On the Rise

Its an exciting time to be alive, to be in social movements, to engage in the dialog and to partake in the action.

Thousands of grassroots, community based organizations have taken power from the state and into their own hands. While fights for broader media access continue, more people are producing their own stories, news, and art than ever before. Siphoning off the waste of our over-producing society, millions have begun to live off our society's waste. Squatters movements, space reclamation, community gardening, organic agriculture, and sexual liberation have all exploded into wildly creative directions and have become less the property of a handful of "leaders" than a groundswell of the multiplicity, the millions of people working to create a revolutionary world.

Multiracial organizing, brown-black-red unity, intersections of environmentalism, disability, and race, animal rights and human rights, community health initiatives, preparation for radical shifts in economies and environments spell out a new direction for social movements where people care for each other. Today, the strength of our movements is that we are making things work beautifully, positively, and intersectionally and soon will trump the old model of swaggering, finger-pointing statists attempting to grab power over rather than share power between.

While we have untold environmental, cultural, political, and social challenges, we have planted the seeds of liberation and are watching them break apart the concrete of late capitalism, bring alienated communities into dialog and mutual support, and flower into possibility, joy, and liberation.