How would you describe a white town in a southern state in the United States that froze the tender for plots of land in a new neighbourhood because it risked allowing blacks to move in? As racist?
What would you think of the town’s mayor for claiming the decision was taken in the interests of preserving the “white character” of his community? That he was a bigot?
Our capitalist elites have used propaganda, money and the marginalizing of their critics to erase the first three of philosopher John Locke’s elements of the perfect state: liberty, equality and freedom. They exclusively empower the fourth, property. Liberty and freedom in the corporate state mean the liberty and freedom of corporations and the rich to exploit and pillage without government interference or regulatory oversight.
I’m writing this letter as the proud son of the working class. My father, who never attended college and was our family’s breadwinner, worked as a Greyhound Bus ticket seller, part-time mail carrier and grocery store stock boy. When he died of a sudden heart attack at age 47, he was working the night shift as a hospital orderly. I was 12 years old and my younger brother was seven.
Largest U.S. Charities for 2016, with private donations received — #37. Planned Parenthood Federation of America, $354 million.
All it takes for a society to express fear, paranoia, confusion, and a sort of mad country (riffing on mad cow disease, bovine spongiform encephalopathy) mental disease is a toxic brew of narcissism, propaganda, amnesia, planned and perceived obsolescence and a transnational economic barbarism against the collective masses, and we end up here:
Claudia Marinaro, a scriptwriter for a play that deals with a conversion to Islam within an atheist Dutch family, explores how theatre can challenge prejudices
The post The theatre company telling stories that the mainstream media overlooks appeared first on Positive News.
You Consume Fear: Then You are What you Eat!
Endless ignorance, presaged by fear, hate, suspicion, paranoia, misanthropy, and then all galvanized to the constructions of neutering culture of consumerism.
If you take a minute and study the turn-of-the-century image of the large, white crowd gathered around the smoldering remains of a young, black teenager named Ted Smith, a few things jump out at you.
First, most of the crowd is adult male, but there are also some young boys. Burning a black man at the stake was a big event in east Texas, so, of course, grown men would take their sons to witness it. It was still a bucket list spectacle in much of the South.
Second, there is a lone figure who doesn’t belong standing along the periphery.
Willie Lawson paints over racist graffiti painted on the side of a mosque in Roseville, Calif. (AP/Rich Pedroncelli)
Two officers sought me from within a crowd at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. They seemed to know who I was. They asked me to follow them, and I obliged. Being of Arab background, often renders one’s citizenship almost irrelevant.
In a back room, where other foreigners, mainly Muslims, were holed for ‘added security’, I was asked numerous questions about my politics, ideas, writing, children, friends and my late Palestinian parents.
