photo top: Hilary Klein background photo: David Hanks
photo top: Hilary Klein background photo: David Hanks
photo top: Hilary Klein background photo: David Hanks
Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
Andrew Stern / www.andrewstern.net<br />
On the day before the anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, a demonstration took place in Baghdad in tandem with protests<br />
around the world against the violence of the occupation on March 19, 2004.<br />
acknowledgment that the<br />
central political project of<br />
our era is the rethinking of<br />
what it means to be human<br />
on planet earth.<br />
— HOW TO CHANGE THINGS —<br />
We have to confront the<br />
cancer and pull the doomsday<br />
economy out of its<br />
suicidal nosedive. The move<br />
toward a politics of reality is<br />
the essence of a fight for the<br />
Infernal Noise Brigade, March 19, 2004, San Francisco.<br />
future itself. Indian writer<br />
and activist Vandana Shiva<br />
said it eloquently in her speech at the World Summit on Sustainable<br />
Development countersummit in August 2002: “There is only one struggle<br />
left, and that is the struggle for survival.”<br />
Ecology must be a key ingredient in the future of pan-movement politics.<br />
But to achieve this, we must ensure that earth-centered values don’t get<br />
appropriated by white, middle-class messengers and become artificially<br />
separated from a comprehensive critique of all forms of oppression. A<br />
global ecology movement is already being led by the communities and<br />
cultures most impacted by the doomsday economy, from international<br />
campesino movements to urban communities resisting toxic poisoning to<br />
the last indigenous homelands. Those of us dreaming of more global North<br />
counterparts to these earth-centered movements have much to learn from<br />
listening to the voices of frontline resistance.<br />
The Western Shoshone people—the most bombed nation on earth who<br />
have survived half a century of U.S. nuclear colonialism on their ancestral<br />
lands in what is now called Nevada—have mobilized under the banner,<br />
“Healing Global Wounds.” This inspiring slogan reminds us that despite the<br />
horrors of brutality, empire, and ecological catastrophe the strongest<br />
resistance lies in the ability to think big.<br />
In facing the global crisis, the most powerful weapon that we have is our<br />
imagination. As we work to escape the oppressive cultural norms and<br />
flawed assumptions of the corporate system we must liberate our<br />
imagination and articulate our dreams for a life-affirming future. Our<br />
actions must embody these new “realities” because even though people<br />
might realize they are on the Titanic and the iceberg is just ahead, they<br />
still need to see the lifeboat in order to jump ship. It is by presenting<br />
alternatives that we can help catalyze mass defections from the<br />
pathological norms of modern consumer culture. 29<br />
205<br />
Jason Justice<br />
POST-ISSUE ACTIVISM