Why Do They Want Us To Shut Up?


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If we were harmless, the riot cops would stay home.
If we were harmless, the riot cops would stay home.

It’s Friday. It’s been a long week. Like most weeks. We are taught to fit in and obey.

We are told that individuality and the search for social justice will get us in trouble, either by government surveillance or social ostracism.

We speak out, still. We put on our Guy Fawkes masks, or not. We endure trolls online.

But this one’s for you.

If the Occupy Movement were no threat, there wouldn’t have been a massive, coordinated, international effort among the elites, their media and their governments to squash it FAST before it dug in.

I recall the email a little over two years ago from Adbusters. Truly, that email changed the world as we know it.

But we have been sidelined. We have been fatigued, threatened, and coerced into no longer taking kids in strollers to rallies lest we get kettled and our children taken from us.

But they want us to be afraid. To stay silent. They want us to feel overwhelmed. But every time we hit the streets, they send the riot cops.

It’s not about democracy anymore. It’s about the survival of the elites.

Are you mad as hell and not going to take it anymore? Even Network was a warning to us because even Howard Beale was assassinated, by, it turns out, his corporate overlords/parasites.

But we are more like Anonymous than Howard Beale. We have the numbers.

Next week when we wake up, let’s remember how much we outnumber the 1%, the elites, the ones who send the police when we try to express ourselves.

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Stephen Elliott-Buckley

Post-partisan eco-socialist. at Politics, Re-Spun
Stephen Elliott-Buckley is a husband, father, professor, speaker, consultant, former suburban Vancouver high school English and Social Studies teacher who changed careers because the BC Liberal Party has been working hard to ruin public education. He has various English and Political Science degrees and has been writing political, social and economic editorials since November 2002. Stephen is in Twitter, Miro and iTunes, and the email thing, and at his website, dgiVista.org.

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2 thoughts on “Why Do They Want Us To Shut Up?”

  1. When OWS quietly folded its tent, many people, progressives included, pronounced it a failure. To them I asked that they imagined what actual failure would look like? Surely failure would entail some acknowledgement of defeat, some symbol of having been vanquished. Yet there was no such thing.

    Then I asked if the conditions against which OWS and the larger Occupy movement railed had abated or were they worsening? The answer again was obvious.

    The conclusion was that OWS was not a failure. It was merely an initial tremor in what would inevitably become a seismic event of some variety (a few good, many more very bad) unless the pressures that sparked the Occupy movement were released through reform.

    There are some, Stephen, who have proclaimed the 21st the “Century of Revolution” and it’s not hard to see that as a real possibility. I think we’re embarking on an era of upheaval driven by a perfect storm of influences from globalization to environmental and socioeconomic calamities. Whether this results in some new political and economic order or a 21st century neo-feudalism is anyone’s guess.

    1. i expect the near future, the economic and climate crises on the way, and increased despotic behaviour from our beloved elites, will all lead to more opportunity for pushing back. all i know is that deepening feudalism is the likely result, barring push back.

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