Critical Mass
Government Center, Miami
Fall 2011

For a-great-while, I’ve lamented about the apparent lack of activism of my generation. Maybe it’s the TVs or the Apple devices which have fragmented both our time and attention spans, or maybe it’s the noise from the talking heads that has pushed people frightfully away from politics. Any which way, a genuinely active social movement is rising up in the localities of our nation, and one message is abundantly clear: the ineffective, debt-accumulative status quo of our deadlocked political systems cannot continue. Neither can the funding for decade-long wars which have long-lost popular support.

After over ten years of continued military deployments, our soldiers who’ve served in the deserts of Iraq will finally, in earnest, be coming home at the end of the year. Unfortunately, more than a few have asked and will repeat the refrain, “bin Laden’s dead and so are 4,800 of my comrades. al-Qaeda’s in shambles. Was it worth it?” They’ll be asking, along with the electorate, whether it’s right that our nation’s spent over 1 trillion dollars in nation-building abroad, all-the-while our own national infrastructure falls apart. They’ll also ask how is it that we’ve embarked on the longest armed battle in American history paid for not by normalizing tax increases on the wealthy, but indirectly by inflationary government debts on the backs of middle and working-class Americans.

From a long and dormant stupor, the beast has awakened to the smell of something unpleasant. Yeah, something’s in the air. That ‘something’ is sweeping around the world, much like it did around this time more than forty years ago during the great progressive movements in the wake of the civil rights struggle. Will it be great? Will it accomplish much? We don’t know. But I’m glad to know that I can finally say that we, as a collective, are finally having our say.

Joey Francilus
Co-Executive Producer, WTS
Originally published on the BigJoe tumblelog

(Opinions expressed are solely those of Joey Francilus and do not necessarily reflect those at UMTV or the University of Miami.)