Your International Moment of Zen

This is why Jon Stewart is genius, keep giving the establishment hell.

The New Age.

This is a video, I stumbled on to not so long ago. It's approach to the events of 2011 and to the whole apocalyptic scenario of 2012 is very interesting. In my case it was actually mind blowing, I never really thought of things along "these" lines... Enjoy and 'enlarge' your vantage point.



Sky

The Long March of Freedom.

               The sun light shattered the amounting confinement of darkness. The shades of darkness that inhabited the morning on the great Washington "domesticated" swamp lands, died, gave into the sun rays. As the bustling city started it's routinely awakening... thousands of million of awakened marched.
The day was the 28th. The Battle Cry of Freedom mixed lyrically with the verses and harmony of We Shall Overcome. The air was filled with some new kind of feeling for thousands of marginalized and forgotten, it was the feeling of some sort of novice sense of self-empowerment. But something was more important then that new born awareness. People couldn't put their fingers quite rightfully on what that condescending feeling was. I guess that we could call it dignity.
Frank was black and back then in the deep south, that was the basis of his whole life story. Before he was even born down in the "Heart of Dixie" he's life was already defined. He couldn't personally give his life it's own sense, it's own definition, his definition. But that is fundamental human right, the right to hope and to build dreams and to actually believe that their is a possibility of realization of those "dreams". Back in those days, and now is no different even in "dream terms" inequality was frequently recurrent. All we're brought-up on the idea that "As long as I breath, I hope", all we're part of this American Dream. This notion of American Dream back in Frank's youth was the fabric of the nation, without it the Statue of Liberty just wouldn't seem that shinny anymore to those boats packed with millions of swarming immigrants coming from all over the world. And on that same day as the mist lifted little by little from the New York City soil, Ricardo had just made his way past customs, you could see the light in his eyes as he made it past the central gate of La Guardia. That dream was alive in their minds, because more important then the feeling of self-empowerment that ran like a rush through their veins that day, was the sense that they we're finally dignified.
And then that dignity, was striped from them. The hopeful sixties turn into an abortion. The abortion of hope. Ricardo had trouble finding work, even if he had a major in English Literature and a very good pen, the only work he found was washing dishes at the back of an old Puerto Rican restaurant. And finally after the frustration and all of the anger, the mere consequence of the realization that this dream was turning into a nightmare, Ricardo enlisted, promised by the government that if he fought for his new found "home" he would come back as a hero and be treated like a "real" American. Even if Ricardo was intelligent and college educated and he hated the smirk on those G.I Joes faces, the dream was still in his mind.
Mike after the march, fought even harder for his cause, he believed more then ever that he was going reinvigorate the dream. So he started participating in the campaigning of voter enlistment in the south. He traveled all around, with sky-high expectations he believed, he really did. And then things just turned wrong.
Ricardo got back from Vietnam, it was hell no need to explain that part. He never really got his American dream. During the great Harlem drug wave, he died a stranger in a strange country, he died of an overdose,  he was an alien. But even in those dying moments the dream was still there...
Frank changed, one day a bullet killed hope. And so he took a security job at the Watergate, and one on one night shift, Frank found intruders and called the police. He unveiled a scandal and deposed a president, in the end he died in poverty and would never be recognized in his life for the great deed he did for lady democracy on that night shift. Frank Wills died on the 27th of September 2000, he died of a brain tumour, like so many of his fellow Americans he was uncovered, Frank Wills died penniless... But I guess the dream was still alive...
And how about if the "Dream" never existed.
Ricardo and Frank's stories are far from being isolated incidents along this pursuit of happiness.
But really to understand this American Dream, the originating myth of the American Republic and the "construction material" of this American enterprise, we must try to understand what this notion of pursuit of happiness is, we have to put it back into context. For me, but then again this is only my opinion, I have the firm believe that one of the notions that the founding father held close to their hearts was the notion of dignity. In the end, all of our existence comes down to the simple notion of dignity. Many people use complicated words and expressions, write papers and essays filled with philosophical and metaphysical issues to try to explain what is a forgotten notion in our modern democratic societies. For me the pursuit of happiness, change up the words, turn it around, mix it up a bit, it all adds up and comes down to dignity because without dignity humanity isn't a possibility and we've been dehumanized for too long.
It's time to forget modernity for a time. It's time to bring things back to their source, dig up the roots and find the knots, recalculate everything and find the errors that have induced "us" into choosing the wrong path. The time has come to back things up and go back to that point in time where we were at that "fork in the road". It's time to rethink things.

"The price of democracy is eternal vigilance" Thomas Jefferson. I think that this quote has that power to be "unageable", we let some pursue their happiness and we renounced to ours. We have been trick to believe that this current situation is natural, that huge inequality is something natural.
The thing is that we laid back and thought that the problems that surrounded us weren't ours, that the injustice didn't affect us, until it did, until we felt it and then was it already too late?
I'm an eternal optimist but I guess that shows, it shines through-out my pores and I believe that maybe this was just part of the great design of humankind, and that drop by drop that balance is turning upside down.
And that we have the opportunity to reimpose dignity as a "currency", put dignity in the limelight again. Because for me a system that strips anyone of his dignity is a system that is undignified and so-being illegitimate. Freedom, Liberty, Equality, Brotherhood, Fraternity all those are good but what are they without dignity nothing, because dignity is essence of humanity, people without dignity turn to animalistic attitudes, people without dignity are very dangerous because their essence is lost, their rationality is gone. The problem of our modernity is that dignity has become marginalized. We don't want dignity we have traded our dignity for material goods and consummation without really knowing it. Since the sixties probably and that abortive tentative, we have been pushed further and further into the infernal decadent spiral of ignorance, we have slept for too long, we renounced, desisted and deserted.
But then this year has proven those that believed that a awakening would never occur wrong, millions of those "subjugated" spirits rose-up to the challenge, millions of people that should never had done so did. And so the dream still lives on, even it might badly bite us, even if the pursuit of a paramount might kill us , we can't stop believing, dreaming, organizing. Because in doing so we are re-indignifing ourselves, because dignity essentially comes down to the simple notion that we have faith in the present and in the future and our hopes and confidence are respected.
Martin Luther King Jr had after the first march on Washington in 1963, the idea to march a second march to the heart of American power, but this march differed substantially from the first one. The first was part of the movement of Civil Rights more specifically the Afro-American Civil Rights Movement but this time around he thought that the march had to be greater, it had to be a march for dignity. He wanted to bring to together the millions and millions of down and out communities and peoples, those people without an actual voice. But Martin Luther King Jr's life was too short he died before we could accomplish the full extent of his will, and so the idea was forgotten.
I believe that the general conscience is opening itself up to the fact that things can be different and things are profoundly wrong and that elections aren't the antidote. So if the OWS movement really wants to thrive, it has to take up this idea and build on it. And so through-out the years the soul of freedom and of the freedom fighters keeps marching on. And as long as we march, we revolt, we contest and participate, as long as we act and we engage the power, the dream lives on and democracy will survive and thrive.
Sky