Designs by Jason Justice
Educational Outreach Cards for the Movement
From the Occucards Website:
We try to choose topics that have a broad appeal, and that highlight the criminal collusion between corporations and government. This is because we believe the rise of corporate power is primarily responsible for the erosion of our democracy, as well as the economy and the environment.
Some people may call us “radical” in our perspective, but we see ourselves as thoroughly populist. Our cards are hard-hitting. We don’t hold back in critiquing the corporate state. Yet at the same time we write them to be accessible to the mainstream. We want our cards to be the kind of things activists feel good about handing out not just to strangers during a protest, but to their parents or children who might not understand why people become activists. We want regular folks, after reading our cards, to say to themselves, “Wow! Maybe I should become an activist too,” or if they don’t have the time (like many good people don’t) at least to understand and be thankful that others are doing this necessary work.
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What a colossal mstaike China is making with this HUGE urbanization push.Sure, on paper, to so many planners, economists, and technologists, moving civilization to high-rise cities and urban jobs makes sense. Agriculture is then consolidated as are the multitude of services delivered to the population. New economies of scale prevail. Cities, in some ways, are good for the environment as they concentrate their damage in one spot. A 200 unit high rise takes less energy per square foot than 200 cottages, etc. etc. Ya da, ya da, ya da. Most of us here have heard all that before and understand it.But what is the cost to the human mind of living that way? Isn’t this exactly what we’ve been seeing in the US going on a couple of generations now? Sure, having millions of people living in condos and apartments by the beltway or even downtown is supposed to free people to sit in coffee houses reading good books or Internet articles after they come home from whatever satisfying, technology job they took on compared to their grandparents working a dirt farm in Indiana (or wherever.) The reality that results, however, is a bored populace sitting around the condo playing endless XBox or watching corporate-driven TV, eating mass-produced microwave food until it’s time to go back to the office cubicle (or wait for the next recharge of their EBT card.) Then come the rise of single-parent homes, the rise of single mothers, more dependent on handouts, men who cannot get jobs (not everybody can be a doctor or lawyer), boys with no outlet for their energy, no male role models in their homes, no yard to play in. Then will come the gangs.Yeah, maybe cash income is higher living the “modern” way than if more of us were still living closer to the land in a more rural setting or even a less dense, urban one, but none of these metrics modern life proponents use can quantify what all of this bland, streamlined modernity does to human happiness.I grew up as a kid in a rural suburb in the 60s and 70s. There were always things for me to do around the house, yard, or neighborhood. Nowadays I see (and work with) legions of kids with nothing to do, living as they do in sanitized houses, apartments, in highly paved neighborhoods. Sadly, I can see how countries like China and their leaders, focused by years of cold economic and political training and thinking, cannot see how massive, modern, corporate, urbanized living is killing the idea of what it means to be human in places like the US. They simply see modernization and they want some of it for themselves too.Rich is not just having a few $$ or Yuan in the bank with a fridge and TV. It’s having things to occupy one’s hands and mind, a small stream to walk to. For a kid it’s a dog or chicken to interact and play with with some grass or other plants outside the back door to watch the bees on. Growing up on the 27th floor of some neo-Brutalist, concrete high-rise, and having to ride the elevator down to the sidewalk just to see the corporately-raised blue grass lawn (do Scotts and Monsanto do much business in China yet?) is no way for a 10 year old to live.China can expect ADHD and many other measurements of mental distress and illness, to start climbing – and probably outright skyrocket.They’re following the industrialized, corporate, West’s worst mstaikes. Fools.