How Can You Keep on Movin?
This folk song, written by an Oklahoma musician, Sis Cunningham, who was an activist for black and white tenant farmers, discusses the plight of Okies trying to migrate to California, but were turned away at the border. My research made me consider how these words take on new meanings in the context of today’s immigration struggles, highlighting the need to connect and organize across place and time, while always beginning the change process within
An Open Letter to the South by Langston Hughes
Inspiration for protest signs
What is to Be Done?
The title of this piece is taken from Nikolay Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky's novel, What is to Be Done?, which has inspired thinkers from Lenin to Rand. Here I am considering how groups have asked this question throughout history and how imagination and play can help us to continue to wrestle with this enduring question. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_to_Be_Done%3F (Lenin) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_to_Be_Done%3F (Chernyshevsky)
Animal Farm, What Orwell Really Meant
"Re. your query about Animal Farm. Of course I intended it primarily as a satire on the Russian revolution. But I did mean it to have a wider application in so much that I meant that that kind of revolution (violent conspiratorial revolution, led by unconsciously power-hungry people) can only lead to a change of masters. I meant the moral to be that revolutions only effect a radical improvement when the masses are alert and know how