A little 6-year-old kindergarten girl who was throwing a simple tantrum is arrested and booked like an adult who committed a crime. Do we want this outrageous insanity and brutality to continue and spread across the globe?

I just have this overwhelming feeling of sadness and hopelessness sometimes. I think what is most disheartening is that true solidarity in the US between people – between family members, even - seems so far off at times it is hard to hold onto even a sliver of hope that as a society we can resolve the enormous pressing problems such as the ones presented here. Henry Giroux details the extent of these problems in this eloquent presentation. If we cannot rise above differences to reach for a total solidarity, we have nothing to look forward to but our near total demise for which we will have to place much blame onto ourselves for remaining complacent and divided. Where is our outrage?

Instead, many of us here in the US choose to fabricate problems that are not even there, searching for pseudo-solutions (usually commodity-driven and out of selfish self-interests) so that we ultimately end up preempting the solidarity needed for tackling real problems, and we blind ourselves to the solutions for these real problems. Daily life struggles for so many people in this broken world, including in the US, are already manifested as an urgent tug-of-war between life and death and for the rest us, as the struggle for survival of a society that is worth living in at all. We can expect that millions of people are sure to die if people cannot get together on the most basic issues, learn to embrace and celebrate differences, and reach for the levels of solidarity required to tackle the imperialist machine. I fear that coming up to this next election, people again will not be able to put aside or reconcile their differences and a fragmented society will become fragmented beyond repair. Are we going to allow that? Where is our rage?

This speech is a must-see eye-opener if you want some of the details about what we are really facing, not only in the US, but all over the world due to global imperialism.

In solidarity,

Vanessa