Thursday, August 26, 2010

Tim Hjersted - People Are Waking Up

Via Adbusters, a brief and hopeful piece on why and how people seem to be waking up (albeit slowly) from the cultural trance. I don't see it as much here in the Southwest as much as it may be happening elsewhere - but I hope it is happening.

People Are Waking Up

People Are Waking Up

From the March 2009 edition of Nylon

People are waking up. They’re saying, Not another day!

This is where I mark the line.

They’re hungry to get involved and they’re getting involved. Their desire to change the world is shifting from wishful Monday-morning thinking into tangible action. They’re beginning to see activism not as something done at nonprofit meetings and protests, but as a way of life, a personal, spiritual choice. Ultimately, it is the choice to reject our culture’s slide into narcissism. It is a view that rejects the modern consumer philosophy that true happiness comes from personal material accumulation and self-interest. It is the realization that the joy of connecting with nature blows the joy of acquiring stuff out of the water.

We are social animals; we crave connection and community; we crave a wide, encompassing identity that connects us with all of humanity – not just our friends and family, not just our city, our country, our species – but every living being on Earth: plant, animal, human.

It is a new philosophy – and perhaps a very ancient one. It leads to the most profound and meaningful kind of happiness one could possibly experience. It adopts the happiness of others as its own … and also shares in their suffering.

You can’t buy that kind of happiness at a store. You can’t get it from beating the last level of a video game. It doesn’t come out of the end of a pipe or at the bottom of a bottle. It doesn’t come from watching sports. It doesn’t come from how you dress or what kind of car you drive. It doesn’t come from getting a college degree or a fatter paycheck. It comes directly from the final and profound realization that there are no isolated islands of “self” and “other.” We are inter-woven into everything. We are all of it.

Tim Hjersted is the director and a cofounder of Films For Action.


Audio version read by George Atherton


2 comments:

Unknown said...

Thanks for the repost. You might be interested in checking out the full article this adbusters remix was based on.

http://www.filmsforaction.org/News/Whats_It_Going_to_Take_to_Heal_the_Apathy_in_Our_Society/

Also, you might dig on my latest:

http://www.filmsforaction.org/Articles/The_Root_Problem_is_the_Root_Solution/

all copy-left, cheers!

william harryman said...

Thanks Tim!