Events like the Canada Social Forum have among their goals that participants examine their assumptions and re-evaluate the direction of their work.
For Daphne and I, the CSF helped solidify a sense of dissatisfaction we'd been experiencing over the past two to three years, in terms of the focus of our activism.
We don't want to do poverty anymore. We live it. That's enough. We don't want to continue butting our heads against a brick wall of good, but often hopelessly misguided intentions.
We want to move forward in our activism, as we've already begun to do, to focus on the one issue that is key to all others: democratic and electoral reform.
We will still write on this blog about the things which speak to our hearts and cry out for comment - such as war, propaganda, animal cruelty, drug prohibition, the lives of street people - but any presentations we do from this day forward will have as their focus that which must change before anything else will.
Until we reform our democratic institutions, the political will to address issues of interest to other than a certain 25% (or less) of the electorate will effectively be zero. We can talk about poverty and solutions to poverty and create initiatives such as Dignity for All until we're all blue in the face. Nothing will change.
Twenty years ago, there was a resolve to wipe out childhood poverty. It didn't happen. It won't happen.
You want change? Then start advocating for democratic and electoral reform. For the foreseeable future, it's the only advocacy that might actually make a difference.
Part 5 - Airport Security
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