Activism

They say people who live for a higher cause are happier than those who don’t. May you always find your happiness in alleviating the pain of others by standing up for what is right and honorable.

Taking back the production of our daily bread is not only metaphorically powerful; it is a practical step towards far more wide-reaching change. Bake our own bread – together – and it becomes clear how much more we can do for ourselves.

Weeks before either the Tunisian or Egyptian revolutions erupted, no one imagined they were going to happen. No one foresaw them. No one was talking about the Arab world or northern Africa as places with a fierce appetite for justice and democracy. No one was saying much about unarmed popular power as a force in that corner of the world. No one knew that the seeds were germinating.

Brandon Darby has been notorious in anarchist circles for a decade — first as a wing-nut, a macho bully, and a womanizer; then as an informant and agent provocateur. He started out as a hippie, became a pseudo-militant leftist, and is now a pundit on conservative blogs. scott crow is one of the few people who saw this entire series of transformations unfold up close.

In January of this year I took off to search for Occupy. I truly did not know what I would find, and must admit to a gnawing fear that I was going to return home to report that Occupy was, in fact, dead. As it turned out, that was most definitely not what I discovered.

I would have liked to know what the drummer hoped and what she expected. We’ll never know why she decided to take a drum to the central markets of Paris on October 5, 1789, and why, that day, the tinder was so ready to catch fire and a drumbeat was one of the sparks.