ENOUGH WITH THE ON-LINE HIQ INTERNATIONAL WHINE AND CHEESE PARTY ALREADY!
The net is full of whine and cheesy posts and I'm getting nauseous from it already.
Many of you post a lot of "Isn't fascism getting ridiculous?" posts. Obviously you're disturbed by what's going down around you - so you brandish your keyboard and post a link. When you really go ballistic, you get sarcastic or sardonic. The ubiquitous injustice hurts you - but not quite enough.
What are you going to DO about where your country is going besides being a total limp dick and posting outrage after outrage on the net? How about a bit of uprising? (Nice pun, Doreen)
How about organizing demonstrations of the HIQ community? How's about organizing to brainstorm about what can be DONE to ameliorate the conditions for Joe Citizen?
The internet was invented:
1) the better to disseminate State-sanctioned modes of thinking, values, fnords and clichés
2) to provide the masses with the illusion that they are doing something when they post
3) to monitor what people are thinking when they go for the bait described in point (2)
By doing nothing and merely posting you are playing right into their hands. You are providing them with the information they want from YOU and effecting NOTHING.
The mega-message that you're sending is: I don't like what I see, but I'm a wuss who can't do anything about it but write. Governments LOVE emasculated intellectuals.
By calling Bush "Shrub" in message after message on the net you do nothing to diminish his power. You diminish yours. You do nothing but create the illusion of having diminished him in your mind. In fact, all you have done is sound peurile, and worse, impotent.
Observe Bakunin. Observe Louise Michel. Observe Emma Goldman (it is said that she never went to a speaking engagement without bringing a book so that when she was hauled off to jail she had something to read). Observe Margaret Sanger. Observe Gustav Landauer. They were intellectuals, surely of stature not less than yours. They wrote, to be sure, and if they were alive today they would, no doubt, avail themselves of the internet. But they principally took ACTION. They were people of action first and foremost. They put not only their brains at the disposal of the masses but also put their asses on the line for the sake of others. They didn't bellyache. When they wrote it was to enlighten the masses and galvanize them into a formidable force, not in order to alleviate their conscience and not in order to express themselves in such a way as to keep themselves safe. They acted. They took personal risks. They were, in a word, REAL intellectuals.
Now excuse me. I have to go back to working on the program for revision of Israel's electoral system that I've been batting my head against a wall for months working out with other intellectuals in a number of countries who are, like me, dedicating their lives to the real bettering of conditions of the citizens of their respective countries.
Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan, Tzfat, Israel
DoreenDotan@gmail.com
