by Gabrielle Jones-Price After an interesting and lighthearted conversation about rules (personal mostly), I was struck by a statement that my friend offered up about anarchy:
"Anarchists don't build roads or hospitals."
My thought was that anarchists would not build more roads or hospitals by the logic that in this industrial age, we certainly don't need roads more than we need to fix what has already been paved. In the same line of thinking, anarchists would not want to build roads that lead to more strip malls and fast food consumerism that in turn lead more people to hospitals where no one gets proper care, even with expensive insurance policies, adding to more consumption within the pharmaceutical realm where CEO's get richer while people get sicker. Being sick in America is profitable -- it's why there is so much garbage in the food.
It's a system that's flawed because the resource extraction to keep it afloat is inherently violent. That is what an empire looks like and all empires fail. I'm glad others are seeking to build something outside of the existing structure that is more localized and community driven.
Anarchists want to turn that system upside down and sometimes break it, so that we can build a better one than exists. Simply put, if anarchists or revolutionaries did not exist, change would not exist and a world without change does not; cannot evolve. Everything is impermanent. Many anarchists understand this Buddhist philosophy more than most westerners and I feel they embody Gandhi's notion of being the change they wish to see in the world.
They may be unorthodox, kooky, strange or bewildering in behavior but in the end, they do it out of love and a passion for something better than the existing mediocrity of an overly comfortable capitalist society that looks the other way [the left] or cheers for more war [right]. Anarchists believe in the beauty of what lies beyond what most people so easily an
d too often settle for in this country. Many civil rights pioneers might today be considered anarchists. Not all anarchists are violent but many are angry because they CARE. Anger is a valid human emotion. Suppressing our anger in the face of injustices puts more people in hospitals due to stress alone.
Hug a local anarchist...they are making changes many Americans are simply afraid to make themselves and those changes will benefit the whole.
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She must descend into the real womb and expose its secrets and its labyrinths. She must describe it as the city of Fez, with its Arabian Nights gentleness, tranquility and mystery. She must describe the voracious moods, the desires, the worlds contained in each cell of it. For the womb has dreams. It is not as simple as the good earth. I believe at times that man created art out of fear of exploring woman. I believe woman stuttered about herself out of fear of what she had to say. She covered herself with taboos and veils. Man invented a woman to suit his needs. He disposed of her by identifying her with nature and then paraded his contemptuous domination of nature. But woman is not nature only. She is the mermaid with her fish-tail dipped in the unconscious. Her creation will be to make articulate this obscure world which dominates man, which he denies being dominated by, but which asserts its domination in destructive proofs of its present madness.