In our country, at this very second, as you breathe and read, with every moment your heart beats, as every millisecond ticks by — your fellow human beings endure poverty so deep “many people don’t believe [it] exists here.” Children go hungry. Brown and Black Americans live crippled by racial prejudice and die young. Uneducated White Americans are getting sicker and killing themselves more and more often through suicide and drug addiction. Native Americans are stricken by poverty and murdered by police. The public school system is racist, unequal, and unfairly funded. We bury more people because of gun violence than any other developed nation in the world. Our labor force is abused and underpaid. Our people are sicker than those of any other wealthy country, and we live underneath a prison system that brutalizes people, especially those who are Hispanic, Native, Black, and Brown, and which locks Americans behind bars at a rate seen nowhere else on this earth.
People’s lives are passing by, lost forever to suffering and oppression.
Babies and children are growing up, abused and marred and forever altered by poverty, a punitive school system, a broken criminal “justice” system, lack of health care, no child care — doomed to life in a country that cares far more about the wealthy and corporations than its poor and lower-class.
Adults work hard yet live in pain, worry, and anxiety — receiving no thanks for their labor. People can’t pay their medical bills or get an education. Individuals are killed because of racial oppression, or live in torment, turning to drugs for escape.
We the people, as we have for thousands and thousands of years, are suffering, struggling, bleeding, hurting.
THIS IS NO TIME FOR INCREMENTALISM. THIS IS NO TIME FOR GRADUALISM. THIS IS NO TIME FOR “PRAGMATISM” — IT WILL ONLY TRANQUILIZE US, BLIND US, CRIPPLE US, AND ENDLESSLY PROLONG THIS ANCIENT FIGHT FOR JUSTICE.
It is time — as it ALWAYS has been — to continue on the work of those who came before, who fought for Native rights, women’s rights, Black rights, and won so many victories.
It is time for us to push further on our crippled, corrupt system (that gives millions of OUR tax dollars to billionaires in corporate tax cuts, subsidies, grants, and incentives; that spends millions on war and the military, while neglecting to care for our veterans), and WIN a basic system of truth, transparency, and equality.
Human beings, my dear primates, my fellow insignificant insects — we all DESERVE to be cared for as babies, to be ensured our bodies are not sick and broken, to be supplied with an empowering, formative education, to be paid fair wages for fair work, to live in peace and plenty, to be allowed to provide for ourselves and win some economic security.
We DESERVE to walk the streets without being shot because of our skin color, to control our own bodies, to freely love who we love, to have our mental diseases treated, to hold positions of power in the institutions that dictate our lives (in other countries, workers themselves are on executive boards of corporations), to have a world that is not continuously polluted for greed and scraps of green paper.
Why can we not see how simple the world is to change? Why can we not see that all that stands in the way of a country that actually grants the promises it espouses (freedom, equality, justice for all) is US, you and me, refusing to stand up and fight back.
Why do we not see that we don’t HAVE to live this way? There’s not some all powerful force that dictates we must exist in such pain and agony, such greed and misery — there is only us, oppressed and blinded into thinking that we must plod along in incrementalism, and allow the smart ol’ politicians, funded by Wall Street and Big Pharma and private prisons, to get together and barter to try and win some freedom for the citizens, which they never have done and never will.
Never believe someone who is making millions off the way things are when they tell you that things are just too damn hard to change.
Real change has ALWAYS come from the people marching, protesting, standing up, fighting back — it will not come from those profiting from the status quo.
It is so simple.
So march, protest, stand up, fight back.
REVOLT, for goodness’ sake, for your own sake!
Get up, pour into the streets, shut down the government like Congress has no problem doing, refuse to work, refuse to do anything, bring the economy to a screeching halt, show the rich and powerful they NEED us, and we will do no more to allow them to live in such obscene comfort unless we, too, are given what we rightfully deserve.
DEMAND JUSTICE!
Make history, be the change you wish to see in the world, fight strongly and relentlessly, show this corporate oligarchy that you WILL NOT BE COWED!
We are individuals of integrity and honor, strength and wisdom! We know we are all connected, that when one hurts we all hurt — and we refuse to be split and divided. We refuse to bow, we refuse to be intimidated by those who would shake us with bizarre notions of operating within this human-created system.
The people who made this government are no better or more important than you — and in fact were horribly racist, sexist, and interested in propping up the elite.
Question everything! Do not let your lives and minds be dictated and controlled by greedy primates who, through no fault of their own, endlessly seek power and money and status!
We teach our children about the American Revolution, about Martin Luther King Jr., about the Civil Rights Movement, about the women’s rights movement — NONE OF THIS IS OVER. NONE OF THIS IS FINISHED.
THIS IS A CONTINUOUS, ONGOING SLOG FOR FREEDOM AND JUSTICE!
DO NOT SET DOWN YOUR BANNERS AND SIGNS, LIFT THEM UP, THE WAR IS NOT OVER, ORGANIZE, HEAD INTO THE STREETS, DEMAND JUSTICE, FIGHT FOR FREEDOM — THIS IS THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT BATTLE OF THE HUMAN RACE!
STAND TOGETHER!
FIGHT BACK!
We are ONE — and we will no longer be daunted and oppressed! Cast off the chains and shackles of incrementalism and gradualism!
Do not look at our politicians and idolize them, do not view them as queens and kings, demand they answer all questions, demand they reveal all transcripts, demand they WORK FOR US, as is their only job!
We can SO EASILY have another Revolution, another Declaration, another Constitution — nothing is set in stone, everything is created by fallible hands, do not be intimidated by institutions set up by human beings — question them, criticize them, CHANGE them.
My fellow primates of this tiny rock — ARISE! AWAKEN!
SOUND THE BUGLES! RAISE ALOFT YOUR STANDARD! CLANG YOUR PENS AND PHONES AND COMPUTERS TOGETHER — YOUR NEW-AGED SWORDS AND SHIELDS — IN A BRILLIANT, RINGING SOUND OF REVOLUTION! FLOOD THE OFFICES OF OUR POLITICIANS WITH PETITIONS AND PHONE CALLS, UNITE IN THE MILLIONS, BATTLE TOGETHER!
AS THE RED SUN RISES—
TO WAR!!!
NOTE: THIS HAS BEEN REPUBLISHED ONCE FOR VISIBILITY BECAUSE I (FOOLISHLY) ORIGINALLY POSTED IT AT 1PM ON A WORK DAY (timing really matters, you find).