It's not business, just personal

One of my favourite lines from one of my favourite "old school" bloggers went something like this: "When I was young, I kept a journal and I would have died if anyone read it. Now I blog and I fear no one will read it."

I feel the need to express myself but at the same time be vague: Enter the world of blogging. Emotional exhibitionist anonymity. Sort of.

So, I'm researching for a paper and came across some rebellious classics on my bookshelf (Fanon, Galeano, Magon) and I couldn't help but be brought back in time. It was not that long ago that I swallowed the red pill. They were exciting times. We had confusion, despair, hope, dysfunction, passion, but above all, for me at least, the feeling that "I am not alone, and I am not crazy." One cannot underestimate the power of solidarity in sustaining one's belief in the movement. Sure, it can lead to hasty alliances and errors in judgement, but it sure helps when you feel your weakest.

I don't know where this is going, maybe no where. All I know is that hope is important, and for some reason sanity seems to be too. I'll leave you with one of my favourite of Galeano's passages from his book, We Say No:

"We have come from different countries, and we are here, reunited under the generous shade of Pablo Neruda - to join the people of Chile, who say no.
We also say no.
We say no to the praise of money and of death. We say no to a system that assigns prices to people...
We say no to a system that neither feeds its people nor loves them, that condemns many to a hunger for food and many more to a hunger for the embrace...
We say no to the lie...
The colonial inheritance obliges the so-called Third World - populated by third-class people - to accept as its own the memory of the victors who conquered it and to take on the lies of others and use them as its own reality. They reward our obedience, punish our intelligence, and discourage our creative energy...
We say no to fear. No to fear of speaking, of doing, of being...
As it happens, we are saying no, and by saying no we are saying yes...
By saying no to the devastating empire of greed, whose centre lies in North America, we are saying yes to another possible America, which will be born of the most ancient of American traditions, the communitarian tradition that the Chilean Indians have defended desperately, defeat after defeat, during the last five centuries.
In saying no to a peace without dignity, we are saying yes to the sacred right of rebellion against injustice and its long history as long as the history of popular resistance on the long map of Chile. By saying no to the freedom of money, we are saying yes to the freedom of people: a mistreated and wounded freedom, a thousand times defeated as in Chile and, as in Chile, a thousand times arisen."

I miss our conversations...