When I lined up the little acts of sabotage I had committed during the last year, it soon got clear that they had been quite a failure: they had never attacked the heart of a project I had been invited to but then felt the urge to criticize. Instead, my little acts of sabotage appear as post scriptum, as last remark that goes against the grain, a gesture of final relief from a system or a rule I could not entirely identify with but got money from.
Did my acts have a destabilizing effect? And on whom: the system or myself? Will I continue this year without committing little acts of sabotage, and does this mean that I won’t earn money with projects I don’t agree with? Am I going to found a movement in order to perform collectively big acts of sabotage in a system or will we stay away from it anyway? And will you join us?
1 comment:
Dear Bettina! it is really interesting to read this; I think I am going through a similar phase like you, even though the triggering points are different, but it all draws down to how much and where and up to where do we engage ourselves. I was deeply touched by the Australian prime minister finally expressing the long awaited 'sorry' for the violence exerted on Aboriginees and particularly on the 'stolen generation', and the fact that 2 days before the "Australian Day' there was an anti-demo called 'Invasion Day', to acknowledge that the country was violently invaded, that the land is first of all the land of the Aboriginees, and that they have rights. I thought that quite an amazing step to be done by a population (and yes, I know, a probably very small part of it as well), but still. Considering we celebrate Columbus (even if studies show today that Polynesians have discovered the American continent far earlier that the Spanish conquistadore), I thought that it might be time for a manifestation expressing our -European- sorry for all the crusades, invasions and wars we brought to other countries and continents. And this not in order to make ourselves feel guilty, or to nourish guilt, but in order to move on to something we can share, and what Kevin Rudd described as the 'healing of a nation'. The healing of a world?
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