For some, even the smallest question can feel threatening. These exclamation marks… towers of certitude… are terrified of this tiny question. They intuitively know that it can completely undermine their dogmatism.
Source: nakedpastor.com
Zuccotti Park Press, a project of Adelante Alliance, a Brooklyn-based immigrant advocacy group, is releasing Occupy, a new book by Noam Chomsky, on May Day.
People seem to know about May Day everywhere except where it began, here in the United States of America. That’s because those in power have done everything they can to erase its real meaning. For example, Ronald Reagan designated what he called “Law Day” — a day of jingoist fanaticism, like an extra twist of the knife in the labor movement. Today, there is a renewed awareness, energized by the Occupy movement’s organizing, around May Day, and its relevance for reform and perhaps eventual revolution.
Actor Wallace Shawn reads the speech of historian Howard Zinn given at Johns Hopkins University on Civil Disobedience, November 1970. Part of a reading from Voices of a People’s History of the United States (Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove) May 2, 2007 in New York, NY.
On February 8, 1921 twenty thousand people, braving temperatures so low that musical instruments froze, marched in a funeral procession in the town of Dimitrov, a suburb of Moscow. They came to pay their respects to a man, Petr Kropotkin, and his philosophy, anarchism.
Some 90 years later few know of Kropotkin. And the word anarchism has been so stripped of substance that it has come to be equated with chaos and nihilism. This is regrettable, for both the man and the philosophy that he did so much to develop have much to teach us in 2012. . . .
The precipitating event that led Kropotkin to embrace anarchism was the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species in 1859. . . .
He spent the rest of his life promoting that concept and the theory of social structure known as anarchism. To Americans anarchism is synonymous with a lack of order. But to Kropotkin anarchist societies don’t lack order but the order emerges from rules designed by those who feel their impact, rules that encourage humanly scaled production systems and maximize individual freedom and social cohesion.
Always Question Authority 