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RANDOM…How to compose a successful critical commentary:You should attempt to re-express your target’s

position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.

You should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).

You should mention anything you have learned from your target.

Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.

LEST WE THINK RESISTANCE IS NOT DANGEROUS

THE PLOTFeminist revolution (bell hooks)Strategies for overcoming binary thinking (Kate Bornstein)Rejecting privilege (Ignatiev, others)Re/Claiming Humanity (Frantz Fanon)Love as Revolutionary (various)

YES ITS ABOUT FEMINISM CONT…

Feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression – bell hooks

HOOKSFeminist Revolution: :Development Through StruggleAsking about how revolutions happen, and why the imagined

simple and quick revolution that militant feminists imagined in the early days didn’t come to pass.

Asks if revolution is about reform – equal pay for equal work e.g. or about transformation?

Says reforms are important movement towards revolution, but the types of reforms need to be considered:

“Feminist focus on reforms to improve the social status of women within the existing social structure allowed women and men to lose sight of the need for total transformation of society”

HOOKS“Feminist consciousness raising has not significantly

pushed women in the direction of revolutionary politics. For the most part, it has not helped women understand capitalism: how it works, as a system that exploits female labor and its inter-connections with sexist oppression. It has not urged women to learn about different political systems like socialism or encouraged women to invent and envision new political systems. It has not attacked materialism and our society’s addiction to over-consumption. It has not shown women how we benefit from the exploitation of women and men globally or shown us ways to oppose imperialism….

HOOKS….Most importantly, it has not continually

confronted women with the understanding that feminist movement to end sexist oppression can be successful only if we are committed to revolution, to the establishment of a new social order. New social orders are established gradually. This is hard for individuals in the United States to accept. We have either been socialized to believe that revolutions are always characterized by extreme violence between the oppressed and their oppressors, and that revolutions happen quickly”

HOOKS“Like every other liberation movement in this society, feminism has suffered because these attitudes keep participants from forming the kind of commitment to protracted struggle that makes revolution possible.”

HOOKSQuotes Grace & James Boggs: “Rebellion is a stage in the development of

revolution, but it is not revolution. It is an important stage because it represents the ‘standing up’, the assertion of their humanity on the part of the oppressed…informs everybody else that a situation has become intolerable…establish a form of communication amongst the oppressed…open eyes and ears of people who have been blind and deaf…break threads that have been holding the system together…throw into question the legitimacy…of existing institutions…shake up old vallues so that relations between individuals and between groups within the society are unlikely to ever be the same…Only by understanding what a rebellion accomplishes can we see its limitations. A rebellion disrupts the society, but it does not provide what is necessary to establish a new social order”

HOOKS“To build a mass-based feminist movement, we need to have a liberatory ideology that can be shared with everyone. That revolutionary ideology can be created only if the experiences of people on the margin who suffer sexist oppression and other forms of group oppression are understood, addressed and incorporated.”

HOOKS“Women must begin the work of feminist reorganization with the understanding that we have all (irrespective of our race, sex, or class) acted in complicity with the existing oppressive system. We all need to make a conscious break with the system. Some of us make this break sooner than others. The compassion we extend to ourselves, the recognition that our change in consciousness and acting has been a process, must characterize our approach to individuals who are politically unconscious”

HOOKSQuotes Susan Griffin:

“When a movement for liberation inspires itself chiefly by a hatred for an enemy rather than from this vision of possibility, it begins to defeat itself”

HOOKSArgues that in US society, armed violent revolution is not possible: “they have both the learned consciousness to do and accept violence as well as the skill to perpetuate it” – argues for a cultural revolution as a feminist revolution.

“Our struggle will be gradual and protracted”

KATE BORNSTEINDescribes herself as “A Queer and Pleasant Danger”, and says

she has been a teen, a freak, an outlaw. A jewish boy who joined the church of scientology and left 12 years later “to become the lovely lady she is today”

Born 1948“I don’t describe myself as a woman and I know I’m not a

man” Performance artist and theatre guru, rejects gendered

binaries. http://katebornstein.typepad.com/

BORNSTEINArticle ‘This Quiet Revolution” taken from the

Heldke & O’Connor ‘Oppression, Privilege & Resistance” book

Exploring the creation and maintenance of a political movement for transgender people

Complicates the binary notions, but also complicates assumptions about inclusivity and exclusivity, challenges identity based politics, and suggests some interesting ways of thinking

Need to take into account her US (middle class?) basis of thinking, but stil…

BORNSTEIN“I think of personal politics as the sum total of skills necessary to navigate a situation in which my values, standards or boundaries are in conflict with another’s or others’. When the others in question have more power, and there’s no relief to the conflict in sight (assuming our own motives to be harmless and inclusive), that’s when a revolution is necessary. That’s when I need to look beyond my own personal politics and assume a position within a political movement, part of which is lending a hand to the rest of us at every moment of the day, so it’s a dance…”

BORNSTEIN“It’s a political smorgasbord out there, a place for virtually every kind of activism you can think of. And if you can’t find an existing group that would serve your political aims, start one up yourself and you’ll have members within a month’s time. The point…is not to tell you what to do. That’s no ones call but your own. The point of this section is to provide some more universal guidelines for whatever it is you chose to do”

BORNSTEIN“The way you do anything is the way you do everything. That’s a good concept to keep in mind when it comes to politics and political activism. It resonates with the concept of integrity”

BORNSTEINAsks about how we define cohesiveness and community –

“The cohesiveness of any successful transgender movement will depend on basing the movement in values rather than identity”

Asks where we look for direction – “For a true gender revolution to occur, each individual needs to name hir own needs, rights, and only then to set about achieving those needs and rights in harmony with others who have done the same work”

Asks where the motivation comes from – argues using an enemy is counter productive – “the enemy to true freedom of gender expression is nameless. The enemy to true freedom of gender expression is a value system, the expression of which needs to be dealt with on a person-to-person basis”

BORNSTEINAsks what kind of political attention we want –

“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house – Audre Lorde”

Asks if not the master’s tools, then what tools can we use?

Provides some of hir own answers….

BORNSTEIN1. Compassion – starting with ourselves and moving outward,

including those ‘who recoil from us in horror’2. Patient persistance

Write down one instance of exclusion or oppression you’ve either experienced or might experience as a result of your messing around with gender. What is the gentlest, most compassionate action you can take in response to that? And if that doesn’t work, what is the next most gentle, compassionate action you can take in response to that? And on and on

BORNSTEIN3. Flexibility & Fluidity – moving out of binary & linear thinkingLets put your flexibility & fluidity to a little test. Here are

some common binaries at work in our culture. Cross out the ones you honestly don’t subscribe to, and circle the ones that are still operating in your life:

Male/Female Student/TeacherSad/Happy Man/Woman Silence/Confrontation On/Off Young/Old Up/Down Rich/PoorManic/Depressive Homosexual/Heterosexual Deserving/UndeservingCapitalism/Socialism Diseased/Healthy Civilized/UncivilizedSadist/Masochist Open/ClosedNice/Not NiceCloseted/Out Girl/Boy Good/Evil Masculine/FeminineLucky/Unlucky Right/WrongLight/Dark Radical/AssimilationistGood/Bad Powerful/Powerless Wine/Lose Beautiful/Ugly and on and on…..

BORNSTEINRaises Anarchy as a resistance, that all of us disobey some

rules somewhere, that gender outlaws shouldn’t necessarily stop with breaking gender rules…

What social taboos, if any, have you broken without harming anyone? What company or organisational rules or regulations, if any, have you broken without harming anyone? What spoken or unspoken codes of your family, tribe, or community, if any, have you broken without harming anyone?What laws, if any, have you broken without harming anyone? Did breaking any of those rules end up being beneficial both to you and others, if so, how?

QUEER CONSCIOUSNESS ON CT’S RACISMThis upcoming summer and beyond, I challenge black people to

insert themselves into the predominantly white spaces that they are yearning to visit. Black people should resist the intimidation by white institutions and insist on their black presence be felt all over this city. To black people all over Cape Town, this is your city.

 Own it!

http://queerconsciousness.com/inserting-your-blackness/

BORNSTEINAnarchy as responsible power playModeration in all things, including moderation

Asks about anger as a motivating force: “Anger feeds the strength of our passion, which in turn is guided by our reason and our honor, and the result is moderated by our compassion: That’s anger’s place in our new politic”

BORNSTEINNon-violence“The way I define violence is the nonconsensual constraint

of, intrusion into, occupation of, or damage to another or others’ body, bodies, possessions, or space. Violence can also be the nonconsensual exclusion of a person from a public space, or the barring of access to basic human rights. There are all kinds of degrees of violence. Violence can be as ostensibly harmless as taking up too much room on public transportation. Violence can manifest as wholesale genocide. It’s a form of violence to force people against their will to be something they don’t feel they are. That’s what’s done to us by the gender/identity/power system, and while we’re in the process of throwing off those constraints, none of us can afford to forward the practice of constraining others, intruding into or occupying their personal space, or wreaking any damage. In the ages old ‘battle of the sexes’, we must be the conscientious objectors”

BORNSTEINThere has to be fun, there have to be laughs, foolishness

“If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution” – Emma Goldman

http://wagingnonviolence.org/feature/fight-system-change/

SOCIAL CHANGE? Swartz, Arogundade & Davis – Unpacking privilege in a South African

university classroom: A neglected element in multicultural educational contexts. Published in Journal of Moral Education (US based)

REJECTING PRIVILEGE

IGNATIEV‘Treason to Whiteness is Loyalty to Humanity”“We do not hate you or anyone else for the color of her

skin. What we hate is a system that confers privileges (and burdens) on people because of their color. It is not fair skin that makes people white; it is fair skin in a certain kind of society, one that attaches social importance to skin color. When we say we want to abolish the white race, we do not mean we want to exterminate people with fair skin. We mean that we want to do away with the social meaning of skin color, thereby abolishing the white race as a social category. Consider this parallel: To be against royalty does not mean wanting to kill the king. It means wanting to do away with crowns, thrones, titles, and the privileges attached to them. In our view, whiteness has a lot in common with royalty: they are both social formations that carry unearned advantages.”

REJECTING PRIVILEGENoel Ignatiev (born 1940[1]) is an academician and former

American history professor at the Massachusetts College of Art. He is best known for his work on race and social class and for his call to abolish "whiteness" as a sociopolitical category. Ignatiev is the co-founder and co-editor of the journal Race Traitor and the New Abolitionist Society, a journal that promotes the idea that ”treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.”[2] He also has written a book on antebellum northern xenophobia against Irish immigrants, How the Irish Became White. His publisher bills him as "one of America’s leading and most controversial historians".[3]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noel_Ignatiev

CLAIMING HUMANITY – MOVING TOWARD LOVE“To be African is to love our children, male and

female, and to dream for them a future in which our vision for their full potential is fulfilled. ‘Humanism’ is the best word to describe this element of an African womanist vision. Humanism is the recognition of the inhumanity of oppression, the understanding that oppression forecloses our ability to reach our full human potential, and the detailed envisioning of that potential in the midst of some of the most vicious systems of oppression the world has known” – Yvette Abrahams

LOVE AND RACE“For me, a white person, loving blackness

resembles Sara Ruddicks’s description of attentive love: a love that appreciates difference without desiring sameness, that loves the other person without trying to turn that person into a version of the self. White people cannot become black, but we can reject the privileges of whiteness, calling them what they are, and in that choice build a bridge across the color line, beginning the journey away from white essentialist attitudes that support racism and that undermine our humanity. Feminists should be in the vanguard of this bridge building. All of our lives depend on that bridge; without it we will surely drown.” – Maureen Reddy, Crossing the Color Line

FRANTZ FANONFrantz Omar Fanon (20 July 1925 – 6 December 1961) was a 

Martinique-born Afro-French psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary, and writer whose works are influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory, and Marxism.[1] As an intellectual, Fanon was a political radical, and an existentialist humanist concerning the psychopathology of colonization, and the human, social, and cultural consequences of decolonization.[2][3]

In the course of his work as a physician and psychiatrist, Fanon supported the Algerian War of Independence from France, and was a member of the Algerian National Liberation Front. For more than four decades, the life and works of Frantz Fanon have inspiredmovements in Palestine, Sri Lanka, the U.S. and South Africa

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frantz_Fanon

FANON ON VIOLENCEIn The Wretched of the Earth (Les damnés de la terre), published shortly before

Fanon's death in 1961, Fanon defends the right for a colonized people to use violence to struggle for independence, arguing that human beings who are not considered as such shall not be bound by principles that apply to humanity, in their attitude towards the colonizer. His book was then censored by the French government.

The reception of his work has been affected by English translations which are recognized to contain numerous omissions and errors, while his unpublished work, including his doctoral thesis, has received little attention. As a result, Fanon has often been portrayed as an advocate of violence (it would be more accurate to characterize him as a dialectical opponent of nonviolence) and his ideas have been extremely oversimplified. This reductionist vision of Fanon's work ignores the subtlety of his understanding of the colonial system. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frantz_Fanon

FANONBlack Skin, White Masks- 1st book, published 1952, in English in 1968 (some

problems depending on translation)- “Fanon’s descriptions of the feelings of inadequacy and

dependence experienced by people of colour in a white world are as salient and as compelling as ever. Fanon identifies a devastating pathology at the heart of Western culture, a denial of difference, that persists to this day”

- This is taken from his conclusion, which CANNOT be read as separate from his visceral examination of the impact of racism on the mind/body/soul of the ‘black man’

FANON“I do not carry innocence to the point of

belieivng that appeals to reason or to respect for human dignity can alter reality. For the Negro who works on a sugar plantation in Le Robert, there is only one solution: to fight”

“I call middle-class a closed society in which life has no taste, in which the air is tainted, in which ideas and men are corrupt. And I think that a man who takes a stand against this death is in a sense a revolutionary”

FANON“The discovery of the existence of a Negro civilization in the fifteenth century confers no patent of humanity on me. Like it or not, the past can in no way guide me in the present moment”

But?

A DIGRESSION – KIMANI S NEHUSIKimani Nehusi (PhD) is a progressive African historian born

in Guyana. Dr. Nehusi, who was also widely known as an athlete and community organiser, has lectured at the University of Guyana, the University of London and University of East London. He is known for his work on lingustics and Ancient Egyptian( Kemet) linguistic dispersal and has a study remit in African and Caribbean history and society, including Nile Valley societies; research methodologies; education and socialisation and African and Caribbean languages.

http://kimaninehusi.blogspot.com/

NEHUSILanguage in the Recovery of Ourselves: The Medew Netjer (hieroglyphics) in

the construction of Pan-Afrikan Unity – in The Afrikana World (unscrambling Africa)

Argues for the re-membering of African history and culture through language as a way of countering the violence of colonialism and its ongoing impact on body and psyche.

“It has been said that the answers to the challeneges confronting the Afrikan people lie in our past. That is true: our afflictions are clearly rooted in our past. But it is true for another reason. The way we interact with that past also holds the solutions to our afflections”

Use the language to uncover ways of being, cultural practices that could ‘heal’

RETURN TO FANON“Every time a man has contributed to the victory

of the dignity of the spirit, every time a man has said no to an attempt to subjugate his fellows, I have felt solidarity with his act.”

“If the question of practical solidarity with a given past ever arose for me, it did so only to the extent to which I was committed to myself and to my neighbor to fight for all my life and with all my strength so that never again would a people on the earth be subjugated.”

FANON“No attempt must be made to encase man, for it

is his destiny to be set free. The body of history does not determine a single one of my actions. I am my own foundation. And it is by going beyond the historical, instrumental hypothesis that I will initiate the cycle of my freedom. The disaster of the man of color lies in the fact that he was enslaved. The disaster and the inhumanity of the white man lie in the fact that somewhere he has killed a man. And even today, they subsist, to organize this dehumanization rationally. But I as a man of color, to the extent that it becomes possible for me to exist absolutely, do not have the right to lock myself into a world of retroactive reparations.”

FANON“The Negro is not. Any more than the white man.

Both must turn their backs on the inhuman voices which were those of their respective ancestors in order that authentic communication be possible. Before it can adopt a positive voice, freedom requires an effort at dis-alienation….Superiority? Inferiority? Why not the quite simple attempt to touch the other, to feel the other, to explain the other to myself…At the conclusion of this study, I want the world to recognize, with me, the open door of every consciousness. My final prayer: O my body, make of me always a man who questions!”

FANON“I, the man of color, want only this: That the tool never possess the man. That the enslavement of man by man cease forever. That is, of one by another. That it be possible for me to discover and to love man, wherever he may be”

LOVE?“In the opening chapter of Black Looks bell hooks says the

“loving blackness” ought to be the basis of anti-racist, anti-white supremacist politics. I think, as hooks also seems to, that the choice of loving blackness is open to whites as well as to blacks, and that it may be an empowering choice, allowing us to maintain independent, individual consciousnesses. Loving blackness is not the same thing as hating whiteness – just as feminism is not about hating men – and in fact, the two are incompatible. Loving blackness requires more than a reactionary attention to blackness, whereas hating whiteness requires foregrounding whiteness. Loving blackness is about refusing to put whiteness at the center of everything, resisting white supremacist views of blackness, seing the value of blackness.” – Maureen Reddy – Crossing the color line

BELOVED COMMUNITIESIn the early days of the US civil rights movement, Martin

Luther King Jr. used the phrase ‘Beloved Community’ to describe the kind of change he was working towards. The Beloved Community expressed a way of organising that made non-violence and compassion both its means and its ends, and placed strong relationships at the core of wider social transformation. The phrase, initially coined by philosopher-theologian Josiah Royce, articulated the idea that organising based on Love will create a culture of Love in its wake. King said:

- See more at: http://organizationunbound.org/expressive-change/beloved-communities-2/?utm_source=Organization+Unbound&utm_campaign=eddb0a5310-Newsletter+September+2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_4217f39792-eddb0a5310-184559721#sthash.k3Uz78Uq.dpuf

BELOVED COMMUNITIES

Imagine if we organised primarily with the intention of liberating human potential?

- See more at: http://organizationunbound.org/expressive-change/beloved-communities-2/?utm_source=Organization+Unbound&utm_campaign=eddb0a5310-Newsletter+September+2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_4217f39792-eddb0a5310-184559721#sthash.k3Uz78Uq.dpuf

BELOVED COMMUNITIES“Love is creative and redemptive. Love builds up and unites; hate tears down and destroys. The aftermath of the ‘fight with fire’ method… is bitterness and chaos, the aftermath of the love method is reconciliation and creation of the beloved community. Physical force can repress, restrain, coerce, destroy, but it cannot create and organize anything permanent; only love can do that.”

- See more at: http://organizationunbound.org/expressive-change/beloved-communities-2/?utm_source=Organization+Unbound&utm_campaign=eddb0a5310-Newsletter+September+2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_4217f39792-eddb0a5310-184559721#sthash.k3Uz78Uq.dpuf

BELOVED COMMUNITIES“Beloved Community …doesn’t just happen magically; we’re coming with so much baggage… people are coming from the system where [they] are so divided from each other and so alienated from each other, and alienated from themselves, that we need help in relating to each other in an equal way… We need help with structure to not permit certain behaviours. And if we agree to those structures ahead of time, collectively, there’s nothing hierarchical about that.”

- See more at: http://organizationunbound.org/expressive-change/beloved-communities-2/?utm_source=Organization+Unbound&utm_campaign=eddb0a5310-Newsletter+September+2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_4217f39792-eddb0a5310-184559721#sthash.k3Uz78Uq.dpuf

STRUCTURING COMMUNITIES…Non-hierarchical structures can help us challenge the

parts of ourselves and others which have been negatively shaped by wider social inequality and injustice. But those structures, just like their hierarchical counterparts, can become oppressive when used too rigidly, playing into wider social privilege and bestowing undue influence on those who know the systems best. And relationships may transcend the structures we create, though if we want them to do so in a positive way, we still need to be very conscious of how we relate to one another. –

See more at: http://organizationunbound.org/expressive-change/beloved-communities-2/?utm_source=Organization+Unbound&utm_campaign=eddb0a5310-Newsletter+September+2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_4217f39792-eddb0a5310-184559721#sthash.k3Uz78Uq.dpuf

TOLSTOY – LETTERS BETWEEN GHANDI & TOLSTOY“As soon as men live entirely in accord with the law of love natural to their hearts and now revealed to them, which excludes all resistance by violence, and therefore hold aloof from all participation in violence — as soon as this happens, not only will hundreds be unable to enslave millions, but not even millions will be able to enslave a single individual.” – Leo Tolstoy

http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/08/21/leo-tolstoy-gandhi-letter-to-a-hindu

/

PAULO FREIRE“Dialogue cannot exist, however, in the absence

of profound love for the world and for women and men. The naming of the world, which is an act of creation and re-creation, is not possible if it is not infused with love. Love is at the same time the foundation of dialogue and the dialogue itself. It is thus necessarily the task of responsible subjects and cannot exist in a relation of domination. Domination reveals the pathology of love: sadism in the dominator and masochism in the dominated. Because love is an act of courage, not of fear, love is commitment to others. No matter where the oppressed are found, the act of love is commitment to their cause – the cause of liberation. And this commitment, because it is loving, is dialogical…”

KORU CONVERSATIONSKoru is a coalition of voices now emerging on the global

stage. We think of Koru as a midwife for grassroots change, a playful but sacred space where ordinary folks seeking new possibilities (who no longer feel a part of their civilization and the stories that have co-created it), can be the new gurus poetically shaping the language of the 'next' consciousness.

Koru is the shared vision of 11 social activists and cultural visionaries from around the world. They are Ej Clement-Akomolafe (India), Bayo Akomolafe (Nigeria), Biren Shah (India), Aerin Dunford (Mexico), Reginald Bassey (Nigeria), Rehana Tejpar (India), Ethan Miller (USA), Kate Boverman (USA), Naveen Kumar (India), and Giovanna Olmos (USA).

KORU CONVERSATIONSWe think that another world is possible, and that we can re-

enchant our lives with new stories about how the world 'works' - and we are deeply excited about it! The global collective is at the cusp of a radical reinterpretation of what it means to be 'human'; even though this is a crisis point in our evolution as part of the earth's ecosystem, this is also an opportunity to change our lives and orient it towards each other.

KORU CONVERSATIONSYou see, we think that the problems we are going through

today are symptoms of an underlying story - a story that has made people into 'human resources' to be 'managed', a story that has converted the promiscuous beauty and sacredness of nature into 'natural resources' to be exploited, and more critically, a story that suggests that we are lords over the earth and we do not need each other. Hence, most of us are conditioned to believe in a world of scarcity, a world in which we necessarily need the nation-state, and a world in which we have to strive to outwit the 'other' in order to be 'noticed' or 'relevant'.

KORU CONVERSATIONSThe magical, not-so-secret idea now invading our collective

consciousness in today's dramatic moments is that most of our problems will not be addressed with more money, more development, more schools, more technology, more political candidates, more degrees, more banks and more religious exclusivism. Instead, people around the world are proving that with locally generated currencies and gift cultures, home-grown food and organic farming, variations of education that are not dependent on state-approved schooling systems, and indigenous approaches to wellbeing, "another world is not only possible, she is already here!" If we beat the system at its own game, we've lost! This is the time for new systems, new ways of doing and being.

http://www.flipsnack.com/A9CDFA86AED/fzu94kmh.html

SONGHAI FARMSWith his pilgrim’s staff and panama hat, Father Godfrey Nzamujo nips up

and down the paths of Songhai, the organic farm he created nearly 30 years ago to fight poverty and rural migration in Africa.

The small farm covered barely a hectare when it was set up in Porto Novo in 1985 but has since become a pilot project for the rest of the continent badly in need of new ideas to maximise yields.

The centre in Benin’s capital now stretches over 24 hectares and employs an army of workers and apprentices, who toil from sunrise to sunset growing fruit, vegetables and rice, as well as rearing fish, pigs, poultry.

“Nothing is wasted, everything is transformed” according to Nzamujo’s principle, with even chicken droppings turned into the bio-gas that powers the centre’s kitchens.

http://voicesofafrica.co.za/organic-farm-benin-looks-set-example-africa/

SHARING…“When my children alight upon terra firma, I will gather

them close and teach them a conspiracy; I will whisper to them a subversive tale under the nodding approval of many moons: I will stare into their starry eyes, and tell them that the world is intensely abundant—so utterly full of everything we need, that we do not need to compete with each other to thrive.

I will tell them that there is more than enough for everyone—and that the idea that we need a money system based on scarcity is a ‘lie.’ I will jump up and down—wildly—to get them to see that they are already ‘relevant,’ that they do not need to be ‘pretty,’ and that they do not need to be great or important or successful or famous to be accepted and embraced”. – Adebayo C Akomolafe speech from the Economics of Happiness conference found http://www.elephantjournal.com/2013/06/as-i-tuck-them-into-bed-i-will-smile-and-leave-the-fairies-that-attend-them-smiling-in-my-wake/