----- Original Message ----- From: "Bill Lear" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> You do the emotionally hard and intellectually easy work of getting > your ass in front of people and talking to them, educating them (I > prefer the didactic mode to that of storyteller, incidentally). I'll > bet Doug Henwood alone has managed to change the minds of oodles of > the formerly benighted. ======================= The "one" speaker "enlightening a passive audience is a horrible method for organizing. One need only think of all those citizens sitting in church pews to realize this. It's not the content alone, but the form of communicating that has created the passivity that we see in large public speaking venues. This is part of why many activists are quickly seeing as the limitations of the communicational formatting of large rallies/demos; too much effort is wasted on the positional goods paradox of who gets to lecture "the crowd." I need only mention how TV reinforces that dynamic on a daily basis. > I want people to be pissed. They are being robbed blind, their > children are denied the glorious opportunities of full development > (use just about any sense you want, Amartya Sen's would be fine), and > the blood of innocents is being spilled to satisfy the wants of a > small sliver of the population. ====================== People are pissed. They just don't know what to do about it because they're so busy paying the rent, sending the kids to school, putting food on the plate etc. that they have little time for thinking through the tough issues in a non-anxiety laden way with others. The time poverty is every bit as pernicious as the pecuniary poverty. > > I am seriously contemplating starting a new party, True Conservatives, > who believe that Democracy must come first, that we should be > responsible for our own actions, follow the Golden Rule, not seek to > enrich ourselves at the expense of others, that we should honestly > communicate with one another instead of hiring professional > propagandists to do so, that we should seek out the boundaries of > human potential and then never rest until each person has been brought > to that elevated plane. > > > Bill ================= Where do I send the check? Ian
