In observance of the day, The World Can't Wait - Drive Out the Bush Regime called for people to wear orange jumpsuits at work, at the mall, on the bus to raise consciousness not only about American abuses at Guantanamo, in Iraq, and internationally with the practice of "extreme rendition", but also with the essential legalization of torture with the passage this fall of the Military Commissions Act of 2006.
With Corpus Delicti, I performed on Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica in an orange jumpsuit. Here are a few pictures (thank you James):
It was amazing the number of people who had no idea what the orange jumpsuits meant. I've had a number of people tell me lately that there's no point to political education or teach-ins, because everyone already knows what's going on. If random people making comments at us last night are any indication, a substantial number of people are clueless. (How to educate them is another question...)
1 comment:
Rosemary, you totally rock. I was brought back to Seattle in '96 when Kagami performed in front of Mitsubishi to protest clear cutting in Siberia (if memory serves me correctly). You bring up some important questions around apathy and I think the juxtoposition of the work you do and the landscape you are in makes for some powerful potential. Since the state of things is essentially that . . . "existing social conditions make the individual feel powerless. He lives in the contradiction between what he is and what he would like to be. Either he then becomes fully conscious of the contradiction and its causes, and so joins the political struggle for a full democracy which entails, amongst other things, the overthrow of capitalism; or else he lives, continually subject to an envy which, compounded with his sense of powerlessness, dissolves into recurrent day-dreams" . . . then the question about how to educate is not only extremely important but rather needs to be urgently addressed. Who are our current role models whose voices of empowerment can be heard above the noise of reality television and the laugh track of celebrity gossip? How can we engage eachother consciously within these "existing social conditions"? Interestingly, I received 3 chapter from a book that my Shakuhachi friend (Phil) is writing on the ways of listening - just when you sent your writings on "seeing". Together, these two subjects make for some powerful conscious soup! Thanks for all the interesting brain food! I look forward to reading this book by Berger and continuing a dialogue with you.
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