It can be done. Now is the time.

An excellent article by Kevin Reese:


It Can Be Done. Now is the Time. Americans Can Stop the Corporate Machine and Create a New World
By Kevin Zeese

October2011.org seeks to Stop the Machine and Create a New World. It can be done. Indeed, it must be done and now is the time to do it. The thousands who have joined October2011.org know the challenges we face but we also know that the disastrous direction the country is going is unacceptable. We have seen that the normal tools - elections, lobbying and education - do not work. The U.S. is facing a crisis on many fronts - economic, environmental and in foreign relations - and the government does not respond or even makes things worse.

We certainly understand the despair, lost hope and discouragement that many Americans feel about the U.S. political system. The system seems designed to make change impossible. We also see the power and sophistication of the corporate propaganda media machine. But, we also see people in the United States seeing through the propaganda, understanding the truth and getting angry. In every rebellion around the world that has occurred in the last year - from Egypt to Spain - the view that it can’t be done, the people will not rise up would have been the belief of 95% of the population before it happened. Predicting the future is not as easy as it looks. There is a lot of evidence that the time may be right for an American Awakening. The past is not always the future.

The organizers of October2011.org are well aware of the challenges we face and aware of the power of the U.S. police forces to stamp out dissent. We have faced them before. We are developing contingency plans to deal with those issues. And, we know if the police remove us on the first day, October 6, we will come back in the days that follow with even more people. We will not give up. Indeed, in Spain on the first day, the police cleared out a few hundred people, and then they came back two days later with thousands more and stayed for a month. They continue to pressure the government with their indignant independent movement demanding real, fundamental change starting with real democracy, not the phony two party charade they encounter in Spain as we also do in the United States.

October2011.org is a peoples led effort. The people who have signed up are doing their part: Spreading the word; Urging their friends and families to come; And, coming themselves. We all know we cannot let business as usual continue -- it is literally killing us and others, degrading the environment, destroying the middle class and creating massive transfers of wealth to the richest 1%.
One thing that stops many from doing anything is fear of failure. We don’t fear failure.

October2011.org will be a success. The issue is what level of success will it be? That is up to you, dear reader. If you see the misdirection of the country, do not despair, join us. Unified with confidence in our power we cannot be stopped.

There are always people who say “it can’t be done.” If the human species lived by that credo we’d still be living in caves and not growing our own food. Africans would still be slaves in the United States. Women would not be allowed to vote. All of these changes became inevitable after seeming impossible. Indeed, change is inevitable. Our economy is collapsing and government is dysfunctional. This cannot continue. Change will occur. It is our job to direct it to a better world.

People involved in this effort have been organizing for years, some for decades. Some of the leaders, including me, organized events where 130+ were arrested in December and 110+ in March protesting the wars. Many were part of organizing demonstrations of tens of thousands of people. This event builds on years of organizing, not just demonstrations but organizations. It is not an event coming out of nowhere or disconnected from other organizing work. And, none of us see this event as the final event that will solve all the problems the United States is facing.

We see October2011.org as another event building an independent movement. This event is not about “instant”gratification, it is about persistent, well-informed citizen action that demands an end to war and domination by concentrated corporate interests.

In December I worked with some of the leaders of Veterans for Peace and other organizations to protest the wars. We knew when we organized this event we would be building to something like October2011.org -- we called it building a ”culture of resistance”. At this event, Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent and author Chris Hedges, made a clarion call for resistance, large and small, against corporatism and militarism: “Hope will only come now when we physically defy the violence of the state. All who resist, all who are here today keep hope alive. All who succumb to fear, despair, and apathy become an enemy of hope. They become in their passivity agencies of injustice.”

LINK TO FULL ARTICLE AND VIDEOS OF PROTESTS HERE.