Skip to main content

Echoing Malcom

By Saqib
Reading Malcolm X's speeches, it is clear that he points to a historical trend in the process of obtaining independence from tyranny. In other words, history shows that people must be committed to overhauling the system and prepared to sacrifice for a great cause. The trouble comes in overcoming the anesthetization of the natural impulse that people have to change their surroundings. I feel that this is incredibly difficult in the modern world when entire industries have been created for the sole purpose of distraction and self-indulgence. Has that impulse changed? Is it still there? Sometimes I think that when people become so self-absorbed and ignorant of rampant injustice, they will only react when its too late. For instance, there have always been economic disparities but public anger only sets in when their houses are foreclosed and savings wiped out. Revolution then becomes the last refuge of the hopeless. Is there any point to calling for revolution when the only precursor to revolution is systemic failure and collapse?

Comments

Saqib said…
My horribly trite poem by the way:

Resistance begins with recognition,
Of the forces beyond control that control,
Resistance ends with change,
Not just platitudes some may extol.

We first seek change through the heart,
Through opening it to the pain of man,
The blood the heart bleeds is the fuel,
For the flames which revolution fans.

Resistance isn't a means or an end,
It's a state of being of those with open eyes,
Those who choose to make real choices,
Not the choices of those on high.
March 29, 2010 at 10:41 AM
VickyOrtiz said…
i really like your poem.
April 4, 2010 at 8:48 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Multicultural-ed student

By
Allow me to be a devil's advocate and speak for students who come form the "other"-ed cultural background, who were, and perhaps still are embracing multicultural imperialism in area studies, or in "inter-cultural communication" in this case. My point is, so long as the site of knowledge, and knowledge creation is West-centered, students from non-western backgrounds will face the difficult choice between co-optation and exclusion. As an international student, you are expected to "bring something different to the table", and the "table" can be a frustrating place: at best it will be in the form where the non-western culture that you represent is "seen as a rich storehouse of timeless wisdom from which the present had degenerated", at worst it will be a cultural freak show. I was shocked and deeply disturbed one time when a Chinese scholar invited to give a lecture on "culture" spent 15 minutes talking about "Chinese...
Post a Comment
Read more

Whose means justifies their end?

By
I spend a lot of my time teaching and disciplining children now-a-days and through these experiences, I have found many similarities in the ways that Marx and Engel construct their arguments for communism and against capitalism, most of which are shaped around the concept of deflection. First, let me provide an example from which my conclusions are built, all of which are inducted from daily experiences. I know that my experience is nothing novel or new, especially if anyone reading this has had the pleasure of working with large groups of kids. In a classroom there is supposed to be only one goal, one guider, and one “law maker” and that lovely job title has been bestowed upon me, the teacher. In trying to achieve my one goal to teach multiplication, I tell every student to be quiet and do their work. While not paying attention, I hear several of the students talking. When I look up, I single out the first one that I see talking (lets call him Crandon). I tell Crandon, “If you continu...
7 comments
Read more

Purdue's Professional Revolutionary

By RK
In light of the discussion we had during our advisee meeting on Friday about being strategic in our means as critical scholars I was struck by the words of Lenin who emphasizes the role of the intellectual. He says, "The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade-union consciousness, i.e., it may itself realize the necessity for combining in unions, for fighting against the employers and for striving to compel the government to pass necessary labor legislation, etc. The theory of socialism, however, grew out of the philosophic, historical representatives of the propertied classes, the intellectuals." (pg. 74) This idea of the bourgeois socialist intelligentsia as an instrument of raising consciousness and fomenting dissent is an ideal one I am sure but in contemporary times we, the academics, forming a substantial part of the "intellectual elite", occupy a unique position which forces us into ...
6 comments
Read more