It is hard to stand when your back is broken.
By Nico Rahim
I’m not a big fan of commenting on other people’s blog entries. But, while procrastinating I responded to a blog entry on Ella Baker Center for Human Rights‘ site called “Will the socially conscious people please stand up???” I probably shouldn’t have, given the title alone plays into two of the more annoying expressions of the day, but it does ask an important question—where the fuck is everyone?
Here it is:
A social consciousness is a heavy burden. Even a trip to the grocery store is like most presidential elections where one must choose between the lesser of two evils. Whole Foods may claim to have a negligible carbon footprint, yet it denies its workers the right to organize. Wal-Mart is quickly becoming an industry leader in “greening” its bottom line. The money it saves from energy efficient technologies is not funding health care or living wages for its workers, but used to increase stockholder equity.
The “green movement” has been co-opted. Vanity Fair—with all 500 pages of fashion ads promoting merchandise made by raw-fingered South Asian and South American women—shows how the fashionable a “social consciousness” can be so long as it can be kept exclusive, and in the hands of those with the resources to be charitable.
Activism has become a privilege. The average student graduates with an average debt of nearly $20,000.00, which often makes it nearly impossible to support one’s self with a non-completive salary that comes a long with a job at a “socially conscious” non-profit.
One only has to look at how the revolutionaries of the 1960’s became the yuppies Reagan’s 1980’s to see how significantly a social movement can be subverted.
A quick look at history, and of present day situations, will cause a stress fracture on the spine of anyone with a social consciousness. But stand up we must en masse to share the burden—distributed the weight—to push to social momentum in the direction of economic democracy and in turn ecological sustainability.
