The Our Struggle Organization has stepped and built the foundation for future fundraising efforts and will soon be hosting several events with respect to speakers of certain inclinations. More information will be availible in short time and we will increase efforts on updating our progress day by day.
Currently our focus is upon infusing the name of our organization into the mindset of the average Edmontonian. This infusion is important as the rallying of the apathetic and the willing is key in the success of our plans. Of focus to our efforts right now is the drafting of the constitution that will be the physical embodiment of the culmination of the triumverate of growingly emergent minds within the organization. Humza, Ashley and myself have been working endless in our efforts of advertising and diffusing the elements of primacy of our message. Flyers will soon be availible as our first project. This project will outline the elements of message and be a test ground for some of our ideas that will be included within our constitution.
WE would encourage the imput of all those who visit our base site and the comments on the progress or message of our efforts.
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Intro
Peace / Paix
Our Struggle. Notre Lutte.
We are realists, first and foremost. We have no market illusions regarding the globalization of poverty. The sustainability of our current habits is nil. The evidence is the climate change that is threatening us with receding coast lines due to higher water levels, increasing desertification, the very possible extinction of whole species, and violent; more frequent storms. The same abuse that nature suffered is doled out daily to humans as well. The difference between nature and humans is that nature fights back, and wins. Starving children, refugees, war victims cannot raise themselves to defend their natural rights. Even in Canada the poor, aboriginals, animal rights activists are marginalized, and in some instances assaulted, abused, or murdered. The historical proclivities to push and oppress until the oppressed can bear no more is not sustainable. It may be profitable for a time. But in the end, it leads only to revolutions, revolutions in weather, revolutions of nations, and revolutions of class. Such catastrophic effects, such as revolution, are the real products of catastrophic repression, tyranny, and cruelty. The idealist is one who thinks that injustices can continue without consequence. They call themselves realists, but they are not. They are idealists, albeit their ideals are selfish. They are idealists because they are short-sighted. They do not see the consequences of their actions. They thought that two-hundred years of a stable environment meant two-hundred more years of a stable environment. How wrong they were. And look at the effects. We all suffer - humans, animals, and plants for the benefit of a relative few. In the same vein, a docile and stable populace is not inevitable. There have always been revolutions - violent ones. Revolution swept Europe, China, Russia, the Middle East, North America, South America, India, and all over Asia. They have all resulted in excessive blood. The cycle of genocide perpetrated by the powers that are, and the counter-attacks of excessively bloody revolutions by the powers to be, is not sustainable. Those vicious cycles of take until either nothing more can be taken or there is a revolution has already changed the global climate. What of when humanity wakes from its slumber and counter-attacks? How much blood will then be spilled? This cannot continue. That cycle is an idealist’s cycle, a cycle that is not sustainable regardless of its desirability.
We are the realists. We realize that governmental and economic tyranny, revolutionary terror, bloody post-revolution repression, and then back to tyranny is not feasible. It can be stopped. But there has to be a fundamental shift in how we all perceive each other, the world and everything in it, and beyond our world. First, to perceive human nature as inherently greedy will always bear sour fruit, becoming a self-fulfilling reality whereby those who are greedy are tolerated and even placed, by popular vote, to positions of responsibility and power. If people begin to view virtuous traits such as honesty, humility, intelligence, lovingness, fortitude, and courage as inherently human in nature, or at least inherently to be struggled for, then when those who are greedy attempt to exploit, they will be stopped by those who view their greed as unnatural. Their greed will clash egregiously with the more humane and wise populace.
The second way is to realize that consumerism does not necessarily entail sweating and slave-driving. Goods that are made by workers are paid a fair wages are goods that still, on the market place will be sold. Blood-goods such as diamonds from repressive regimes and textiles from sweatshops must be boycotted. When successfully boycotted an exploitative corporation must either amend its business practices as to treat the workers more humanely, or face bankruptcy and the possible ire of the populace.
The third way is perhaps the most fundamental. Our society is plagued by the worship of material objects. We rush blindly to the altars of chain-stores and supermarkets to satiate our unquenchable desire for material items. Desire for this world is unquenchable. That is why we see individuals with billions attempt for billions more. To attempt to satiate this desire is akin to a man who attempts to satiate his hunger by eating all he can eat. He will grow obese, he will grow lazy, he will not care if others have eaten and whether or not they are eating as luxuriously as he is. He will care only for himself. In a sense, we are that man. We are obese. We are lazy. We do not care about others. We eat sumptuously but care little if others do. Material desires can never be satiated and any attempt to do so is doomed to failure. The attempt must not be to satiate the desire but to control the desire, to choose rightly when to desire, what to desire, and the level of fervor with which to desire. We blindly rush towards the glitter, trampling over millions abroad and thousands here to achieve material items.
Why are those items so valuable? Our perceptions are arbitrary. They are relative to our physiology, age, emotions; physical orientation, ad infinitum. A blind man does not perceive visually. For him, the senses of the ears are much more exquisite. He smells like how a hummingbird smells the nectar of flowers. A child perceives a tree in a different way than an adult perceives a tree from atop another tree. A pigeon does not perceive a newspaper, while people not only perceive certain items to be newspaper but also discriminate between newspapers. The point is that perception is subjective and perhaps more importantly, perceptions are arbitrary. You are a human because of arbitrary physiology. Nothing unique makes you a human. To a hungry shark you are another piece of flesh. To the opposite sex, a potential mate. To an enemy, a danger. To a friend, a source of relief. To an owl, a part of the topography. To bacteria in the oceans, you are not even existent. To a computer you are stimuli, to physics you are mass, to sulphuric acid you are chemicals, to a virus you are a host, to a rock you don’t even matter, to the rain you are dry, to the sun you are cool, to the wind you are still. At once you are food, a mate, a foe, a friend, the topography, and even non-existent. What are you? You are nothing but what a perception, a reaction, a reflex, a reflection of some thing or some things outside yourself. Your flesh is the reflex of sex, the reaction of sperm to egg, and the reflection of genetic proteins. Nothing is what it is. It seems as it seems but never is as it is. No thing can be broken down to fundamental elements just as no thing can be objectively considered in its entirety, in the absolute realization of its potential. No thing is truly what it is, so no thing has a true value other than what arbitrary perception values that object as. So then, why are these material items, these goods and services so valuable to us, all of us, that we are willing to ignore the sweating and slave-driving, the environmental destruction, and the expulsion of native inhabitants that are the cause of the existence of those goods and services?
But we do not mean to. Nonetheless we are at fault. It is us who decide to support the market. We work strenuously, over-time, night-time; all the time to make more money to spend on more goods and services solely in order to overcome the stress of the impending work. We work to live, and live so that we may bear the drudgery of work. We create our misery. And in the process, we create misery for millions of others. Millions of people have lost their lands, homes, lives, families, culture, and freedom so that we may purchase goods and service and those who sell those goods and services able to profit prodigiously.
These three ways, valuing virtues, giving no patronage to exploitative companies, and changing our perceptions of what matters are what I believe will help change our ways, and in turn, change the world that we live in, if only a bit.
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