Films For Action

Website Contact the organization

Films For Action We're a library for people creating a more free, regenerative and democratic society. Browse 6000 videos, 4,000 articles and share them with friends.
(366)

Benjamin Netanyahu, Itamar Ben-Gvir, and Bezalel Smotrich decisively lost Israel’s election on October 27. The governing...
10/30/2026

Benjamin Netanyahu, Itamar Ben-Gvir, and Bezalel Smotrich decisively lost Israel’s election on October 27. The governing coalition of Likud, the far right, and the ultra-Orthodox parties fell from 64 seats in 2022 to 53, eight short of a majority in the 120-seat Knesset. The other 67 seats went to parties that campaigned to replace the government: 48 to the Jewish-led opposition headed by Gadi Eisenkot, a former army chief of staff, and 19 to the two Arab parties. Turnout was 77.9 percent, the highest since 1999, and Arab citizens, who make up about one-fifth of Israel’s population, voted at an estimated rate of about 80 percent, up from 53 percent in 2022. The results make it clear: Israeli voters chose to end the Netanyahu government. The solution to Israel’s political crisis is in plain view. The only thing standing in the way of ousting the government is racism: the refusal of Israel’s Jewish opposition leaders to treat Arab citizens as part of the political community.

The racism is not hidden. On election night Netanyahu claimed a “decisive majority among the Zionist and Jewish public,” a formula that simply subtracts the votes of one citizen in five. His Likud party then viciously and absurdly declared that the election had been “stolen” by the Arab parties and demanded investigations by the police and the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service. The purpose, of course, is to brand Arab votes as illegitimate, so that no government resting on them can be accepted.

The tragedy is that the opposition leaders have adopted the same premise. Naftali Bennett, a former prime minister, has said that the Arab parties “ are not Zionist, and therefore we will not rely on them.” Avigdor Liberman has ruled out any government that depends on Arab votes, even a temporary one. Eisenkot has said that Ra’am’s leader “ won’t be part of my next government,” and that he does not “see any Arab or Haredi parties who accept” his conditions for partnership. These leaders do not object to anything the Arab parties would do in government. With good will, they could easily negotiate a governing arrangement.

The consequences of the racism are predictable. If the opposition leaders hold to their refusal, only two outcomes remain. Israel will go to another election, with the current murderous government remaining for many more months, or the opposition will join a unity government in which Netanyahu stays in power. Netanyahu has ruled out abandoning his far-right partners. Either way, the opposition leaders would hand Netanyahu and his murderous colleagues the victory that the voters denied him.

There are no real policy obstacles to cooperation. Ra’am, the United Arab List, has already served in an Israeli government. In 2021 it joined the coalition led by Bennett and Yair Lapid, the first independent Arab party ever to do so. The other Arab party, the Joint List, has said it would vote with an Eisenkot-led government to establish an official inquiry into the failures of October 7, which is the opposition’s own first priority. Israel’s voters appear to be ahead of their leaders. A Hebrew University survey on election night found that more than 61 percent of opposition voters want Eisenkot to form a government with Ra’am, while only 20 percent prefer new elections. Arab and Jewish opposition voters want the same thing, which is to oust Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir, and Smotrich.

A practical plan should follow directly from the arithmetic. First, when the new Knesset convenes, the 67 members opposed to the Netanyahu government should elect a new Speaker, giving the new majority control of the parliamentary agenda even before a government is formed. Second, Eisenkot should form a true coalition in which Ra’am sits as a full partner with ministerial posts, giving 56 seats, with the Joint List supporting the government from outside to reach 67.

The program of such a government would not be hard to negotiate, because the parties that would be in it already share most of it. The government would establish an official inquiry into the failures of October 7. It would adopt an emergency plan against the crime and violence that have devastated Arab towns, and it would invest in housing and services for Arab communities, including the unrecognized Bedouin villages of the Negev. It would restore the independence of the courts and the attorney general.

The government might last a year. Questions of borders and the Palestinian territories would not be settled by this government, but a non-racist coalition government now would move Israel toward a lasting peaceful solution, perhaps toward a binational democratic state or toward the two-state solution of the long-standing Arab Peace Initiative. In the meantime, and crucially, Netanyahu and the other war criminals would be ousted.

Israel’s leaders should also understand what is at stake beyond Israel’s borders.

Israel’s racism and murderous campaign in Gaza and the occupied West Bank have profoundly alienated people all over the world. A Pew Research Center survey of 36 countries this spring found that a median of 67 percent of respondents view Israel unfavorably, including 60 percent of Americans. In Pew’s surveys this year, Israel was viewed more negatively than any other country it asked about. More Americans now sympathize with the Palestinians than with the Israelis. The alienation extends to Jews all over the world. If the politicians double down on their racism now, they will confirm the world’s harshest judgments of Israel.

What is needed from the opposition leaders? Nothing beyond decency. The government that ousts Netanyahu is the one that accepts the votes of Arab citizens. Israel’s president has asked the party leaders to come to his consultations with an open mind. The majority to remove Netanyahu exists, provided that the leaders drop their racism.

---

Jeffrey D. Sachs is a University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed The Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the UN Broadband Commission for Development. He has been advisor to three United Nations Secretaries-General, and currently serves as an SDG Advocate under Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Sachs is the author, most recently, of "A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism" (2020). Other books include: "Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair, and Sustainable" (2017) and "The Age of Sustainable Development," (2015) with Ban Ki-moon.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

[Find the web link for this article in the comments]

Dockworkers in more than 20 countries—from France to India to Greece—are withholding their labor on Friday to demand an ...
10/30/2026

Dockworkers in more than 20 countries—from France to India to Greece—are withholding their labor on Friday to demand an end to Israel's genocidal assault on Gaza and highlight the role that commercial ports play in fueling deadly militarism worldwide.

Organizers said the work stoppages, led by dockworkers' unions at 113 ports across 22 countries, would be the "largest coordinated port action ever," easily surpassing the international day of action held in February. No Harbour for Genocide, a collective of trade unions and others supporting the day of action, said $2.8 billion worth of cargo will be halted at Mediterranean ports, where workers are planning to strike for 24 hours.

"A cargo refused in one port sails on to the next," said No Harbour for Genocide. "Refused in every port, it stops, and the workers have enforced the embargo that governments announced and did not."

In a joint statement last month announcing the day of action, dockworkers' unions from Türkiye, Morocco, Italy, France, Greece, Italy, and Basque Country laid out their demands:

1.An immediate end to the genocide of the Palestinian people and the opening of safe corridor for humanitarian aid.. An end of colonization, occupation and apartheid imposed to Palestinian People and the recognition of an independent Palestinian state recognized by the international community on the 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital.

2. An end to the war in the Middle East. No support, no facilitation, no participation in the US-Israeli war against Iran, Lebanon or any other imperialist intervention. Military fleets and bases out of the region. We express our full solidarity to the people of Cuba and Venezuela and Sudan menaced by US imperialism and we call for defend people's sovereignty, resources, territorial integrity, peace with justice, and the right for resistance for self-determination.

3. Ports must not be used for the transport of weapons, am******on, military equipment and troops. We call on unions to strengthen vigilance, to inform workers, to expose the cargoes of war, and to organize mass collective resistance with all our rightful available means and our struggle.

4. An end to the militarization of ports and critical infrastructure. Ports belong to the peoples and the workers. They are not bases for NATO, the USA or the EU, nor tools of shipowners and monopoly groups.

5. No to the war economy and armaments. The money must go to wages, collective agreements, health, education, social needs, and the protection of life and safety at work.

6. Health and safety measures in the workplaces. Not one worker dead for profits. An end to intensification, subcontracting, dangerous conditions, and employer arbitrariness.

7. Collective agreements with real wage increases, stable jobs with rights, a retirement policy with better pensions, and a reduction of working time. Technological developments, mechanization, automation, the use of AI and the development of ports must serve the needs of workers, and not lead to the intensification of work or the disappearance of their jobs.

"Our strength lies in organization. It lies in our unions, in general assemblies, in collective decisions, in solidarity among workers from different countries," the unions said. "We, the workers in the ports, know very well that without us nothing moves. Without our hands, containers remain still, ships are not loaded, the war machines are blocked."

Al Jazeera noted that of the ports participating in Friday's actions, "Genoa, Livorno, and Gioia Tauro in Italy, Marseille in France, Piraeus in Greece, and Tangier in Morocco all have proven links to weapons shipments to Israel."

The strikes come as Israel's genocide in Gaza continues despite a ceasefire agreement that putatively took effect last October. A United Nations report published earlier this week noted that "Israeli authorities and forces continue to commit genocidal acts" in Gaza "even after the so-called ceasefire agreement, with the intent to destroy the Palestinian people, in whole or in part."

The report found that Israel—which is armed and supported diplomatically by Western governments, principally the United States—has "committed war crimes and the crimes against humanity of extermination, persecution, torture, r**e, and other forms of sexual violence" in the illegally occupied Palestinian territories.

Port Workers and Communities for Palestine said in a statement Friday that will be demonstrating at the Port of Elizabeth in New Jersey. The coalition said the New Jersey port is the only port on the East Coast of the US where a protest is expected. Demonstrations are also expected in Oakland and San Francisco, California.

"We know that, regardless of what union leadership may decide, workers everywhere stand in solidarity with Palestine," said Port Workers and Communities for Palestine. "We will be out there on Friday to show them that they are part of this movement too. Workers have the power to stop the war machine."

---

Jake Johnson is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

[Find the web link for this article in the comments]

In a play by Bertolt Brecht, the persecuted astronomer Galileo says: “Unhappy the land that needs heroes."Right now, the...
10/29/2026

In a play by Bertolt Brecht, the persecuted astronomer Galileo says: “Unhappy the land that needs heroes."

Right now, the United States is unhappy enough to need a lot of heroes—and during this election year, many have emerged. Here are five of the notable ones.

Abdul El-Sayed
-------------------------------

No other major candidate this year has been the target of so many shameless and racist smears as Abdul El-Sayed, a 41-year-old Muslim American who is one of the most articulate and persuasive campaigners to arise since Zohran Mamdani. The former health official in Michigan is in a toss-up race for the U.S. Senate against former Rep. Mike Rogers, who is a nonstop fountain of MAGA talking points and deceptive campaign messaging—reinforced by President Trump—that tries to cast El-Sayed as a terrorist “jihadist.”

Countering this barrage is a grassroots campaign that El-Sayed started to build during the Democratic primary, which he won by overcoming a nearly 10-1 funding deficit, including more than $30 million spent against him by AIPAC. Whether explaining Medicare for All (which he literally wrote the book on) or the genocide in Gaza or the affordability crisis at home, El-Sayed conveys a strong progressive agenda with clarity, depth and wit. While Republican donors and AIPAC are dumping vast amounts of money into propping up Rogers and attacking El-Sayed, some corporate or Israel-aligned Democrats evidently wouldn’t mind if El-Sayed loses.

Angie Nixon
-------------------------------

A longtime community activist, labor organizer and fighter for human rights, 42-year-old Angie Nixon is now fighting for a seat in the U.S. Senate from Florida. In November 2023, as a member of the Florida legislature, Nixon sponsored a Gaza ceasefire resolution that went down to defeat, 104-2. Absurdly vilified as “antisemitic,” she stood firm, insisting that caring “about thousands of innocent lives lost makes nobody antisemitic.” Prophetically, Nixon said: “Continued attacks will only lead to more suffering and more death.”

In 2024, Nixon opened a remarkable bookstore/coffeehouse as a community hub in Jacksonville’s African-American community, offering books banned by Florida school districts thanks to Gov. Ron DeSantis and the state legislature. Five months ago, Nixon was arrested for civil disobedience while trying to meet with DeSantis over the state’s new gerrymandered congressional maps.

Aligned with the Working Families Party and Democratic Socialists of America, Nixon was a longshot in the Democratic Senate primary against the establishment favorite. Vastly outspent, she outorganized the opposition and stunned the power structure two months ago to become the Democratic nominee. If she were to win another upset victory on Nov. 3 in a state that Trump carried by 13 points in 2024, she’d be a force to reckon with on Capitol Hill.

Melat Kiros
-------------------------------

In early summer, when Melat Kiros defeated a 15-term incumbent Democratic congresswoman in Denver’s deep-blue district, the win by the democratic socialist sent political shockwaves nationwide. Her victory crushed the myth that a socialist electoral insurgency could only succeed in the Northeast.

Kiros, who arrived in the U.S. from Ethiopia as an infant, is an attorney who will enter the U.S. House of Representatives in January at age 29. She lost her job at a major law firm over her advocacy for pro-Palestinian protests. She chose as a keynote for her campaign: “Establishment Democrats are beholden to the same billionaires who keep our prices high, burn our planet, and profit from a genocide. We can change that. It starts by changing who we send to Congress.” Kiros has not committed to supporting Hakeem Jeffries for speaker if Democrats take over the House, where she says she’ll push for a full progressive agenda, including federal rent control and a moratorium on data centers.

Mai Vang
-------------------------------

For the first time in memory, a genuine progressive is on the verge of ending the Matsui dynasty that has represented the Sacramento area in Congress since the 1970s. Doris Matsui has held the congressional seat for 21 years, ever since her husband Robert Matsui died after 27 years in office. In sharp contrast, 41-year-old Mai Vang is committed to upsetting the pro-corporate, pro-war apple cart instead of riding on it.

She grew up poor, the eldest of 16 children. After stunning achievements as a community organizer, she has been a pathbreaking member of the Sacramento City Council since 2020.

Vang is running on a platform that includes abolishing ICE, enacting improved Medicare for All, establishing a federal Renters’ Bill of Rights, and taxing billionaires. If she wins her seat in Congress and Democrats win the House, Vang has said that she's not committed to supporting Jeffries as speaker.

With emphatic positions that include “stop the genocide in Palestine” and “repeal the blank check for war,” Vang explains: “My family fled the CIA’s Secret War in Laos as Hmong refugees. I carry the memory of what happens when our government chooses war over diplomacy: families torn apart and trauma that haunts generations. Today, as conflict devastates communities from Gaza to Iran to Ukraine to Sudan, our mission must be to protect life—not fund its destruction. We need a representative who refuses to profit from the industries fueling this violence. I will fight to redirect our tax dollars from endless wars abroad into healthcare and housing here at home.”

Ro Khanna
-------------------------------

Along with his regular appearances in national media discussing the Epstein Files or his opposition to the Iran War, Rep. Ro Khanna has emerged as the most high-profile politician in California advocating for the billionaire tax measure on the state’s Nov. 3 ballot. Although his congressional district includes much of Silicon Valley, he has clashed with Big Tech billionaires and their supporters who want to defeat Proposition 40, which would generate state tax revenue to backfill the huge upcoming hole in California’s healthcare programs expected to reach $100 billion in losses of federal Medicaid funding over the next five years due to the Trump regime’s draconian cuts. Khanna has been willing to publicly denounce Gov. Gavin Newsom for siding with billionaires against the measure that would raise tens of billions from those who can easily afford it.

Khanna has not shied away from clashing with establishment Democrats for lacking conviction and moral principle. When he toured the West Bank in July, Khanna was confronted and detained by armed Israeli settlers. He later said: “If you're unwilling to speak up for Palestinian human rights, if you're unwilling to speak up against the genocide in Gaza, the apartheid in the West Bank, then you are morally compromised.”

---

Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. The paperback edition of his latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, includes an afterword about the Gaza war.

Jeff Cohen is an activist and author. Cohen was an associate professor of journalism and the director of the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College, founder of the media watch group FAIR, and former board member of Progressive Democrats of America.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

[Find the web link for this article in the comments]

"In the face of increasing chaos in our world, Nate turns inward in this week’s Frankly to examine a more personal quest...
10/29/2026

"In the face of increasing chaos in our world, Nate turns inward in this week’s Frankly to examine a more personal question: what allows an individual to remain grounded, authentic, and capable of contributing meaningfully in turbulent times?

He draws on his own experience to identify five things that help him build personal resilience, taking care to not treat them as any sort of universal formula. Rather, Nate offers a systems-oriented perspective that recognizes that our capacity to engage with a complex world depends partly on the conditions that sustain us as human beings.

For Nate, those conditions begin with self-care and the knowledge that burning oneself out in service of an urgent – although perhaps just – cause undermines the work itself. He explores the need for both structured routines and slack that allows the mind and body to process experiences, rather than remain trapped in a constant state of simulation. He also discusses how time in nature and friendship help reconnect him to a deeper sense of belonging and self, and the importance of meaningful work that directs our time and energy toward the possibility of creating a better future than the default. Nate’s five priorities form a sort of personal compass that allows him to navigate uncertainty without losing sight of what makes life worth living – he invites listeners to examine their own experiences in order to discover the conditions that help them show up more fully for themselves, their communities, and the future they hope to build.

What are five things from your own life that help you feel like your whole self? How might you redesign your daily life to create more space for the relationships, environments, and practices that sustain you? And if you had more of what genuinely grounds you, what meaningful work might you become capable of doing?"

17 minutes | In the face of increasing chaos in our world, Nate turns inward in this week’s Frankly to examine a more personal question: what allows an individual to remain grounded, authentic, and capable of contributing meaningfully in turbulent times? He draws on his own experience to identify ...

What I want to do in this post is outline an idea that’s still forming, of why the movement we need now might be a massi...
10/29/2026

What I want to do in this post is outline an idea that’s still forming, of why the movement we need now might be a massive national play with a cast of seventy million.

Inhabiting a movement for self-rule
---------------------------------------------
If the movement we need – in an era of climate calamity – is, as I wrote last week, an “everything movement” that leads to real democracy, that means it’s a movement for self-rule.

A movement for self-rule is what I think we’ve been working on (collectively, across many different regions, organizations and groups) for many years.

It’s the logical response to the failures of the existing neoliberal paradigm in maintaining our basic life support systems: the food system, the water system, the climate system, etc.

At some point(s) in our history we had the ability to govern ourselves ripped from us, and concentrated in the hands of kings and aristocrats, then governments, and now, it seems, tech bros, private equity, and banks too big to fail.

You could call this failing system World 1. These bad actors are driving us to our deaths. So we have to take rule back into our own hands. We have to lead the way to World 2, and act as if we really are in charge and are already building it.

To do this, I have reset my strategic orientation, and that of the people I collaborate with, from a single movement- or organisational- view, towards a diverse and complex eco-systemic approach; beyond a narrow cause-and-effect logic that can give you great tactics but does not provide a system-changing strategy.

This movement for self-rule is more clearly about work that can actually change the system. From World 1 to World 2.

World 2
---------------------------------------------
I believe that we are moving towards an absolute cl*******ck situation, where systems break. T-I-N-A (Thatcher’s famous “there is no alternative”) has left us divided, weak, alone, and afraid, with a grave lack of agency.

Now is the inflection point. Because only at the point of total belief that no one is coming to save us, will people invest everything they have in moving from World 1 to World 2.

The work remains a hearts and minds job. You do need the right information in front of you to understand how utterly and systemically, totally fu**ed everything is, so that you will turn your life’s work into the constructive rebuilding of absolutely everything.

Once you see what is going on in the data, in our cascading systems collapse, you will know that the future is more fun if you are swept up in the thrill of making a new world than clinging to a collapsing sh*tshow and feeling miserable. And the sooner we start, the more we have that we can work with.

And it has to be fun, enjoyable, challenging, and collective. Which is why it has to be culturally-led, to allow people to dream, imagine, take up a role, act, rehearse without fear, and get performing.

That’s why I think the movement for self-rule we need is a play with characters people can inhabit.

The Play: suspension of bad-beliefs!
---------------------------------------------
The problem we face is that a majority of people have come to inhabit the story of T-I-N-A and so they really do believe there is no alternative.

What we need to do is overcome this neoliberalism paradigm which has trapped people in self-destruct cycles because they believe there is no alternative. Friends call this belief a “deep disposition” that guides people’s lives and habits, their attitudes and behaviours.

Our job is to help people believe there IS an alternative. We have to get to people deep down, not just their thoughts, but into what they often don’t even realise is a deeply held disposition or belief.

As my friend Charlie says, “the nation that plays together stays together”. Playing together boosts trust, confidence and relationships. I think playing a role and inhabiting that role with others can help do this.

A word on acting like you’re in charge
---------------------------------------------
One of the main reasons why I have been celebrating the National Emergency Briefing on the climate crisis is that they have self-organised something which is statesperson-like.

But more specifically, for me, they have taken the lead where the government is missing in action, and they’re acting as if they’re in charge.

You will notice if you pay attention that many people in politics succeed simply by acting as if they are in charge, when really they’re not in charge of anything.

Others wrestle with reality and say, “Well, I can affect that, but I can’t affect this, and I’m going to be honest with you, this is difficult, or that can happen and that can’t happen”. But the people who inhabit a confident narrative, where they assume a lead position in pulling everybody forwards into a story that they dominate, seem to build themselves up an enormous amount of power, and often remarkably quickly.

If we could assume this work in that mode of inhabiting this story, with confidence, with the suspension of disbelief that is required for us to believe that we are not just capable of, but already doing self-rule, then I think we could make strides extremely quickly.

R&D: making the play
---------------------------------------------
In my version, the roles in the play that we would inhabit:

• are very specific

• serve different relational needs

• often reflect what people are already doing, but help people reinhabit the larger story

• come with outfits

If you were playing out our new World 2, what job would you do?

You could choose to be statesman-like like the people behind the National Emergency Briefing. Or you could be a healer of communities, a story wallah, a process nerd, a power broker or a diplomat, a social entrepreneur, a therapist, an artist. Are you holding and hospicing pain or running ahead with bright eyes and naive hope?

We might not feel ready for the opening night, but we’ve got to get on with it
---------------------------------------------
It won’t all have to be perfect, and we don’t have to have every job ticked off.

What’s going to be important is that whatever is built has an ecological view, where we are put back in our place as humans, as part of the living world, not the supreme people in charge of the universe. That’s Elon Musk’s job, and I’m sure he’ll do it great from his headquarters in Mars. What’s also important is that we recognize how damaged everything is, and that the future will have to be built to be regenerative by design.

What matters is being collective
---------------------------------------------
What matters is how we are developing people (and ourselves) in collective ways. The work now has to be making things together, a living, breathing practice of making the new World 2 together that moves as a process and is in relationship to itself. We have to get people into Doing Mode, not thinking or showing up sometimes, but to be doing things together over the long term.

This Doing Together is key. We have to get into a flow of doing, making, building. (It’s ‘work’ we need to do, but in a ‘your life’s work’ kind of way, not a 9-5 kind of way.)

And there’s no better way to get people to do something that might feel difficult or scary or challenging than to first of all get people to simply pretend, play, or act in that way.

How it might work in place
---------------------------------------------
I’m talking to a lot of people right now about how this might work. How we might land in a place, convene the ‘150’ organisers, activists, artists, already doing the work, and help them play, re-inhabit and re-dream their work into a bigger story: not simply of making the best of World 1 where they live, but making the leap into World 2.

What are the other roles we need in this play? What are the systems of psychology (like Robert Schwarz’s Internal Family Systems) or systems of theatre (like forum theatre) that we can learn from in developing this idea? I’m talking to brilliant people such as Ruth Ben-Tovim at Town Anywhere and of course my friends at Dash Arts. Who else can I be learning from? Questions I’m asking are: how can the play help develop perspectives in ecological ways? How can we improvise in real time? Can it accommodate the bridge builders and agitators?

It’s not all rosy and frictionless. As we noted in XR’s story circle back in 2022, in an ecosystem some things fight and some things eat one another! But it is ‘being’ a form of intelligence, self-perpetuating and learning through doing and experience.

Dreaming the new reality
---------------------------------------------
We have to dream ourselves into a new ecological reality.

The issue up to now has been that some humans have imagined some systems into existence – like permanent growth – which cannot survive their contact with reality on the earth. But because some people really benefit from these systems, at the expense of the vast majority of us, they defend their systems with violence, even as they destroy the very ecological reality that underpins survival.

It’s the paradox that we must imagine and dream the new whilst making sure it is realistic in terms of earth systems, energy and material and life itself. The skill we need for this is reality-bound dreaming. And where else better to rehearse this skill than inside a play?

Humility, Empathy, Frugality
---------------------------------------------
We did a lot of this work during XR. It was our ambition to dream into reality a new regenerative culture.

I still think the best banners we ever did were the Empathy, Humility, Frugality banners. At the time they were unfashionable words. But they summed up what we were trying to do. Before XR, when I created the Bodypolitic project with Miles Glyn, it was out of an early recognition of the lack of spiritual thought and support structures in our society to help shift the system. So it necessarily went to this language because the ideas we need are around the transcendent and the sacred.

The questions: “what are you even alive for and what are you doing with that life?” were, I think, a major attractor for the ecologically-conscious membership, and probably was a reason for so much confused response to XR from the materialist left. That’s because we were moving people into a perspective of being and becoming; and out of the mode of having, acquisition, or even of achievement. Virtue ethics, not utilitarianism.

It is the practice of being, acting, listening and then doing that appealed to the ecologically minded, who know that the problem is that we are not, as a society, in right relation to the reality of the problem. And the problem is that some humans have dreamed up a system of supremacy over nature (and over each other) that leaves us very much not in right relation to the ecological, the planet, or each other.

It is a path we’re on; a real movement
---------------------------------------------
Elon Musk says, “I’m going over there because over here is fu**ed, and that means Mars.”

The far right are saying, “the system’s fu**ed, we’re going over there to the right, to the white ethno-nationalist, supremacist, authoritarian state”.

So when we say “the system’s fu**ed, we’re going over there” for us “over there” has to be towards a place-based, commons-grounded, interconnected society and bioregional economies based on love, care and freedom. It is play. It is diverse and multicultural. It is digging down into the grassroots and down to the ground.

It also means going down into the self, our inner experience of life and re-enchanting ourselves with the miracle of living and breathing on this magically beautiful Earth.

---

Clare Farrell was a co-founder of Extinction Rebellion and is now building real democracy in service to life.

[Find the web link for this article in the comments]

Address

Lawrence, KS

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Films For Action posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Organization

Send a message to Films For Action:

Shortcuts

Share

Category