I Guess It's Time to Say Something

Here I was just fooling around amusing myself last night with this idea of creating a blog and already someone has posted a comment!

I'm wondering how Janinsanfran even FOUND my blog, with the amount of blogs being created on a daily basis, ricocheting out there into cyberspace.

Truly, we are becoming beehive cells in one giant mind ...

So, Jan, you've forced me to actually START blogging, when here I thought I could get away with just posting a few links and mumbling incoherently to myself as part of my efforts at managing this one little beehive cell.

Tonight I went to a showing of the film about Argentina, Hope in Hard Times, which was playing in the basement of a Methodist Church in San Rafael. This is a film my friends Mark Dworkin and Melissa Young (www.movingimages.org) made when I was living and working as a journalist and teacher during the Argentine uprising and social movements of 2001-2003. Because I introduced them to some of my Argentine activist friends and offered some creative feedback on the film while they were making it, they were kind enough to list me as associate producer. So I spoke a bit after the film about the Argentina I had lived in two years ago, and Andres Conteris, another filmmaker and
director of Nonviolencia Internacional spoke about what's happening in Uruguay with the election of the Frente Amplio and a lot of former revolutionaries,ex Tupamaros, to the government.

It is a good thing, we all agreed, that George W Bush has been so preocupied with Iraq, leaving South America much more to its own devices than the US is usually capable of doing. As Conteris said, if not for Saddam, Chavez would have been out of Venezuela. Forget about attempted coups. He would have been outta there.

Meanwhile in Bolivia the bees are busy uniting their
powerful beehive cells into one giant Aymara mind, cascading down from El Alto and the hills and filling the streets of several different cities,waving the multi-colored Wiphala flag, and calling out Basta!

The bees are tired of the honey being sucked dry by multinationals while the bees themselves don't get any. In this case, it's Bolivian natural gas. In Uruguay, they have declared water a "constitutional right" in their referendum. They have learned from the Argentines who lost most of their natural resources to privatization in the 90's, and from the South Africanswho sometimes have not been able to afford their own drinking water.

The Mapuche in Chile and Argentina, whose water had been poisoned by oil drilling when I visited them in 2003, now have their own newspaper. The written word, as they say in their online newspaper,
is another tool, another weapon.

I guess it's time to say something.