Another world is possible…

I just don’t think school is more important than a kid or teacher’s life. I don’t think work is more important than the life of a worker. I don’t think the government is more important than it’s citizen’s. I don’t think the economy is more important than people.

It bothers me that we talk about these systems — school, work, government, the economy — as if they aren’t systems we created. But they all are. They are all concepts that we set in motion at a certain point in history. They have a beginning, they could have an end, if we will it.

We could wake up tomorrow and collectively construct an entirely new way of doing education, an entirely new way of sharing goods, an entirely new way of organizing life together. What is timeless is not the school or the government or the economy, it’s the people. It’s us.

The powers and principalities of this world want us to pretend that we could not exist without schools, work, government, the economy as presently conceived. But all of these systems are historically constructed. They didn’t always exist, and people still lived.

So when I say another world is possible it’s because history is riddled with examples of people who didn’t accept their current order and attempted to live otherwise. Some succeeded, some were repressed, but they tried, they dreamed, they hoped. Why can’t we?

It is for this reason that, to me, the possibility of a different order is not an abstraction. It’s the hope that comes from a long view of history. People rise up, they demand something different, but first they accept that the systems that govern us were once created and as a result are not immortal.