The celebration lasts into the night with bonfires, barbeques, music and dancing. Someone shows up with a mobile DJ booth built into a bike cart and starts pumping tunes. This no longer just a protest against inequality and police brutality, it’s a festival of freedom. Punks, hippies, squares and freaks, moms, kids, teachers, workers, immigrants and natives, all sharing this moment together. And rightfully so! It’s your unity that made this happen, and everybody knows it too. From adversity you have risen and for one night you will create the better world you strive to live in. You savour the kinship, the compassion, the atmosphere of what is possible when people work together. Everybody here has been touched. You will all share forever the knowledge that another world is possible. And life will never be the same again.
As you walk home through the city streets that not long ago were a battleground of clashing ideologies, it all seems so surreal. Everything’s so quiet and normal, as if none of it had ever happened. Peering through the brightly lit storefront of a twenty four hour franchise you can’t help but ask yourself: How much has really changed?
You still see all around you a world in which markets pit worker against worker in competition for jobs, and large companies see low wages and weak environmental standards as business opportunities. The everyday products we consume are manufactured from raw materials ripped from the earth with no thought of future generations. CO2 levels in the atmosphere rise higher every day, as each day there is less clean water in the world and more people who need it. Most of the worlds’ resources from oil, lumber and minerals, to the factories that process them, are privately owned by investment firms who loan money to governments so they can bail out banks while people sleep in the streets and all over the third world children starve. The gap between rich and poor has never been bigger. Every time you buy groceries or a pair of pants, spend money on rent or open a bank account, you pay into this system. Where do we go from here? Is the only solution revolution? Or is that too simply feeding into a violent narrative that has plagued humanity for all if its history? Perhaps you’re feeling overwhelmed and overly dramatic. After all, the world is a better place than it was before. In most of the world women can vote and become educated, workplaces are safer and cleaner than ever, people are gradually overcoming historic racial divisions, hazardous chemicals like DDT, asbestos and Freon are no longer used, and whaling has become a banned industry worldwide. Change is slow, but everyday people are fighting in their own small ways. Most of the work is unglamorous and goes on unnoticed, but bit by bit the work of individuals in their own communities is changing society.
Over next couple of days you realize that other people have been asking themselves the same questions. The Solidarity Collective is proposing a co-operative economy that would prioritize fulfilling social needs over generating profits. You’ve seen the potential strength that this unity movement has. But the future they envision may come too late for the people dying daily of imperialist wars, and for the species of life that disappear from the planet every minute. The greed heads responsible for these things will stop at nothing unless we make them. They are the result of a system that is inherently flawed and no amount of reform can fix it. Or perhaps that is too simplistic. While radicals will continue to agitate on the margins of society, only populist movements contain any real hope for change. We are all collectively responsible for the human rights abuses and environmental damages that are caused by our lifestyles. The only real hope for change is mass-education and cool-headed rational policies supported by the majority that can transform the system from within. One thing is certain: something must be done. The time for action is the present and you are committed to act.
Original photo by: Coco Curranski
Do you:
Join the Solidarity Collective and help to build an alternative economy? (click here)
Seek out other trustworthy individuals and form an underground revolutionary cell? (click here)
Sign up to volunteer with an NGO, get your head out of the clouds and get down to work? (click here)