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activism, corporation, documentary, health, mental, michael, moore, of, university, uva, va, virginia
if your core values do not allow for “by any means necessary,” this message is not for you.
part of the reason, i was chosen as game mistress for charlottesville inception is because i am willing to appear crazy, wrong, dangerous, violent, unpopular, arrogant in order to complete what i feel is a proper course of action.
i base my codes on my experience and my imagination.
i keep the particular trends and patterns that personally appeal to me private, so only those bothering to pay attention to a social and cultural loser like me know how to quickly and most effectively move me to action.
and. sometimes it’s just, because i personally care about the people who are trying so hard to affect change that i must step in.
for the record my personal view of the living wage at uva is mixed. several of the community members that have no personal or professional connections with uva do not work toward living wage issues with their own non-uva employers or help or know their neighbors who are also underemployed and working poor who are also not affiliated with uva.
if you are an ant, why try to move an elephant instead of addressing various ant hills?
especially, if we create a community that offers living wage in other job arenas, people won’t have to turn to uva as one of the main employers.
why go to strangers and ask for help, when you can go to groups you have a real connection with and affect change there?
success can be viral and gather from the combined energy of smaller, diverse pockets.
anyway, that is beside the point.
i love some of the people who hungered for this cause, so here is a strategy to bring living wage to uva, all in a day.
this can be accomplished with a small group of people who see the living wage at uva issue as a crisis and are willing by any means necessary to accomplish this.
pray the devil back to hell is an episode in the series “women, war, and peace,” and depicts how groups of poor, country, religious black women brought peace to liberia.
in africa, it is a curse to see your mother naked.
during peace talks that were not going anywhere, a small group of women from liberia locked down around the meeting room, and when the security came to haul them away, the leader exploited the men’s superstition about women’s nudity and began to strip. the leader of the peace conference took her aside and spoke to her seriously for several hours. then, he came back, the peace treaty was signed, the reigning war lord was exiled, the first democratic election was held, and the first woman president was elected.
nudity can only go so far in 2012 america, because although a lot of people would be uncomfortable with it, very few would feel cursed.
however, people who uphold rigid beliefs especially those that uphold the status quo can be cursed.
each member of the board of visitors has a belief system. determine the system. learn how to effectively threaten it, threaten it, if pushed do it.
for example. a lot of people believe in a “right” to privacy.
find out private information that hurts whatever beliefs they have about themselves and expose it either directly or through art.
you don’t have to stick to just the members themselves. their loved ones are fair game too. people who don’t care about what you think of them, can be hurt by the pain of…..their wife’s sullied reputation if they buy into traditional gender roles or their uncle being gay and married if they buy into traditional homophobia.
for example, as part of the lock down around the next bov meeting, when the cops show up…have everyone start participating in queer or fetish sexual behavior. since. a lot of it is incorrectly illegal in virgina, it would be very uncomfortable for all authority to witness this act.
a lot of them fear the stigma of mental health issues. but, 1 in 4 americans are currently diagnosed. expose their loved one’s issues, and say how contributing to the degradation of a community by denying living wage are results of anti-social sociopath disorder or connect with it being social suicide. the beauty is that your audience mostly share the same stigma, so connecting the bov with diseased thinking is a quick way to make them look monstrous. the documentary “the corporation” does this flawlessly by quoting all of the scary characteristics of sociopaths and connecting it to big business. most viewers just thought of it as a way to explain their hatred of corporations not realizing they were exposing themselves as people who also hate people who have sometimes violent mental health situations.
i feel comfortable suggesting the dirtying of the hands in this way, because someone openly victimizing someone else by implying they went to western state or went to 5east or are region 10 clients is currently an acceptable way of shutting someone down in this community.
i know, cause i have been all those things. and, because i do not take part in the stigma, accusations do not hurt my feelings.
the beauty is…if you don’t find anything, you can just make it up….to a point… with enough online social feeds purporting to be sources of news and facts, it is amazingly easy to create a well documented fact-rumor.
i call this technique: 6 degrees of mike moore.
in bowling for columbine, he connects a celebrity dick clark to a young black child shooting a class mate. his mother was taken off welfare, and had to take a couple hour bus ride to her two mall jobs, and her absence led to the child staying with an uncle with an easy access hand gun. one of the mall jobs was a franchise paying minimum wages and owned by dick clark. moore confronts dick clark implying that this one person with clout shared responsibility in the killing of an elementary student and the jailing of another.
this tangential jumping around along with images and a compelling narrative creates a chain that creates causality.
take the top ten most tragic local, current events and trace them back to each one of the members of the bov either in their actions as the bov or their personal ones.
make poems and songs about the connections and showcase them at every open mic night.
make plays and skits and perform them on the downtown mall.
put them all over youtube with scary, sensational tags.
create a culture that fears and is disgusted by the bov.
make a fully fleshed out propaganda scapegoat.
the key in charlottesville, i have found, is not to overcome the apathy of the masses.
and, there is apathy about living wage, because all it would take is a weekend walk out of about 40% of the working poor working at uva to create the chaos necessary to make a change, and…. i haven’t seen any walk outs….
so, the key is to have a small group of extreme people using guerrilla tactics to personally maneuver those perceived to be in power.
mlk talked about finding your enemy’s moral center and appealing to it.
i saw a glimmer of that with the living wage hunger strike sign, “got honor.”
however, the uva honor code is consistently reduced to don’t lie, cheat, or steal.
when the bov historically and consistently through word and deed shows, they have no economic compassion or respect for their workers, it’s not lying. it’s telling their cultural truth.
when the bov historically and consistently through word and deed feels that a group is expendable. easily replaced, and mostly forgotten and ignored, and they give them what a group like that traditionally deserves. it’s not cheating. it’s telling their cultural fairness.
and, when the bov historically and consistently through word and deed negates any responsibility toward the well being of not only current but future charlottesvillians working class, that stealing of future is not really stealing. it’s preserving their cultural status quo.
these traditions of “truth,” “fairness.” and “status quo” hold more weight than honor.
don’t hate your enemy. understand them. then, conquer the enemy within.
when you bully a bully using enlightened bully rhetoric in a very cunning, subtle, unexpected way, things change.
as a uva philosophy professor once asked our class….
if you had the 7 year old daughter of a man who was about to blow up a skyscraper full of thousands of people including your mother, and you knew that he would stop the action as you threatened to torture the little girl with everyone understanding you would do it….. what would you say about the thousands who lived or died that day to your grandchild?
if the living wage is not really a crisis to warrant living or dying for it or becoming taboo or becoming what you hate……
give charlottesville and uva a living wage, or i will take this knife and tickle her ear to death!