We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Saturday, May 11, 2013

The Radical Center and Armed Revolution

Click here to access article by Rob Urie from CounterPunch.

Although I think that his overly complex sentences and writing errors get in the way, he makes some very good observations about political conditions in the US. Using a recent polling report which upset the ruling class (a "center" consisting of both liberals and conservatives), the author points out the many contradictions infecting their policies which provides opportunities for the left to exploit. My favorite is this:
...gun control advocates only look at the civilian side of the issue. Coincident in recent decades with increasing concentration of political-economic power has been the militarization of the police; the massive build out of incarceration and prisons as capitalist enterprises, the erosion of legal protections from illegitimate state and commercial power, the growth of intrusive surveillance technologies and a shift to formal race and class-based strategies of police repression. On the one hand gun control advocates argue [that] the fear of growing state power is lunatic paranoia while on the other there is no apparent interest on their part in disarming the increasingly militarized state against who the claims of outsized power are being made.