The American Dream: Do Not Resuscitate!

http://againstsleepandnightmare.org/

It is amazing, awe-inspiring, for this movement to have made the few, stumbling steps it has – against TV reports’ lies, against advertising consultants’ agendas, political consultants’ spins, talk radio hosts’ slander and beyond. Still, at this critical time, any movement’s ability to escape our present dilemmas will be proportionate to the number of critical illusions which it can go beyond:

• We should recognize that no movement yet represents either “the 99%” or the dispossessed

The “occupations” will be only a single moment unless they continue their process of rapid transformation.  Direct democracy and avoiding leaders is crucial yet this is also not enough. Even with the many “Occupations” drawing on a variety of different groups in different places, these events must open up even more, must be even more accessible to the other parts of the 99% which haven’t yet appeared. Having no demands is crucial because the movement cannot yet speak for everyone.

The Awakening in America

http://www.bopsecrets.org/recent/awakening.htm

 

A radical situation is a collective awakening. . . . In such situations people become much more open to new perspectives, readier to question previous assumptions, quicker to see through the usual cons. . . . People learn more about society in a week than in years of academic “social studies” or leftist “consciousness raising.” . . . Everything seems possible — and much more is possible. People can hardly believe what they used to put up with in “the old days.” . . . Passive consumption is replaced by active communication. Strangers strike up lively discussions on street corners. Debates continue round the clock, new arrivals constantly replacing those who depart for other activities or to try to catch a few hours of sleep, though they are usually too excited to sleep very long. While some people succumb to demagogues, others start making their own proposals and taking their own initiatives. Bystanders get drawn into the vortex, and go through astonishingly rapid changes. . . . Radical situations are the rare moments when qualitative change really becomes possible. Far from being abnormal, they reveal how abnormally repressed we usually are; they make our “normal” life seem like sleepwalking.

—Ken Knabb, The Joy of Revolution

 

The “Occupy” movement that has swept across the country over the last four weeks is already the most significant radical breakthrough in America since the 1960s. And it is just beginning.