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inevitable. How can we use this, for building a muscle of discontent
in this country? How can we take advantage, so to speak, of what will seem
as our failure to stop this war, to use it towards something we want? Saul
Alinsky called this 'capitalizing on failure'---to turn what could seem a
failure, into something that further rallies people to sustained
discontent.

Last philosophic note----I maintain we are trying to create a foment of
discontent, not content. We are doing the delicate, almost artistic dance
of taking our horror at the current political directions, and rather than
have that discourage us(which would normally happen), make this 'horror'
be empowering. When SDS came to campuses in the 60's(I was there) they'd
show up in a car from some other campus in a different state, and put up a
film projector in the lounge of some dorm, and there show 33mm films of
what was going on in Vietnam. The films horrified people, shocked people,
made people really mad. What SDS did, was generate discontent, push at it,
sort of 'push people's noses in it'. They didn't offer solutions, other
than to organize.

OK, you get my point: we're engineering discontent, making sure it doesn't
decay into discouragement.

So, my question for the question 'what next?'---how can we make more
discontent, of the kind we can use for building a movement?

Susan, who misses AWARE

On Tue, 12 Nov 2002, Carol Inskeep wrote:

>
> folks,
>
> i've been thinking quite a bit about what's next for us.  it seems to me
> that AWARE is in a very strong position right now as an organization - we
> have some money (yeah!), we have good turnouts to our events, we have
> strong organizers in our group, and we get more media coverage these days.
>
> on the other side, there seems to be concensus that things are bad and
> getting worse - the war is soon to expand, civil liberties restrictions
> and harassment of groups like ours are likely to increase, and there is
> always the possibility of more 9/11 style terrorism that would dramatically
> inflame the situation.
>
> are there some ambitious plans we could make?  could we organize a
> regional event, for example, that would promote alternative media -
> perhaps try to bring amy goodman of democracy now and - a concerted effort to
> expose folks to a range of alternate sources for news?  or could we use
> some of our money to send someone to afghanistan and organize widely
> around that trip?
>
> these are just ideas that i pose in effort to get a discussion going about
> what to do with this chunk of money and with the great energy we have
> going right now...
>
> carol
>
>
>
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