This week as I pondered my existence while driving from a physiotherapy appointment to work, I thought about the power of words. No this is not referring to the child rhymes “sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me”. I rather thought of how words frame our existence and understanding. They create as well as limit the imagination. They define and explain our realities. In so doing, they have immense power over us.
As I drove, I thought specifically about the words we use to describe employment. The phrase that came into my mind was “I’m so thankful I have been given a job”. The phrase is manipulative and a lie. A job is basically the selling of one’s time and existence for money. I state this in the crassest way I can. Really, the basic job, the selling of oneself for money, is not dissimilar to prostitution of one’s self.
This comes to a head for me when I am told a job is a gift, then in the same breath I hear that gift is the selling of myself. I think such words limit my options, limit my existence, and limit who I am at the very core. So what then shall I say? How can I communicate the action of employment in a better way? How can I be more honest to myself and not segregate my life into little boxes? I think of the Occupy Wall Street protester’s slogan “I quit my job and found an occupation”.
Is it possible to live a holistic life where work does not become a segregated piece, the prostitution of self?
Reflecting on this I think back to one professor’s list of confused priorities. He stated that in our world we all too often worship our work, work at our play, and play at our worship. Maybe beyond being confused all of these categories are a façade that captures our imagination, a façade we are then not able to think out side of. The categories of work, worship, and play seem too ridged. What would it look like to refuse these words their power and imagine economics differently?
I pondered this question for many hours this past summer as I swept concrete dust and carried lumber around a hole, as well as commuting three and a half hours a day to be permitted to do so. I was selling large amounts of time to make a buck, but I really had no other options. I worked as a manual labourer with a bunch of people who knew their existences to be the prostitution of self. When I found out these same people had no moral qualms about the hiring of sex slaves on the weekends it was surprising but not incomprehensible, because their own existence was very similar as they prostituted their physical strength to make money.
What drove these people to live like this? How were they so trapped in a system that they saw no way out? As I listened and observed, I realized they were there for different reasons. Some of them were there out of obligation. They were court ordered to pay child support and they needed a job that would pay enough to do so. Others were there out of necessity, much like me, this was the means to enable life. Still others were there motivated my greed, it was a place where those at the top were driven solely by self-interest and greed. All of these, obligation, necessity, greed, I determined were not worthy motivators.
As I worked as a manual labourer, I followed in my Pake’s (grandfather’s) footsteps. As an immigrant after WWII he attempted farming in Canada. After a few bad years, he, like many others, made his way to the city where he found work on a construction site. For the rest of his life he worked concrete construction as a manual labourer. Now that I was doing the same thing, I wondered what motivated him all those years. I know from stories he never loved the work but did what was necessary. Was he motivated by obligation? Is that really all that pushed him through his entire life, obligation to his family? I hope it was something more. Though I cannot ask him, I would hedge a bet, that if asked what his motivator was, he would have answered, love. Love for his daughters and wife, a sacrificial love given so that his daughters might have a better future. A future that would enable them to live more holistic lives.
How many more times do we need to be trapped by words? How long will we permit our imagination to be limited by the vernacular of a system that promotes segregation of life? I know in my family one generation has already offered sacrificial love to enable a more holistic future. If I continue to life with such segmentation, without challenging the words and ideas that oppress, I spit on the love my Pake displayed? Or for you, do you spit on the love Jesus already displayed, a love that broke barriers, dismantling the segmentation of life?
Showing posts with label occupy wall street. Show all posts
Showing posts with label occupy wall street. Show all posts
Monday, November 7, 2011
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
#OccupyWallStreet - An Issue of Choice
Complex, malleable, uncertain, passionate, misunderstood, confused. These are all words that come to mind as I ponder the "occupy" movement. I have many thoughts about what is going on in New York and around the US (and now Canada). With regards to those thoughts, what stands out to me is how much my thoughts have changed and morphed day-by-day as this protest continues to unfold. My emotional responses have ranged from cynicism to self-righteousness to support. I have yet to settle into one opinion. I think I am just as amorphous as the movement itself, I am unable to pick a side. Picking a side, well one can hardly do that with a movement like this because it does not have the same sides of the debate we have grown accustom to in our civic dialogue.
There are no sides. As I read a number of articles tonight and pondered what is occurring in the world around me I began to dwell on the concept of choice. As a result of my pondering, I am proposing that the heart of the issue is the desire to choose. I believe we were created for choice, it is innate within us to want to choose. Whether we are good at choice or not is beside the point, we all choose. This desire to choose, for a long time, has been satiated by the binary mode of thought we have grown accustom to in the west. We choose to be liberal or conservative, white collar or blue collar, religious or non-religious, we are products of the either/or. But we are entering, and have been entering for a long time, an era where the choices are less well defined, a movement into the both/and. We are in a time of challenge. A time where our post-modern outlook on life challenges the binary choices. When this occurs we often discover the choices we have been making are not really choices at all, or at best have been limited choices. We are forced to consider that the limited choice offered by both/and is just that, limited. One chooses democrats or republicans only to find they are more similar than they are different. One chooses Mac or PC, but they are both computers. One chooses to buy x or y only to find there is no choice in the system. Both/and is beginning to feel like a non-choice when we consider things such as economics, or a financial reserve that is beyond choice, or a capitalism that has become empire as it exhibits the trait of totality. We feel like we have lost choice.
It is my opinion that at the heart of the occupy movement people are desiring true choice. As a result, we are confronted by an amorphous protest that appears to be incoherent and unable to articulate what it wants. I suggest this is precisely because it is attempting to redefine the parameters of choice in the macro structures and ideology that govern our time.
I am not sure what the end result will look like, but I do know I am in favour of being along for the ride that takes our society to its redefinition.
There are no sides. As I read a number of articles tonight and pondered what is occurring in the world around me I began to dwell on the concept of choice. As a result of my pondering, I am proposing that the heart of the issue is the desire to choose. I believe we were created for choice, it is innate within us to want to choose. Whether we are good at choice or not is beside the point, we all choose. This desire to choose, for a long time, has been satiated by the binary mode of thought we have grown accustom to in the west. We choose to be liberal or conservative, white collar or blue collar, religious or non-religious, we are products of the either/or. But we are entering, and have been entering for a long time, an era where the choices are less well defined, a movement into the both/and. We are in a time of challenge. A time where our post-modern outlook on life challenges the binary choices. When this occurs we often discover the choices we have been making are not really choices at all, or at best have been limited choices. We are forced to consider that the limited choice offered by both/and is just that, limited. One chooses democrats or republicans only to find they are more similar than they are different. One chooses Mac or PC, but they are both computers. One chooses to buy x or y only to find there is no choice in the system. Both/and is beginning to feel like a non-choice when we consider things such as economics, or a financial reserve that is beyond choice, or a capitalism that has become empire as it exhibits the trait of totality. We feel like we have lost choice.
It is my opinion that at the heart of the occupy movement people are desiring true choice. As a result, we are confronted by an amorphous protest that appears to be incoherent and unable to articulate what it wants. I suggest this is precisely because it is attempting to redefine the parameters of choice in the macro structures and ideology that govern our time.
I am not sure what the end result will look like, but I do know I am in favour of being along for the ride that takes our society to its redefinition.
#OccupyWallStreet - Zizek
So far to my knowledge, Cornel West, Slajov Zizek and Shane Claiborne among others have all given speeches at Occupy Wall Street. They are like three of my favourite people!
Here is the transcript of part of Zizek's speech:
…2008 financial crash more hard earned private property was destroyed than if all of us here were to be destroying it night and day for weeks. They tell you we are dreamers. The true dreamers are those who think things can go on indefinitely the way they are. We are not dreamers. We are awakening from a dream which is tuning into a nightmare. We are not destroying anything. We are only witnessing how the system is destroying itself. We all know the classic scenes from cartoons. The cart reaches a precipice. But it goes on walking. Ignoring the fact that there is nothing beneath. Only when it looks down and notices it, it falls down. This is what we are doing here. We are telling the guys there on Wall Street – Hey, look down! (cheering).
In April 2011, the Chinese government prohibited on TV and films and in novels all stories that contain alternate reality or time travel. This is a good sign for China. It means that people still dream about alternatives, so you have to prohibit this dream. Here we don’t think of prohibition. Because the ruling system has even suppressed our capacity to dream. Look at the movies that we see all the time. It’s easy to imagine the end of the world. An asteroid destroying all life and so on. But you cannot imagine the end of capitalism. So what are we doing here? Let me tell you a wonderful old joke from communist times.
A guy was sent from East Germany to work in Siberia. He knew his mail would be read by censors. So he told his friends: Let’s establish a code. If the letter you get from me is written in blue ink ,it is true what I said. If it is written in red ink, it is false. After a month his friends get a first letter. Everything is in blue. It says, this letter: everything is wonderful here. Stores are full of good food. Movie theaters show good films from the West. Apartments are large and luxurious. The only thing you cannot buy is red ink.
This is how we live. We have all the freedoms we want. But what we are missing is red ink. The language to articulate our non-freedom. The way we are taught to speak about freedom war and terrorism and so on falsifies freedom. And this is what you are doing here: You are giving all of us red ink.
There is a danger. Don’t fall in love with yourselves. We have a nice time here. But remember: carnivals come cheap. What matters is the day after. When we will have to return to normal life. Will there be any changes then. I don’t want you to remember these days, you know, like - oh, we were young, it was beautiful. Remember that our basic message is: We are allowed to think about alternatives. The rule is broken. We do not live in the best possible world. But there is a long road ahead. There are truly difficult questions that confront us. We know what we do not want. But what do we want? What social organization can replace capitalism? What type of new leaders do we want?
Remember: the problem is not corruption or greed. The problem is the system that pushes you to give up. Beware not only of the enemies. But also of false friends who are already working to dilute this process. In the same way you get coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, ice cream without fat. They will try to make this into a harmless moral protest. They think (??? unintelligible). But the reason we are here is that we have enough of the world where to recycle coke cans…
Mic check
We can see that for a long time we allowed our political engagement also to be outsourced. We want it back. We are not communists. If communism means the system which collapsed in 1990, remember that today those communists are the most efficient ruthless capitalists. In China today we have capitalism which is even more dynamic than your American capitalism but doesn’t need democracy. Which means when you criticize capitalism, don’t allow yourselves to be blackmailed that you are against democracy. The marriage between democracy and capitalism is over.
The change is possible. So, what do we consider today possible? Just follow the media. On the one hand in technology and sexuality everything seems to be possible. You can travel to the moon. You can become immortal by biogenetics. You can have sex with animals or whatever. But look at the fields of society and economy. There almost everything is considered impossible. You want to raise taxes a little bit for the rich, they tell you it’s impossible, we lose competitivitiy. You want more money for healthcare: they tell you impossible, this means a totalitarian state. There is something wrong in the world where you are promised to be immortal but cannot spend a little bit more for health care. Maybe that ??? set our priorities straight here. We don’t want higher standards of living. We want better standards of living. The only sense in which we are communists is that we care for the commons. The commons of nature. The commons of what is privatized by intellectual property. The commons of biogenetics. For this and only for this we should fight.
Communism failed absolutely. But the problems of the commons are here. They are telling you we are not Americans here. But the conservative fundamentalists who claim they are really American have to be reminded of something. What is Christianity? It’s the Holy Spirit. What’s the Holy Spirit? It’s an egalitarian community of believers who are linked by love for each other. And who only have their own freedom and responsibility to do it. In this sense the Holy Spirit is here now. And down there on Wall Street there are pagans who are worshipping blasphemous idols. So all we need is patience. The only thing I’m afraid of is that we will someday just go home and then we will meet once a year, drinking beer, and nostalgically remembering what a nice time we had here. Promise ourselves that this will not be the case.
We know that people often desire something but do not really want it. Don’t be afraid to really want what you desire. Thank you very much!
Here is the transcript of part of Zizek's speech:
…2008 financial crash more hard earned private property was destroyed than if all of us here were to be destroying it night and day for weeks. They tell you we are dreamers. The true dreamers are those who think things can go on indefinitely the way they are. We are not dreamers. We are awakening from a dream which is tuning into a nightmare. We are not destroying anything. We are only witnessing how the system is destroying itself. We all know the classic scenes from cartoons. The cart reaches a precipice. But it goes on walking. Ignoring the fact that there is nothing beneath. Only when it looks down and notices it, it falls down. This is what we are doing here. We are telling the guys there on Wall Street – Hey, look down! (cheering).
In April 2011, the Chinese government prohibited on TV and films and in novels all stories that contain alternate reality or time travel. This is a good sign for China. It means that people still dream about alternatives, so you have to prohibit this dream. Here we don’t think of prohibition. Because the ruling system has even suppressed our capacity to dream. Look at the movies that we see all the time. It’s easy to imagine the end of the world. An asteroid destroying all life and so on. But you cannot imagine the end of capitalism. So what are we doing here? Let me tell you a wonderful old joke from communist times.
A guy was sent from East Germany to work in Siberia. He knew his mail would be read by censors. So he told his friends: Let’s establish a code. If the letter you get from me is written in blue ink ,it is true what I said. If it is written in red ink, it is false. After a month his friends get a first letter. Everything is in blue. It says, this letter: everything is wonderful here. Stores are full of good food. Movie theaters show good films from the West. Apartments are large and luxurious. The only thing you cannot buy is red ink.
This is how we live. We have all the freedoms we want. But what we are missing is red ink. The language to articulate our non-freedom. The way we are taught to speak about freedom war and terrorism and so on falsifies freedom. And this is what you are doing here: You are giving all of us red ink.
There is a danger. Don’t fall in love with yourselves. We have a nice time here. But remember: carnivals come cheap. What matters is the day after. When we will have to return to normal life. Will there be any changes then. I don’t want you to remember these days, you know, like - oh, we were young, it was beautiful. Remember that our basic message is: We are allowed to think about alternatives. The rule is broken. We do not live in the best possible world. But there is a long road ahead. There are truly difficult questions that confront us. We know what we do not want. But what do we want? What social organization can replace capitalism? What type of new leaders do we want?
Remember: the problem is not corruption or greed. The problem is the system that pushes you to give up. Beware not only of the enemies. But also of false friends who are already working to dilute this process. In the same way you get coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, ice cream without fat. They will try to make this into a harmless moral protest. They think (??? unintelligible). But the reason we are here is that we have enough of the world where to recycle coke cans…
Part Two
….Starbucks cappuccino. Where 1% goes to the world’s starving children. It is enough to make us feel good. After outsourcing work and torture. After the marriage agencies are now outsourcing even our love life, daily.Mic check
We can see that for a long time we allowed our political engagement also to be outsourced. We want it back. We are not communists. If communism means the system which collapsed in 1990, remember that today those communists are the most efficient ruthless capitalists. In China today we have capitalism which is even more dynamic than your American capitalism but doesn’t need democracy. Which means when you criticize capitalism, don’t allow yourselves to be blackmailed that you are against democracy. The marriage between democracy and capitalism is over.
The change is possible. So, what do we consider today possible? Just follow the media. On the one hand in technology and sexuality everything seems to be possible. You can travel to the moon. You can become immortal by biogenetics. You can have sex with animals or whatever. But look at the fields of society and economy. There almost everything is considered impossible. You want to raise taxes a little bit for the rich, they tell you it’s impossible, we lose competitivitiy. You want more money for healthcare: they tell you impossible, this means a totalitarian state. There is something wrong in the world where you are promised to be immortal but cannot spend a little bit more for health care. Maybe that ??? set our priorities straight here. We don’t want higher standards of living. We want better standards of living. The only sense in which we are communists is that we care for the commons. The commons of nature. The commons of what is privatized by intellectual property. The commons of biogenetics. For this and only for this we should fight.
Communism failed absolutely. But the problems of the commons are here. They are telling you we are not Americans here. But the conservative fundamentalists who claim they are really American have to be reminded of something. What is Christianity? It’s the Holy Spirit. What’s the Holy Spirit? It’s an egalitarian community of believers who are linked by love for each other. And who only have their own freedom and responsibility to do it. In this sense the Holy Spirit is here now. And down there on Wall Street there are pagans who are worshipping blasphemous idols. So all we need is patience. The only thing I’m afraid of is that we will someday just go home and then we will meet once a year, drinking beer, and nostalgically remembering what a nice time we had here. Promise ourselves that this will not be the case.
We know that people often desire something but do not really want it. Don’t be afraid to really want what you desire. Thank you very much!
Reposted from: http://www.occupywallst.org/article/today-liberty-plaza-had-visit-slavoj-zizek/
Friday, October 7, 2011
#OccupyVancouver ?
Hopefully you are aware that there has now been close to a month long protest in wall street...
http://occupywallst.org/
What is more is that this ambiguous and amorphous protest of a variety of things is spreading across the continent...
The first general assembly for Occupy Vancouver is tomorrow:
W2 Media Cafe - 111 W. Hastings St. Saturday, October 8 - 1:00pm
Let them gawk, let them ask questions, let them wake up.
We realize that our social, economic, and political structures are broken. This is more than just a protest "against" something. It is about coming together as people, acknowledging things are broken, and working together to fix them.
"This protest cannot be boiled down to a simple soundbite because this protest is ambitiously seeking a complex, fundamental, philosophical change in the social, political, and economic infrastructure of our country... The strength of Occupy... lies in the ambiguity of its mission. There is no laundry list of specific, unreasonable, and untenable demands. There is only the demand for change. Change of, by, and for the people, enacted by our elected officials. If the powers-that-be respond with absolutely nothing, then it is clear that they will never, ever be interested in effecting substantial change of our financial system, no matter how strong public support may be."
- Edward Murray, Huffington Post
http://occupywallst.org/
What is more is that this ambiguous and amorphous protest of a variety of things is spreading across the continent...
The first general assembly for Occupy Vancouver is tomorrow:
W2 Media Cafe - 111 W. Hastings St. Saturday, October 8 - 1:00pm
They intend on staging their occupation beginning on Oct 15th in front of the art gallery...(not in protest of art but based on space and proximity to Howe)
Garret Menges posted the following quote from adBusters in a satus update:
The rat-bastard Capitalist scum who are telling you to "reach out and touch someone" with a telephone or "be there!"--these lovecrafty suckers are trying to turn you into a scrunched-up, blood-drained, pathetic, crippled little cog in the death-machine of the human soul. Fight them--by meeting with friends, not to consume or produce, but to enjoy friendship--and you will have triumphed over the most pernicious conspiracy in EuroAmerican society today--the conspiracy to turn you into a living corpse galvanized by prosthesis and the terror of scarcity--to turn you into a spook haunting your own brain.
I posted this Oscar Wilde quote a while ago:
It is immoral to use private property to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property.
There is clearly a growing discontent and critique of of our post modern consumer capitalism and the inevitability of its failure...
There has certainly been significant anti-empire language used on this blog...
I feel like, maybe, we are standing on the precipice of something big...
So is Occupying Vancouver fighting the empire?
Can we please define empire before its too late?
Are we going to participate?
How is global economic failure going to effect society?
I think that our generation has been raised on stories of glories of the protests of sixties over Vietnam and civil rights...
I think that we have been raised watching Star Wars and know instinctively to fight those who would dominate the world with fear and violence...
The generation that fought in WWI remembered glamourized war. The generation that fought in WWII idealized war. Vietnam destroyed moral superiority. The cold war killed idealism. The war on terror is ending fear? Every generation forgets, every generation believes, every generation remakes the world, is this that moment? The moment of revolution... A revolution of what and to what?
According to Occupy Vancouver:
It is time to come together and educate each other. We will stand in solidarity with these other movements and we will create a platform for people to speak and provide an audience that will listen. Let them gawk, let them ask questions, let them wake up.
We realize that our social, economic, and political structures are broken. This is more than just a protest "against" something. It is about coming together as people, acknowledging things are broken, and working together to fix them.
If you are thinking that that very ambiguous you are correct.
- Edward Murray, Huffington Post
Silas articulated via something he heard that the ambiguity is positive in that it does not allow itself to be co opted to single agendas or groups - the ambiguity forces conversation and dialogue as a starting place.
Clearly the ambiguity has allowed for a unity in discontent.
However, there is an emptiness to the demand for change that offers no plan, no solution and continues to look for the "powers" to satiate their thirst for change...
Zizek has suggested that the lack of actual coherent voice in the protests across the world, from greece to london to New York to Vancouver, other than complaint is the breeding ground for support for totalitarianism. That the blind support for change is liable to support a dictator who offers salvation... that between the financial crisis and the social unrest we are writing a story that is starting to sound like 1930's Germany...
Here is an article by Zizek on the London riots:
Clearly the Occupy movement is different but is it different enough?
Based on the immanence of this we are going to spend this week exclusively writing, thinking and researching this and will probably show up on the 15th to have some conversations...
Thoughts? Questions? Concerns? Rhetoric? Propaganda? Hope? Alternatives?
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