If I were free…
If domination, hierarchy, privilege, patriarchy, racism, ecocide & genocide, class & caste, nationalism, ethnocentrism, representation were abolished… if manipulation or outright theft of personal agency, norms & mythic standards of identity, all forms of police and all the other burdens humanity has endured for millennia were to be thrown off… if we build positive notions of freedom, focused on the freedom-to, rather than languish under notions of -unfreedom, the contradictory freedom-from – contradictory because if you feel a need to have a freedom-from, you’re not truly free at all… if all oppressions could be cast aside and a multitude of better worlds and communities could pop up like so many weeds breaking through the cracks of the coerced, the forced, and the un-natural…
“If…”
The risks and uncertainty of freedom are real, but are they more threatening than the certainty of countless & painfully familiar sufferings and daily humiliations under domination? The persons who contributed to building the hegemononic society of control had no crystal ball, no certain or objective knowledge of how their systems of domination would turn out. Likewise, none of us who stand and resist possess any roadmap certain to lead to the downfall of hegemony.
At the very least, we are united in our common recognition of the overbearing wrong-ness of the state of the world, today; it’s ever-present violence at every level of our lived experience. At the very least, we become accomplices in our common understanding that we cannot sit by and do nothing. In a cause & effect world, we must take action against the conditions of domination, of the domestication of all life for the purpose of consumption, consumption which feeds the systems of domination.
Recognizing that we share similar persistent dreams, our imaginations insisting even in the face of all the pain and suffering inflicted up this world that we CAN be free, we take aim not only at the institutions and the individuals who serve and pursue domination over other persons and communities, we take aim as well at the internal domination of repressed hearts, minds, spirits and imaginations which stifle our agency, circumscribe our lives and fill up every hole left by the alienation of un-freedom with the banality of what passes for life, today; a domesticated, increasingly dominated life.
Because we must…
Understanding that we must free ourselves, together; that we must free ourselves if we are to lend a hand in freeing one another, and we must lend a hand to one another in order to get free, we acknowledge that we must do both together, at once, as part of the same process.
Because we must take affective action inside ourselves, in our relationships and the world around us if we want to have an effect on the horizons & potentials of our lives, we seek the de-colonization and re-wilding of everyday life.
ReWyld!