Avoid The Unimaginable

Tom Hayden

December 11th, 1939 - October 23rd, 2016

"Our work is guided by the sense that we may be the last generation in the experiment with living. But we are a minority -- the vast majority of our people regard the temporary equilibriums of our society and world as eternally-functional parts. In this is perhaps the outstanding paradox: we ourselves are imbued with urgency, yet the message of our society is that there is no viable alternative to the present. Beneath the reassuring tones of the politicians, beneath the common opinion that America will "muddle through", beneath the stagnation of those who have closed their minds to the future, is the pervading feeling that there simply are no alternatives, that our times have witnessed the exhaustion not only of Utopias, but of any new departures as well. Feeling the press of complexity upon the emptiness of life, people are fearful of the thought that at any moment things might thrust out of control. They fear change itself, since change might smash whatever invisible framework seems to hold back chaos for them now. For most Americans, all crusades are suspect, threatening. The fact that each individual sees apathy in his fellows perpetuates the common reluctance to organize for change. The dominant institutions are complex enough to blunt the minds of their potential critics, and entrenched enough to swiftly dissipate or entirely repel the energies of protest and reform, thus limiting human expectancies. Then, too, we are a materially improved society, and by our own improvements we seem to have weakened the case for further change... Some would have us believe that Americans feel contentment amidst prosperity -- but might it not better be called a glaze above deeplyfelt anxieties about their role in the new world? And if these anxieties produce a developed indifference to human affairs, do they not as well produce a yearning to believe there is an alternative to the present, that something can be done to change circumstances in the school, the workplaces, the bureaucracies, the government? It is to this latter yearning, at once the spark and engine of change, that we direct our present appeal. The search for truly democratic alternatives to the present, and a commitment to social experimentation with them, is a worthy and fulfilling human enterprise, one which moves us and, we hope, others today."

Quote excerpted from The Port Huron Statement, 1962

This Makes Sense

"From the time I was kid, I saw the broader context of how we live here in the U.S. When I was twelve, I saw Edward R. Murrow’s Harvest Of Shame and that was it. It led me to uncover the image versus the reality of how people live. I then learned to pronounce "apartheid" and saw the treatment of blacks here in this country as they struggled for civil rights. It made me question deeply and ask myself: How can people like migrant workers who are helping us eat not have a pot to piss in? I started learning about countries that have a "share-the-wealth" system and I said to myself, There is nothing wrong with that. This makes sense.

Capitalism’s problem is that it has nothing to say about how to combat greed. For all the moralizing this country does, people don’t get it: They’re greedy. And it's gotten worse in my lifetime. You don’t even have to have socialism. I am talking about minimal things. Put money aside to fund playgrounds and high school football teams. Are you kidding me? The Grammy Awards has to make a plea to keep music in schools? I mean, what planet are we on? I guess I am asking another question in my work as well: What happened?"

From Lewis Black's interview in The Progressive, April 2007

The Principles Of Our Freedom

"Let us close the springs of racial poison. Let us pray for wise and understanding hearts. Let us lay aside irrelevant differences and make our Nation whole."

Wheels Of Fate

"Tiananmen showed the world that the Chinese people are no different from everyone else. When given the chance to express their views freely, they seized it and howled in unison their desire for democracy, freedom and human rights. Although their understanding of the concepts was elementary, they instinctively grasped, like the protesters in Place de la Bastille and Wenceslas Square before them, that these ideals formed the foundation of any civilised and humane nation."

Quote excerpted from Ma Jian's Tiananmen Square 25 Years On

"Life is not what you alone make it"

Yuri Kochiyama

May 19, 1921 – June 1, 2014

The Ballad Of William Worthy

William Worthy

July 7th, 1921 - May 4th, 2014

"Only a gullible American public would go on, revolution after revolution, decade after decade, swallowing what Lippmann and Merz nailed as "double­ think" long before George Orwell coined the word. Even if a dying or already dead revolutionary government some­ how managed to spread feeble propaganda beyond its own borders, what revolution-hungry people anywhere on earth would buy into and emulate a widely heralded and demonstrable failure? ... With few exceptions, the American people for years after a revolution receive totally negative journalistic images, with virtually nothing to suggest a return to normalcy in the lives of most of the people."

Quote excerpted from Prolonged Surrender to Reality: U.S. Media Coverage Of Revolutions, 1985

Witness To History

The '60s: Decade Of Change

"My photographs became my protest. My friends stood up and picketed, and I was a surrogate of them. I protested for them and with them, through my pictures." -Benedict J. Fernandez

On exhibit from May 2nd – Friday, July 20th

Bronx Documentary Center

614 Courtlandt Avene, Bronx, NY

Photograph: 1968 MLK Solidarity march, © Benedict J. Fernandez

Let Freedom Ring

Martin Luther King, Jr.

January 15, 1929 - April 4, 1968

"Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends. And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'"

If There Is No Struggle There Is No Progress

"Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters... This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will." -Frederick Douglass

The Worldwide Wave Of Action begins April 4th and runs through July 4th. During this three-month cycle, people throughout the world will be protesting corruption, rallying around solutions and taking part in alternative systems. The new paradigm will be on full display.

Studies have proven that it only takes 3.5% of the population taking nonviolent action to create meaningful and positive change. The Worldwide Wave Of Action gives all of us who want change a powerful opportunity to make it happen and move society forward. Change-makers all over the world will be engaged at the same time in an unprecedented wave of transformation.

On April 4th, there will be Worldwide Wave launch celebrations at hundreds of former Occupy locations globally to honor Dr. Martin Luther King’s legacy of nonviolent action. The day will be spent connecting with allies and strategizing Spring action campaigns. This campaign will become what you, the people, make of it, self-organizing and organically evolving, a new culture will emerge.

What are you most passionate about? What are you doing to be the change? Whatever it is, passionately be it in public this Spring. We have power in numbers. United we are unstoppable.

The Gifted Hunter... One Aim, One Destiny

Chokwe Lumumba

1947 - 2014

"Capitalism, at its rankest form, is not a humanistic economic system. It allows the most powerful to tear into the economic fabric of the least powerful. It allows people with big money to control people with no money, low money and small money in many ways including politically because the people with the money the determinant of who runs for office." -from Jackson Free Press interview

Days Of Decision

Photograph from Freedom Now! Forgotten Photographs Of

The Civil Rights Struggle (University of California Press, 2014).

"Where words leave off, music begins."

Pete Seeger

Rest In Paradise

"Decade after decade. Singing and agitating and inspiring the children and the grandchildren and the great-grandchildren of those who had heard him singing the songs of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in 1938, or serenading Eleanor Roosevelt in 1944, or accompanying Henry Wallace’s presidential campaign in 1948. The hundreds of Occupy Wall Street activists who joined Seeger on a thirty-five-block march through Manhattan in Octover 2011 knew that he was seventy years older than they were, but he was one of them." -John Nichols, The Nation