If YOU don't share this... IT WILL NOT BE SEEN.
NOTICE: Among the reasons for some long pauses in this vlog is waiting for morning rush hour buses and traffic flows to pass when the light turns green, to reduce the difficulty of hearing me over their noise....
ALSO, some corrections and clarifications are made in the transcription below. I recommend that as you watch/listen to the vlog that you read the transcript.
Transcript: The missing ingredient in this Death Fast, several weeks ago I made an all important post,
The Law of Social Change, which is the Law of Suffering,which is the Law of Paying the Price of the Change. There are only two ways of bringing about massive social change: threatening to take the life of others as the price of them not changing, or, offering the price of ones own life, lives, to mobilize the onlookers to join the press for the appropriate change; the righteous change. Examples of the latter are Tahrir Square 3 years ago, the March on the Dharasana Salt Works many decades ago; the march in Selma.... Paying and or absolutely offering ones life, lives, for a righteous, just, humane, social change.
It may be that the missing ingredient in this Death Fast is the element that must be there for such a nonviolent (unviolent) action to work. And that missing ingredient, that ingredient is, an untapped humanity - first among a vanguard, and then secondly among the masses.
So, basically, the way Tahrir Square worked, a friend of many of the small cadre of young leaders in Egypt,
Khaled Mohamed Saeed, expressed himself in a way that predictably caused the security forces to torture him to death, and a photo of his destroyed face and destroyed body surfaced, and among those who saw it was a young Google executive for the Middle East, Wael Ghonim, who had been clandestinely maintaining a widely followed FB page, and he posted this photo; more importantly, he was hugely mobilized by the picture of his friend, and the fact of what had been done to his friend; he posted the photo at extreme risk to himself and further mobilized his social media skills to expose this picture, to expose what it represented, and to lay out an opportunity by which people could do what was never done, come into the street and protest. And it happened by the thousands, and then 10's of thousands, and maybe 100 thousand, and they stayed in Tahrir Square.
So the fact of this tells us that in Egypt at the time there was a latent, a huge latent, hidden, reservoir of humanity, first among the small cadre of people like Wael Ghonim, and as this horror that was done to their friend, this extraordinary injustice, tapped and released and hidden humanity in this small cadre, that set up a chain reaction where their humanity, their putting their lives out there, tapped the latent humanity in an infinitely larger pool of onlookers and then finally, those 10's of thousands in Tahrir Square, and then that unleashed the humanity of millions and millions of onlookers around the world. Far and away the greatest humanity was that of the young man that stood up before anyone else, and was brutally murdered for it. The second largest pool of humanity (on a per person basis), though small in number of people, was the cadre of Wael and and handful of others. The next larger pool was the 10's of thousands that went to Tahrir Square, and the next larger pool, that is smaller than the prior ones per person, was the millions. But in each case, in each pool of potential resource, was a latent humanity, a latent, untapped, capacity for loving.
For this Death Fast, each of the last 51 days is teaching me that there is no such latent pool(s) anymore in the US. There is every indication there is NOT the equivalent of Wael Ghonim and his small cadre of leaders. There is every indication of this, that is, there is no indication to the contrary. All indications are that what could have been that cadre, the vanguard of the so called Free Palestine movement, would have shown, some affinity, some recognition, some understanding, some curiosity about this Death Fast, and all indications are that it is quite the opposite - they want not to see it, they want to be protected from it, they want to not be drawn in such a direction, they want to be opposed to it, they want to be horrified by it, all by way of denial and self-protection.
Similarly with the Palestinian Diaspora and with the Palestinian leadership itself.
Of course there is another possible explanation (other explanations) for what I am saying - that they don't know, or that I'm too strange with tattoos on my face, or that I've been too deliberately marginalize by those who have come before this campaign that have wanted to be certain that the standards by which I live do not become standards that pulled on them, and have gone to significant lengths to discredit, dismiss, disparage... me and my work.
But my sense is that is not the case; that is not the way that latent humanity works, it is not easily fooled, it is not distracted by tattoos, it recognizes sincerity, it recognizes courage.
As I stated in a
hugely important video log the other day, which included the beginnings of the thoughts I've just shared, whereas I'm down to only a 30%, sadly, a 30% chance of being able to pay the full price of my life in this Death Fast, because there is no one there to receive the payment, it is not time for me to stop my; my body says that it is, but I have not yet expressed as fully as I need to my horror, my outrage, the price want to pay... I want to pay as much of the price as possible of the Freedom of Palestine, of the Freedom of the Palestinians. Don't you?
And I've not yet done that, this being day 51. Beyond my control my body could terminate itself now, organ failure, whatever. But tragically, due to this element that appears to be missing, any latent humanity left in this sickest of all societies, at best it is looking like a 30% chance that I'll be able to take this its final conclusion, the full payment of my life, now.
Creator willing there are several more weeks that I'll be able to continue this. And I keep watching and learning and learning and recalculating every waking second, but my current outlook, my current assessment, is what I just shared.
I don't want to die. I want live. There's much I want to be able to do in this Fight for Palestine. And if Palestine were freed, which is virtually certain it will NOT, NEVER (before they are all destroyed), be, but if it were, there are 100 other fights, 1000 other fights, that I want to live to fight. But that's way down the list. I want to pay, now, as much of the price as I possibly can to Free Palestine, and as best and as constructively as I can do it, that is what I shall do.
