Revolution in My Mind

The USSR deserved to live.  There are so many things that I wish had never happened, like the entire year 1989 for instance, or New Years Day 1992 – when the moneymen came and took everything.  God damn why did it have to end like that? A bunch of backroom deals by mafia-sponsored yes men – choking and strangling a dream seventy years in the making – and the motherland that had smashed Hitler was nothing more than a memory.  What if Lenin, dead drunk from drearyhead, had stumbled from his tomb on that fatal day and said “WAIT...don’t do it” – would anyone have listened? Could two decades of misery, meltdown, decay and terror have been avoided? Even better, he could have dragged Boris Yeltsin down into his tomb and ate him up – though I doubt his liquor filled carcass would have tasted all that good.

No, the generation of 1917 did not call out to the children of 1991, and here we sit, you and me, dealing with the consequences – a world where capitalism has no competitors but a gaggle of self-righteous NGOs who bitch, moan, and complain even as they throw their arms around the waist of the almighty dollar; the ultimate femme fatale.

Oh status quo, you make me want to cry.  How can a young man feel so old? Chasing a thousand vast hopes.  Will Egypt be the one? Will the land of the great river be the place where brilliant revolutionaries will have the boldness – the boldness to build a new reality in defiance of the stifling conformity of “international norms”? Or will the crowds just cast up a tired old technocrat or flashy young go-getter whose dream only extends as far as he can make his country “more competitive”? Is there nothing more?

I worry.  It seems that’s all I ever do – worry and hope.  Hopes and fears dance naked on the vistas of tomorrow.  Speak, write, type – page by page, word by word, line by line, and this vision, this web I weave, this tapestry of the written word, this creation takes shape.  I hope, like a mother bird, that it has wings that will carry it so high that it will pierce the clouds and open the way to realms undreamed of; herald the awakening of new life and be the vanguard of the human spirit as it dreams the landscapes of our collective future.  Fly, fly, phoenix wings of fire – humanity unbound and ablaze; an unobscured sun – light the way, light the way, eternal fire light the way.

Light my way as you once lit the path of Cleisthenes when he cast the Archons from their thrones in Ancient Athens.  Light my way as you once lit the path of Tiberius when he faced the oligarch’s death squads in the Roman Forum.  Light my way as you once lit the path of Spartacus, of Caesar, of Tyler, of Tone, of Robespierre, of Mackenzie, of Papineau, of Riel, of Lenin, Connolly, Castro, Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Allende, Lumumba, Mengistu, Sankara, Nasser, Sands, Ortega, Guevara, Chavez, Morales and the list of brave men goes on as long as injustice persists and as long as human beings draw breath.  For all human hearts have a hero within.

There are so many things that should never have happened but there remain so many things that should happen and thus our spirit drives us on, battle after battle, until the final victory is fought and won and dignity at last prevails.  Revolution, it’s in the blood, human beings do not like injustice and will fight to oppose it whatever its guise.  That final battle will come and in one form or another I will be there on that day – for the final struggle, for the final victory, and for the rising of the sun.