Viktor Yuschenko Here are the voices of protest from Kiev: “I don’t realize I’m freezing and exhausted until I get home every night and collapse,” said Alexander Kmet, his hands shoved in his pockets and his shoulders hunched and shuddering as he spoke. “But this is an inspiring moment in the history of our country. We have to be here.” “The truth makes us warm,” said Ala Babich, 38, a management student, before breaking into the protest song We Shall Overcome in English. “At first we watched it on television because we’re not so young anymore, and we live on …
When 200,000 people simply don’t believe it, look what can happen. The Ukraine may yet reverse the trend of many former Soviet republics and join Georgia in turning back creeping authoritarianism. How can this be happening around the world and the 2000 election get stolen so easily in the USA? Where were the protests in the streets if people believed so strongly that George W. Bush stole the White House? Can you imagine 500,000 people gathered everyday outside the US Supreme Court to state their opposition to the fraud they believed was committed? Look around. Masses of people who know …
From a fantastic essay in the November issue of Harpers magazine called Quitting the Paint Factory: On the virtues of idleness: Idleness is not just a psychological necessity, req�uisite to the construction of a complete human being; it constitutes as well a kind of political space, a space as necessary to the workings of an actual democracy as, say, a free press. How does it do this? By allowing us time to figure out who we are, and what we believe; by allowing us time to consider what is unjust, and what we might do about it. By giving the …
Frog Feast Bowl by Dale Faustich Recently on the OSLIST we have been discussing “givens” the boundairies within which group work happens. Both Harrison Owen and Paul Everett, an American consultant, talked about the universal givens, like the laws of self-organization and gravity. Paul wrote about the boundary conditions that tip chaos into order: Chaos Theory, et. al. deals with ‘bounded instability’. There is a container, an edge. OS is certainly Chaos Theory in action, imho, where something will emerge but you don’t know what or where, just that form will emerge from the primordial soup. A person I met …
Taiaike Alfred is a Mohawk academic who teaches at the University of Victoria. He is an uncompromising champion of declonization here at home and in the wider world. Recently he took part in a two-part dialogue at the Musqueam First Nation with some guests, community members and Elders. A transcript of the dialogues can be found on his home page. Here is one of the many interesting quotes, from a conversatio between Taiaike and Sakej Ward from the Burnt Church First Nation: Sakej Ward :…As colonized people, our typical reaction is to feel ashamed of ourselves. So we must bring …