There is nothing more powerful than an idea.
In the long term. In the short term tear gas, billy clubs, pepper spray, water cannon, etc. are more powerful....as we are seeing again and again, all over the world.
But in the long term all advances in human society have started as an idea, and once the idea spreads far enough, has been around long enough, and enough people have accepted that idea on a gut level, that once new idea becomes fact. Fact that people know and so facts that overthrow the old fact. Only two facts never change: Everything always changes...and...What ever the majority of people believe to be true IS true. For the time being. Until everything changes again.
That is called revolution. And we are in one right now. But this revolution is different for one very important reason.
All past revolutions were limited by geography, by how far the new idea could effectively travel in the critical period. These days, there is no more geography as far as ideas are concerned, the hole planet is connected. The whole planet shares the same consciousness and thus the same idea.
There is only one thing missing, so far, from this revolution...one thing that has kept it from truly igniting, so far, and that is the lack of a coherent label, or theme, or rallying cry. A name, in other words. The conscious, articulated, and resonant definition of what this 'it' is that is being felt around the world.
Since all we earthlings share the same information now (unlike in past revolutions) it is only a matter of time until that spark, that label or theme or rallying cry, lights the tinder of the just now coalescing new consciousness that is laying, so to speak, on the tip of the planets tongue.
The new idea, the new fact that is coalescing right now, once named, will spread like wildfire. Then the only question will be whether this new revolution can also find a new, less destructive and violent, form of expression.
Let's hope so. And let's all try to work towards that, ok? Because as John Kennedy said ...
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
Non Serviam