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is change coming to america?
jll
Veteran
what do you think?
or will it be business as usual?
or will it be business as usual?
0
Comments
We should have compassion for bwankers, imperialists and the hard hearted.
America is always changing. I feel we are part of the change, bottom up.
He charted the disparity in income from the highest paid, to the lowest paid, over the last 200 years or so.
And he charted social unrest over the same time. And he found we (the first world) is 20 years away from a revolution or large-scale civil unrest, if the trend continues the way it is at present.
Interesting!
my first thought when reading that was; Too bad it won't happen sooner, so I can be sure to be here and not too old to participate.
My second thought was; Maybe I don't want to be around to see that, after all.
Would suck to be someone living in a major population center when shit hits the fan.
I hope America doesn't go the "revolution" route. It just seems so childish.
If I was in the States I'd do a @zayl - pack up my guns and hang out in the country. Maybe buy a plot of land and like, register it as my own personal country, kinda like Vatican City but more fun
Revolution itself simply means "a fundamental change in power or organizational structures that takes place in a relatively short period of time." Not all revolutions and forms of direct action need to be violent on the part of the people outside of acting in self-defense (e.g., Gandhi's nonviolent challenge of British rule, the Egyptian Arab Spring, etc.). Revolutions can have many motives and take many forms depending on the context; and instead of fearing changing and trying to prevent it, I think it's better to anticipate it as an ever-present reality and try to prepare for more conscious and peaceful shifts.
One of the things I like about the recent Occupy movement, for example, is that it's attempting to do this by gathering like-minded people together and creating community-based, democratic assemblies and engaging in non-violent direct actions while at the same time trying to highlight pressing socio-economic issues and advocating for shifts in both policy political consciousness as a whole. And one of the unintended yet positive results of this kind of organizing has been illustrated by the relief efforts being provided by local Occupy groups in the wake of Sandy.
The most important thing, in my opinion, is to be active and involved in trying to steer the change in a more skillful direction. Otherwise, we leave everything in the hands of others, some of whom are slaves to their defilements. If we choose to live in the world, then I think we at least share some responsibility for shaping it; and it makes sense to have people motivated by things like non-greed, non-aversion, and non-delusion add their voices to the mix, not to mention helping do what they can to fix things like inequality and injustice, especially when it's done with a spirit of compassion and harmlessness.
Do we live in the same country? lol Because while currently we are really not a physical war with each other, we have been at war for quite a while in different places. The civil rights movement was a revolution, as was women's suffrage at least in my opinion, and the gay rights "war" that is going on in a lot of areas feels a bit like revolution to the people who are passionate about it. It doesn't always have to involve blood and guts.
There were days the Skytrain through the heart of New Bangkok had to shut down completely due to the demonstrations. People occasionally threw hand grenades into the old-fashioned markets. There was literally a 2 hour shoot-out on one of the expressways...which I missed by less than an hour. And then on the day when it all came to a head, 30 major buildings were burned down (including the largest mall in Southeast Asia), and at around 3 p.m. dense black smoke billowed down our street and I began to think they might target our condo with arson. No one was "in charge" for most of that day. Not the police. Not the military. And then 3 days of something akin to martial law when you couldn't be out after dark.
Nope, I'll take America's political battles over blood and guts battles.
But even social liberalism, as is being rolled out across the Western world, will struggle to save capitalism. The liberalism we see in Europe, the liberalism that America is adopting, it's simply a feeble last ditch effort to tart up capitalism, to make it appear less ugly.
The saving grace for capitalism at the moment is that we're very much taught that there is no alternative. Taught that hey, we've tried everything else, capitalism is the best of a bad bunch. I think people are, slowly but surely, starting to wise up to that notion.
My prediction is that socialism will win, eventually - even in America.
@vinlyn I know, I wasn't blood and guts was better. Just that just because we sit in our cozy homes and pretend we aren't causing death and destruction around the world, doesn't mean we aren't. I know we have it good here, I wasn't disagreeing with that
I'm not a fortune teller, I have no idea what the future will hold and I'm not overly fond of the status quo we have here in the States. But if there is a revolution, who knows how things will go about? How many people will die? Humans have the capabilty to saints or sinners and as Solid Snake once said, "It's easy to forget what sin is on the battlefield." Does anyone really want this going down in their city? Down their street?
prostitution, drugs n guns are widely available.
america isnt exactly peaceful.
with the highest number of gun violence per capita, i dont really feel safe in usa.
but then again, usa is still one of the most popular country for immigrants.
i am quite optimistic about america's future, as long as they stop believing the nonsense on foxnews.
@Music
Will you at some time in the future (convenient future) claim that English is your second language as well? You know, another "Boom!" to lower on us when another of your outrageous statements comes off as "misunderstood"....
But how are things really? Well, I've lived in a small town in western NYS, suburbs in Maryland and Virginia, and now the city of Colorado Springs. Everyone I know personally has a relatively high standard of living. Even my 78 year old neighbor who is close to the cushion on only social security and a very small savings account has her own small townhouse, a good mid-sized car, all the food and health care she needs, and an occasional "extra" when she really wants it.
Meanwhile, my Thai ex's family that -- at least in terms of rural Thais -- live in a reasonable house...in a swamp. An outhouse. A tiny refrigerator in which they can keep the most perishable foods, but not all foods that should be refrigerated (such as eggs). They throw their trash out in the swamp that surrounds their house, therefore the standing water (which could easily breed malarial and dengue fever infected mosquitoes) around their house is polluted. It's a struggle for them to afford needed health care, and several relatives have died at early ages. They have a beat-up pickup truck so the father can farm his rice paddies. There are no extras in their lives, yet they are doing better than most in Issan.
Yes, you hear immigrants anxious to come to America. When I was about 30 I moved into a duplex with a Thai friend just outside Washington. For two of us, it was rather crowded, though manageable. But before he bought and renovated it, it was rented by some Latinos and 13 people lived in that same duplex. Friends would ask why they would want to live in those conditions. Answer -- because even as substandard as we would see that, it was far better than they were used to in Central America.
As much as the world likes to believe that in America if you are just willing to work hard you can do anything...it's not quite true in the way most people think.
That said, most Americans are selfish and don't really understand how good they have it. As the saying goes, the poorest American has more than a whole lot of other people in the world have. Even being homeless in America is better than a normal life in some countries. But we know that that doesn't make it ok. Just because things are worse somewhere else, doesn't mean it is ok that people are treated badly here as an excuse of "well, at least you don't live in Sudan!"
Change is cool, Martin Luther King and Gandhi were awesome. I'm all for change for the better, but revolution as defined by the common usage is usually pretty damn awful.
I did. Quite closely, in fact. While there were some violent protests, the Egyptian uprising was predominately a peaceful one (as was the initially uprising in Tunisia), with citizens gathering in public places like Tahrir Square and refusing to leave until Mubarak stepped down, which he eventually did under the combined pressure of public outrage and the Egyptian military. The protesters were routinely assaulted by police and Mubarak supporters, and some protesters fought back in self-defense, but the majority of protests and protesters were peaceful. Civil disobedience ≠ violence. Self-defense ≠ violence in my mind, either. And just as one can find sporadic acts of violence during the civil rights movement and Gandhi's nonviolent challenge of British rule but still consider these relatively peaceful and non-violent events, I think the same can be said of the Tunisian and Egyptian Arab Springs. I saw on the news the other night that there was another rape on the state university campus downtown and they're considering creating a campus police force to deal with the rising number of assaults. That doesn't mean, however, that every university student is a rapist, or that universities are inherent violent places in and of themselves. The same is true with Occupy, I think. The majority of Occupy protesters are non-violent and doing constructive things in their communities. Occupy Sandy is one example. I've had personal experience with both Occupy Detroit and Occupy Portland myself, and their focus has been on things like government reforms, homeless advocacy, and trying to keep people from being evicted from their homes when they have nowhere else to go.
For my part, I'd say that, on the whole, the civil rights movement was a predominately non-violent one (i.e., more protests and civil disobedience than acts of violence on the part of civil rights activists), and that even when it wasn't and violence did break out, the legalized racial discrimination and segregation of blacks was something worth fighting against and trying to change.
It begs the question though. Would Martin Luther King and Gandhi have been as effective as they were, if not for the violence before and during their time? I don't think they would. If the two movements weren't shrouded in violent uprising, I seriously doubt anybody would have given MLK or Gandhi much thought.
It's okay to look to these peaceful people, the ones history remembers, and say 'That's how you make a difference'. But you're living in a bit of a fools paradise if you can't see that violence(by others) was necessary for their success.
I'd suspect that police, especially in non-Western nations, are often instructed to be heavy handed and incentive - sometimes to the extent of using plants - as a means of disrupting protests and discrediting, in the eyes of many, the protest and protesters.
The Egyptian uprising certainly didn't start out as a violent one. The deaths on the side of the Egyptian police and government I'd suspect would be very, very few in number.
It just brings Maslow's hierarchy into play. Because we are mostly blessed with comfortable lives, we have the ability to question things people in other countries cannot question, whether simply due to them being unable to meet all their needs, or the government where they live not allowing it. More Americans need to learn how to appreciate what they have, for sure. As the meme on FB said "Only in America do we spend one day supposedly being thankful for what we already have and then go shopping for billions of dollars of things we don't need."
If immigrants are happy with their situation after having moved to the US, then more power to them, that's great news. But I hope they aren't just accepting poor treatment because it's better than what they had before. It doesn't make it ok just because it's better than what they had.
Maybe the wrong word then. What I was trying to say is that I'm surprised at the dismissive responses for what was a harmless, fairly accurate observation on attitudes.
Now I'm going to say something to you that you'll at first think I'm talking down to you...but then I want you to read this paragraph again and see that there is balance: There are two groups who are usually substantially wrong when they talk about history. The first group are those who are young enough that they are reading about the time in question in books and other documentary evidence, because they are simply learning about the time, rather than living through it. The second group are those who are old enough to have lived through the time, but lack the perspective of reading about it and looking at other documentary evidence.
In my view, there was a lot of violence on both sides of the civil rights issue. There was an evil Ku Klux Klan on one side. There were also the Black Panthers on the other side. We can talk about Martin Luther King (a man I consider a hero of mine), but we tend to mostly forget about Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. And I remember the 1965 race riots in Watts (LA), and 1967 riots in Newark and Detroit...not to mention smaller race riots in Rochester, NY (close to where I lived), Cleveland, Chicago, and Cincinnati, and 5 days of race riots in Washington, D.C.
And no, as a former long-time card-carrying member of the NAACP and the Southern Poverty Law Center, and probably the only person here who has sat down in a very small group with Julian Bond for a 2 hour chat, I don't say it would have been better for American society to accept racial discrimination and civil disobedience...and I resent any implication that I would advocate that position. After all, I remember often traveling through the Carolinas and Georgia and northern Florida and experiencing "colored water fountains" and "colored toilets", and restaurants and motels that were "whites only". I remember attending an all-Black church in central Florida in 1961.
But to be purely objective about it, other than during the American Revolution and the Civil War, I don't think there has been a more violent period within America than during the Civil Rights struggle.