from Prachi Noor, World Can’t Wait national steering committee & Saira Ali – World Can’t Wait
posted on www.samarmagazine.org
You look at the pictures of naked men on leashes ordered at act like dogs and your anger wells up)
You hear about Falluja being bombed to rubble and despair…
You see over 100,000 mainly Black people left behind to die in New Orleans and your blood boils)
You
see John Robert’s swearing in as Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court
and get chills imagining how we will go back to back-street alley
abortions and no birth control)
You read about prisoners at
Guantanamo bay pledging to starve them-selves to death to end the
torture and indefinite detentions without trial and you are infuriated)
You
hear about two 16-year old Muslim girls picked up from their homes,
detained without charges, with secret so-called evidence against them,
and you fear for what will happen to the youth…
And it doesn’t
stop there. Every day you open the newspaper, open your emails or put
on the TV wondering what will be next: intelligent design in schools,
vilification of gays and lesbians as unnatural and satanic, unleashing
of Minutemen militia, moves towards a theocracy, attacks on academic
freedom and unfettered assault on the environment
The Call for
the World Can’t Wait, Drive out the Bush Regime says, ‘The Bush regime
is setting out to radically remake society very quickly, in a fascist
way, and for generations to come. We must act now; the future is in the
balance.’ November 2nd 2005 will be the beginning of this! What you do
in the next two weeks could be part of making history.
Many of
us organized for and marched on February 15th and March 20th to stop
the invasion of Iraq. We poured onto the streets to stop the attacks on
immigrant communities and against the Patriot Act. We celebrated the
tremendous resistance of millions of people around the world. Some of
us organize for detainees, worker’s rights and against the war. Some of
us voted for the first time in our lives in the last election and
organized others to do the same. We’ve been talking to our friends,
families, and co-workers about our anger, despair and frustration.
This
is not enough! Anger and frustration alone will not stop the current
atrocities carried out by this government and the horrific direction
they are taking. However, this anger and frustration can drive us to
take history into our hands and organize and mobilize the millions of
others who feel the same way. It is no longer enough to live an ethical
life of good politics. It is no longer enough for us to declare our
solidarity with those people around the world whose lives have been
devastated by this government. ‘Silence and paralysis are NOT
acceptable. That which you will not resist and mobilize to stop, you
will learn( or be force( to accept.’ We can already see the beginning
of this being borne true with torture, racial profiling, mass murder
and destruction and the list goes on.
We will not conciliate
with this regime over mass murder, torture of human beings, and denial
of women’s right over their own bodies. We can’t afford to keep waiting
and hoping that somehow we are going to make it through. We can’t sit
there and hope that the âempire’ will fall or that the Democratic Party
will come to the world’s rescue. We can’t stand aside from what is
happening here because our homes are in another country. We need to
stop this regime now. Because the world really can’t wait! Because the
people living here and all around the country can’t afford to wait
another day for more lives to be devastated, as they take us daily
closer and closer to a society we could not stand to live in.
We
need a movement that threatens their existence. We need a vehicle that
is aimed at halting the entire program that encompasses all the
outrages of this regime. âWorld Can’t Wait!’ is this vehicle and Nov. 2
will be the day of public manifestation of that aim to drive the regime
out.
What is the responsibility of all of us who live in this
country and hate the outrages forced by this government on the people
of the world? As people who hate the Bush regime for what it is doing
and the future it promises we have to take responsibility to drive out
the Bush regime. We are people from parts of the world where we have
seen various religious fundamentalisms take brutal forms we know what
this looks like; we can begin to imagine what a fascistic form it would
take in this country. We are those communities in the United States
that have seen large scale mass round-ups, rampart racial profiling,
surveillance and disappearances. We are those communities here and
around the world torn between vicious choices over supporting Bush’s
war on terror or siding with fundamentalists. As such people, we have a
responsibility to drive out the Bush Regime. As people from countries
with a history of liberation struggles and driving out colonial regimes
we have a responsibility to take inspiration from that courage,
rebelliousness and determination and put it into ending this entire
program.
And WE can do it.
‘We need more than fighting
Bush’s outrages one at a time, constantly losing ground to the whole
onslaught. We must, and can, aim to create a political situation where
the Bush regime’s program is repudiated, where Bush himself is driven
from office, and where the whole direction he has been taking society
is reversed.’
As writers and artists you can express the anger,
the pain, the truth of these outrages, you can inspire people to resist
and you have an audience that reaches far beyond those you know. You
can create art, write articles, call up editors and ask them to print
the World Can’t Wait Call in their newspapers, put it on their websites
and publicize November 2nd.
As professors and teachers you can
start organizing the youth, students, teachers and professors(students
have always played a tremendous role in upsurges and resistance, and in
fact if the campuses and high schools are not alive with resistance and
debate, we will not be able to drive out the Bush regime. Today when
academic freedom itself is under attack, those who have dedicated their
lives to this must play a forefront role in mobilizing others to resist.
As
taxi drivers and grocery store owners you meet hundreds of people every
day( figure out ways to plaster the World Can’t Wait posters, stickers,
flyers across the city and spread it throughout the communities(
imagine if on November 2nd, South Asian communities across the city are
vibrant and alive with a visible and public proclamation to Drive Out
the Bush Regime(we are not alone or scared because hundreds of
thousands more across the country are with us.
As lawyers many
of you know families of people who are currently caught up in
immigration dragnets( you can give voice to these nameless and faceless
people, you can organize lawyers, legal groups, bar associations and in
law schools. The unanimous passage of the Patriot Act, the unabashed
disdain and violation of International law, the rejection of
international treaties on torture and detentions has many lawyers and
legal scholars up in arms. All of this needs to be harnessed into a
movement that is actually aimed at driving this regime from power.
As
activists and organizers you work with people who every day face and
stand up to the harsh realities of these outrages( draw these different
people together as a strong force that isn’t aimed at just one outrage
or another, or scrambling from one attack to another, but that can
galvanize millions into a force that will actually have a chance to
stop this onslaught in it’s tracks.
To everyone: we need you to
be organizers and inspire others to be organizers. We need people ready
to DRIVE OUT the Bush regime, we need to you to raise and donate money,
we need you to mobilize your families and co-workers; we need ideas,
creativity, courage and defiance. We all have a tremendous role we
could play now, or we could continue with life as usual.
‘November
2 will be the beginning( a giant first step in forcing Bush to step
down, and a powerful announcement that we will not stop until he does
so( and it will join with and give support and heart to people all over
the globe who so urgently need and want this regime to be stopped. The
future is unwritten. Which one we get is up to us.’
Go to
www.worldcantwait.org, check out the website, and sign the attached
call. Get in touch with us; take this call out to others and start
organizing massive walk-outs from work places and schools for November
2nd, the âbeginning of the end of the Bush Regime.