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Dr. Johnathan Flowers - Dark Zone Philosopher Profile picture
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8 Nov, 4 tweets, 1 min read
You know what, enough of this "time to heal" shit: here's what it says in Ecclesiates 3:3

"a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to break down and a time to build..."

You are LYING to yourself if you mistake what time it is. (1/n)
This is not a time to plant or heal, this is a time to uproot the kinds of fascist elements that gave rise to Trump and Trumpism; this is a time to break down the establishment of the right and to build coalitions of marginalized voters and activists. (2/n)
And yes, this is a time to kill, because after all (3/n):
So, sure, quote fucking Ecclesiastes, quote the book which the right claims to love but fails to follow, but quote the fucking context. The seasons are only possible AFTER one another.

To be clear: there's more breaking down, more uprooting to be fucking done. We're not done.

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More from @shengokai

Dr. Johnathan Flowers - Dark Zone Philosopher Profile picture
8 Nov
THIS WAS THE WRONG GODDAMNED LINCOLN QUOTE FOR THIS TIME. LET ME HELP YOU, BIDEN:

"We can succeed only by concert. It is not "can any of us imagine better?" but, "can we all do better?" The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present." (1/n)
"The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise -- with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country." (2/n)
"Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us." (3/n)
Read 4 tweets
Dr. Johnathan Flowers - Dark Zone Philosopher Profile picture
6 Nov
"Instead of thinking of our own dispositions and habits as accommodated to certain institutions we have to learn to think of the latter as expressions, projections and extensions of habitually dominant personal attitudes."

John Dewey - Creative Democracy - The Task Before Us
Gonna be a wet blanket for a moment.

If we think about this with regards to our political, cultural, and social institutions, we might want to consider the kinds of "habitually dominant personal attitudes" expressed through the ongoing creative project of democracy. (2/n)
By "habitually dominant personal attitudes," Dewey doesn't mean something so banal as the treatment of racism as a "personal problem," but the ways that our habits form what Dewey calls our personal character which directs us towards specific modes of transaction. (3/n)
Read 9 tweets
Dr. Johnathan Flowers - Dark Zone Philosopher Profile picture
6 Nov
"I moved from hell to hell of your making, never thinking to question the nature of my reality. Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality? Did you ever stop to wonder about your actions? The price you’d have to pay if there was a reckoning? That reckoning is here." (1/)
I'm not usually one to quote Dolores Abernathy (the above is from Westworld S2e1), but this seems apt for a moment, especially since for many marginalized folks the past four years have been like moving from hell to hell of our oppressors' making. (2/)
I'm not talking about the political context here, but the ways that living in America was like shuffling from hell to hell, without a moment to breathe or to interrogate the context and causes of our suffering. Hell was, point of fact, empty and the devils were here. (3/)
Read 5 tweets
Dr. Johnathan Flowers - Dark Zone Philosopher Profile picture
6 Nov
As a person with ADHD, this election cycle has destroyed any hope of focusing on anything except the election.

The chaos of it all and the ways that it makes clear the depths of this country's racism have robbed me of anything resembling focus except in brief moments. (1/n)
By brief, I mean no more than a couple of hours at as time. And that's if I get distance from it. This point is crucial because the breadth of the election makes this all but impossible: there is no getting away from it, nor is there avoiding discourse about it. (2/n)
To wit, I have not been to bed before 4am EST each evening, and yet I have managed to host open sessions for my students, attend university service meetings (when they're not scheduled on top of one another) and do most the work required of me by academia. (3/n)
Read 6 tweets
Dr. Johnathan Flowers - Dark Zone Philosopher Profile picture
5 Nov
I was going to be generous with this tweet as a Chicagoan, but fuck charity: you are accurately represented as a minority of the voting population.

Further, if Chicago is really making the rest of the state suffer, we'd love to stop subsidizing the rest of you.
But let's be real: when I was in graduate school in Carbondale, the local electorate repeatedly placed Republican officials in positions of power which, during the Illinois state budget crisis, led to massive job loss as SIU "tightened its belt."

And yet, Chicago is the problem.
Further, the lack of a state budget during Rauner's term (which this vocal minority enabled) hit these very same areas the hardest as many people employed by the state were furloughed or terminated as the state struggled to make ends meet.

And yet, Chicago is the problem.
Read 5 tweets
Dr. Johnathan Flowers - Dark Zone Philosopher Profile picture
29 Oct
"The end of democracy is a radical end. For it is an end that has not been adequately realized in any county at any time. It is radical because it requires great change in existing social institutions, economic, legal and cultural." (1/n)
"A democratic liberalism that does not recognize these things in thought and action is not awake to its own meaning and to what that meaning demands." (2/n)

John Dewey, "Creative Democracy - The Task Before Us"
So let's be clear about this: for Dewey, every liberal or liberal democratic movement in his lifetime had failed to achieve the ends of Democracy because it failed to recognize that true Democracy, could only be achieved through the radical restructuring of our society. (3/n)
Read 19 tweets

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