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