Lizzi > Recent Status Updates

•many uncounted casualties of noncombatant civilians by disease, stray bullets, slave/owners, and white northern citizens protesting against going to war for emancipation.
•Slaves were encouraged by disruptions to challenge masters and masters became paranoid and “witch hunted” those suspected of planning uprising, as well as retribution toward wives of runaway male slaves who joined the Union army.

•popularization of social media is shaped by neo-liberalism/libertarian ideals, as well as a new-age individualist Utopianism and the New left.
•social media companies utilize this reputation to profit by showing “anti-systemic, vaguely countercultural quests to save the world”.

•the “Tahrir model” inspired protests in Spain and Greece but ultimately did not lead to collapse of the government, because their institutions were stable enough and life was easy enough, compared to the global south where more livelihoods are on the line.
•”Unless society actually ground to a halt, and the reproduction of the economic system became impossible, the institutions could survive”

The price of the liberation of the white people of the liberation of the blacks.

If one is continually surviving the worst that life can bring, one eventually ceases to be controlled by a fear of what life can bring.

White Americans have thought of [concept of color] as their shame(…)white Americans have supposed “Europe” and “civilization” to be synonyms(…)and have been distrustful of other standards and other sources of vitality(…)if we(…)persist in thinking of ourselves as [a white nation], we condemn ourselves(…)if we could accept ourselves as we are, we might bring new life to the Western achievements.

(…) the sloppy and fatuous nature of American good will can never be relied upon to deal with hard problems.

It is the responsibility of free men to trust and to celebrate what is constant—birth, struggle, and death are constant(…)to be able and willing to change(…)But renewal becomes impossible if one supposes things to be constant that are not—safety, for example, or money, or power.

White Americans have contented themselves with gestures that are now described as “tokenism”(…) White Americans congratulate themselves on the 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation in the schools; they suppose (…) this was proof of a change of heart (…)[we] do not believe that this immense concession would ever have been made if it had not been for the competition of the Cold War.

In order to change a situation one has first to see it for what it is: (…) [black Americans] has been formed by this nation, for better or for worse, and does not belong to any other—not to Africa, and certainly not to Islam.

I am also concerned for their dignity(…)must oppose any attempt that [black Americans] may take to do to others what has been done to them(…)Whoever debases others is debasing himself.

One cannot argue with anyone’s experience or decision or belief.

(…) looked back at Elijah, who was saying that no people in history had every been respected who had not owned their land (…) only [black americans] who remains trapped, disinherited, and despised, in a nation that has kept him in bondage for nearly four hundred years and is still unable to recognize him as a human being.

[black people] cannot risk assuming that the humanity of white people is more real to them than their color (…) this leads (…) to a state of mind in which, having long ago learned to expect the worst, one finds it very easy to believe the worst.

When he realizes (…) the attempt of white people to destroy him (…) is utterly gratuitous, it is not hard for him to think of white peoples as devils.

[black soldier] knows that the white G.I. has informed the Europeans that he is subhuman(…) watches German prisoners of war being treated by Americans with more human dignity than he has ever received at their hands(…) far freer in a strange land than he has ever been at home.

Why were they hearing it now, since this was not the first time it had been said? (…) it is not he who has done it but time. Time catches up with kingdoms and crushes them, gets its teeth into doctrines and rends them; time reveals the foundations on which any kingdom rests, and eats at those foundations, and it destroys doctrines by proving them to be untrue.

To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.

(…)to love everybody(…)applied only to those who believed as we did, and it did not apply to white people(…)what was the point(…)of my salvation if it did not permit me to behave with love toward others, no matter how they behaved toward me? What others did was their responsibility, for which they would answer when the judgement trumpet sounded. But what I did was my responsibility.

Black people, mainly, look down or look up but do not look at each other, not at you, and white people, mainly, look away.

The fear that I heard in my father’s voice[…]when he realized that I really believed I could do anything a white boy could do[…]was not at all like the fear I heard when one of us was ill or had fallen down ten stairs or strayed foo far from the house[…]a fear that the child, in challenging the white world’s assumption, was putting himself in the path of destruction.

Every effort made by the child’s elders to prepare him for a fate from which they cannot protect him causes him secretly[…]await[…]his mysterious and inexorable punishment[…]He must be good not only to avoid being punished by them; behind their authority stands another[…]this filters into the child’s consciousness through his parents’ tone of voice as he is being exhorted, punished, or loved.

Everyone else[…]would never, by the operation of any generous human feeling, cease to use you as an outlet for his frustrations and hostilities. Neither civilized reason nor Christian love would cause any of those people to treat you as they presumably wanted to be treated; only the fear of your power to retaliate would cause them to do that.

You must[…]accept them with love[…]They are[…]still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.

Many of them[…]know better, but[…]people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger[…]the danger, in the minds of most white Americans, is the loss of their identity.

•naming was difficult due to many completely obliterated bodies
•families were striped of the ability to even mourn because of the uncertainty of whether the soldiers were still alive
•prisoners size exceeded both north and south’s ability to supply food and medical care; regular prisoner exchanges

•personal efforts to communicate info about soldiers’ status
•dog tags, pre-written letters, bible inscribed with name and address

•sanitary commissions size far exceeded Christian commission; more importance on modern warfare realism rather than sentimentalism
•sanitary commission created Hospital Directory which acted as communication agency for families about soldiers’ conditions

•acknowledgement of the importance of information, whether a soldier is dead or alive
•wrong and confusing info in casualty lists

-embalming and the entire funeral industry started during civil war
-embalming as a way to “defy death” and grieve

-Arab Spring
-when gov’t shut down telecommunications, protesters in Cairo were still able to spread info bc of dense population and tightly knit communities
-the complexity of protest participation motivations, although the result is the same
-US backed brutal crackdown of leftist uprising in Bahrain, in partnership w/ Saudi Arabia

•Egypt earned huge debt relief in exchange for supporting Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Neoliberal reforms did not magically deliver democratization.
•Neoliberalism & communism—authoritarianism in different flavors
•Egypt protests over the murder of Khalid Said

•when a movement insists no leaders, de facto leaders appear anyway except no fair selection/removal mechanism. Having leaders is crucial to successful revolutions.
•creating social democracy ends in one of two ways: explicit socialism or it’d fall into neoliberalism
•view on progress as means to an end (historical teleology, roots in Christianity) is dangerous—progress needs continuous maintenance