If there is anything this journey has taught that identity is not fixed. Not mine. Not Wolf's. Not even the barrier between our two identities. It's all fluid, shifting around and doubling constantly. Negotiating that doubling-between our younger selves and our older selves, between our public selves and our private selves, between our living selves and our dying selves-is a part of what it means to be human. A bigger part of being human, though, and certainly of living a good life, is not about how we make ourselves in those shifting sands of self. It's about what we make together. (from the Epilogue)
Canadian author and activist (born 1970)
(born on 8 May 1970) is a Canadian author, social activist, and filmmaker known for her political analyses and criticism of corporate globalization and of corporate capitalism.
From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Vertigo invades when the world we thought we knew no longer holds. The known world is crumbling. That's okay. It was an edifice stitched together with denial and disavowal, with unseeing and unknowing, with mirrors and shadows. It needed to crash. Now, in the rubble, we can make something more reliable, more worthy of our trust, more able to survive the coming shocks. (chapter 15, p342)
Here is my attempt to decipher the chaos of doppelganger culture, with its maze of simulated selves and digital avatars and mass surveillance and racial and ethnic projections and fascist doubles and the studiously denied shadows that are all coming to the surface at once. It's going to take some wild turns-but rest assured that the point of this mapping is not to stay trapped inside the house of mirrors, but to do what I sense many of us long to do: escape its mind-bending confines and find our way toward some kind of collective power and purpose. The point is to make our way out of this collective vertigo, and get somewhere distinctly better, together. (from the Introduction)
That bleak view of humanity--that we are nothing more than a collection of atomized individuals and nuclear families, unable to do anything of value together except wage war-has had a stranglehold over the public imagination for a very long time. No wonder so many of us believed we could never rise to the climate challenge. But more than thirty years later, as surely as the glaciers are melting and the ice sheets are breaking apart, that "free-market" ideology is dissolving, too. In its place, a new vision of what humanity can be is emerging. It is coming from the streets, from the schools, from workplaces, and even from inside houses of government. It's a vision that says that all of us, combined, make up the fabric of society. And when the future of life is at stake, there is nothing we cannot achieve.
the very idea that we, as atomized individuals, even lots of atomized individuals, could play a significant part in stabilizing the planet's climate system or changing the global economy is objectively nuts. We can only meet this tremendous challenge together, as part of a massive and organized global movement.
yes, we need to grow faster and do more. But the weight of the world is not on any one person's shoulders: Not yours. Not Zoe's. Not mine. It rests in the strength of the project of transformation that millions are already a part of. That means we are free to do the kind of work that will sustain us, so that we can all stay in this movement for the long run. Because that's what it will take.
The main reason that the elite attacks never succeeded in turning the public against the New Deal was that its programs were helping people. But another reason had to do with the incalculable power of art, which was embedded in virtually every aspect of the era's transformations. The New Dealers saw artists as workers like any other: people who, in the depths of the Depression, deserved direct government assistance to practice their trade. As Works Progress Administration director Harry Hopkins famously put it, "Hell, they've got to eat just like other people." ("The Art of the Green New Deal")