photo top: Hilary Klein background photo: David Hanks

POST-ISSUE ACTIVISM
flyer: justicedesign.com photo: David Hanks
— HOW TO CHANGE THINGS —
1980s band discoindustrial
My Life with
the Thrill Kill Kult:
“‘Reality’ is the only word
in the English language
that should always be
used in quotes.”
Frye’s poem uses the
etymology of the word
reality to expose the
flawed assumptions that
shape the dominant
cultural lens. The king’s counting house is the origin of today’s corporatedriven
doomsday economy. A “reality” that has colonized our minds to
normalize alienation from nature, conquest, and patriarchal hierarchies. A
“reality” based on the censorship of our history of collective struggle that
makes us think rugged individualism is the only tactic for resistance.
“Reality” is the lens through which we see the world. If we want to create
a different world we’re going to need to create some new lenses. We can
begin by understanding that the values that currently underlie the global
system didn’t win out because they are time-tested, democratically
supported, or even effective. This “reality” is a product of the naked
brutality of European colonization and the systematic destruction of the
cultural and economic alternatives to our current pathological system.
The struggle to create political space for a truly transformative arena of
social change is the fight to build a new collective reality. Our last (or is it
first?) line of defense to the spreading consumer monoculture is the
struggle to decolonize our minds and magnify the multitude of different
“realities” embedded in the planet’s sweeping diversity of cultures,
ecosystems, and interdependant life forms.
At the center of these efforts must be the understanding that the
ecological operating systems of the biosphere represent an overarching
politics of reality. If we want to talk about reality in the singular, outside
of its conceptual quotation marks, then we must talk about ecological
reality—the reality of interdependence, diversity, limits, cycles, and
dynamic balance. A politics of reality recognizes that ecology is not merely
another single issue to lump onto our list of demands; rather, ecology is
the larger context within which all our struggles takes place. A politics of
reality is grounded in the understanding that the ecological collapse is the
central and most visible contradiction in the global system. It is an implicit
202
On the one-year anniversary of the shutdown of San Francisco’s financial district, DASW kicks off its Empire versus Democracy
(beyond voting) campaign with a protest and nonviolent direct action on March 19, 2004,
in conjunction with the global day of action against war on March 20, 2004.
The Infernal Noise Brigade comes to town for antiwar protests on March 19–20, 2004, San Francisco.
Jason Justice
Jason Justice