- A Simple Lesson Of Change –
After celebrating Hosni Mubarak’sresignation during the whole night, people in Cairo went to Tahrir Square to clean up: picking up garbage, scrubbing statues and tanks, sweeping the streets…
Euronews
The Egyptian protesters exhibited good citizenship the day after their celebration of success. It was also tactically brilliant because entrenched powers are always quick to dismiss protesters as vandals and litterers. The rightwing, as usual, were quick to push that narrative in Wisconsin.
Wisconsin tea party members are planning a “It’s Time to Take out the Trash Day” at the Wisconsin State Capitol to clean up after the smelly slobs who defaced the capitol building during their two weeks of protesting and sleepovers. Wisconsin officials say the cleanup after the protests will cost the state tens of thousands of dollars.
And in Michagan
Granny commented:
Way to go Michigan! These anarchists simply cannot be allowed to trash public property as they did in Wisconsin. Glad to see that the Michigan police are still on the side of law and order.
Forget for a moment that those assertions of vandalism and garbage were as concocted as an O'Keefe production. Forget about how such stories were delivered to them. Simply recognize that they, and most of us, possess a cognitive frame (stereotypes if you will) that says: undesirables = dirty, trashy, etc. The reverse: dirty, trashy = "undesirables present" has astonishingly been demonstrated in a recent Dutch study reportecd by USA Today.
Could messy streets lead to discrimination? A Dutch study finds they might.
During a cleaners strike at a train station in Utrecht, researchers found that when the environment was disordered and dirty, white Dutch people tended to sit further away from Dutch people of African descent. After the strike was over and the station was again neat and clean, they repeated the study and found that white Dutch people didn't seem to care about the race of the person in the seat near them.
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Spending hours cleaning up years of trash – candy wrapper, chip bag, cigarette butts, etc. – from an inner city alleyway a few years ago (a task not on our Christmas in April agenda) now seems somewhat less futile to me than it did at the time. Not infrequently, I'll stop and pick up some trash on my walks. Often while our local homeless people sit and stare at me. But I could easily do more by regularly carrying and filling a trash bag. That's not going to change the world. It's unlikely to have any impact on unconscious racism in my predominately white neighborhood. It hardly comes close to anything resembling a rebellious act that Chris Hedges counsels we need more of. It's just something that I can DO that is basically good. Something that most people can DO. Enough of us and we could have a broomstick rebellion.