Charlie Brown ,Jaques Brel,Nina Simone and the Nerve of the Shifting Paradigm

WAHHHHA

WAHHHA

WAHHA

( double dose)

Just about anything written about Live Earth , Live 8, or Live Aid. ( start at 2:35 by 3:16 you'll understand

So amongst the healing community of AMC and really REALLY good pina colada drinks .

I asked the gathering a question.

In many battles on the webz I had been obliquely referred to as theory head, or nit picker for using WOC writing to challenge things i believed had been tinged in the stupid.

And I truly didn't comprehend it.

My main mode of study is historical, and my theory basis is weak . How could me using personal histories and established texts be consider THEORY in response to the same tactics used against me. How could demanding really specific points using some of the most broad shit since the dawn of the country( Y'all I tend to Start with IDA B WELLS) be obscure theory?!?

So I asked, everyone here was brilliant . At least very LEAST five people at this table had MA's and two or more were working to PHD's surely they would have deep philosophical wisdom for me or some places I could steel my self

" At times I think I'm not even speaking the same language as these women .. What , Am i .."

Of course Jasmine of UBUNTU cut through it REAL QUICK

"You're not"

Lex added

" and the sooner you realize that in your bones you will destress significantly"

When someone can drop science on you and not miss a serving of hummus, your amongst good company.

I have been since before AMC weening myself off blogs, and news media in general .

The dramatist/performer wants to give you some deep sweeping tale about how it was so much PRESSURE blah blah .

In actuality it had gotten to the point that it felt like I was Charlie Brown searching for the Great Pumpkin amongst the adults.

People were talking to me, some angry , some nice, but mostly it came out as

WAHHH WAHHHA WAHHH.

I got the gist of it but at that point ancient Aramaic may have been a better framework for " discussing" with people in any part of my life that hinged on radical action or social justice was literally like translating .

And not in the good way.

This wasn't Nina Simone taking a tune making it hers ,imbuing it with her sense time and sensibility creating something both timeless and anachronistic ( see her sing Ne Me Quitte Pas as originated by Jacques Brel)

This was the English translation of Ne Me Quitte Pas.Ain't even the same song. For tune's sake and the ease of singing.Stripped of its force and sounds " pretty" . But makes you beg for the gorgeously in pain french man with the funny teeth

At AMC Grace Lee Boggs said we are witnessing a paradigm shift . What has amused me in the weeks since is
1) so true it is
2) where and when it's happening
3) how unprepared the world is for it
4) how clueless " media " seems to be
5) how much this fulfills the real adage how we win will be as important as the victory

Or in short.

Blind Privilege makes you stupid, Privilege unexamined makes you smug and stupid. Smug and stupid leaves you unprepared

" We" won horribly and we are beginning ( just beginning ) to lose horribly. Yeah I said it this is
only gonna get "worse".

The paradigm is shifting , tighten up your singing muscles!

The first article probably is a very big point of growth for me, as I did not delete every U2 song I had and throw up a fuck that sunglasses wearing bastid post when I first read it.

A real live African , Ugandan actually (but let me not dispell the tightly held notion that the continent with 20% of the earths population and about 15 percent of the worlds land isn't one big place, just yet. Baby Steps people I am trying to work Baby steps) has the nerve to challenge the great white man on what he feels is best for HIS nation .

AND GETS SHOUTED DOWN!

Let me repeat that someone who makes more money than the GNP of the countries he is "helping" shouted down an actual resident because . HE KNOWS WHATS BEST.

Mind you Red has out spent the money it's raised on a good 10:1 basis.

This isn't to impinge Bono or Red but just the facts and at a symposium FOR AFRICA we defer

TO THE WHITE GUY FROM IRELAND!?!

Live Aid Live Earth Live 8 follow this formula PEOPLE NEED OUR HELP IT IS FINALLY TIME !?!?!?!

And people are also shocked by how little people are " appreciative" missions of mercy.

The simple linguistic mode of " it's time" means something very sinister and very direct.

It WASN'T time before. ( please as writers of people concerned with others never go IT IS TIME it is quite honestly one of the most blindly privileged phrases EVER)

That these people for whatever reason have not been a priority . They have lived and existed in ways which we tacitly admit they were secondary.

But now is the time.

Why wasn't it before?

The acts in England have stymied people EXACTLY because of this preoccupation with ahistoricality .

This very selfish very annoying and to those of us not basking in the glow of multiple privileges completely foreign idea that only the now is important.

Sure their doctors, but they WERE brown boys under oppression, they were also isolated students , men adrift, men who worked their ASSES off and never ever felt it was enough .

And it was never the time to listen.

Their was time to pathologize , pander, prioritize, and push aside .

And now SOME people have no idea what's going on.

And others some barefoot , some in Jimmy Choo's, hood rats, barrio bunnies, Doctors , Lawyers.

Understand it on levels that are so deep we no longer need words.

Or have they any use.

Because it's BEEN TIME for some while.

People have been writing and talking and dialogging and TRYING . To the point that some arguments can be quoted verbatim from texts published YEARS AGO.

I have been in discussions where I have been later pointed to texts that my foremothers have written I NEVER KNEW where I came close to recreating them word for word

written ten to 15 years BEFORE MY BIRTH

and while my intellect may have been behind. My bones know it, my soul knows it.

The world has affirmed time and time again that this system isn't for "us" so why are they shocked we place no value in it or heart in it?

To hear someone talk bout finally having PROOF that science may be biased or the laws don't actually protect, isn't even news .

It's a constant reminder that when it was brown women speaking , or brown men. or non able bodied, or workers.

It was not time.

We're not speaking the same language and where we see simply the long fulfillment of a history being based on not our time and oppression.

We never hear what Charlie Brown hears from the adults but we always know the sense he is getting.

Too stupid , too young, not right. You can't even see them cut off at the knees

And frankly this is how social movements won. We'd become " adults " and our wisdom would lead us into being able to do the same invisible incomprehensible spoil sporting that the wahh wahh adults did.

And should we not , should we believe in the Great Pumpkin, our the football, we would be ask to suffer as Charlie Brown did.

The article about the book is entirely unremarkable to me, except for her very uninformed and kind of appalling take on the social movements of the 60's .

What would the social movements of the 1960s have looked like if baby boomer collegians had been stifled by the same educational debt as their children? What if they hadn't been buoyed by the broadly shared prosperity of the postwar era, or subsidized by a ratio of minimum wage to living expenses far more forgiving than what their offspring face in most metropolitan centers today?

While the point is fair . This gets back into the " maybe Aramaic will work" mindset. because how on earthy can you look at the 60's and concentrate on the movements spearheaded by college kids? Regan made it hard for middle class students? THE HELL? When I think of those times and the things that REALLY shocked my world as it would be. It wasn't the college kids but farmers , workers , uneducated people fighting for their lives. Yes teachers get paid less and it sucks, but lets be honest the people in the MOVEMENTS who REALLY had to deal with the shitstorm and the oppression college students FOR REAL?

But like I said when someone talks about marches and protests as the ACTIVISM they are sad about.

We ain't even close to the same language

People want to define THEMSELVES and not just as within something but outside it and living through it. Rampant individualism and handwringing aren't even on the menu anymore. And also off the menus is this expectation that the "system" will do anything but what the system does.

REALLY ! A system that got rocked by people being self determines IS GONNA TRY AND STOP THAT!

WAHHA WAHHAH WAHHH

And the scary thing is that this language barrier does not just produce fabulous teenagers and amazing conferences and people doing things never thought of. Of a journalist going toe to toe with the biggest star alive to speak for HIS life.

It will produce bombs , and attacks and force of people who have no respect for the system cause it had none for them. And I am often shocked by how much in my day to day regular reactions.

PEOPLE GET IT ON SOME LEVEL

Old young white black . People understand you can't erase history.

While activists seem to be focusing on how much we need to transcend it.

Trying to change things IS NOT THE SAME as pretending they won't matter. I think so often people get so mired in the desire to change institutions or be absorbed into them BECAUSE there is such a lack of history in examining the real complete history of how they functioned.

Not just the ones we know as evil but the ones we accept as good.

To fully realize what must be done for us now is not a bugle wake up call, that's just insulting . It must be a full reckoning

Recognition
Recollection

of what it means for all sides and not just the ones that make us immensely comfortable. Because as these institutions begin to cannibalize not just themselves BUT US AS WELL there not only must be break form the destructive mentality of these things but their destructive organizations.

For all the blather I have yet to hear what the average person thinks of the planetary situation, how can we truly deal with it if instead what needs to be a concerted LARGE scale movement is constantly only mentioned through the lens of Al Gore telling me what I need to do?

How can we truly understand violence and what pushes people to it if WE NEVER EVER EVER EVER engage those who are pushed to it? If we truly continue to IMAGINE that terror is incomprehensible as if it is not weaved deeply into a world of violence. Then we will of course never understand how DOCTORS could blow up airports , while happily ignoring the fact that these doctors were humans subjected to a psychic violence they felt so deeply it had only one escape valve.

That truly understand the system it is just as if NOT MORE SO to cede the floor ( not give voice, not listen,not uplift but shut the fuck up and cede the floor) to those it has failed .

Because as it is failing us , these people ARE THE ONLY ONES WITH the knowledge of what to do.

Believing the translation is dependent on them has left us with media and mindsets that at this point can only marvel at how badly they are unprepared or how complete the subjugation of reason sense has been to prop up some ...

WHILE AFFIRMING THEIR AUTHORITY TO DO SO.

Marveling at the unreadiness or the injustice of the unreadiness is no longer worker . It is merely holding on to what is already dying in your arms

The difference between the old and the new will be as wide as the difference between purple and lavender

Between making a day that like no day has been or will be

and

Creating

a place where even the places where the earth has scorched gives us more nourishment than the best of Aprils.