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The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted.


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The other day I was thinking about Gil Scott Heron's Poem the Revolution Will Not be Televised.   I was considering writing a updated version to the poem, tentatively called, "The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted".

 

 

Realizing there is nothing new understand sun, I decided to search the term, "The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted," and I actually was surprised by the abundance of content on the subject and discovered other people had already written similar poems on the subject, so I abandoned the idea. 

 

The Brother's version below is better than what I would have done, though I think far too long.

 

 

I also discovered a four-year-old article written by Malcolm Gladwell, entitled, "Why he Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted."  While one can easily find a lot of criticism of the article, I find it to be on point.

 

People tend to exaggerate the impact of social media:

 

“It is time to get Twitter’s role in the events in Iran right,” Golnaz Esfandiari wrote, this past summer, in Foreign Policy. “Simply put: There was no Twitter Revolution inside Iran.” The cadre of prominent bloggers, like Andrew Sullivan, who championed the role of social media in Iran, Esfandiari continued, misunderstood the situation. “Western journalists who couldn’t reach—or didn’t bother reaching?—people on the ground in Iran simply scrolled through the English-language tweets post with tag #iranelection,” she wrote. “Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi.”

 

Social Media is not a substitute for organizations:

 

The drawbacks of networks scarcely matter if the network isn’t interested in systemic change—if it just wants to frighten or humiliate or make a splash—or if it doesn’t need to think strategically. But if you’re taking on a powerful and organized establishment you have to be a hierarchy. The Montgomery bus boycott required the participation of tens of thousands of people who depended on public transit to get to and from work each day. It lasted a year. In order to persuade those people to stay true to the cause, the boycott’s organizers tasked each local black church with maintaining morale, and put together a free alternative private carpool service, with forty-eight dispatchers and forty-two pickup stations. Even the White Citizens Council, King later said, conceded that the carpool system moved with “military precision.” By the time King came to Birmingham, for the climactic showdown with Police Commissioner Eugene (Bull) Connor, he had a budget of a million dollars, and a hundred full-time staff members on the ground, divided into operational units. The operation itself was divided into steadily escalating phases, mapped out in advance. Support was maintained through consecutive mass meetings rotating from church to church around the city.

 

The article sums up the situation perfectly. and in my mind explains why we are so ineffective today:

 

"...it is simply a form of organizing which favors the weak-tie connections that give us access to information over the strong-tie connections that help us persevere in the face of danger. It shifts our energies from organizations that promote strategic and disciplined activity and toward those which promote resilience and adaptability. It makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact. The instruments of social media are well suited to making the existing social order more efficient. They are not a natural enemy of the status quo. If you are of the opinion that all the world needs is a little buffing around the edges, this should not trouble you. But if you think that there are still lunch counters out there that need integrating it ought to give you pause."

 

The full article is 4.4K words worth reading.

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Talib Kweli explains, during a interaction with Don Lemon, that Tweeting does not make a revolution.  He does however point out that there are several organizations, on the ground, doing the work I did not think was getting done.  I trust they get the people of Ferguson to vote, with their numerical majority they could at least get some Black folks in office who would be more inclined to support the Black residents there.

 

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A revolution at the polls was what got Barak Obama elected. Now he has become a part of the problem instead of a part of the solution. "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrumpts absolutely". Why? because once you become a part of the power structure, you are absorbed by it. 

 

Blacks need a revolution of the mind.  They need to distinguish between "united we stand" and "misery loves company".  New strategies are needed because the old ones don't work. Especially since there's truth to this issue being about class as much as race.  

 

In this country, Blacks have to control the "white" because Whites control what's "black".  In other words, Whites have what's written, and Blacks have the spaces between the words. It's almost to the point were we have to call upon metaphysics to get over on The System.   

 

There are Blacks in this country who are thriving because they've learned how "to get in where they fit in". Unarmed, black, 18-year-old aspiring rapper, Michael Brown, was executed during an encounter with a gun-toting white cop in a town where Blacks are second class citizens.  Who came down to Ferguson, Missouri, to throw his weight around and threaten the authorities there?  The Attorney General of the United States, who happens to be a black man. Is there something wrong with this picture???

 

Here in Chicago a little league baseball team, composed of 13 young boys, became the heroes of this battle-scarred city because they carved out their niche. They  went out and played the game like it was supposed to be played and brought back a trophy that made all Chicagoland proud. Is this a teachable moment?

 

As a race, the future looks bleak for Blacks but, as individuals, progress is possible.  Whites  get ahead because they do not carry the burden of their color on their shoulders; they do their own thing and if they fail they have nobody to blame but themselves. In a better world things would be different for Blacks.   But this world is cruel.  America is the  "land the free white man and home of the brave black nigger", as my father used to say.

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 "land the free white man and home of the brave black nigger"

 

Interesting quote what year was you dad born in Cynique?

 

Sure the election of Obama proved the system is broken.  However Obama was elected, in part, because Black people voted him in.

 

In Ferguson, I've read voter turn out in the Black community is roughly 10%, not much than in Harlem during the midterms.  Ferguson would have much better representation if they simply exercised their rights to vote.

 

I would not call the election of Obama a revolution.  The fight to get the right to vote was revolutionary, taking advantage of that right is not.

 

The old system clearly worked much better; Gladwell's article illustrated a fine example.  

 

I'm afraid if we have to fight for the right to vote or to eat at a lunch counter we would be in sad shape.

 

I don't even blame us for the situation. Perhaps if MLK and company where protesting in 2014 they would encounter the same issues. 

 

Our enemy is brilliant and they execute flawlessly.

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My Daddy was was born in 1890.  He died in 1967.   I am just expressinsg thoughts off the top of my head, Troy.  We are not as in control of our destinies as we think.  Shit happens.  Time marches on, the world keeps rotating on its axis and orbiting the sun.  Whatever will be, will be.  Obviously,  I am world weary.

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1890, deep.  He lived through, as an adult, the entire depression, WWI, WWII and Jim Crow.  I wonder if he was world weary? 

 

Despite all the nonsense we see today, America, the world even, seems to be a much better place for the generations that came after his; at least it seems that way...

 

I'm gonna hold onto my dream of being able to control my destiny for a bit longer, otherwise what is the point? 

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