Being Seen And Heard

by C. A. Matthews

“The people are not to be heard…”

You could have heard the gasps from miles away.

“The people are not to be heard at council meetings,” the chairwoman of Toledo’s City Council announced after anti-Flock camera activists clapped for a few brief moments following another council member’s brief statement. He’d actually had the audacity of wanting to hear more about what was actually being done with the data the Flock cameras were collecting before renewing the contract. (The vote on the contract is scheduled for later this week.)

Obviously, Toledo City Council doesn’t need to listen to its citizens—citizens who voted each of these city council members into office. We’re allowed to show up at the council’s meetings and listen quietly, but our wishes are not to be made known.

“The people are not to be heard…”

We are to be treated as children—seen but not heard.

If you’ve ever been in a similar situation where someone in authority told you to shut up and stay in your place, I’m sure you would have gasped at that ill-considered statement, too. Residents concerned about ICE obtaining data from the city’s Flock cameras and using it to harass and wrongfully deport others of color are to be scolded, told to sit quietly in their seats like the naughty little kids they are.

Even with all the pleas of politicians encouraging citizens to register and vote that we’ve witnessed lately, there still seems to be an underlying message of, “Vote, but then go home and leave it to us. We know best.”

“The people are not to be heard…”

At least once a year I feel obligated to remind readers that voting cannot save us from the abuses of authority we suffer daily at the hands of the politician-puppets of the oligarchy. It was never meant to, particularly not in the US. Voting is a method of pacification used by the powers-that-be to placate the masses into thinking they live in a “democracy” so they don’t get any ideas above their station in life.

You know the kind of ideas I’m talking about if you’ve read this blog regularly. Ideas like:

“All humans are created equal and deserve to live in peace.”

And dangerous ideas like...

 

To read more dangerous ideas and find out how voters can actually make themselves heard, please copy or click on the following link: 

https://therevolutioncontinues.substack.com

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This article is the 594th blog posting of The Revolution Continues. We began in June 2015, and we're still going strong. Please keep reading, sharing, and subscribing to help TRC continue for another twelve years. Thanks! 

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“The Piers Morgan Question”

 

“The Piers Morgan Question”

words and photos by C. A. Matthews

So much going on this past week and at least some of it makes me feel… hopeful?

There were good turnouts at the two local third anniversary events I attended. We could be witnessing the last days of the apartheid state of Israel. A leaked CIA report says as much. We could be seeing a possible way of getting humanitarian aid and food into Gaza if the Israelis start a shooting match among themselves and their fascist government falls apart. Is it only a matter of time until these sociopaths/psychopaths screw themselves over?

More hints in the news gave me hope. The Greens of England and Wales have adopted a resolution stating that “Zionism is racism.” Amen! Let’s not hold back any longer about the truth of who runs the “Jewish supremacist state” as Norman Finkelstein has labeled it. 

Finkelstein gave a lecture in town while on his book tour for Gaza’s Gravediggers...

 ...Professor Finkelstein framed his talk around with what he called “The Piers Morgan Question”. If you were a guest on Piers Morgan’s TV show in the first year of the genocide, you could expect to be asked, “Do you condemn what Hamas did on October 7?” The professor stated that one must always give their answer to that question with a persuasive argument that includes both facts and an appeal to reason. But he admits that everyone on air felt forced to answer, “Of course, I condemn Hamas!” or else they’d never be invited back on the show and might be labeled as antisemitic or worse by the public.

So, how does one answer “No!” to the question without being discredited or kicked out of the conversation? The facts of that day alone make it difficult, but to persuade others one must always put the facts into the context of history. Once the history of Gaza is known, it’s much harder to condemn the actions of Hamas.

Finkelstein shared the analogy of Nat Turner’s Rebellion. In 1831, the “question” would have elicited the response, “I wholeheartedly condemn what Nat Turner did!” But in the 21^st century, we know the context of the facts and the motivations that drove the actions Turner and his men took, and some see them nowadays as American heroes. They were enslaved with no hope of ever gaining their freedom. They had little choice—either they fought the whites who enslaved them or they would die as slaves.

The parallels of what has happened in Gaza are undeniable. Eighty percent of Gazans are refugees or descendants of refugees from the Nakba, and children make up about 50% of the population. UN officials and Israelis alike have labeled Gaza as “a huge concentration camp” over the last several decades—this during what could be called Gaza’s most “prosperous era”...

 

To read more about what Norman Finkelstein had to say, please copy or click on the following link: 

https://therevolutioncontinues.substack.com

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Subscribe to The Revolution Continues on Substack today. Power to the people!   

This article is the 592nd blog posting of The Revolution Continues. We began in June 2015, and we're still going strong. Please keep reading, sharing, and subscribing to help TRC continue for another eleven+ years. Thanks! 

Feel free to make a donation at Paypal or via Buy Me a Coffee or Ko-fi. Every little bit helps. Thank you. 

 Conscientious  Objectors: Call the G.I. Rights Hotline at 1-877-447-4487 or the Center for Conscience & War at 1-800-379-2679. Call today!  

Childhood's End

 

Childhood’s End: Three Years of Murdering, Maiming, Bombing, Starving, and Deporting Children

by C. A. Matthews

Some anniversaries aren’t worth celebrating, but they are worth noting.

I participated in a short interview with a local university sociology professor and his student this past week. One of the questions they asked me was: “How have you changed personally because of joining this (pro-Palestine) movement?”

Three years into the Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people and what hasn’t changed me?

Things certainly aren’t going back to the way they were prior to October 7, 2023. Little did I—or anyone, really—know that we’d be observing a livestreamed genocide on our computing devices for three straight years, all the while observing nothing positive in our governments’ reactions to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians—and so many of them children— at the hands of the IDF. I don’t know how being exposed to such a lack of compassion, empathy, and concern for others on such an immense scale wouldn’t change a person’s outlook on life unless the person was already spiritually and morally dead inside.

Three years of knowing that your government doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the health, safety, and security of children in Gaza—or the West Bank or Lebanon or Iran or Cuba or Venezuela, for that matter.

Three years of watching these little ones die from preventable diseases because your “ally” Israel won’t allow sufficient food, medicines, medical supplies, or Doctors Without Borders from entering their open air prison.

Three years of realizing the horrors of children and adults trapped under tons of rubble having to have emergency amputations without anesthesia...

...Honestly, I don’t know anymore if it’s just me who has gone insane because I can’t stand knowing so many horrific details about what’s happening in the world, or it’s the rest of the world that is insane for allowing them to occur in the first place...

 

To read what else has brought about "childhood's end" in these past three years, please copy or click on the following link: 

https://therevolutioncontinues.substack.com

There you'll be able to read the rest of this article, find related links, see more graphics, and leave comments. You can become a free or paid subscriber and receive weekly email posts, along with occasional special articles just for paid subscribers, too.

Subscribe to The Revolution Continues on Substack today. Power to the people!   

This article is the 591th blog posting of The Revolution Continues. We began in June 2015, and we're still going strong. Please keep reading, sharing, and subscribing to help TRC continue for another eleven+ years. Thanks! 

Feel free to make a donation at Paypal or via Buy Me a Coffee or Ko-fi. Every little bit helps. Thank you. 

Conscientious  Objectors: Call the G.I. Rights Hotline at 1-877-447-4487 or the Center for Conscience & War at 1-800-379-2679. Call today!