Roads, meadows, highways, bridges, seams of coal and ore, airwaves, forests, streams – all these things and more make up the Commons, meaning that they belong to each person equally, and that persons have the inalienable right to access them in times of need. Under the capitalism-driven corporatization that has of late transformed America into a sterile and desolate place hostile to individuality and intangible value alike, however, these things that were once the common property of all persons are now harvested, packaged, and sold with the purpose of making just a few hundred thousand of the hundreds of millions of citizens who live here rich beyond reckoning.
Fellow lovers of liberty, if we aim to free our common property from the stranglehold of money-lust, making it accessible to all, the way it used to be, we must occupy it with our bodies. Camp out on your local bridge! Ride your bicycle in out in the street, right next to the pitiable fools trapped inside their cars! Fill the radio with static, and jam the television signals! Only by making our presence known can we even begin to effect change, and only by putting our bodies in harm's way can we ever prove to a candid world that we deserve freedom, equality, and justice. Do we we have the guts to stand up in the face of inequality and injustice and demand that things change? Do we dare put down our tablet computers and switch off our cellphones and look around for the first time in a decade and marvel at just how bad things have become for persons who choose not to live the cookie-cutter, debt-fueled, consumption-oriented life?
Recent legislation is turning America into a police state (the Patriot Act, NDAA 2012), and I suspect that talking as I am talking here and examining ways to reclaim the Commons will be viewed by law enforcement as a crime, and that the federal and local police will try to paint me as a rabble-rouser and a corrupter of the minds of the youth. If, however, a love for Nature and an interest in the happiness and well-being of my fellow homo sapiens is a crime, then I am a criminal of the worst and most dastardly sort! Let us fight to keep the Commons the property of all persons equally, reminding the gullible and the television-addled people of this world that they do not have to live their lives under the cruel lash of wage-slavery, a lash that never ceases to strike. If we do not fight, if we do not bring our struggle out into plain view, then the capitalists and their cronies in the world's national banks and national legislatures will have won. They are already effecting their subjugation of liberty, equality, and justice, enveloping average persons in the false comfort of a mass-produced, corporate-designed culture of conspicuous and continuous consumption that rewards executive officers and majority shareholders for exploiting the Commons and selling back to us that which was already ours, all along.
Dear friends, we are not subjects, and we are not slaves – we are proud and self-sufficient people who work hard without complaining much, who come up with new ways to do and to make things, who protect Nature and care for our neighbors, and who know when things have gone too far. And gone too far they have – too far, certainly, to be remedied without massive societal upheaval and lots of bloodshed. If we must reclaim the Commons by force, then let us do just that, take matters into our own hands, and fight. Strassenkampf, Strassenkampf, alle auf die Barrikaden. Mahalo.
場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit
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