My internal need to slip inside the fragile skin and stalwart psyche of Ed Snowden while lying in bed early this morning apparently led me straight to this article, describing the discussions that led to his decision to leave Hong Kong.
For Snowden, A Hasty Exit Started with Pizza Inside a Hong Kong Hangout
I learned two things: 1) he didn’t mind the idea of prison, but prison without his computer would be intolerable; and 2) he prefers pepsi to wine, which made his Chinese host think of him as a “kid.”
The first revelation runs me smack dab into the mirror. What did I do when I got back from this morning’s walk? Sit down at the computer and head straight for the guardian, live updates. Whee!
18m ago
In a characteristic rhetorical flourish, Assange said that Obama had taken on “a generation” in this case – “a young generation of people who find the mass violation of privacy unacceptable. In taking on a generation the Obama administration can only lose.”
Paul Owen has more from the Assange call. Assange said he knows where Snowden is and “his spirits are high”:
All of which reminds me: there is a book sitting on my computer table, essays by a number of other remarkable members of this generation, Share or Die: Voices of the Get Lost Generation In the Age of Crisis, edited by Malcolm Harris and Neal Gorenflo. Read it, if you want to immerse yourself in their experiments to create a future that works for all of us. And check out their website: shareable.net.
It’s not just elders like Vandana Shiva who are showing us the way, it’s these young ones too, and increasingly, they are offering up their lives to serve the rapid development of what Teillard de Chardin spoke of decades ago, the noosphere, or neural network that links us all, with each individual cell freely expressing itself according to its own nature and linked inextricably with all the others.
Hierarchical hegemonies, like this latest, stupidest superpower corporate state that has replaced the republic of America, are virulent cancers upon the Earth body.
I will end this with a quote from the final essay, “Occupy Everything,” by Willie Osterweil, from Share or Die, page 189.
“When we look around us, we see a world that is burning, a planet being consumed by capital, an economic system that thrives on the production of human suffering, mass imprisonment, violence, economic strife. We see a world that cannot be fixed by the same people who brought us here, with the same methods, ideologies and processes. And we see that we are not going to win the fight tomorrow. But we want to win. We’re going to win. So we do what we can. We take a space, we built our resolve an dour numbers. With every day that we hold the square, we chip away at our fear, at our confusion, at our alienation. We improvise new ways of living, new relations, new forms of solidarity. We create. We meet each other. We share food, sleeping space, music and drink. We fight the cops together. We talk about what a new and better world would look like, and we try, to the best of our abilities, to build it.”
This photo, from yesterday’s story from Brazil, in U.S. Today, could have been taken at Zuccotti Park in 2011, or Turkey today, or any number of other countries where beautiful, young protestors, with steel in their spines and peace in their hearts, are both waking up to their human rights and refusing to back down. So grateful!
2 thoughts on “Still ruminating — on Snowden’s — and his generation’s — psyche”
Reblogged this on Awakestate.
I am sceptical about the claims the young care about their privacy since they are the ones apparently revealing every intimate detail of their lives on Facebook. The young are more individualistic and I think that is what is provoking them when the State infringes upon their lives.