You know. Yesterday i was feeling very depressed--most especially after my friend Erica sent me a few videos regarding undocumented people and also some radio show clips in which the announcers spewed hateful suggestions and sentiment. I had this terrible, terrible realization that I am not doing anything!!! I am complicit in a system that allows this kind of sentiment and even encourages it (as "American"). I am participating in the education system and it is making me tired and run-down and that leaves little to no room for true advocacy and action. I have been coerced (definitely not forced, but it has been made necessary that "success" equal an education) into lockstep. I am a drone.
And I am so depressed by that. I have always felt like the only real way to change things in the system was to use the system to fuck with it. You know, getting the degree and being taken "seriously." The whole using the tools to dismantle. But maybe Audre Lorde was right. Maybe that is simply not possible. Maybe all of those thoughts about living in a revolutionary way individually are not enough. They are certainly not enough as I sit here, writing and rewriting my thesis, and trying to make it conform to the proper guidelines and rules or regulations.
I feel like I have a clarity about the lies I have been telling myself about getting this degree. In this respect, I am just like everyone else. And that is what is fucking with me.
Finally, I wonder what Herbert Marcuse thought about all of these feelings. Did he have them? And how did he negotiate his own position as an educated, white, male?
When I think about all of the hatred that exists (and for what reason), I think about his quote, "The "natural" individuality of man is also the source of his natural sorrow. If the human relations are nothing but human, if they are freed from all foreign standards, they will be permeated with the sadness of their singular content. They are transitory and irreplaceable, and their transitory character will be accentuated when concern for the human being is no longer mingled with fear for his material existence and overshadowed by the threat of poverty, hunger, and ostracism."
sweeter dreams.
k
And I am so depressed by that. I have always felt like the only real way to change things in the system was to use the system to fuck with it. You know, getting the degree and being taken "seriously." The whole using the tools to dismantle. But maybe Audre Lorde was right. Maybe that is simply not possible. Maybe all of those thoughts about living in a revolutionary way individually are not enough. They are certainly not enough as I sit here, writing and rewriting my thesis, and trying to make it conform to the proper guidelines and rules or regulations.
I feel like I have a clarity about the lies I have been telling myself about getting this degree. In this respect, I am just like everyone else. And that is what is fucking with me.
Finally, I wonder what Herbert Marcuse thought about all of these feelings. Did he have them? And how did he negotiate his own position as an educated, white, male?
When I think about all of the hatred that exists (and for what reason), I think about his quote, "The "natural" individuality of man is also the source of his natural sorrow. If the human relations are nothing but human, if they are freed from all foreign standards, they will be permeated with the sadness of their singular content. They are transitory and irreplaceable, and their transitory character will be accentuated when concern for the human being is no longer mingled with fear for his material existence and overshadowed by the threat of poverty, hunger, and ostracism."
sweeter dreams.
k
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