I am (an) expendable

I am (an) expendable. What the hell does that mean?

With the forced downtime in the music scene here, I warned of some other category posts being on their way. I now they have arrived, tremble in their presence ... mwa ha ha ha.

... yes ... so ...

Something quite important hit the blogosphere today. Blogger Maxwell Black made his way up to New York City from his native DC and taped an entire presentation by radical writer Mickey Z for public consumption on the net.

So, before I get to my own ranting, you can find all five youtube videos in one place at the original post here.

Back to the expendables thing. 

Ever since I was born I have been around activism and radical thinking, we all are but we have varying levels of awareness. As I became an adult I have hung around - both in person and 'virtually' - various groups and communities who are commited to social change, justice and freedom. But I've never felt more comfortable than I have 'hanging out' at Mickey Z's blog. This is because of the difficulty people have accepting what I think of as the true radical position - constantly putting yourself outside of what you know and putting yourself in the place of others. The majority of so-called liberal spaces on the net are simply caught up in arguing the toss within the system/discourse allowed to them by the people they supposedly oppose. Did that make sense? I hope so. 

Even at Mickey's blog, I was initially cautious as other semi-regulars were sometimes too caught up in the allowed discourse and thinking, for example, trying to fight nationalism with nationalism. But after a while I saw a core of people there who, to me, appeared genuinely sane. Of course, I was jumping the gun by judging people in the first place - we are all at our own point in the journey of enlightenment and realisation, me too. This brings me to what I want to say:

Becoming more aware than before and increasing your knowledge and perception of the world around you is not actually 'enlightenment' at all and it doesn't need any external help or any kind of epiphany. Enlightenment is the natural state of the human mind, a continuous process. If you are not experiencing it then you are in a state of suppression, oppression or outright denial. Daoists in China articulated this a long time ago - to enable enlightenment you simply have to do nothing. That is - don't stop it.

Enlightenment leads to right action, and not doing that which harms others. Hence the famous paradox in the same Daoist philosophy of finding right action through inaction. But I digress ...

In our world of corporate mass media and communications, language is a battlefield where words are captured and abused. Over at Mickey's blog, the community struggled to find a word outside of this, one that could describe people who strived to stay outside of the mind games and to stay radical. They (we?) settled with ... Expendables. 

So, follow the link, listen to Mickey's talk and hear some sanity while the Ol*mp*cs bashes us over the head with nation states and competition.