Here’s where progressive activists get all messed up. We fracture into innumerable constituent groups, based on race, class, gender, sexual orientation, geography, political leanings, drug use, and God knows what else. Conservatives, you have to respect them for casting aside differences and working together. The genius of the GOP is that they’ve managed to unite the 1% and the white working class, management/capital and production, linked. Marx is turning over in his grave.
When I pop into my Facebook, for example, here are all the groups that I have on my sidebar:
At the Chalk Face
Save Our Schools: Activism
Miseducation Nation
Dump Duncan
Teachers Letters to Obama
Parents Across America
Teachers for Social Justice
Save the Indianapolis Project School
Children Are More than Test Scores
Education Forum of Indiana
Schools of Professional Conscience
And a new one: I’m a Teacher and I’m Staying Home in November (where did this come from?)
So that means I have to cycle through all of these damn pages to see what’s happening. If I want to share something, I have to click on them all individually and post. We end up cross posting with each other, sharing the same things, and getting lost. This is why we lose, and if this keeps up, each new page splintering off into ten more pages, we are finished. Completely. Totally. Done.
Enough.
This post is a natural extension of your previous post. Not only do people fear the loss of what they already have more than giving it up for future gain, when people do begin to respond to actions that threaten what they do have, the response comes in a profusion of discountenance.
The GOP had little trouble uniting the 1% as it has been GOP policy to give the rich the biggest rewards. They have also had scant complaint from the propagandized, white middle class as the decades long mantra has always been: Hey, you can be rich too. This is America. So those managers of capital and production slave away as the euphony of false dreams play in their heads.
If public education is to have a chance to save itself, it needs to organize. A clearinghouse for information so that duplication, disingenuous lies from the enemy, and erudite studies can be filtered out. Our voice needs to incorporate and model successful media-speak.
We are, as Karl Marx explained, operating within the tryranny of a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. And it’s the well laid plans of the GOP that have delayed the workers’ democracy. Marx, as he rolls around in his grave, would no doubt be asking, what the hell are you waiting for? Workers of America unite. The truth? The majority of people in America have been propagandized by the rightist plutocratic messaging of everything but the truth. John Kenneth Galbraith wrote a small volume entitled, “The Sheep Look Up.” That was over fifty years ago. Most people have been corralled by the inequities created by th” ruling class for so long that they become to busy working (if they’re able to work) to have a life. They look up to there big flat screens without discernment. Without understanding that the media is the message. Whether truth be known or not, most people are too busy to consider truth.
Are we to be solution-based? Waiting for a new birth of equality for all people? We need to organize by bringing ALL groups together. Bring to life a people’s movement that is all inclusive of labor sectors, civil rights groups, etc. Like Bobby Dylan said: He that’s not busy bein’ born is busy dyin’.
Yes, I agree. I talk with folks outside of education and they just don’t get our anti-reform message. It fits within a prevailing common sense that is very difficult to challenge.