So the question is how to go about it, not How did this happen to me.
It happened. Get to work. Carrol
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Yes of course, I agree. But the importance of understanding how this process or transistion worked isn't about my sphincter. The importance is figuring out how to bring others into their political awareness.
I realize I write a lot about my experience, but the reason is as a kind of social specimen. The point isn't navel gazing, but understanding the human condition. I don't know, example. Because I had been in scary demos, under threat of prison, seeing army troops with rifles and bayonets, the sounds of gun fire, though nothing near Cairo, still it gave me an almost instant empathy with Egyptians.
Morgan to his credit talked about images. But these were nothing like the raw intensity of images on AJE in Cairo. You could read them like telegrams from the front, feel the movement of social forces, great masses of people caught up in the flows of history.
``They wanted to inquire into the private motives of the protesters instead of looking at the arguments of the protests, the politics of them. And Chuck even wants to look at his own motivesd for recognizing the truth! Instead of exulting in recognizing the lies he worries about just what it was that caused him to recognize the lies...'' (CC)
You're not seeing it, maybe I am not explaining it. It really has nothing to do with me. It is about hearing, reading, seeing, feeling others within a vast sea of solidarity in its ebbs and flows of struggle. The realization we are in a mass deception envelop is one step. Psychological alienation from social institutions that are supposed to represent a collective interest is another step. The apparent isolation from our own institutions is a kind of preamble to forming or joining an alternate collective, and the basis for an alternate solidarity, one that more accurately speaks for our interest or makes up our interest in some large sum.
The latter is a very vulnerable step and we can see that when numerous groups arise, opportunistic politics, cults, religions, and all sorts of sectarian nonsense. Some of these divisions seem necessary, say students from workers, men from women, and so forth.
This is were understanding internal motivations or aspirations become important to understand and address in a larger context. There is a learning phase to be with others, but not of them. I first started learning some of this with various movements that I was with, but not of; the obvious ones, black, latino, women, and then disability.
We are still stuck in this fractured state, and the established political system is very adept at manipulating divisions. This probably accounts for the rise of the right, and its ideological creation of a white male identity with all its individualistic trappings and the whole backlash phenomenon.
At this point, part of the reason Wisconsin is important is because Walker et al have directly attacked their own constituent identity (mostly white middle class) by crushing their ability to sustained their lives working in their social institutions: schools, health, medical care, the apparatus of state, police, fire, etc.
I love this:
``Dane County Sheriff Dave Mahoney said enough was enough. He withdrew his men from the capitol, saying they were not hired to act as a Palace Guard.''
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mary-bottari/scott-walker-down-the-rat_b_831386.html