You know something is up when even Rahul Mahajan is asking his readers whether he should spend some time on vision and strategy:
So here’s a question, especially for readers who have been with me for a while. Do any of you feel as if further analysis of the occupation is beating a dead horse and that you want and need something different? Do you want to see more about vision for how to change the world, instead of an exclusive focus on what’s wrong with it? Thoughtful, reasoned answers are welcome; so are straightforward votes. Drop me a line.
I guess readers who have been with me for a while know that I named this blog after an essay by Michael Albert, called ‘Stop the Killing Train’. In his work, he emphasizes the stopping part. Readers who follow this blog know that I seem to be emphasizing the killing train part. I’m a lot more tentative in what I offer in the way of strategy or vision, probably just because I’m just not as sure about things as he is, though I do try to offer experiences that are positive, like the Northern Cauca process or even local things like OCAP.
But I have been feeling some of what Rahul describes — a sameness to the news. A sameness to the non-news, which is what I report here. We report these things out of a sense of duty, sometimes.
Fernando Garavito is a Colombian journalist in exile, who lost his job with a major Colombian newspaper for doing it too well, and fled under threat from paramilitaries. He does an internet column called ‘the Lord of the Flies’ (I translated just one of his articles). About a month ago, Garavito wrote what he announced as his last column. The world was on fire, going insane all around him, and there was just no point in putting these silly writings out over email. It’s the proportion problem I described a couple of days ago.
Garavito was convinced to keep writing, in part at least by another Colombian friend who wrote him a very moving note, which I got to read as well. That friend wrote: “I have been speaking in empty and full rooms all over the place over these past years and all of it only does a tiny bit to release the voices in my head that cry out to be heard, the voices of people who have taught me and people who have died.” That’s a sense of responsibility that I feel on me as well. That’s why I keep repeating things like “Israel killed 17 Palestinians last week” despite the “sameness” of it to the week before — those 17 people deserve better.
But the question, of course, is what we can do to see that they get the justice we owe them.
In his ‘Stop the Killing Train’ essay, Michael asks, and answers (as he is wont to do) my problem about proportion too:
“At first, becoming attuned to our country’s responsibility for the corpses stacked behind transparent cattle-car walls makes handing out leaflets, or arguing for peace with a co-worker, or urging a relative to think twice about paying taxes, or going to a demonstration, or sitting in, or even doing civil disobedience or building the movements to do all these things collectively seem insignificant. But the fact is, these are the acts that the hypothetical God, tired of our behavior, would be calling for if she were to actually parade the “free world’s” corpses down our main streets in killing trains. These are the acts that can accumulate into a firestorm of informed protest that then raises the cost of profiteering and dominating so high that the institutions breeding such behavior start to buckle.”
So, readers, whether I was influenced by Rahul’s note or whether I am responding to the same wider phenomena, I’ll meet you over in the vision blog, for a couple of posts I could have done months ago.
