6/22/2003 01:15:00 PM

This country,
with its institutions,
belongs to the people
who inhabit it.
Whenever they shall grow weary
of the existing government,
they can exercise their
constitutional right
of amending it, or their
revolutionary right
to
dismember
or
overthrow it.

~ABRAHAM.lincoln~

i have discussed politics and violence with many of you. the two seem inextricably linked. this is why war is so often described as politics by other means. what is one to do? that always seems to be the question when it comes to the subjects of liberation, peace and conflict. i wrote this some time back. i still stand by the outline of it. nevertheless, there is a perpetual goading that will not leave me alone. the source of this goading is the bare fact that violent revolution is my freedom's heritage--and, seemingly, the heritage of any modicum of political freedom that the communities of our planet have known.

the thing that seems more and more evident to me regarding revolution, as it pertains to the empire we live under, is how totally irrelevant violence is in the face of the near total hegemony the United States is in the process of unleashing. just try to organize an armed resistance and see how far you get. the homeland security enforcers aside there is a more fundamental reason for the near total uselessness of violence in our moment: there is always someone to take the place of whatever is destroyed. take out a building. take out a person. take out a certain industrial capability. it does not matter. the anomaly is immediately absorbed by the system rerouting the function, location or capability to one of a hundred thousand similar options.

when We The People grow weary what shape does our constitutional right, our revolutionary right, now take?

our constitutional right may consist of a renewed political engagement in protest, in candidacy, perhaps even in an active refusal to fund what we deem to be the perverse excesses of leaders who will speak lies and unleash death in our name--fully willing to live with the consequences of our actions (the party of tea in Boston so many years ago seems both apropos and surprisingly overdone in our present context. what would these same patriots who acted out against the royal taxes on tea do in our day of new American monarchial swaggering?).

our revolutionary right may be one of big box consumer and major corporate media disengagement--an active shunning of the debt-slavery that many political and economic elites encourage the working poor and working rich alike to engage in, "for the health of the economy"; a certain stepping away from mainstream infotainment journalism to nurture a critical, multi-source engagement with the polyvalent voices of global media.

and yet, these do not seem enough.

they seem a hollow shell of what Lincoln speaks of.
to rekindle a local dialogue that catalyzes an awakened engagement
among the distracted and disappointed citizenry that we are all a part of--this seems only to begin...