Why We Revolt - The Butterfly and the Boiling Point

Comment

Comment by Mark Szpakowski on April 3, 2011 at 8:09pm

Hi Ria, when you respond to "what is the continuity that furthers?" with the question "Isn't that life itself, evolution itself?", here's how that comes home for me.

I am holding, and being held by, life itself. But that just makes the question even more original and personal :-)

In practical terms, ALIA and AOH and Theory U and others suggest something like this:

• how to hold yourself in your highest intention is personal practice
• how the group holds itself in its members' highest intentions is group practice
• 'it takes a field to hold a field'

That last one perhaps was a magic point felt recently in public squares. Attending to the first two may be part of the continuity spreading that point out in time and space.

That includes stories that are meaningful personally, to groups, and in publics, channelled through media of all scales, including social (like this one) and network (Al Jazeera!) media. For the Egyptians one story is their constitution: they get to write their future selves.

Comment by Ria Baeck on April 3, 2011 at 6:08pm

Mark wrote: "The question then is, what is the continuity that furthers?"

Isn't that life itself, evolution itself?

Or are you asking something different?

Comment by Mark Szpakowski on March 28, 2011 at 4:32pm

Here's a few follow-ups:

 

Wael Ghonim writes:

I'm writing an op-ed in one of the most read newspapers in the US. The theme is going to be: "How can the world support Egypt's revolution". The idea is to provide concrete and actionable items on what can be done to ensure that Egypt's transformation to democracy is going to happen in a successful way. This is not an invitation to intervene in Egyptian internal issues rather how to technically and practically support the demands of the people of Egypt.

You can contribute at this Google Moderator page.

 

Related to that is this Digital Town Hall event on April 4th:

On April 4, the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University will be holding a Digital Townhall meeting to connect activists who were leading the protest movement in Cairo with researchers at Stanford, Harvard, and the University of British Columbia. This will be an opportunity to hear directly from activists about their experiences leading protests, using social media to influence events, and what assistance they could use to increase their influence going forward.

Finally, in a North American context, here is Bob Herbert's final column for the New York Times, pointing out incisively and starkly how the USA is reaching its own boiling point.

 

Comment by Susan Szpakowski on March 26, 2011 at 9:00pm

Great article! Uncanny that she talks about the moment of suspension as being common to both revolutions and disasters. 

"When a revolution is made, people suddenly find themselves in a changed state—of mind and of nation. The ordinary rules are suspended, and people become engaged with each other in new ways, and develop a new sense of power and possibility.... This state often arises in disasters as well, when the government is overwhelmed, shut down, or irrelevant for people intent on survival and then on putting society back together."

It seems that we are in the midst of accelerated suspensions, on a massive scale. Perhaps there are now more latent revolutionaries among us and we are getting better at seizing these moments; we are less willing to be manipulated or shut down, as in the wake of 9/11 and as documented in Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine.

Even as Japan continues to reel from its triple earthquake/tsunami/nuclear disaster, there are movements afoot to turn recovery into revolution, to build anew rather than simply rebuild. Watch for that story In the upcoming issue of Fieldnotes.