Members and supporters of hacktivist collective Anonymous are marking Guy Fawkes Day with a global ‘Million Mask March’ to protest against government corruption, corporate malfeasance and the expanding surveillance state. Cities in Japan, Australia, and New Zealand have already started their local events. Activists in Europe and US are expected to join soon. Event organizers have planned rallies and marches at 450 locations around the world, although the majority of the events have thus far attracted between several dozen people or a couple of hundred people.
People realize that the institutions don’t work because they are experiencing the consequences. This week was the one year anniversary of Hurricane Sandy and the recovery effort, Occupy Sandy.To mark the occasion, people rom those areas brought a human “wave of change” to city hall in New York and held a march they called “Turn the Tide.” Protesters are demanding that five priorities be met: good jobs, affordable housing, sustainable energy, community engagement and strong healthcare.
Sandy demonstrates the dysfunction of government to address both the people’s needs and climate change. As Naomi Klein wrote this week in How Science Is Telling Us All To Revolt, “there is still time to avoid catastrophic warming, but not within the rules of capitalism as they are currently constructed; which may be the best argument we have ever had for changing those rules.”
In the small, university town of Gottingen, Germany, a handful of autonomously acting ‘Flower Children’ have decided to rogue-plant cannabis seed in the hundreds of thousands as an act of defiance against the ‘demonization’ of a plant that has been proven to treat multiple ailments. To put it in simper terms, citizens are planting cannabis plants randomly throughout the town to really show officials what the people want.
The pro-marijuana supporters point to Germany’s restrictive laws, and many comment on the plants abilities to do more than just get people high. Police continue to pull the plants up, no matter where they sprout, and often mistake non-cannabis plants as the work of the activists. They have been told to be vigilant about removing anything that looks like cannabis.
I'm not sure why I'm writing this post. I just feel I have to say something. It seems the upheaval going on around the world is happening 'out there' but it actually is a reflection of what's going on inside each and every one of us. We are feeling empowered to rise up, to declare ourselves present, to say "No" to the ruling class and to take back that power we gave away and redistribute it amongst ourselves in a fair and balanced manner.
The fear mongerers say we can't have it that way. That ability was lost long ago when Atlantis sank beneath the waves. But the actions of many protesters acting in concert around the world say something vastly different. Whether in protests at a gold mine in Bulgaria, on the streets of Egypt or at the Beltway in Washington DC, there is a rising spirit at work here, something unsettling for those in power for they know of no other way to be. So attached are they to this fictitious power they claim as theirs they are willing to commit political suicide in order to continue clinging to it as if it were being ripped from their arms.
Witness the Tea Party in the US congress. So obssessed are they with holding on to power they are willing to hold an entire nation hostage so they can have their petty childish trantrum acknowledged as a legitimate course of political action. They are essentially holding their breath to get their way.
While they are turning blue with self-generated outrage the rest of the world stands with mouth wide open watching this calamity unfold. It's like witnessing a car accident in slow motion. You simply can't turn away.
