::::TOURISTS::Wilma Hollander:::: [ flash fiction ]

‘Have you seen the way they treat the dogs here?’ The woman – definitely a tourist – sounds really upset. ‘I can’t believe it! Someone should do something about it. Don’t they have Animal Welfare here?’

She’s sitting a few tables away from me in the taverna where I sometimes come to chat with the owner. The people around her – from their casual clothing I gather they are tourists as well – are nodding vehemently. Yes, yes, they’ve noticed it too! And what about all those stray dogs in the mountains? Quite a nuisance when you want to have a nice, quiet walk through nature.

‘It’s a shame,’ the woman goes on. ‘This morning when I was jogging through the olive grove I passed several houses with chain dogs! Everybody knows it’s not human to keep dogs on chains!’

She’s right of course. It is a shame. It’s not human to keep dogs on chains. And about those stray dogs… Well, I better not tell her about the poison that the municipality itself provides every Spring in order to get the villages ‘clean’ for the tourists. Half starved and neglected animals are not what people want to see when they spend their holiday money on our nice authentic Greek peninsula’s beaches. But in a country where people are dying because there is no money for National Health Care anymore, the welfare and wellbeing of animals is not the most important thing on the Government’s agenda. Destroying stray dogs in the night is the cheapest way. Of course nobody shall admit this cruel thing is being done. But we all know. It’s not something most of the villagers are proud of, but it happens. That’s the way it goes here.

I suppose I could tell this woman about all the nice people who are feeding the cats and dogs of the village. I suppose I could tell her about the doggy bags people take home after their meal in a tavern to give to the animals on the streets. And I could also tell her about the chain dogs we set loose in the first years we lived here, although we’ve stopped to do that. They were back on their chain within the hour, because they didn’t know what to do with their freedom.

Or maybe… maybe I should tell her about my neighbours. The three boys who came from Albania to work in this country several years ago. They live in a one room shed on a sand road that’s totally impassable after a rain shower. Three beds have been put in a space of barely ten square metres. The toilet is outside, and they take a daily bath, in the sea. When nobody is looking, of course, because they are really nice and very decent guys. They do all the work nobody else want to do, for wages nobody else want to work for. I suppose I also could point out to her the many other sheds and half collapsed houses where now more and more families are living under circumstances I wouldn’t even allow my dog to live in, but I don’t. I know it’s no use. I just wonder, like I do every summer, why I never hear tourists talking about that. They must be blind.

Or maybe… maybe it’s easier to care only about animals.

::::via::::

capitalism is crisis

More than a year after the storming of Millbank, ‘This is just the beginning’ – the slogan which rang out that day, and which appeared on the front pages of the next day’s newspapers – is still one of the most important memes of the entire movement. The shattering of the glass in Millbank Tower was, as I have argued before, the shattering of capitalist realism – the intellectual malaise identified by Mark Fisher, in which it is accepted that there is no alternative to capitalism. Millbank was the beginning of a generational epiphany – perhaps the first in the UK since 1968 – that another world might be possible. It marked a psychic transformation into thinking beyond capitalism, one whose timing could not be more appropriate.

<<Dan Hancox — And Then?>>

Dan Hancox talks student protest and interesting stuff….

tea parties vs. occupy shit

A surge of re-energized American citizens positioned in cities across the country are carrying out the grassroots “Occupy Wall Street” movement (or the “99 Percent Movement”) with an intelligent and provoking agenda that invokes real patriotic citizenship – much unlike the backwards Tea Party protests that have done little more than pervert our founding ideals while hidden under the guise of Americanism.

Also unlike the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street is not fueled by corporate dollars or any major television network (aka, Fox News), but by a vast, grassroots network of individuals who have either been negatively affected by the pro-regressive sentiment in the country or by those who have grown disillusioned by the Right wing’s strangle-hold over our country’s future and its catering to corporate citizenship.

The moniker “We are the 99%” is touted proudly by diverse groups of everyday Americans, ranging from teachers and students to firefighters, nurses, construction workers and Marines.

Unfortunately, though – if you listen to many Congressional Republicans, Right wing pundits and Tea Party aficionados – when common citizens across the country representing the vast majority of America peacefully protest in mass numbers against unbridled greed by Wall Street and the banking industry, they are just angry mobs of un-American thugs engaging in anti-capitalist propaganda mongering.

But when corporate-sponsored Tea Partiers protest outside the White House or other public centers (albeit carrying signs promoting bigotry, racism, hatred and/or violence), they are symbolic of the purest form of patriotism in action…

< link shit >