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Still Ready For The Revolution
I was listening to Something In The Air by Thunderclap Newman recently and it occurred to me I’ve been ready for a revolution my entire life. I was born into a world where Martin Luther King Jr. still drew breath, where Vietnam, Angola, Mozambique, and many other countries were fighting their own revolutions. Even at that young age I sort of understood they weren’t engaging in independent struggles but were all fighting the same system of oppression. That the success of one assisted in the success of others.
As I grew, so too did my understanding of other countries struggling to be free and independent, and even then I understood that independence was impossible without interdependence. We all achieve freedom together or we all suffer oppression alone.
Because I was a child, I had childish and romantic notions of revolution. I thought it would be all so easy and inevitable, and that the enemy couldn’t possibly be as devious and immoral as he turned out to be. Being on the defensive at that time, he assumed a more conciliatory pose, pretending that the fight was not existential. There was a patina of democracy, something so sacred that even the kinds of people who participated in slavery and genocide were bound by its principles. If the people wanted, really wanted change, then the system would give it to them. We didn’t understand their deviousness, but they…