politicsThese quotes are what I’m considering to lead into the chapters.
Introduction
“The man who struggles to find his place may find his place in struggles. In the struggle man will come to know himself, his place, and that place of struggle within humanity.”
-Antonio Garcia
On competition beyond survival
The ultimate value of life depends upon awareness and the power of contemplation rather than upon mere survival.
-Aristotle
The only justification for repressive institutions is material and cultural deficit. But such institutions, at certain stages of history, perpetuate and produce such a deficit, and even threaten human survival.
-Noam Chomsky
In a world where change is inevitable and continuous, the need to achieve that change without violence is essential for survival.
-Andrew Young
The landscape of power
Between man and other animals there are various differences, some intellectual, some emotional. One of the chief emotional differences is that some human desires, unlike those of animals, are essentially boundless and incapable of complete satisfaction.
-Bertrand Russell in Power
The process, path, and experiment of humanity
In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than just ideals to be valued - they may be essential to survival.
-Noam Chomsky
Critical thought is a tool (chapter name not definite)
“If you desire to build a house you will need tools. If you desire to tear it down you will need tools for that as well. Without the tools to construct and deconstruct you are left with only seeing what you hope could be, is, or not be”
-Antonio Garcia
The rage is relentless, we got move it with the quickest (Rage against the Machine. See right through their right white and blue disguise. Keep raging against the machine. To stand up with your fist in the air a “fuck the system” in your mind you have ascended to dissention. Feel good my friend because with out the critical awareness we would be lost in the comfortable, yet ignorant bliss of control, dominance, oppression, and be forever comatose to the world around us (See Orwell’s 1984). Our fist is not meant to be a weapon but we must protect ourselves. Raise your middle finger as an extension of your angst, turmoil, and relegation to slave. Yell from the top of your lungs and bottom of your “fuck you I won’t do what you tell me.” It is not out of pure hate, but anger. A distinction between the tow is critical. Anger is the natural emotion that we feel when we are discontent. Hate is the frustration of not being able to understand the system of oppression upon us or those that are different from us (See Sleeter and Grant, 1994 Ch.3 “Human Approaches” in Making choices for multicultural education).
We have become silenced slaves. We feel our tongue has been removed or that is no longer needed so long as we are fed and provided for (in equal or equitable terms in debatable). The use of our voice is not to communicate disdain but to request, wait fuck that, demand, take, and fight for our freedom (Paolo Freire in Pedagogy of the oppressed). Emancipation is the greatest gift of all. Perhaps you emancipate yourself through education or “momentarily” emancipate your mind through illicit potations. Nevertheless, an enlightened sense of self coupled with community is true elation, a momentarily lapse into what some may call “heaven” (not directly referring to Christian heaven but the metaphysical pane of stillness (Eckhart Tolle’s A new earth: awakening your life’s purpose), contentment in ecstasy, and libratory movement of the essential soul. I want to feel myself with my community as free and harmonious.
Freedom is not governmental it is individual, yet it is a state we try to obtain as a physical apparatus. The free mind can never be caged or imprisoned in such a way that the mind because dulled into a dreadfully declined state much like that moments before death. If we can free our minds (as cheesy as the Matrix movie was) then we will free ourselves. Yet, I would maintain that freedom is a balancing not an absolute gift to be obtained and forever known. We can break the body as well as the soul. When we have broken both we have left man (in oppression) with nothing more [to break] short of exterminating him.
How much can we talk about oppression, change, freedom, and revolution? How long can you maintain it?
Life will eat away at you if you have the burning inside cause by an enlightened understanding of what is and can be. I dream of a different. It is within my heart and my writing that I discuss these topics. People ask me why I do and don’t do certain things. As I will assert and have discussed, there must be a genuine cause. I do not support speculation or “preemptive” movements nor do I participate willingly in vain charity, sometimes deemed as radical movements. There must be an understanding and strategy outlined. That which we do in haste, masked as spontaneity, is often done without considerable thought of consequence. Being and living the pedagogy of humanity requires me to understand consequences and to practice/exercise embracing that rationality. Though quickness of thought and judgment are needed in certain times, wide spread or mass movements that seek to be popular rather than those that are purposeful are without true cause. We were meant to live for so much more…..but we lost ourselves (Switchfoot, Meant to live).
Antonio Garcia
Indiana University
agarciaj@indiana.edu
The perfect song has just come on my ipod. Its "dreamland" by Robert miles. How coincidental. This slow song relaxes my mind and allows my flow to leak from my mind to the pixilated paper before me. I have had many thoughts today and collective thoughts emerge over this week. I am coming into focus and understanding myself and my movement. Movement is what drives me. Often, movement is revolution, perhaps even militant, but I now realize that my movement is here. We often neglect the symbols around us that direct towards our calling, understanding, and reflective being.
When I moved to Indiana to start my graduate school I hated it here. The people were fundamental Christian and covert racists. I was catapulted into developing a heightened sense of politics and religiosity that existed outside safe liberal realm of the university. My first year here I taught in a small community 35 miles south of Bloomington. It was very conservative, very, Christian, and there was little questioning the dominant (hegemonic) routine of the school and community (See Micheal Apple's Offical Knowledge and Educating the "right" way). I’m not one to live on my knees (See Emiliano Zapata) so I stand with my fist in the air. It wasn’t my intention to go to this community to shake things up, but it happened. A multitude of events transpired during the single school year that I taught there. At the end of the year, I couldn’t stay. One student talked with me and was upset. He asked how I could talk so much about revolution and change and then just leave. I told him that the revolution had to come from the people, not from the outside. He was upset that I was leaving, but I think he came to understand my effort as an educator, advocate, and revolutionary was to only plant the seed, ignite the spark or whatever other cliché one may choose to use in this case. It was a very hard year and at first I was conflicted in trying to negotiate and rationalize my leaving (though I was given the choice to resign or be formally declined a.k.a fired otherwise). What movement had been caused? Was it my place? I was trying to do as Paolo Freire (See Pedagogy of the oppressed) said and join with the oppressed to counteract the oppressive, dominant, narrow minded, thought sedation that was so evident in the school and community. Were my efforts in vain? Was it my revolution or was it theirs? Three years later I still talk with students, they still email me, several have taken my class at IU in the school of education, and more than one has said we now know what you were saying. I came to realize that revolution does not always mean an instant militant over throw or radical (overnight) change. A revolution simply is the growth and process of overcoming what plagues the oppressed.
As I look for jobs and talk with people about revolutionary thought and education people keep directing me to California, Oregon, Florida, New York, and Wisconsin. They say that these are the places where progressive liberal thoughts and ideology are most prevalent. Frederick Nietzsche said “The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.” It’s very comfortable to be with other people who believe the way you do. At the same time, we relinquish our motivation and drown our desire to challenge the ideologies that are oppressive. Should I be concerned with the areas that already have a large liberal activism? Just as I am not concerned with the students that are succeeding. I am concerned with the students in the remedial classes, the “bad” ones, the ones who have given up on the system because the system has given on them. JJ Rousseau (See Emile) discusses a similar thought in addressing the understanding of survival. Rousseau says that the rich elite is in more need of education and training in survival than the poor working class because the poor student has been surviving all his life, the rich student has been given his means of survival for which he knows not where they come form.
We often want to go to places that are comfortable and familiar (culturally and in ideology). These places do not need me. My revolution, my movement is wherever I go. To sleep with the enemy is the only way to know it and I have made a mistress of it. Revolution need not be large scale movements nor championed only in popular areas. Revolution and the pedagogy of humanity are needed in the areas that have been sheltered from the world under the guise of hegemony and ideological dominance (mostly, Eurocentric, Christian (protestant), conservative, and republican). I do not mean to infer that Christian or conservative or republican are bad; however, the areas that are most racists, resistant to progressive ideas, and willing to accept critical thought (and dissent) are areas that are comprised of such demographic characteristics.
Revolution is not a physical movement it’s a way of life. The pedagogy of humanity is not a way of viewing life and society; it’s a way of being in life and society. All that we do must be understood as a process, a path, and an experiment. What worked yesterday may fail today. What was exemplary yesterday is criticized today. What will be needed tomorrow is uncertain. We search for the right mixture for today but we will never find the cure. We will only find a way to slow the effects of today effects. Absoluteness and arrival are the utopia we dream of. We must understand utopia as the carrot in front of the horse. It keeps us going because we believe we can obtain it. Yet, what would happen if we could have utopia? Would we not consume it and commodify into a product that we could further define ourselves as more utopian than others? As such, we should seek never an end and maintain an understanding of the means. Our revolutionary soul wills our future, it critical examines our past, and understands that we will continue in means with no end. A struggle? yes. A mentality for hope? yes. A way of being? If not then my end has no means and no further meaning.
Antonio Garcia
Indiana University
I stop every so often to observe what I have written. I question its fluency and understanding. On these pages my collective thoughts are displayed without much thought but fluidity. I begin to write and let the thoughts pour out. Sometimes we think in such ways that no one understands but us. A code of sorts. Each section is one thought that has manifested or lingered. Sometimes the thoughts are there before we know and it takes some stimulant to retrieve them. For me it is the key of music. A soft beat and harmonious electronica invigorates my inner being to start relaxing the thoughts I need for now and start researching the thoughts that exist independent of obligation. I sometimes wake from dreams with the words but I'm lost when i got to write them the next day. Perhaps it’s not time for them to be retrieved. Our mind has a way of moderating our thoughts so that we do not become overly pensive to the point of insanity. Perhaps our inner being has no language that can be recognize within some sort of systematic pattern or structure. Our true being may exist in a way that is incomprehensible. Perhaps it is good and needed. Do we need to see our true being revealed through the shedding of conditioned thoughts and routines? Our solstice and tranquility lies in a language all our own, an ontological idiolect. So for anyone who reads these scribbles of thoughts, they are what they are. If you finding meaning in them then that meaning is yours alone I hope that you find something meaningful in your own life that allows for an exploration and willful desire to relinquish thinking and sustain being in true essence.
Antonio Garcia
Indiana University
There are a multitude of causes around the worked each worthy in its own right. Some are more in need than others. Some are only causes in the name of a cause. The word itself is speculative cause yet we find more allure in individual operations. It is truly with great valor and honorability that we recognize the action of such causes, but with some hesitancy I would assert. It seems that in a time of rapid technology and popular culture the increasing source of epistemological reckoning we fall prey to fetishism. I have discussed in my talks about academic and intellectual fetishism. Fetishism is referred to most often in sexual contexts. The act of fetish is indulging in as a sense of “deviant” behavior that is an obsession produced by an egoic thirst (see Sigmund Freud). Causes have become a fetish taken up by those with kind hearts and imaginations. The more causes that are taken up the more causes that are produced to address those causes and thus and endless cycle of causes occur by an affective causation. Ironic isn’t it. So how do we navigate and negotiate causes in order to understand how we are attempting to bring about an end by our means rather than a continual supply of means with no end? We must find meaning in ourselves that promotes us to stand for a cause that may encompass or willfully incorporate several causes under one distinct meaningful approach. We must not take pleasure in causes but pain. Sympathy is the oppressors understanding that his position is safe and distance from the oppressed. Empathy attempts to provide a relational consciousness within the oppressed and victimized. Charity is an oppressive tool that teases unknowingly. Not all charitable negotiations are this way. It should be understood that charity is not the empathetic consciousness but the sympathetic. It leaves a noticeable distance form the charitable producer and the consumer of such charity. In many cases the sympathy stimulates a brief moment of contentment that the charity has somehow participated in an active agency to better the situation. It is nothing more in this case but a tithing of aberration for the charitable. It is a cause which causes them to feel elated. What dreams they rest with easily do not incorporate the stark and desperate realities of those whose charity they will receive. At times I am cynical of the world and the cycle of charity. Charity keeps alive the dead and the terminally oppressed. At his point we can return to the original discussion of causes. To take up a cause is to take up a life. A life that is responsible not for the self, but for those that it aims to affect. Education is a cause in its own right. Though in understanding education as a cause it is not complete, absolute, nor terminable until death. Time is irrelevant in understanding cause. With a swift blow one movement is erased and another one takes its place. We must caution ourselves in taking up causes. It is not an easy task or one that promises great reward. If anything there is certainty of consequence, pain, and relinquishing of what one enjoys in order to participate as an advocate and a possible constituent. Great revolutionaries have understood that causes are devised by those who are often not constituents of them. We feel sympathy for the suffering of a group but would refuse to trade places, to momentarily emancipate an individual. When one refuses to give up his or her life even in an abstract hypothetical proposal then that person not only understands their position, they have strengthened it. The strengthening of such positions continues to promote a cycle of dominance, unearned privilege, oppression, and willful neglect. Charity becomes the financial penalty for refusing such hypothetical terms. It is the opium needed to intoxicate the mind as it drifts into an abstract reality filled with sympathy and comfort. Life is comfortable for those who are not within a cause. Those who do not receive charity are comfortable in the leisure and ability to not be so. We cannot condemn the charitable, sympathetic, and good intentioned. We can, however, attempt to convey a consciousness and empathetic realization among those who are quick to give and take but not partake. So much as we critically discuss these unknowing benevolents they are the advocacy and agents of transformation. With clarity and willingness to be what they are objecting they become like the other which loses its rigid categorical form in place of self-affiliation. So to the missionaries who give conditionally what has been taken away from you that heeds such condition for charity and cause. Such understanding of support or “cause” must be negotiated diligently or we fall into a mindless fetish of causes for the sake of having a cause.
Antonio Garcia
Indiana University
To what degree does man owe his life to another. Perhaps, he owes nothing, and yet everything. Man seeks to find wholeness is another's warmth and soul, yet he must find himself within his own souless stew. It is the torment of man to be able to gaze upon an object of beauty and vibrance without being able to touch it. One touch could corrode nd destroy the object leaving it in disrepair. A tangible movmenet toward the statue would leave texture on his fingers and memories of it in his mind. The more we touch the more we corrode and connect with people and the world. Is there any escape form the devastation of corrosion to the beauty and objects we adore? Perhaps it is a common agreement or compromise between man and that which man finds to be worthy of such exploration beyond the visual. If our eyes were cut outs our hearts would still yearn. What we see is only the first embrace of enchantment leading to an unattachable love and understanidng of the memory of texture whcih the object has given to man. To understand with such breath the breathless expression that man not only partakes in but adores is to see life and nature at work. A tandem of respect and consequences, patience and virtue, will and desire, to gain by losing. To never have had is the most man can ever hope to have for the absence of such pychological categories inthe mind leaves man in the contentment of ignorance. That which we never know never knows us. We can abstain and remain in the contentment of ignorance. Safety of not knowing becomes our world of knowing only the known to us and ignoring the known to man. It must be a leap of discontent and will to break out of such security and transcend to a place of utter uncertainty, fear, and yet beauty. It is here that we find man wrestling with love and hate, frustration and confusion. It is with empotional effect that we ignore the diffciult in place of seeking the simpleness of life. Lost in the illusion of happiness we are only suppressing, and slowing, the corrosion we fear consuming us. Happiness is but a state marked by spontaniety and in excusable actions that lash out against any prevailing law or norm in the name of assuming one's or announcing one's self to bree liberated in happiness as a pure intoxicating form of emotional exctasy. We fool ourselves by following, not what we believe, but what others have conditioned us to understand as happiness. I gaze up a statue which I cannot touch. I see it in its beauty. I see it from afar and let it be. I stand apart but close just to see. The things we love should not be confused with happiness. Love brings happiness and hate, but happiness is a state all its own.
Antonio Garcia
Indiana University
Man has but the simple task of balance. Balance is not the same as moderation. That balance entails the unique and tumultuous duty of acting in a way that brings neither extreme or fanaticism nor subjugation. We act in ways that fulfill consumption. This may be food, sex, alcohol, reading, etc.. Consumption fuels the inner desire we have for something. Eckhart Tolle discusses the idea of the ego as being the barrier to enlightenment and stillness. Hannah Arendt would refer to conditioning, but it becomes a quandary of sorts in understanding the function of conditioning (separate from that of influence). Man produces conditions, yet he is subject to being a product of conditions. It seems an inescapable dialectic of life. To what degree, if any, can we escape conditioning without providing conditions by which to escape previous conditions? Since we cannot seem to escape conditions and conditioning we must work within them to understand their influence and determinism in imbalance. Balance is our continuous struggle and reward in life. We maintain an understanding of our consumption as being appropriated in moderation in order to implement balance that is neither starvation nor gluttony. This process of balance does not only occur within ourselves but also with ourselves and nature, individually and collectively. There is not centerfold which holds higher regard than the other because in the cosmic illumination that extends beyond our understanding we are but workers. What are we working towards? This remains a question of life and a collective question for humanity. Man has been given the unfortunate ability of emotion, love and hate, which predicates most of his feelings and willfulness to act. The balance is to not fall into the extremist disillusionment of fanatical love or hate. A man who has all the love for the world one day can awake with the bitter taste of hate on his lips the next morning. Man fails to understand balance and partake in healthy emotional consumption. When man fails to moderate such consumptions he becomes consumed by it and no longer assumes the role as consumer but product. He becomes a product with extremism and narrowness of thought. His balance has shifted from one terminal point to another. If becomes consumed then he may become confused and unable to discern balance fearing that one movement will shift from one terminal point to another. Perhaps this manic imbalance is why people struggle with life. They have been conditioned to allow consumption to consume them and thus are no longer masters of their consumption but products of it. They are oppressed by the ego as they try to fulfill it but it is an unhappy bitch. It takes what it wants and destroys, sometimes, violently what it discards. Man's responsibility is to understand that neither peace nor war can ever sustain man. It is utopian to believe in sustained peace and abominable to believe in sustained war. Man will always feud. His feud will primarily be with himself. He projects his internal conflict outwardly and thus begins the cycle of providing a condition under which others are conditioned. It is with moderation, compromise, mediation that we can come to an understanding of balance within ourselves and humanity. As we look for answers to the world’s problems and degradation of humanity, we must look at the consumption of one and the ill conceived product of being consumed. When you can balance yourself you can project a balance proposition for conditioning and thus retract the ill fated cycle of extremism and teetering form one terminal point to another.
Antonio Garcia
Indiana University
I am currently working on several paper presentations and a possible book regarding the pedagogy of humanity. This work has not been completely thought out and articulated, but I hope through discussions and presentations that I will be able to refine ideas and culminate them into a succinct discourse. My goal is to start developing teacher materials through rethinking schools or another publisher that shares the same vision for what I am trying to work on. As I have said in discussions, what can we say that hasn't been said? What we strive for is the right prescritpion (combination of philosophy and thoughts) for the right time that will address issues appropriately. Life is a process, a path, and an experiment.
Antonio Garcia
Indiana University
If you don't believe in humanity then see its devastation. We are all linked to these events directly and indirectly. The pedagogy of humanity is not conerned with polticial and religious ideology of discerning who is right or wrong. What we must understand is that "we" either stand with humanity or against it. Like a disease we cannot escape, the degradation that is eating away humanity is foreshadowinng a grim fatalism. These should be viewed within the critical reflective frame of respect, responsibility, and consequences.
Antonio Garcia
Indiana University
The life of a bullet
http://youtube.com/watch?v=n4jMzKxYB74
Kenya in conflict
http://quicksilverscreen.com/watch?video=45358
Israel and palenstine
http://youtube.com/watch?v=l0aEo59c7zU&feature=related
Eugenics
http://youtube.com/watch?v=ufqOe0_pres
Human experiemnts on prisoners
http://youtube.com/watch?v=_MD9yKW-S1k
Nazi experiment on Jews
http://youtube.com/watch?v=6qS_Vwz47gI
Japan's human experiments and torture
http://youtube.com/watch?v=bAp8bSdE5MQ
Abu Ghraib torture (Please beware the images are disturbing)
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Ru0bxSqWMdo
