Today's reading
pickRevisit to one I studied in teachers‘ college (my choice!) years ago. Still relevant: students aren‘t empty vessels, there shouldn‘t be a split between “leaders” and “followers” when organizing for social justice, the political left can be just as guilty as the right for self-righteously neglecting to include everyone in work for change, space for love and creativity is needed.
#ReadingTheAmericas2023 #Brazil
#Nonfiction2023 #MasterofPuppets
The essential elements of witness include consistency between words and actions; boldness, which urges the witnesses to confront issues of permanent risk; radicalization, not sectarianism; courage to love, which doesn‘t accommodate an unjust world, but transforms that world on behalf of the increasing liberation of humankind; and faith in the people. Witness which has not borne fruit under certain conditions can still bear fruit tomorrow.
#TLT @dabbe
1. Mattie Ross (True Grit) - number 1 by a mile, on short list of favorite character ever.
2. Judith Hearne (The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne)
3. Three-way tie between Moiraine, Egwene (Wheel of Time), and Lady Jessica (Dune)
Tag @RaeLovesToRead @CBee @Leftcoastzen @BarbaraBB @ImperfectCJ
In the process of oppression, the elites subsist on the living death of the oppressed, and find their authentication in the vertical relationship between themselves and the latter. In the revolutionary process, there is only one way for the emerging leaders to achieve authenticity. They must die in order to be reborn through and in communion with the oppressed….what can be more important than to live and work for the wretched of the Earth?
Revolutionary praxis cannot tolerate an absurd dichotomy in which the praxis of the people is merely following the leaders… revolutionary praxis is a unity, and the leaders cannot treat the oppressed as their possession. Manipulation, sloganizing, depositing, regimentization, and prescription cannot be components of revolutionary practice, precisely because they are components of the praxis of domination/1
I read this because:
* Someone at work said of a 17 YO I admire, “PF would say the oppressed will become the oppressor.” And now I can say that work person doesn‘t know jack about what PF would say about this kid.🖕🏻
* POTO was banned at my kids‘ high school.
* I‘m working on my advocacy.
The oppressed must realize that they are not fighting merely for freedom from hunger, but for freedom to create and construct, to wonder and to venture. Such freedom requires that the individual be active and responsible, not a slave or a well-fed cog in the machine. It is not enough that men are not slaves, if social conditions further the creation of automatons, the result will be not love of life, but love of death.
“Certain members of the oppressive class join the oppressed in their struggle for liberation…They almost always bring with them the marks of their origin, their prejudices and deformations, which include a lack of confidence in the people‘s ability to think, to want, and to know… because of their background, they believe that they must be the executors of the transformation. They talk about ‘the people,‘ but they do not trust them.”
The oppressor is in solidarity with the oppressed only when he stops seeing them as an abstract category and sees them as persons who have been unjustly dealt with, deprived of their voice, cheated in the sale of their labor: when he stops making pious, sentimental, individualistic gestures and risks an act of love. True solidarity is found only in the plenitude of this act of love in its existentiality, its practice.
