At 09:18 AM 12/8/1999 -0600, you wrote:
>I really appreciate everything that I have learned about the real WTO
proceedings
>from the postings here.
oh much agreed. i hardly looked at the mainstream media during the whole
time, there was so much more to be learned via alt. media.
I want to make one observation though. I live in
>Minneapolis, a long way from Seattle and despite all my efforts and good
>connections, I didn't hear your perspective until today. So the hundreds of
>thousands of fellow Minnesotans who may have watched TV or read the newspaper
>last week with me hungry for "real news" will never know your perspectives
or why
>the black bloc acted as they did.
heh. i live in what i swear is the cultura/political tundra of the
US--florida--so i understand entirely. i know that my son came home with
tales from his teacher about how the protestors were bad and the police
good. and my neighbors were surprised when i told them about other accounts
i want to make one thing clear though. i'm not part of any anarchist
group. my political work here involves pretty mainstream progressive
involvements. though i tend to sympathize with anarchists' views,
philsophically. i just posted that so people could read a justification.
and to stress again, that was the justificationof just one segment of
anarchists in seattle. they point out that they are only speaking for the
Black Bloc, not other groups.
There is a whole lot of truth in this posting
>that will never reach the uncoverted is what I'm saying. We're all
preaching to
>the choir here; my thing is how to we activate more women, mothers, sisters,
>daughters, spouses, partners, and friends to find this kind of info. Few
whom I
>know would not read all this with an open mind and see the parts that ring
true.
<sigh> i know this all to well since i've always worked with the
uncoverted for various reasons. i've never had the luxury of living in a
community with a lot of left activism. this means, though, that i'm not a
fan of preaching at anyone as i don't think it works. it just takes
patience. and, most importantly, i think it takes this kind of event to
spur people to move toward different analyses --they have insights into the
problems in their daily lives but they are often inchoate insights. in
turn, there are not many place and not much time for them to pursue
different ways of looking at the world. i always think that those of us
who've been able to do so are very lucky indeed --born into a certain
political and cultureal era, a certain milieu, stumbled over certain
teacher or colleagues or acquaintances, etc events like these start a
process of crystallization, but if left to languish it never gets further
than that stage.
oh i'm rambling...what i'm saying is that all too often i think we forget
all that was involved in getting us to become members of the choir. i'm
learning new and more things every day. we certainly weren't born that
way. so you're point is well-taken.
i wrote donna offlist about the issue you raise --how to utilize alt. media
to fight the mainstream media. we're setting up a N30 testimonial archive,
collecting the personal accounts/testimonials about what happened in
Seattle. I think this is very important. as you know, not many people
have time or patience for newsgroups or e-lists. but one thing we can do
is archive these accounts and make them accessible as a kind of alternative
source. [in some sense it's somewhat like anti-corporation sites which
are set up to expose the practices of corporations.]
also, if you've ever read doug mcadam's _freedom summer_ you might be
familiar with an argument he makes. a lot of upper middle class white kids
signed on to freedom summer. their experiences --their politicization
during those events--reached far beyond them as individuals because they
wrote home to family and friends about what they'd seen. mcadam points us
to understanding on these kinds of testimonials often played a role in the
birth and spread of all kinds of social movements that coalesced into what
we call "the 60s". so, this testimonial archive is a step in that
direction, only using mass media instead of personal letters.
i'm working on it right now, but the bare bones are at
http://www.flash.net/~oudies/pulp_culture/N30Archives.htm
i often do these things in spare time late at night, so excuse typos,
broken links due to typos! if you have stories/accounts that you've rec'd
from other lists send them to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
kelley
//
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