurance.
You didn't get mad when lack of oversight and regulations from the Bush Administration caused US Citizens to lose 12 trillion dollars i n investments, retirement, and home values.
You finally got mad when a black man was elected President and decided that people in America deserved the right to see a doctor if they are sick. Yes, illegal wars, lies, corruption, torture, job losses by the millions, stealing your tax dollars to make the rich richer, and the worst economic disaster since 1929 are all okay with you, but helping fellow Americans who are sick...Oh, Hell No!!
Aggiw Falk-Hirschman - attack obama as a war criminal because that's what he is despite all them pitchers makingus wanna identify with. THAT WAS THE SET UP. 88 billion to afghanistan and the 23 billion moreshd have told you. please, get away from the black people. you're loved for your class insights.the race stuff is bullshit. he's a gutless sellout.---sempre-jack
Sarah Menefee - i'm going to say this again:
we need to get rid of broken humpty dumpty capitalism,& not play into the hands of our enemies by personalizing this as being for or against Obama.. what the hell can he do, anyway?
[less& worse than he is, for sure].. the fascists like nothing better than seeing us narrow our focus& lose sight of the fact that the whole rotten system,& the ruling class that it benefits, is the enemy..
escalatepeace - Hi Sarah,
I think we really agree on this, however this discussion is also very important - sex, race, identity - insert your issue here - has successfully divided us for centuries - and I think what both Jack (not speaking for you) and I have been saying is that we must drop all this identity politics, because above all else this is a class war and as long as we continue to focus on the reflection in the mirror we are going to keep losing.
The discussion isn't about Obama, or any of the other personalities, but about how we - as individuals within a greater movement (for all of us are equally important and none of us are greater than the movement itself) allow ourselves to be blinded by our identities.
This is something that we absolutely must address or else we are going to find ourselves in another generation from now still losing, with fewer and fewer rights and services, while we continue to circle around in the same petty arguements shooting ourselves in the back.
The only identity - and I know this is difficult for many due to our individual sufferings and circumstances - that we must rally around is that of human beings within the poverty class of the world.
Once we do that all who suffer within our movement become our equals - all struggles within that movement become equally important - none more important than another - all for one and one for all, as cliche as it may sound - that is where we need to get to - and to unite, the most common denominator we have is our class - that is our unifying point - that is how we grow and will finally win - anything else has historically proven to fail.
In solidarity,
Mark
www.casadepoesia.com
http://poetsagainstwar.blogspot.com
http://marklipman.blogspot.com
revolutionary-bounces On Behalf Of Giancarlo Campagna
Hello
I'd like to weigh in.
I like what Mark says about us being human beings first then everything else: identity, class, race and so forth: is kind of secondary. All those categories are the things the hold and keep us separate from one
another.
We are simply and irrovocably human beings. We breathe we eat we work we shit we think. One thing though is that great and mysterious thing called thought. We are thinking beings afterall. And I think this is our greatest asset. Not sure how we got it so powerful, this thinking we do, but it is, and damn I'm gonna use it.
The powers, call em fascists, industrial technologic predators, etc, ruling class, brahmans, eye of the pyramid, have learned very well that thought is crucial, more than anything else, that's why they spend so many billions of dollars, and commit so many millions of people into buying into their bullshit that is simply about control of our behaviors.
The thing that makes me so angry about the '08 campaign was how so many millions of people bound together to elect the first black president when those very same millions of people with all that energy, all that energy, all their energy, all the energy did not could not channel it into taking down the military schemes of war. To me the campaign was chiefly a anti-war difusal scheme by the powers.
And you know they fuckin did it. And they won. So lick our wounds.
I voted for McKinney and Clemente because I heard Rosa Clemente speak, and she blew my mind with her analysis. Women of color, far more reflective of those who live close to the bone in the hemispheres.
I think all this Obama, this Obama that talk is kind of simple-minded.
For one, what is a US presidency for anyhow? When you truly answer that and be real about it within the power structure, then you know what you can and cannot do anymore.
Forget about McGovern. That kind of presidency push was a pipedream.
A good and noble one to strive for. I'm all for overthrow, or transformation of a system. But what for and how is it achieved?
History has seen the replacement of one power structure for another.
And they all have their particular brutalities.
The powers, the rulings classes, absorb everything we throw at them.
Everything. And why is this?
We are human beings and we have to relate as such. Perhaps we need to spend a little time figuring out what that is. I know many have spent their life times on this and many in struggle against and for this and that, and I don't want to minimize, only celebrate, but I feel deeply that we need to get beyond the categories and limitations of our minds and just fucking think a little about what we truly are with this great capacity for thought.
"Culture contains
the seed of resistance
which blossoms into
the flower of liberation."
-Amilear Cabral
Joshua G. Boylan - Giancarlo,
While the development of "sophisticated" thought structures by modern man is perhaps, truly profound, it is not the end all be all, of human existence.
One could actually make the counter-argument that in many respects, the damage caused by belief and participation in certain systems of thought, to the exclusion of other valid points of view, has been the bane of human existence for millenia. Freedom lies in the transcendance of thought identification and the presence of being, here, now.
The thoughts themselves are not necessarily the problem, but the identification with a specific modality of thought, and any which are less than all encompassing of our shared humanity, is. We are so much more than thinking creatures. We are first and foremost, beings of the divine. We have spent so much time and energy arguing over and devising ways to enslave each other to one set of ideas or another that we've missed the point. To say that we are nothing more than a collection of fabricated thought structures, which we identify with to such a degree that we are willing to die for them, is belittling to our true nature. It is only our ego which will not tolerate any idea with
which it is identified to be proven false.
For that equates to the death rattle of the ego itself. Ego would argue, since it only exists as a concept in the mind, who am I if an idea with which I fervently believe and draw my sense of self from is disproven? That inevitable occurrence however, is precisely what we as human beings must herald and allow through compassionate awareness of the present moment, to flower in this world.
That golden age of man, which at our core, each of us who have in the past and continue to struggle towards with our entire being, is nothing short of the total destruction of ego...individually and collectively within every culture. Consciousness is ever evolving.
Thought is but a component of conscious awareness. We can utilize thought as a tool, but we must remain vigilant about not getting sucked into another egoic identification. For it will ultimately erect more ivory towers to itself and defend them with great vigor.
When we find ourselves defending this mental position over that one, we are in the throes of ego and thus limiting the great "is-ness" of being.
Liberation is brought about through regcognition of one's being and its commonality with every other living creature.
In compassion and love...
Joshua
Richard M Gross - To Joshua & Giancarlo (& obviously, the rest of us)
- Great beginning discussion of the most important and difficult subject of all: the Nature(s) of Human Nature. My favorite & most confounding subject.
Just a few thoughts:
1. A great contemporary American philosopher, Ken Wilber, wrote in his book, "A Brief History of Everything," "The archbattle of the Universe is,
always, Evolution vs. Egocentrism."
2. Jonathan Schell, in his 1982 masterpiece, "Fate of the Earth," wrote "We can only be in awe before a mystery that both is what we are AND surpasses
our understanding."
3. Alexander Pope, "Essay on Man," 1734:
Created half to rise and half to fall
Great Lord of all thing, yet a prey to all
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world.
I rest my case, opening arguments, only.
Richard
Isaac J. Conner - I don't know many of you, but can say that I agree with or support many of the comments made in the thread... Except for whomever initiated the conversation. I don't know the experiences in your life that have made you who you are or given you the perspective that you have, so this is not meant to be critical of you, just of your take on things.
I don't believe there is anything naive about feeling grateful for ice cream shoppes, room-lighting smiles, the thinking mind, humor, the love of people and family or witnessing the evolution of sexual and racial inclusion (if only so that we may see the vanishing of these fictitious lines of separation).
There is great naivety in the remarks which comprise the rest of mricardot's post, however.
For making the White House the people's house.
This building now belongs to everyone but "the people" in a very literal sense these days.
For preventing a second Great Depression.
Bankers caused that era and they have caused the crisis in which we now find ourselves. We have been robbed so that they may have bonuses on top of the largest profits in their history while we make less in wages than in 1973, adjusted for inflation.
For the First Lady.
Why?
For Health Care reform.
There was no reform. There was an insurance industry give-away, but in today's Orwellian speak, legislation is usually labeled as its opposite. Single Payer is the only system designed to work best for the citizenry and, as well as leaving zero people out it would not incur over 30% administrative fees.
For leaving the past behind.
Is this what you call ignoring Bush's illegal war of aggression and crimes against humanity which continue to be perpetuated by the Obama administration? Or were you speaking of something entirely different?
For the world loving America again.
The statement is evidence of denial.
For quietly and calmly dealing with crisis after crisis, even if not being responsible to any of them.
Apparently, you do not consider the removal of civil rights a crisis.
For being so cool
And fierce
And curious
And imperfect
And not giving a damn
And compassionate
And an inspiration.
The cult of personality is good for rhetoric, but not policy or reality.
For saving the auto industry and at least 1.4 million jobs.
Imagine what a new "New Deal" would bring.
For loving the troops.
For keeping them in an illegal war of aggression, punishing them for following illegal orders and punishing them for opposing them?
And bringing 100,000 men and women back from Iraq.
5 other wars do not seem to bother you.
For facing the most difficult and loneliest job in the world with grace, dignity, honesty and guts
And despite all the hate, pettiness, racism, corruption and immaturity around, still being the most progressive and 'for the people' president in decades.
Your use of the word progressive to describe Obama shows that you know how to echo the calls of the status quo, which is concerned with defusing the actual progressives of the country. What has Obama progressed other than the Bush agenda and why does any of this weigh heavily in your evaluation when measured against endless war, removal of civil rights and thieving from Americans?