Rethink Resources

So I was reading various sites and found this: Tide? or Ivory Snow?: Public Power in the Age of Empire by Arundhati Roy. Especially compelling to me was her critique of NGO’s - nonprofits and how they function as way to suppress and divert radical energy for change. Much to discuss there and this really caught my eye.

If we want to reclaim the space for civil disobedience, we will have to liberate ourselves from the tyranny of crisis reportage and its fear of the mundane. We have to use our experience, our imagination, and our art to interrogate the instruments of that state that ensure that “normality” remains what it is: cruel, unjust, unacceptable.

Here she’s referring to the media’s desire to make everything into a crisis and lack of interest in the normal brutality of people struggling. Consider New Orleans; thousands homeless, homes still uninhabitable, basic needs not being met and when was the last time you heard about that on the news? The moment of dire crisis held attention for a while, but now it’s just back to the dull, blunt feeling of need and want that marks so many communities.

It reminds me of how the media always wants to characterize youth involvement in the sex trade as worse, growing, reaching more youth or different youth or younger youth, for it to be shocking in some way. Instead of recognizing it’s been like this for a long time now. It’s hard to tell really if it’s getting worse or better because of poor previous research. And even if it wasn’t getting worse in some definable way, it’s still happening a lot.

I do believe we need to pull ourselves away from portraying youth in the sex trade with that framework of crisis. Instead present the everyday reality of so many youth who don’t need a catastrophic event to make their life circumstances unacceptable. And we need to challenge all the systems that make it possible for this to be normal.