| Subject: Fwd: Wikileaks Rally Planning Document |
| From: Clark Robinson <robinsonchicago@gmail.com> |
| Date: 1/11/11, 17:47 |
| To: Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> |
| CC: evilevilcouch@gmail.com |
In the days to come, we will stand at the crossroads of the infinite, a tipping point, one of those precious few moments in the vast stretches of humanitys history where the actions of a dedicated few can dictate the course of all mankind.
So we must ask ourselves an important question: what is the future we want to live in? Is it a future divided and bloodied by endless strife, fueled by willful ignorance and petty disagreement? Is it a future dominated by dizzying new heights of thoughtless greed and unthinking self-absorption? Is it a future of zero sum, where the gain of one man must be taken by the loss of another, where parents must be forced to think that the only way to feed their children is to steal the bread from the mouths of their neighbors? Is it a future where the unrestrained freedom of the few is bought at the cost of the liberty of the many and where the happenstances of birth, the chaotic lottery of genetics and lineage and class and location, should determine the course and the worth of a childs life?
Or is it a future where the grand possibilities of cooperation have been recognized and the untold bounties of our combined efforts realized, where humanitys greatest dreams are made manifest?
Is it a future where no one has to see their children struggle in vain through their prime years, unemployed and unproductive, where no one has to see their proud parents descend into the indignity of poverty? Is it a future where those in need are given the help they need, the endless varieties of help that we all sometimes need in order to be able to help ourselves? Is it a future full of compassion and brotherhood, where the first thought is not whose fault is this?, but rather, how can we make it better? Is it a future where we give all people the full respect they deserve, not because of the luck of their birth or even just for great deeds they have accomplished, but simply because they are human beings? Is it a future where we have realized that, whether we like it or not, we must all make our way through this strange, beautiful, wondrous world together?
I know what future I want, and I know that I am prepared to shed my sweat as well as my blood to bring it about. I want the future of our dreams, not of our nightmares.
So, I suppose, that actually leaves us with two questions.
What is the future you want to live in?
And how hard are you willing to fight for it?
For we undoubtedly live in tumultuous times and the future is nothing if not uncertain. 43 million Americans are currently living, or should I say, struggling to live, in poverty. One in seven families cannot afford to eat without government assistance. One in ten Americans are unemployed. In 2009 the wealthiest 25% of US households owned 87% of the countrys wealth, the middle 50% of the country held 13%, while the bottom quartile held no net wealth at all--they are living on pure, unadulterated debt. 25% percent of the American people. 60 million Americans have no health insurance coverage, their entire livelihoods and lives teetering on the thin edge of fates razor.
And yet, at the same time, we live in an age that is absolutely full of wonder. More than 10 years ago, the 1.4 ton supercomputer Deep Blue beat Grandmaster Gary Kasparov at chess. Today, we can fit the processing power of that 1.4 ton computer onto a chip the size of your thumbnail. Ten years ago, it cost 10 million dollars to sequence the first human geonome. Today, a geonome can be sequenced for less than $1000. We live in exponential times. The efforts we make today will be magnified unimaginable through ten thousand tomorrows-- so too will our failures, but none will reverberate with more chilling effect than a failure to try. I fear that that our country, similar to our uninsured countrymen, is being walked on that razors edge, and precious little attention is being paid to where our steps will lead us.
I know that I am only alive and free today because brave men and women stood up before me, because they dared to aspire to leave the world better than they found it. They disbelieved those who told them that their efforts were for naught, their goals impossible. When tyranny shackled them, they cast off the chains. They stood up for equality, and when the firehoses knocked them down, they stood up again. They dared to ignore those who strove to drive them apart, the fear-mongerers and the war-hawks, and to do the things that no one thought could be done. We fight an evil that is more insidious, but no less dangerous.
We have many urgent challenges facing us, so we must not let ourselves be distracted by fear; we must be focused and productive. We have no time for the needless, endless delaying of electioneering politics. We must demand competency, accountability, and transparency, and we must demand them now. We must demand campaign finance reform including strong public financing and a real single-payer healthcare option. We must demand an open Internet enshrined in law. and we must demand stricter regulations on trusts and monopolies, including the re-instatement of the Glass-Steagal act. We must demand a massive investment in clean energy and our nations failing infrastructure. We must demand a repeal of the PATRIOT Act and with that the return of our dignity as citizens, and we must also make it most crystal clear that America does not torture--even when it is called extreme interrogation.
But more than all of that, we must demand a change in the tone of our nations discourse and direction. We must demand respect, honesty, compassion, and we must stop tolerating corruption and gross hypocrisy. We must demand a government that is run by honorable and noble men and women, great statesmen, not dirty politicians. We must do these things not because they are easy, nor simply because they are hard, but because they must be done and because they are right.
I think what we need now more than anything is to realize our own greatness. Not to realize that we are great--for we are not, not yet--but to make our greatness real, to fill ourselves so full of courage and inspiration that we cannot help but overflow and remake the world with the force of our actions. Wouldnt it be a wonder, if one day we could count ourselves among them? Would it not be one of the most fantastic wonders of all, if our children, and our childrens children, if they all counted us among those heroic men and women, the brave and the righteous?
Many of us have become jaded and cynical, and not without justification. For certain many of our countrymenhave already been a great disappointment. They have greedily shirked their humane duties, betrayed the proud pasts of their ancestors and the bright hopes of our children in exchange for an ugly train of fleeting indulgences...but that is absolutely no reason for us to give in to the gilded temptations of anger and fear and blame. It must rather serve to drive us to redouble our efforts, to do everything that we can, everything and even more, to forgive and forge ahead, because we have learned that if we do not stand and rise to the brutal challenges that lay before us... no one will stand in our place.
Together, united, we might yet live. But divided, our efforts shall falter, and we shall surely die, and all our grandest aspirations will perish with us. Not likely today or tomorrow, perhaps not even on a day that you or I live to see, but harbor no doubt in your heart or your brain or your gut, if we do not realize that our greatest strength is each other -- all of us, together-- if we do not learn to see past our superficial differences of religious dogma and social more and recognize our vast commonality--recognize the fact that when it comes down to it, we are all the same, we are all human--if we cannot shatter the chain of our history, atrocity after bloody atrocity linked in horrible, unbroken succession...if we cannot do these things, then mankind is surely doomed. And the wondrous world that we have created will collapse under its own mighty weight, and it will burn, and it will engulf all humanity in its terrible funeral pyre. If we do not grow up, as individuals, as a culture, as a species....we will destroy all that our forefathers and foremothers fought for, all that they built, and our progeny will suffer among the smoldering ruins of mankinds brilliant yesterdays.
There will be naysayers, those who think that what we intend cannot be accomplished. Those who think the Grand Experiment of America has already failed and that great men and women only live in the history books, those who think that we no longer live in an age of legends and heroes, those of little hope and little faith and little minds. Those who doubt the potential in the fundamental goodness of the human spirit and our universal quiescent greatness, who see their own darkness cast upon the face of the world and think they prove the inevitability of the coming night, confusing their willful short-sightedness for a triumph of cold realism and steady logic and not realizing that all their shadows do is prove the existence of the light.
So what do we do? Do we take their word for it? Is the task that lies before us so great that we should stop struggling, that we should give in and surrender? Is the spirit of hope so long dead that nothing can be done? Do we truly stand facing the impossible? I have learned that the most important thing that one must remember about naysayers is that, despite what they would have you believe, they are not always right. If they say we will be fools, for trying the impossible and failing, then I say they will be fools, for calling a thing impossible and living to see it accomplished. If they say the odds are against us, I say never tell me the odds. The odds underestimate how much of a fight we can put up.
In answer those who criticize and cower, I say: if we cannot find a way, we will make our own.
Now, today, we have a chance to start proving those who doubt us wrong---and I say we take it.
We need you to take a risk with us, not only because the reward is far more than worth it-- for what could be worth more than a free tomorrow?--but because the alternative, to sit still and take no conscious risk, to make a choice by making none at all, is to risk one of the most dreadful fates there is. It is to risk the paralysis of cowardice and a slow, debilitating murder for your mind at the hands of fear and doubt.
So I ask you with utmost earnesty: cast aside your cynicism and scorn, open yourself up and let your old wounds be healed, and let all misdeeds be forgiven. Cut through the numbing chains of apathy and ambivalence, dismiss the needy petulance of outrage and entitlement, pierce the beguiling veil of easy entertainment and discard the high mantle of righteous indignance, cast aside the shallow pleasures of consumerism and set yourself free from the unquenchable fires of revenge and hatred, let them burn out and allow yourself to grow mighty from the ashes. I ask you to distrust the promises of the powerful and discredit the hateful hypocrites who clog the airwaves. I ask you to turn your back on fear, to look away, for a moment, from how and why things might go wrong, and instead to focus on the great deeds that lie within our grasp. An answer to the energy crisis. An end to world hunger, an end to disease. A truly global network of free information that could connect and unite all humanity. These are things that we can see accomplished, if we do the right things now. Let us focus on doing the right things today for the best tomorrow, because tomorrow begins today.
I ask you to make the effort to reach out to each other, to help, to understand. For we need you now, and we need the best of you. We need your stubborn hope and foolhardy courage, your defiant spirit and unwavering dedication to a good cause, your brave individuality and generous nature, your hunger for innovation and your passion for a good days work. We need the light that burns within you. Because it is not too late--if we try, we can save our selves, our world, and our future. But we must try. And if we do not try...then we deserve whatever ill fates befall us.
I ask you to take your own deep drink of liberty, for it is still yours to take. For that is the good news: it is yours to take, it is still yours and no one elses. The bad news is that no one can do it for you; to be truly free you must free yourself. So take a deep drink, and spit it in the faces of those who dont like it.
Do you feel it, now? Humming in your bones, the call to greatness? The ignition of a thundering dynamo, a roaring engine, straining to break loose? That electrifying potential running down your spine and over your arms, the shivering power that tells you that if you would only just attempt it, if you would straighten your back and speak your heart, that if you would stand up, others would stand with you? That you could make the slightest difference, which is all the difference, and you could reshape the future of humanity, that if you help, we may find that, contrary to all popular belief, mans best days still lie ahead in the uncharted darkness.
But we need your light to help us see the way.
The day will come, when we all must take a stand, and that day will ring strong through the halls of history. And while that day is not yet come, we cannot merely lie in wait for its arrival. We must plan; build our strength and gather our allies. The best thing for us to do right now is what I am doing today--weve gotta raise our voices.
We must speak up for the good and against the bad, speak from our hearts and speak those precious, powerful truths which we cannot deny, speak them and write them and post them, plaster them to the concrete and paint them on the glass, nail them to the doors of the churches and the mosques and the synagogues, sing them in the streets and the bars and the parks, yell them all from the rooftops and chant them on the steps of city hall. Fill the world so full of truth that it can no longer be ignored, so that it touches the insulated and moves the reluctant, so that it echoes in the ears of the deaf and is seared in the sight of the blinded. In the end it will be the truth that sets this country free, and so what we must do first is to let it ring.
Let the truth ring, my brothers and sisters.
Let it ring today, before it is tomorrow and it is too late.