Is Another World Possible? How Do We Know Reality?

It started this morning listening to "Another" radio station - KWMD, 104.5 or 87.7 on the Anchorage FM dial. Arlo Guthrie singing Alice's Restaurant leading into a story about another alternative radio station - KPFT Houston.

We’re also joined by Mary Thomas. She is the host of the weekly Zydeco music program on KPFT. The bullet that was fired into the station Monday morning narrowly missed her head.

This is coming from Amy Goodman's Democracy Now (Link to KPFT story here)

Then we hear Naomi Klein at the American Sociological Association last week

We did not lose the battles of ideas. We were not outsmarted and we were not out-argued. We lost because we were crushed. Sometimes we were crushed by army tanks, and sometimes we were crushed by think tanks. And by think tanks I mean the people who are paid to think by the makers of tanks."

In this piece she talks about how the radical capitalists have shut down each budding alternative. In 1989 when the Soviet Union fell

And it was in that moment of flux and disorientation that several very savvy people, many of them in this country, seized on that moment to declare victory not only against communism, but against all ideas but their own...
...if we look back at the past thirty-five years, we see this slamming of the door on alternatives just as they are emerging repeating again and again.

She identifies a list of situations when alternatives to the American model were either crushed outright (Allende's Chile) or perverted into capitalist copies (Solidarity in Poland).

Citing declassified conversations between Kissinger and Nixon,

Kissinger says very bluntly that the problem with Allende’s election is not what they were saying publicly, which was that he was aligned with the Soviets, that he was only pretending to be democratic, but that he was really going to impose a totalitarian system in Chile. That was the spin at the time. The example of a successful elected Marxist government in Chile would surely have an impact on -- and even precedent value for -- other parts of the world. . . The imitative spread of similar phenomena elsewhere would in turn significantly affect the world balance and our own position in it.

And then a little later on Fresh Air, we hear Eugene Hütz, the leader of Gypsy Punk Group Gogol Bordello. Hütz grew up in Kiev with Gypsy DNA whose family left when Chernobyl blew and eventually made their way to Vermont.

All these stories reinforce that there are possibilities other than the standard model we see on mainstream media. We can have better health care, we can have real citizen involvement in government, we don't have to live lives that that require going into financial debt to Visa to pay for all the necessities of life (that didn't even exist 30 years ago) and time debt to our sleep and families.

We can know the possibilities of better lives if we escape from the ways our ideas are shaped by the fear mongering politicians and corporate media. So go to the links and listen to these ways people are not accepting the status quo.