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Forum Post: What Liberty Asks

Posted 12 years ago on Oct. 18, 2011, 7:13 p.m. EST by AJourneymanWayfarer (1)
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Dear brothers and sisters occupying Liberty Plaza and friends taking action elsewhere around the planet, I'm a one-time radical Aquarian from the '60s, and I have been thinking about the calls for concrete demands coming from the left and ridicule from the right about the lack of them. I offer the following poem after wrestling with this question, which led me to the observation that a set of "actionable" demands is inconsistent with the revolutionary histories of the last three centuries: What must be articulated first is a new paradigms of social relations in language that is necessarily broad and nondoctrinaire, as in: "Don't Tread on Me," "Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité," and "Peace, Land, Bread." Such slogans are the expression of the general, underlying revolutionary spirit which gives voice to the feeling of human disaffection with the "solutions" offered by the established arrangement and its inadequate terms of discourse.

What Liberty Asks 

When they demand you list your demands, With a show of a rainbow of hands And full-throated cries as high as the skies Tell them, "A garden where hope never dies."

And when they insist you must have a list,
Say, "Sure you have guessed, just all we have wished, All that you've promised and all you've dismissed." Then quietly raise one militant fist.

But if for a plan they'd ask and cajole, I think I'd say this with loud drumming roll: "Undo a stone street and tower of lies, And so grow a garden where hope never dies."

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