Deprive It of Oxygen

"What can we do?

We can hone our memory, we can learn from our history.

We can continue to build public opinion until it becomes a deafening roar.
...We can expose George Bush and Tony Blair - and their allies - for the cowardly baby killers, water poisoners, and pusillanimous long-distance bombers that they are.

We can re-invent civil disobedience in a million different ways. In other words, we can come up with a
million ways of becoming a collective pain in the ass.

When George Bush says "you're either with us, or you are with the terrorists" we can say "No thank you." We can let him know that the people of the world do not need to choose between a Malevolent Mickey Mouse and the Mad Mullahs [ or Obamney-ia ].

Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To
shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance,
our sheer relentlessness - and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones
we're being brainwashed to believe.

The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling - their ideas, their version
of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.

Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.

Another world is not only possible, she is on her way.

On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing."

Arundhati Roy, Confronting Empire
Porto Alegre, Brazil
January 27, 2003