Small Brown Vagrant

neat-o:

Track: bikeway

Vehicle: bicycle

climateadaptation:

Camila Vallejo was profiled in the NYTimes yesterday. She is everything OWS is not. 

“In perhaps the most poignant set piece in the year of the protester, Ms. Vallejo addressed a dense ring of photographers and reporters in August while kneeling within a peace sign made of spent tear-gas shells, where she calmly mused about how many educational improvements could have been bought with the $100,000 worth of munitions at her feet.”

NYTimes

aside from turning her into a celebrity/rockstar, this is a pretty good profile. and it’s true, she represents everything that OWS has failed to achieve— that is, preaching to the choir instead of engaging with those who don’t understand and bringing them into the fold; instead of galvanizing people into taking action beyond simply occupying and just saying that the current state of government is oppressive; instead of actually creating change, even if it is within the confines of a system one doesn’t agree with, so that the mode of government begins the change from something sluggish, bureaucratic, nepotistic and necrotic, to something alive, vital, dynamic and inclusive of all.

basically what I mean is, the American masses by and large don’t take part in their electoral and governmental processes because they ”forget” to vote, or just don’t care. but oh, they will definitely vote for their favorite singer on American Idol. so many people seem to think that just because it’s happened before, it’s okay for their local congressman or senator to proxy for them, and even the local elections to appoint these representatives are so poorly attended that it makes me feel ill. i’m not talking bullshit, either. this isn’t conjecture. this is all stuff that i’ve seen with my own eyeballs and heard with my own ears when i used to work for the new york state board of elections. people actually say these things. i once heard a wall street stockbroker— somebody who should have had a vested interest in voting— yell into his cellphone “fuck this shit, i’ve been waiting here for the last five minutes! i’m just gonna go back to my Ferrari and go to Scores, i don’t even give a shit.” Scores is a strip club where really rich people go to throw entire rolls of money at half-dressed people and drink overpriced champagne. basically it’s for business school types and lawyers who’ve made partner. this guy was gonna go there on his lunch hour. i just wanted to say, “hey, man. it takes a total of five minutes for you to wait in line (about four minutes), for me to look up your voter registration information (twenty seconds), give you directions (another twenty, unless it’s a new electronic voting machine, then it’s about a minute because those are still a little bit new and exotic to some people) and point you at a voting booth, where you can take as long as you like to make up your mind and vote, but even if it’s one of the older mechanical machines, it literally takes about twenty seconds if you know who you’re voting for, and if you don’t, it just takes as long as it takes you to read who’s on the ballot, with another five seconds for you to flip a switch.

“all you have to do to vote is to read some names and pull a fucking lever. how fucking simple is that. HOW FUCKING SIMPLE ARE YOU?!”

equally stupidly, a lot of activists refuse to vote and change things by, for example, creating an alternative and voting for that. instead, i’ve heard people— even members of my own local group— say “oh the system sucks and it oppresses me, so i’m not going to enable it by participating in it, because it won’t change anything, and i’m not going to vote.” i find that to be incredibly poorly thought out.

in fact, i’d say that almost (almost) all of the problems in any modern democratic society would be solved by holding a series of plebiscites to make all their decisions. it’d be infeasible for any entity with vested interests in whatever decision’s being pondered by the masses to lobby for or against whatever, because you’d basically have to placate EVERYBODY.. and that means being held responsible by everybody, which is exactly the opposite of what lobbying is all about. of course this is completely infeasible, not least because of the very real dangers of the tyranny of the majority, but hey, it’s just a daydream. in fact, i still wouldn’t want to be part of that, because baby, i’m an anarchist and you’re a spineless liberal. wow, it’s been a while since i quoted Against Me! and i don’t know how i feel about it.

so yeah, back on topic: even though the New York Times article does portray her as somewhat of a rockstar, hey, at least Camila is getting the message across that people need to do something besides simply saying “yo broseph. this situation both sucks and blows, brah.”, and that they need to, above all else, get involved.

holy crap this rant is long. i may be crazy.

this. this this this is my life.

i’m not usually a big huge fan of Ice Cube, but FUUUUUUUUUCKKK. this pretty much expresses how i feel about life, the universe, and everything right now. but mostly, being in New York, and pretty much living in the hospital or a doctor’s office, so many days of the week. the craptastic feeling in one’s body after chemotherapy makes me want to rage, but yknow, i feel so tired and nauseous and dead that it’s hard enough to type, much less go and strangle something. thank you, Ice Cube, for almost making up for xXx 2: State of the Union.

(Source: rappersdoingnormalshit)