For anyone to understand a regime like the GDR, the stories of ordinary people must be told. Not just the activists or the famous writers. You have to look at how normal people manage with such things in their pasts.
If I focus on being an activist and my job is to be a rapper, I'm not going to be as good of a rapper. I need to focus on hip-hop and focus on making the music, so that when the activists come to me and they need my voice to create a platform, then I've got enough people listening to me. Not because I'm conscious, but because I'm dope.
I was raised with no religious training or influence. Except the influence was to be a moral and ethical person at the secular level. And to be a peace marcher, an activist for civil rights, peace and justice.
Journalists are simply leftists disguised as reporters. They're political activists disguised as reporters.
During the summer of 2009, conservative activists turned up the heat on Democratic politicians to protest the innovation-destroying, liberty-usurping Obamacare mandate. In the summer of 2012, it's squishy Republican politicians who deserve the grassroots flames.
It's obsequious little nicety-nice girls like me who allow assholes to run the world: Miss Harlot O'Harlots, billionaire phony tree huggers, hypocrite drug-snorting, weed-puffing peace activists who fund the mass-murdering drug cartels and perpetuate crushing poverty in dirt-poor banana republics. It's my petty fear of personal rejection that allows so many true evils to exist. My cowardice enables atrocities.
Collectively, we activists are essential to advancing U.S. policy to help empower marginalized people to lift themselves and their communities out of poverty for good.
People get cranky when you burst their bubble. Over time, advances in astronomy have relentlessly reinforced the utter insignificance of Earth on a celestial scale. Fortunately, political and religious leaders stopped barbecuing astronomers for saying so, turning their spits with human-rights activists instead.
Those who are most sensitive about "politically incorrect" terminology are not the average black ghetto-dweller, Asian immigrant, abused woman or disabled person, but a minority of activists, many of whom do not even belong to any "oppressed" group but come from privileged strata of society.
I'm a dad, I'm a husband, I'm an activist, I'm a writer and I'm just a student of the world.
There is an elementary aspiration which undergirds the humane impulse in our history and our culture and binds us together as political activists. This is a simple, irreducible, indisputable aspiration. It is the 'dream of justice' for a beloved community, in which the level of terror in people's lives is sharply reduced or maybe eliminated. It is the belief that extremes and excesses of inequality must be reduced so that each person is free to fully develop his or her full potential. This is why we take precious time out of our lives and give it to politics.
I was not an activist.
Portland is a place where you can find a community as a feminist, a vegan or a fat activist. Artists, musicians, knitters, and filmmakers can all meet like-minded souls. It's proved the perfect place for me and all my punk friends.
My father was a physicist and also an activist. My first public protest was with my dad at Stanford. I came by all that honestly.
I think it's the responsibility of every human being, not just those who wear the identity of poet, activist, voter, religious person... it's the responsibility of every person. Our responsibility is to use our intelligence as clearly and coherently as we possibly can.
When I think of my background, if I was privileged on any level, it was in terms of the kind of exposure to experience and bohe-mian cultural influence that my parents and my uncles and my grandfather gave me. On both sides I come from an extremely eccentric, artsy, intellectually intense, activist family.
Another part of what gave me a questioning, rabble-rousing, activist heart and soul is that when all these heavy events went down, my parents did not shelter the kids from it.
My father wasn't a militant racist. He was a human rights activist - he was about human beings, so let's just get away from going way back then.
In San Francisco, most of the older activists, especially at Berkeley, were very hostile towards punks. The music, certainly, wasn't nice and mellow for them, and neither was our look or our attitude. While in Vancouver, the two most important early punk bands, D.O.A. and the Subhumans, were both managed by former yippie activists, who saw this as a logical extension of what they were already doing.
I got out of that immediately was that now, all of a sudden, rock music had become a spectator sport, that corporate labels and their bands were the new establishment, and punk was there to fight them the way the activist hippies must have fought what the establishment must have been ten years before. And it was interesting to see the reactions in different parts of the country.
I think there are three types of actors. There are the ones that do the ego thing, which is "I'm never going to look bad in a movie, ever." This is mostly the action film dudes, like, "Nah, hell no. He ain't punchin' me! I'd whoop his ass!" Then you've got the activist type who bases their decisions in the development of a character on what it symbolizes to society - what the ethical code is. And then the third type is a true thespian who doesn't give a flying rat's ass what it is as long as it's deep, powerful, and painful, and they will dive in headfirst. I really respect those people.
I intensely dislike the word 'critic,' because it puts you in an antagonistic position to artists. I've learned everything that I know about art from artists... I see myself as an advocate and an activist and a writer.
I wrote an essay too, and mine started something like, "When I was asked to contribute to this book, I said, 'I could do a piece on [Larry] Kramer as a pain in the ass, but I suppose you have too many of those, as it is.'" And Sarah's began something like, "When I read about America's angriest AIDS activist, I can't believe they are talking about my sweet Uncle Larry."
I think that because of YouTube, because of MySpace, because of the digital domain that we have on the Internet, the younger generation is much more open to information. I think it's so much easier for them to gain information and trade information, and they have become more aware. In some cases, more aware than their own parents and adults, as to what's going on in the world. I find that really intriguing and interesting, and I think there is a brewing of a whole new generation of activists coming.
Many of the people who voted for Trump were people who voted for Obama eight years ago. You remember, of course, his message was "hope and change." People wanted change, for good reasons, and they wanted hope. Disillusioned with what took place, they turned to someone else who was offering hope and change. When they're disillusioned with that, it depends on what activists and others do.
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