Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

I just spent the last hour watching a most amazing spectacle on C-Span.

It was the demonstrators in NYC. As far as the eye of the camera could see up and down seventh avenue there were people "singing song and a carrying sighs."

I watched the file by in front of the characteristically static C-Span camera. They just kept coming. There are several hundred thousand of them. Most of them seem to be young and other than that a fair cross-section of our citizens. But among them you could tell that there are some highly organized and experienced cadre leaders.

The streets are packed and the convention hasn't even started yet.

This could turn out to be a bigger rodeo than Chicago in '68.

thanks for the tip, I'm gonna turn it on mute and watch.

for some reason this whole upcoming republican convention has given me a sick feeling in my gut.

i'll be glad when it's over.

Yes, it was simply amazing and did my heart some good. Those lines of caskets were incredibly effective, and I thought about how Bush would not allow the caskets to be seen as they returned from Iraq.

I switched back and forth on the tube from the protest to the Olympics. I love the Olympics, that is the stage to compete on, to achieve dreams, not with some war somewhere.

Both of these events were peaceful...I only wish more peace would break out in our world.

SooZen

sooz and hest,

I can't remember seeing so charged a convention atmosphere since Chicago.

It concerns me a bit, because I heard the dull thud of police truncheons on human heads and smelled the teargas firsthand in '68.

Just a couple of weeks I read an interview with Norman Mailer. He was worried about the outcome of the protests as well.

I think it is great that so many people are demonstrating their displeasure with this government, but if too many rocks and bottles get thrown it will play into the hands of the Republicans.

I would love to see the protests be strong and impressive but completely peaceful.

Dear cyberfriends:


Just this morning, LR, I was reading this interview with Ram Dass:


http://www.greatmystery.org/interviewrd.html


Now 70 and confined to a wheelchair because of a stroke, he is still teaching the "in the moment" philosophy and "slow consciousness."

I bring him up because, as a representative of the "generation of 1968" ("mtmynd" and I were both 23 that year), he emanates much of the feeling I read in your post above.

If it were only possible to slow everyone down and make them "see" a little of the moment-- the moment of the screaming 500 pound bomb and the severed limbs of Iraqi children instead of the military uniforms and the empty-suit bureaucrats . . .

BUT, perhaps, as you wish, things will remain peaceful, not as in Chicago in '68.

But a draft, as in 68-- horrific as it sounds, THAT might get the attention, as the stroke and near-death experience did for Richard Alpert (Ram Dass)-- and for me.

I'm not advocating a draft, just a greater level of consciousness, as they used to say in my "consciousness-raising" group.


--Zlatko

I didn't know Ram Dass was having health problems. He christened my son twenty-five years ago on Gaskin's Farm in Tennessee.

You can always learn from a wake-up call.
9/11 was like that.
The only problem is that we learned the wrong thing.

Now we have to deal with the ever so much more troublesome task
of forgetting the wrong or useless information