007. I categorically reject the post '60's notion that no one, and nothing, is worth giving my life for


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIPG2_gy_XU

I hardly know what to say about this except that I didn't see it clearly until yesterday afternoon.  It's been a source of deep motivation for me for years, as I've been more dumbfounded, month after month, in my experience of the DC activist clubs, and more recently the environmental Armageddon activist club, my brothers and sisters all.  But it was only yesterday, afternoon late, that recent experiences caused the clarity for me - that somewhere between the late 60s in the mid-70s a universal decision was made among US activists:   Nothing is worth our lives.  Nothing is worth our death.  Nothing is worth our lives in prison; nothing is worth dying for.  No one is worth dying for except of course for immediate family, maybe. 

Isn't this nice and convenient?  It so neatly reduces the risk that we would actually die for something, rank cowardice.  No other explanation.  

We cloaked the decision in a hideous bastardization of the word nonviolence. How did this happen?   Who thought of this?  The nonviolence where repeatedly Gandhi and others put themselves on self-imposed death threat through hunger strike, that nonviolence?  King, that kept he and his biological family under death threat his entire life.  That King, that nonviolence?  That's where nonviolence came from - risk no one's death on any account?  Oh my God.  What hideous, deadly cowardice. What unilateral disarmament of all hope, of potent unviolent action. 

I categorically reject that there's no one that's worth my life, and that there's no cause that's worth my life.  I reject that as the rank, intellectually, and morally bankrupt cowardice, that it is. 

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