Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party compared (guardian.co.uk)
Unlike the Tea Party, who see themselves as the customers of government, people in the Occupy Wall Street movement understand that we are the government. Stated most simply, we are trying to run a 21st-century society on a 13th-century economic operating system. It just doesn’t work.
Douglas Rushkoff
(Source: deepthinking)
from the-activista (via loveandzombies)
Another Allah o Akbar video. It’s not much to look at, but the audio is just… wow. Especially when reading the translation:
Tomorrow is Saturday. Tomorrow is a day of destiny.
Tonight, the cries of Allah-o Akbar are heard louder and louder than the nights before.
Where is this place? Where is this place where every door is closed? Where is this place where people are simply calling God? Where is this place where the sound of Allah-o Akbar gets louder and louder?
I wait every night to see if the sounds will get louder and whether the number increases. It shakes me. I wonder if God is shaken.
Where is this place that where so many innocent people are entrapped? Where is this place where no one comes to our aid? Where is this place that only with our silence we are sending our voices to the world? Where is this place that the young shed blood and then people go and pray — standing on that same blood and pray. Where is this place where the citizens are called vagrants?
Where is this place? You want me to tell you? This place is Iran. The homeland of you and me.
This place is Iran.
So powerful. (from The Huffington Post)
Video of the sounds of protesters in Iran who nightly cry out “Allah o Akbar” (God is Great) from the rooftops in Tehran. I first read about this yesterday in an LA Times article. The article itself was about a student being inspired by the protest and all that’s going on in her country, but I personally found myself captivated by this style of protest. I just think there is something so beautiful about a people who are so moved and who have come together so strongly as a community that fear of violent reprisals does not stop them and even at night, even in the confines of their own homes they still must find a way to connect with each and cry out together.
From the article:
Reporting from Paris — Every night at 9, Golaleh goes to the top of her five-story apartment in northern Tehran, where she has a view of the whole city.
“It’s like a date,” she said of the nightly rendezvous, because like clockwork voices of opposition protesters start calling out from rooftops in all directions.
One man usually starts.
God is great, he will shout. Then hundreds respond.
Their cries remain faceless. People stay hidden in the dark so that police cannot track them. “But we can distinguish between them [the voices]: There are men, women and even children” who chant until 10 p.m.
I mean really, is that not beautiful? It’s very poetic, I think, and reminds me of the civil rights era my parents were so fond of talking about with such feverish passion that I never really got, having never experienced anything like that in my generation. All those pictures of people converging on DC, the oracular power of Martin Luther King, Jr…. it must have all been so inspiring!
And now, watching and reading about the people of Iran coming together - it makes me feel this sense of wistful longing that we here in the US could come together like that again… (saudade, is what this feeling is called in Portuguese, described as “a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist… a turning towards the past or towards the future”). I think there is a real hunger for that kind of connection here, but I think what stops us from crying out is the fear that no one will respond.
Or maybe enough of us just don’t care. There must be something holding us back. I would say it’s the lack of a unifying major event - like the Iranian elections - but we had our own stolen elections, we had 9/11, and while we’ve had protests and inspiring groups of people coming together, it wasn’t this many of us at once, with this kind of depth, coming together despite the violence, at night and on rooftops needing to connect with each other. Maybe we as a people are just totally jaded. Or maybe you really have to be experiencing true anguish and adversity to reach out like that. Whatever the reason for our apathy, it’s sad.
From The Huffington Post.
It’s amazing to me to see images like the one above, and to read AP headlines like “March in Tehran stretched five miles long” because when elections get stolen here (or wars get started under false pretenses, or we learn that we are party to torture, etc.), there is not that kind of outrage. The only time we get all riled up like that is when our favorite sports team wins. Our priorities are all messed up. No wonder the world at large thinks we collectively blow…
The Uniform Project: One girl. One dress. One year.
The Uniform Project: This is a really cool idea for a fundraiser / social consciousness raising experiment, and the girl behind it is SO cute! Fashion, fundraising and social good? I’m all over that!
From the website:
The Idea
Starting May 2009, I have pledged to wear one dress for one year as an exercise in sustainable fashion. Here’s how it works: There are 7 identical dresses, one for each day of the week. Every day I will reinvent the dress with layers, accessories and all kinds of accouterments, the majority of which will be vintage, hand-made, or hand-me-down goodies. Think of it as wearing a daily uniform with enough creative license to make it look like I just crawled out of the Marquis de Sade’s boudoir.
The Uniform Project is also a year-long fundraiser for the Akanksha Foundation, a grassroots movement that is revolutionizing education in India. At the end of the year, all contributions will go toward Akanksha’s School Project to fund uniforms and other educational expenses for slum children in India.
These are my favorites so far:
What do you think?
Wake up Humans! Brilliant campaign from Amnesty International in Belgium.
a riddle, wrapped in mystery, inside an enigma -- her brain is the key:
