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Chris Hedges: No Act of Rebellion Is Wasted. Go to Lafayette Park at 10:00am Dec. 16.

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Karmadillo Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Dec-13-10 11:28 AM
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Chris Hedges: No Act of Rebellion Is Wasted. Go to Lafayette Park at 10:00am Dec. 16.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/12/13

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We may feel, in the face of the ruthless corporate destruction of our nation, our culture, and our ecosystem, powerless and weak. But we are not. We have a power that terrifies the corporate state. Any act of rebellion, no matter how few people show up or how heavily it is censored by a media that caters to the needs and profits of corporations, chips away at corporate power. Any act of rebellion keeps alive the embers for larger movements that follow us. It passes on another narrative. It will, as the rot of the state consumes itself, attract wider and wider numbers. Perhaps this will not happen in our lifetimes. But if we persist we will keep this possibility alive. If we do not, it will die.

All energy directed toward reforming political and state structures is useless. All efforts to push through a “progressive” agenda within the corridors of power are naive. Trust in the reformation of our corporate state reflects a failure to recognize that those who govern, including Barack Obama, are as deaf to public demands and suffering as those in the old Communist regimes. We cannot rely on any systems of power, including the pillars of the liberal establishment—the press, liberal religious institutions, universities, labor, culture and the Democratic Party. They have been weakened to the point of anemia or work directly for the corporations that dominate our existence. We can rely now on only ourselves, on each other.

Go to Lafayette Park, in front of the White House, at 10 a.m. Dec. 16. Join dozens of military veterans, myself, Daniel Ellsberg, Medea Benjamin, Ray McGovern, Dr. Margaret Flowers and many others who will make visible a hope the corporate state does not want you to see, hear or participate in. Don’t be discouraged if it is not a large crowd. Don’t let your friends or colleagues talk you into believing it is useless. Don’t be seduced by the sophisticated public relations campaigns disseminated by the mass media, the state or the Democratic Party. Don’t, if you decide to carry out civil disobedience, be cowed by the police. Hope and justice live when people, even in tiny numbers, stand up and fight for them.

There is in our sorrow—for who cannot be profoundly sorrowful?—finally a balm that leads to wisdom and, if not joy, then a strange, transcendent happiness. To stand in a park on a cold December morning, to defy that which we must defy, to do this with others, brings us solace, and perhaps even peace. We will not find this if we allow ourselves to be disabled. We will not find this alone. As long as a few of us rebel it will always remain possible to defeat a system of centralized, corporate power that is as criminal and heartless as those I watched tumble into the ash bin of history in Eastern Europe.

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gkhouston Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Dec-13-10 11:34 AM
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1. Proud to rec this. The entire article is worth a read.
:thumbsup:
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Poboy Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Dec-13-10 11:36 AM
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2. recommend
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Dogtown Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Dec-13-10 11:45 AM
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3. K&R n/t
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LongTomH Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Dec-13-10 11:54 AM
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4. K&R
:kick:
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dgibby Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Dec-13-10 12:36 PM
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5. Hope he put this on FB and Twitter. n/t
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me b zola Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Dec-13-10 12:52 PM
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6. K&R
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NightWatcher Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Dec-13-10 01:01 PM
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7. Unfortunately a million people standing is not news, imagine that million with a brick in hand
Now that would start to scare the powers that be and make some news.

A million head of cattle with signs in hand are easily ignored. A million angry citizens with stones in hand ready to be heaved at a target of frustration, now that'll get their attention. I'm not saying "throw em"... Yet
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