Am I the only one that feels like she's living in a nation of wimps?

Today I saw the Greenpeace protesters on top of Parliament roof. When I lived in Spain, I saw ordinary people walk out of their job to go protest all kinds of things out on the street. They do this in France, in Italy, you name a place.

Here? We sit in our cubicles obediently and never ever discuss civil disobedience.

Everyone is in a state of wimpdom or depression, or they just can't because their lives are an American mess.

That's the question.

THE question is appropriately directed to Sarah Ibarruri since she asked the original question.

FMD is a comfortable and secure cog in this beautiful machine. He needn't worry his beautiful mind about such things.

The surface trappings are commodity fun/cool, but the very serious matters are trivialized, and looked down upon for what should be obvious reasons.

...and people are afraid of losing the few jobs available?

Biggest military in the world by far...highest % in prison...jobs exported to other countries...but you can get a job in prison fairly easily???

Very difficult to post meaningful info online due to moderator deletions...and govt surveillance of your postings brings trouble.

So people post these kinds of things bemoaning the lack of any real action.....


http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23703.htm

National Lawyers Guild on-scene legal observers reported an “unwarranted display and use of force by police in residential neighborhoods, often far from any protest activity.” According to the civil liberties’ watchdog group:

Police deployed chemical irritants, including CS gas, and long-range acoustic devices (LRAD) in residential neighborhoods on narrow streets where families and small children were exposed. Scores of riot police formed barricades at many intersections throughout neighborhoods miles away from the downtown area and the David Lawrence Convention Center. Outside the Courtyard Marriott in Shadyside, police deployed smoke bombs in the absence of protest activity, forcing bystanders and hotel residents to flee the area.

Later, while some protests were ending, riot-clad officers surrounded an area at the University of Pittsburgh, creating an ominous spectacle that some described as akin to Kent State. Guild legal observers witnessed police chasing and arresting many uninvolved students.

Among other questionable tactics, officers from dozens of law enforcement agencies lacked easily-identifiable badges, impeding citizens’ ability to register complaints. (National Lawyers Guild, “National Lawyers Guild Observes Improper Use of Force by Law Enforcement at the G-20,” Press Release, September 25, 2009)

The Times reported that after his arrest the FBI raided the home that Madison shared with his wife, Elena, and conducted an exhaustive 16-hour search of the premises seizing computers, books and a poster (horror of horrors!) of the old mole himself, Karl Marx.

Media was bought up to keep the masses from noticing just how much they have already lost, and the fact that they are about to lose everything and become slaves in all but name.

"Until John Doe and his wife Mary lose their six pack and their television, they wont get off the couch to fight Washington DC".
Sometimes I wonder if he was right.
edit to add: France, Spain, Italy, the UK..they were all old empires. They know what it means in their history, to be a fallen empire. they have centuries of war on their own soil , people bombed and destroyed over and over...they have that history.
we dont. we are so new as a country. we have not ensuffered the horror of being bombed over and over and watched the horror of war after war on our own soil.
I dont know what it will take to wake people up. Maybe a few centuries of suffering as an empire.

:kick:

Or maybe they just don't fight back at all.

We're there Saturday's at 9:00 AM as well. The more the merrier.

their health coverage for themselves and their families, and thus can afford to leave their cubicles and protest.

Our lives are hanging by a thread. We live terrified of losing what tiny bit we have, so we don't protest.

Consider American life in the 60s - 70s. People actually could drop out, life was inexpensive and if your needs were modest, you could get by spare changing people in the park. One person holding one job could buy a house, send kids to school, have a car or two, and take a vacation every single year.

Now they've got us right where they want us and it has been done quite deliberately.

"Necessitous men are not free men." - FDR from The Economic Bill of Rights, 1944

"I freed a thousand slaves, I could have freed a thousand more if only they new they were slaves."

OTOH, teaching the "average" American anything is something I don't know how to do. We have developed a profound resistance knowledge over the years.

We are The Sheeple. Raised to be sheared as long as we produce enough and then slaughtered. Of course, a portion of our children must be sacrificed to provide our parasite masters with the tender lamb they crave, but that is a small price to pay for the security of being cared for by the wolves.

That's exactly how I'm feeling about our country. We're trained to shut up and withstand anything.

The Greyhounds have been trying to get the hell out of here while the gettin's good, but you need between $50,000 - $200,000 in the bank for any civilized nation to let you in. We're toying with the idea of just "taking a vacation" and refusing to go back. I've heard the German system is the best bet for this strategy.

I have lost all hope for this nation. Just too many people that cannot see 5 minutes into the future here. Whatever crap, no matter how absurd, that comes out of their GodBox is passively accepted.

http://www.newcolonist.com/rr11.html

Basically, he blames suburbanization for the decline of American community spirit.

French, Italians, Spaniards still mostly live in stable neighborhoods with neighborhood businesses and gathering places. Americans live in isolated housing tracts and shop at chain stores.

An additional factor is that Europe still has strong unions, while over here, the right-wing media have spent thirty years telling working class people who BAD unions are. No wonder--they're BAD all right--bad for rich people.

We are too spread out, far from one another, don't know one another, etc.

And still, with how suburbanization has destroyed us, I hear people talking about how much they love isolation and their isolated houses.

Weird

do you really know? When homes were close together, people knew everybody by their first name! They would stop and talk as they walked down the sidewalk because most people were on their front porch. Now, with A/C you rarely ever even see anyone outside!

Isolation in the U.S. only helps to make us more helpless.

We live in a small town, but aside from the people in the houses on either side of us and the two houses directly across the street we don't know anybody on our block by name.

There are still a few front porches -- though a lot of them have been enclosed to create an extra room and the newer (1950's and later) houses don't even have them. But nobody sits on the remaining ones very much because there's no social interaction. Kids don't play out on the sidewalk, and nobody comes down the street except people with dogs and an occasional jogger.

In fact, you can drive around town on a Saturday afternoon and hardly see a soul -- they're either in their back yards, indoors, or at the mall.

Part of this, of course, is because there's no local shopping. There are no corner stores. Even if there were, parents wouldn't dare send their kids down the block for a carton of milk because there's no longer an army of grandmothers out on their front porches to keep things safe.

It's not just suburbanization and not even air conditioning -- though that plays a role. It's the death of community. People no longer feel *connected* -- and this is a great hollowness in the lives of most Americans that people in this country don't even realize they are missing.

compounding the problem is all of the electronic toys that preoccupy us now...so many are absorbed now with the Internet, ipods, iphones, game consoles, etc. Lots of protests now are done virtually and I'm as guilty of that as anyone...

since everything becomes geared to catering to the isolation.

but those days are going away as the greatest generation fades away.

My dad was in the Railroad UNion, I remember him coming home and going on strike for better wages and working conditions. I remember all the Unions sticking together.
If only they taught labor history in the schools.

Let me know if you get more than blank stares.

but you are correct.

Hell ask them about what a Union is. If you are lucky they will know the word, but it will come with quite a bit of anti red and anti union propaganda. I mean, you do know they will keep money for their bosses, not your needs... :sarcasm:

The few who know the phrase will tell you it was in the 'olden days'. If one can grasp the trend of our time, I would be damned surprised.

and those are the extended arm of the Repugnican party.

those are the churches that believe in christ`s teachings. i will agree that there are far more churches that do not believe in christ`s teachings. remember we do have a minister here at du.
the solution for my parents started when roosevelt said the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. that`s why i said the message is fading away with the "greatest generation". i guess it`s up to us to carry the torch.

the teabaggers did whatever they could to raise a ruckus. They have public option essentially off the table as the least of their 'accomplishments' and we still don't know if they will scuttle anything but some ineffective piece of crap legislation that politicians will try to pass off as reform.

Now, back in the Vietnam War days, people had guts, they were willing to go to prison for their beliefs about shutting down that war. Now, we can't even get the Nobel Peace Prize winner to pull our sitting duck troops out of Afghanistan and Iraq. Sixteen more died last week.

the monks and citizens of myanmar want you to know that if you honestly believe THAT- then you ARE a wimp.

In an isolated state of perennial suburbanization, away from one another, with distance in between. How do you protest when you are phone distance away and no closer?

having several million people converge on dc should be relatively easy.

but people gotta wanna.

and they don't seem to wanna.

sitting at home and bitching about it on the internets is a whole lot easier.

and ultimately completely ineffective.

I do think people who mentioned we live isolated from one another, and that we can therefore no longer know one another and band together to protest, I think those people are correct.

European governments fear their people.

1) No fear of losing their job
2) There were places to protest, not merely empty highways (which is all we have now that we're the suburbanized, Walmart society)

Etc.

We are helpless here. Where are we going to protest? Maybe I can go protest alone in the I-10. People driving will find me a curiosity.

How sad a society we've become. Our isolation has killed us.

I was surprised after I noticed and thought about the difference in living situations in Europe. Cities, promenades, Sunday walkabouts, civilization.

right to work states... you needed to get rid of them nasty commie unions... so unless everybody goes off ot protest, don't hang your hat.

Few benefits, but they are TIED to those jobs.

A LOT of propaganda, where them strikes are things commies and anarchist do.

Here in the land of the free and the brave propaganda has created a nation of wimps.

Why do you think certain things like EFCA and oh I don't know ACTUAL health care are feared?

Deer Hunting with Jesus, helps to understand this so well, I don't hold any hopes we will see a national strike anytime soon. Here is a hint, the last one was 1952

Oh and add quite a bit of consumerism... and walla.

:shrug:


However nothing so far has topped that pic of the Spanish farmer squirting the cops with milk fresh from the udder at the farmers protest in Spain. Wish I had saved that pic...

So people talk, walk, know one another, there are dense areas everywhere, where people can protest.

Here? We have empty highways and the local Walmart.

Twice during the ten years I lived there, I participated in protests of 30,000 people (about 10% of the population of the city proper), once to protest cuts to school funding and once to protest the beginning of the Iraq invasion.

Portland has one compact downtown linked to the entire rest of area by light rail and frequently-running buses.

The Minneapolis-St. Paul area, almost as left as Portland, has two downtowns, a mediocre transit system, and urban sprawl that reaches 40 miles out. Despite the larger population, protests have been much smaller than in Portland.

until there are MILLIONS of people marching on dc to DEMAND healthcare change- NOTHING is going to change for the better.

and bringing the country to a full stop.

Protests have never really done much... now national strikes... will do that...

Don't hold your breath though. It is not the protests that get European governments going... oh boy, it is the strikes.

especially in an economic climate where people who HAVE jobs are scared to death of losing them.

people are even going to work unpaid on their mandatory furlough days in hopes of impressing the boss.

I gave up oh them changing...

No security if we take off to protest. We can be fired.

No safety nets.

that, whereas Europeans will not. Europeans can strike AND protest and STILL not lose their jobs, and if they did, they have a safety net. We do not.

If you have lets say, for the sake of argument, ten folks striking... yep, you are correct. Now use percentages, even 20% you'd be correct. But once you hit a tipping point, in my view close or over 50% well then, at that point firing people becomes far less practical.

That will not happen. After all we are all middle class :sarcasm: and only commies strike.

Translation, there is no class unity... and that has been the success of the right... all for ME and not for US...

It is a lack of CIVIC consciousness.

They know we'll never get out there in a mass of people so astounding that it terrifies them. They know we cannot. We live apart, and are therefore helpless until we change that isolation-silence mentality we have.

It's only a matter of time before the bread runs out and the circus leaves town. Throw in 50% unemployment & that's when you'll see people start to get riled up.

If we had a different, unsuburbanized lifestyle, we'd be out there everywhere, by the MILLIONS, demanding everything, and a force to contend with.

Just like you said in one of your earlier posts, you know if you went out there you'd go alone.

Even when there is a large scale protest, like when there were the WTO protests in Seattle or the Million Man March on Washington, hell even those Right to Life protests, they might get media coverage, but do they ever make a difference?

Unfortunately I can see why people wouldn't even bother protesting, it's why I don't. It just feels completely pointless. I feel like the corporations have completely beaten us already and I could march in the streets every day until the day I die and it wouldn't change a thing.

And then we live so suburbanized, that it'd be 1 person protesting, or two.

Nothing like Europe.

Our own isolated, distant, suburbanized lifestyles are killing us. We are helpless because of them and cannot band together to fight whatever we may have to fight.

was that we can't afford to leave our jobs for a protest. If you leave, you get fired -- and you become homeless. Or you lose your company health insurance, get a catastrophic disease and die. The consequences are very real in today's economic structure, as I'm sure you know.

Traditionally, who are the people who protest? Students, farmers, shopkeepers, and union members acting en masse. Students timewise can afford to protest and they're idealistic (except current American students are largely docile and apathetic -- or maybe they're just getting by and worried about their future). Farmers and shopkeepers are their own boss, set their own hours and can protest all they want. And union members are protected by their collective action.

Farmers, shopkeepers, energized students, and union members are pretty scarce in 21st-century America. Most of us are fucking wage slaves.

Just a few examples within the last two months.
Young people have protested:

left you a world that doesn't live up to your expectations.
I see much more effort spent complaining than in getting up and doing.

About fucking time you all changed something for yourselves.

Oh, I forgot - you did vote.....1 for you.

mark

I'm old enough to be any of those protesters mother.

I was just pointing it out since some here spout off without any actual knowledge as to what's actually taking place.

On edit: You're coming across as an angry person with a chip on their shoulder, whose jumping to the wrong conclusions.

We're all on the same team and without our young people there's no hope for our future. Bask in the glory of their efforts and be happy.