Wednesday, August 10, 2011

The World is Violently Unwell


Take one quick look at global news, and you'll see pretty quickly that London isn't the only area in the world right now going through some genuinely turbulent and floor-shaking insurrection. Rebellions, protests, demonstrations, revolts, and any number of other nouns most news agencies will ignore in place of the pejorative and dismissive "riot" are occurring on nearly every continent, much of it coming from a exceptionally disenfranchised youth culture who is appropriately, understandably, and justly upset with what has become of the market-driven neoliberal policies which have resulted roundly in failure, widespread cuts to vital infrastructural measures, and dizzying poverty and wealth-gaps. At this very moment, the ground underneath all of our feet feels particularly brittle and unsteady, not because of the threat of some kind of foreign "terrorism", but because of the domestic policies that have been in place collecting dust and quietly bringing ruin to our countries, our cities, our lives, hopes, and every single dream. While Tottenham's frustrations spread through London, Chile right now is undergoing a massive student-led movement involving a number of varied demonstrations--"Mass suicide by education" protests in which students scream and clamor before lying down in the street, "dead"; "passion for education" clusters in which whole streets are clogged by students kissing and making out; hunger strikes and more--in protest of the country's floundering educational system. What they're specifically seeking a plebiscitary process to increase the funding and the level of quality of the public schools, and ultimately that for which they're asking is a overhauling to the framework of the whole education system, including increased state participation in secondary education and a moratorium placed on educational profiteering. An August 11th poll demonstrated the an almost overwhelming 72% of the Chilean population approved of the student movement, a level of endorsement I believe you'd be hard-pressed to find in American polls if our frustrated students went ahead and engaged in the same insurgent behavior, which they have every good and solid reason to do.
The Atlantic just put out a tremendous and elucidatory--and emotional--series of photos taken from the protests. They make your heart hurt. I'll drop a couple below but check out the whole lot of them; they're intensely visual. I firmly believe that we're, as a world, as a whole global populace, approaching a breaking point, a fiscal breaking point, a societal breaking point, a human breaking point. We are seriously in need of some kind of transportive, transformative succor or medication or resolve--something analgesic. People are frustrated and in pain; they're afraid and alone. They feel abandoned and ignored by the policymakers and the governments who have toyed with them for years as if those underneath them were made of this kind of superplastic material who could bend and twist and be pulled apart without eruption, and guaranteeing them their best interests were in mind. This has all been slowly fomenting, I'd say, for thirty or forty years. The world will change or people will make it change by bringing it to its knees; the world will listen or the people will rip its ears out. These aren't the first rebellions and, unfortunately, it's likely they won't be the last. Think of Spain's 15-M or the Arab Spring going on. These aren't capricious uprisings, but rather they come from an incredibly disgruntled society sick of political jargoneering and mealymouthed status quo-keeping charlatans and orators who differ from religious orders only in their uniforms or lack thereof. To be clear, what I don't mean to imply is a kind of logical, philosophical, or ideological concinnity or a similarly realized underpinning for each and all of these outbursts. They are occurring for their own bevy of reasons worthy of study and rational, unbiased attempts at understanding. What is similar, though, is the frustration, the hopelessness, and the anger, which is there, and which has been there for who knows how long, and which is manifesting itself through similar but different modes of rancorous expression, expression and rabid activity we would be wise not to write off as unjustified or nihilistic or greedy. For the record, most of the students seen in the pictures are covering their faces not to protect their identity but to keep them safely blocked-off from the toxic tear gas. All photos are credit to the Atlantic and Alan Taylor. The spirit of this social energy is captured in these photos and should be seen by as many people as possible. In one of the photographs, the grafitti-tagged words "Chile Lucras Con Todo" can be seen, what looks like, stencil-printed onto a building wall. Translation: Chile, you do everything for profit. Sound familiar? It should for a depressing and uncountable number of countries where suffocating systemic implementations have laid waste to entire groups and subsets of "nonessential" people, who neither provide much revenue for the country nor are they large enough for politicians to spend time pandering to. 





























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