City Report Shows More Were Near Poverty in 2011

It’s 10 o’Clock on a Saturday night, and for the last 24 hours, I’ve been emailing a 15 year old girl pretty much non-stop. About Bab al Shams and the occupation of Palestine. I guess this is kind of the life of a teacher, right?

Uh. No. I don’t actually know many people who do this, even though most of my friends are educators. People tell me that I would be an “intolerably idealistic activist type” if I wasn’t such a cynical asshole pretty routinely.

I guess I feel like being something of a revolutionary is a popular image these days. Part of this might be something of a function of life in New York, but it really seems like the fashion has changed. Kuffiyahs and fitted dark Tshirts have replaced Lacoste polo shirts with ironed up collars. Mens Warehouse (which I recently had to make an expedition to in order to buy a suit for my sister’s wedding) has a sign in the Midtown Window saying “You don’t have to BE a suit to WEAR a suit.” But for those of us who fancy ourselves to actually serve as revolutionaries, instead of fashion ourselves after them, I have to wonder what it really is that motivates us, and then, naturally, what it is that motivates others. After all, how much different/better/more progressive would the world be if everyone committed themselves to truly revolutionary pedagogy and action?

The obvious answer is that we are driven by the injustice we see in the world around us, but for virtually everyone I know our understanding of this injustice started with some personal feeling of injustice, or that experienced by someone we loved.

It’s funny, really. It sometimes seems as though we are dealing with what is wrong with our own lives by engaging in some sort of never ending problem… we can’t control what is going on in our lives, and so we engage in something larger than ourselves.

I know what it is like to fight seemingly unwinnable battles. Whether it’s fighting to do right by students in the US’s education system, arguing for the rights of Palestinians in a climate where the unsubstantiated accusation of anti-semitism can silence an entire academic discipline, or doing attempting to expose Human Rights violations in central Africa and hoping for some kind of change, I’ve been involved in some way. By and large, these are battles I continue to fight, namely because they are far too important to give up on when things start to seem complicated.

In many ways the biggest void I feel between myself and so many of those around me is that I simply don’t understand why they are living their lives. Not to say that if they did they would “obviously” end up living their lives in a similar manner to the way I have chosen to lead my own, but just that they sort of “ended up” where they were and, due to a variety of circumstances, found themselves obliged to keep working in that direction, whether for kids, status, or an attempt to please biological families or partners.

I know it sounds like I ended that sentence way too early. But how should I end it? I don’t understand why they are living their lives… the way they are? for no apparent reason? That’s the other thought process that comes to mind. But it also isn’t what I want to say. I don’t understand what it is that makes them get up in the morning. What it is that makes them go to their jobs. I can’t imagine…. cannot… fucking… rationalize, that what guides people through life is fighting for more money and more money alone. While a substantial minority of us (in the United States at least) are, in some detached way, fighting to stay alive in a society where cash-flow dictates an individual’s right to survive or become a corpse, or are fighting for the future of children we may or may not have chosen to have, for most of us it is somewhat more subtle. We are trying to save up enough money to have the “adulthood,” or retirement, or whatever the hell it might be, of our dreams, often without knowning, or having had the chance to think through, exactly what those dreams might look like. And I just don’t get that.

I live in Manhattan. I have friends in a lot of different industries, spanning the entire moral spectrum. I know investment bankers at JP Morgan who are perfectly happy to work 90 hour work weeks because it makes them a decent amount of money now and holds the possibility of making them substantially more down the line. I have friends in Williamsburg who may or may not ever have a conventional job, because they are constantly hopping from one project to another, and because they are those people (we all know them) who have some sort of innate knack for making ends meet and finding just enough money to survive (having zero student loans and family to fall back on generally plays into this equation quite significantly). One thing that we all have in common (besides perhaps the latter) is that we are constantly making sacrifices in order to budget the thing that is most scarce for us: time. Whether it is time to spend with friends, to spend taking care of ourselves, or time to sleep (I know very few people who get as many four hour nights as I do), we are pretty consistently cutting back on our time and space, focussing instead on finding the time to fulfill our workplace responsibilities, our moral responsibilities, and take the necessary steps to care for ourselves. And for me, all that makes this bearable is an understanding that I am making a positive impact in the world.

And for that, I feel really different. Because I know SO. MANY. PEOPLE. Who seem to do it just for money! What is the point of going to a job you don’t believe in, just so you can have more money, to pay for you to go on existing, so you can keep going to your job, so you can continue having enough money to live, and one day, retire and pay for the medical care you will need to survive, before dying?!

Revolutionaries believe in changing the world and helping people, yes. But fundamental to this mentality is another concept of liberation. It is the concept of liberating ourselves. Of liberating ourselves (both our personal selves and our society) from the classism, the racism, the closed mindedness in which we were raised. A part of this is a reflection on life in the USA. A part of it is life as members of that phenomenally privileged class which, at least on the World Stage, refers to itself simply as “the West.”

Is it surprising that so many activists are travellers, and vice versa? Both are constantly fighting to escape our reality, to experiment with new ways of living, with new possibilities which bend or break what we are told are the barriers of “what is possible.” This can be achieved through art. Through politics. Through that absurd fusion of art, passion, and politics which composes the fabric our lives.

So I guess my long document ends with a question no less profound than the one we started with. How can we change the perspectives of as many people as possible? How can we manage to create a world in which more than a tiny minority of people are awakened to, or interested in, the struggles of the world?

Or is this more a frustration with the world as we know it? How did we get to the point where the priority was Money. It isn’t everywhere, to be sure. I’m sure Manhattan is more like this than many places, but very few places in the “Western World” could argue that the persuit of money has not, it some significant way, eroded the extent to which culture, relationships, and service functioned as seemingly important points of value for the world.

Right. I started typing this nearly two months ago. Now seems as good a time as ever to cut it short.

Andrew