Lately I've been sorely missing a place to bring my revolutionary self.
I mean that voice in me that walks around my city stirring with the urges of unrest, the unwillingness to be boxed in to society's complacency and norms. The inability to stand aside, and watch others burn our precious planet, or their own precious bodies.
For me, this is the revolutionary self. It is everything in me that knows *more is possible*.
Lately I've been making conscious efforts to re-expose myself to literature and magazines that tie themselves in with the revolutionary spirit brought forward during the initial Occupy Wall Street occupation in NYC. Never have I been more inspired with the revolutionary spirit than I was during that time, and it lasted well into 2012, but since then, it has been largely dormant. It hasn't taken much reading though to re-awaken them, and I find now they're stronger than ever. But with no outlet for them, it's become a very frustrating experience for me.
Frankly, sitting down and writing a fucking blog post about them feels like a lousy last resort. But what else can I do at the end of a day that saw a thanksgiving family gathering on my fathers side, sitting at a table at my grandparents house, waiting for tomorrow to come to celebrate thanksgiving on my mothers side. Such is the paradox of these feelings. Time doesn't stop moving simply because Connor is feeling the internal stir of revolution.
To be clear, and some of you may know immediately what I'm talking about, and some of you may not, I'm talking about the temporary acquisition of a certain lens through which you see the world, and that lens helps you see the stupidity in almost absolutely everything that we encounter daily in a North American city; from traffic jams, to cigarettes, to the horrors of some stuff we've come to call 'food' found in grocery stores. Then there's the resulting state, after having navigated a mere one day in such a North American city, that ends up feeling a lot like 'FUCK IT ALL, JUST FUCK IT ALL, I DON'T KNOW EXACTLY WHAT INSTEAD BUT FOR GODS SAKE NOT THIS, NOT ONE MORE DAY'. Sometimes I even have these feelings while sitting around the table at thanksgiving with my extended family, it's most certainly not a jab at them I love them dearly, but the overall feeling I still have while in this particular state is one of 'I AM SITTING AROUND EATING TRIFLE WHILE THE WORLD BURNS, I DON'T KNOW EXACTLY WHAT INSTEAD BUT FOR GODS SAKE NOT THIS, NOT ONE MORE DAY'. For the most part if you have even once, like I have, 'taken the red pill' and stepped out into the real world to observe what's really happening, there are few things more morally excruciating than stepping *back* into the matrix to play by its rules. Trust me, reading AdBusters is like taking the red pill. The same goes for the writing of David Graeber, whose book The Democracy Project, I just finished reading yesterday and further stirred up this blog post in me.
But to trace back a moment, one might ask, "can't you bring some toned down version of these feelings up with your family so as to relieve all the internal pressure?" and the answer is NO with reasons to follow, and the answer is also not specific to my family, it applies across the board to this feeling of not having anywhere safe to 'put' my revolutionary self.
Reason 1: I do not want to be mistaken for looking for people to complain with, or that my fundamental attitude here is one of disempowerment and complaint.
* it is amazing how quickly a conversation can turn into this, after only a small misstep of the revolutionary self that comes across like this. In the past, this happened a lot in conversations with my father, who is himself a strong social cynic, but one hard pressed to move beyond cynicism into action.
Reason 2: I am not looking to enter into 'debates' about ideologies, current events, rights/wrongs.
* this has also been a pattern of the past involving my dad, on my initiative to start politically inclined conversation, except that it happens most often when the conversation also involves my brother, the two of whom seem to, to this day, be unable to prevent the conversation turning into this. I am not interested in a conversation in which people who are not sufficiently informed on something, try to propose and defend theories on those topics as if they were fact. The whole structure of the conversation is non-collaborative to begin with, and doomed not to satisfy the revolutionary self, still hungry for shared action.
Reason 3: I am not looking for sympathy.
* It is true. I do carry a large sense of responsibility for the world on my shoulders, sometimes so much so that I am reduced to tears at the degree of suffering undergoing all life forms on earth and the planet itself. At times like these, I have had extraordinarily frustrating experiences of others expressing sympathy for me. In that moment, all I want is not their sympathy, but to see that they too share an empathy for all that life on earth, and to cry with me. To let themselves *feel* what is really happening in the world, and for once, weep for it. I really feel that if we all began to weep for it, the things we were weeping for would be in rapid decline.
This was the beauty of Occupy Wall Street, they came together around conversation that started with the revolutionary self, and managed to carry on that conversation without these three things infiltrating the dialogue. And it made it the perfect place for anyone who was feeling the revolutionary impulse that I've been feeling to arrive. That, again, was the beauty of it. You could physically *arrive* there. In a place where you wouldn't be called insane, for thinking that the rest of it was insane. Not only that, because I can find even that much common ground with the majority of my immediate family members, but you could turn that feeling of insanity into shared action with those peers, actively participating in their direct democratic processes that, in themselves, defied our so-called democratic system. I remain hopeful that there may still be hope for this with my immediate family in years to come.
But there is no Occupy Waterloo. These last few weeks I confess to feeling lost in the city, aspects of real happiness when I'm sleeping in bed next to my girlfriend yes, but ultimately even confused/conflicted about that. Everything feels much less radical than I'd like it to be, and anytime that I'm in situations of privilege (even just... riding in a car) there's a voice that sounds the alarm because I know that 'to participate is to perpetuate'.
But 'god I don't just want to go live alone in a cabin in the woods'...
A dilemma at every turn.
Appearing too radical will just turn people off and away from you... Or will it? With all the inner unrest that I suspect so many are feeling, perhaps now is the perfect time to speak radically, attracting them to something with real promise of something different, everything that Obama didn't follow through on...
To be continued...
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