What We're Thinking
These are some of the thoughts and thinkers that influenced the organizers of the 2007 AMC in planning last year's conference and formulating the 2007 vision statement.
"True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring."
- Rev. Martin Luther King, A Time To Break The Silence (April, 1967)
"We declare... that we will make a network of communication among all our struggles and resistances. An intercontinental network of alternative communication against neoliberalism, an intercontinental network of alternative communication for humanity...
"This intercontinental network of alternative communication is not an organizing structure, nor has a central head or decision maker, nor does it have a central command or hierarchies. We are the network, all of us who speak and listen."
- Zapatista Army of National Liberation (read by Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos), Second Declaration of La Realidad (August, 1996)
"King had a vision of people at the grassroots and community level participating in creating new values, truths, relationships, and infrastructures as the foundation for a new society. He called for programs that would involve young people in 'self-transforming and structure-transforming' direct actions 'in our dying cities.' He called for a radical revolution in values and a new social system that goes beyond both capitalism, which he said is 'too I-centered, too individualistic,' and communism, which is 'too collective, too statist.'"
- Grace Lee Boggs, The beloved community of Martin Luther King (2004)
"Skills are needed in technical areas, yet the most essential skills are in the area of basic human relationships. How can I learn to operate this equipment? Is all well and good. But if I refuse to change my emotionally cold ways with those I work with, what good are the technical skills? Who will I work with? Who will work with me? Why am I cold? How can I change this and become a warm human being who feels good about myself, about what I do, AND ,about those who are my comrades?"
- Ashanti Alston (AKA Rev. Lucien), Refocusing on the PLAGUE within Political Relationships (1985)
"The media is the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent."
- Malcolm X
"Art is our weapon, our medicine, our voice and our vision."
- Alixa Garcia and Naima Penniman (Climbing Poetree)
