I had to travel all the way to Ireland to find an upcoming social movement activity of note (that is not one of the notable tonight: an Anti-War Movement General Meeting on January 29, 2011. A bit farther to the East, a national student walkout in the UK on January 26, part of the impressive Stop The Cuts movement in defense of social spending. And way across just about every ocean in Waihopai, New Zealand, there’s an important camp-in protest on January 21-23 to resist collaboration on global electronic surveillance.
It’s great to see what angry, fed up people are doing in the English-speaking world in the Eastern Hemisphere. Way to go! Tell me more about it.
Meanwhile, over here in the United States, there’s… well, on the right there’s the annual “March for Life” against reproductive rights this January in Washington, DC. On the left, there’s…
What?
What am I missing?
What big, fat, angry, riled up protest of all the CRAP that’s going down, from neutered net neutrality to a massive surveillance program that makes Bush look libertarian to tax cuts for billionaires (if you need a link for that, you’ve been sleeping all month) to Democrats, not Republicans sponsoring bills to kill trial by jury. This crap makes the years of Dick Nixon look like a reunion of John Denver and the Muppets.
So where’s the protest? Where is it?
Please, you movement people out there, let me know what’s going down. And if nothing’s going down, help me understand that too.
The American sheeple are a whipped bunch of spineless eunuchs. Nobody protests nothin’ here. Groping by the TSA?
They kinda like it now. Ruining the environment? Yawn. Next! You wanna have martial law declared? No problem, people will hole up in their little houses and watch American Idol, like they do anyway. Take everyone’s first born – hey, it’ll prolly do em some good! Shut off t.v. for a week? Oh boy the hate mail will pour in then! But then they’ll do somethin’ else for entertainment (like text each other about how angry they are), not protest, not get angry and throw things or shoot anybody (who?). Nope, jellyfish don’t protest. Sorry. We’re all so lazy, fat and stupid that we’re just amorphous blobs mindlessly sucking up resources with not a care in the world. On the brink of WWIII or the next environmental calamity? Who cares. The ruling class has won. We give already. Throw us some crumbs and we’ll stay quiet (and if you don’t, we’ll only grouse about it for a short time and then we’ll forget all about it, waiting for the next insult & injury). i’d like to say we’re practicing Ghandian non-violence, but we don’t even know who that is anymore and if somebody will just Google him in and spread the result via e-mail or text, i’m sure somebody will read it (and promptly forget about it). Yeah, the “floundering fathers” would be oh so proud of this lot. Democracy. It’s what we were SUPPOSED to be, but – nah too much trouble.
“Our” government watchdog on the environment – looking out for you and me, as usual:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/10/science/earth/10epa.html?_r=1
okay, not so much . . .
Ah – and now, for your global climate change video of the day:
To be fair, trial by jury is such a terrible way of obtaining justice (if we take justice to be related to fair outcomes and truth) that it’s probably a good thing if it goes.
This said, it would be a major change, and it would not be a positive thing if there wasn’t some form of precaution taken to make sure there was still an element of layman input, and it IS worrying if no one seems to care…
The alternative governments push for – detention if the government decides so – is frightening.