Revolutionaries Don’t Ask Permission

by C. A. Matthews

The kids in Minneapolis get it. They stood outside the hotel where ICE agents were staying and made noise all night long. Loud noise. Deafening music and consistent shouting. All. Night. Long. No sleep for the killers and kidnappers of ICE allowed.

The kids didn’t ask for permission. They didn’t care about violating a noise ordinance or getting arrested. They just wanted ICE gone. For good. For the family of Renee Good. For the good of the community.

This is what Revolution is all about. It’s about doing good for the sake of the community—not the billionaire oligarchs ruling this fascist state.

Revolution is not about doing nothing and taking the shit dumped on us. It’s about shoveling that shit right back into the faces of those who wish to bury us. We bury them instead until the threat is no more.

I think the constant following and videoing of ICE agents in Minneapolis will wear the bastards down in time. They will leave town and avoid the upper Midwest from now until their ultimate demise at our hands. So keep it up, kids! You do us proud.

More Americans need to demonstrate the same bravery, the same courageous bloody-mindedness of the Minneapolis protesters...

 

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The Stain Remains

by C. A. Matthews

The graffiti artist Banksy honored the Royal Courts of Justice in London recently with a great original artwork. Its subject caught the public’s eye immediately. The spray-painted scene showed a judge, complete in black gown and white wig, using his gavel to pummel a protester to the ground. The protester is attempting to hold up a protest sign splattered in his own blood. After the recent “I support Palestine Action” protests and massive arrests of people of all ages and conditions, what image of violent censorship by the state could be more appropriate?

According to Novara Media:

The arrests included Steve, a disabled RAF veteran using a walker, Mike Higgins, a 62-year-old blind and disabled man who was previously arrested on 9 August, an NHS midwife, a retired doctor in her 80s, two mental health nurses and 83-year-old Anglican priest Reverend Sue Parfitt.

Of course, this was to be the only Banksy artwork that couldn’t remain so the British people could enjoy its message for years to come. (There’s actually an earlier Banksy decorating a London police box, so his paintings are usually left alone.) The court had the image of the abusive judge and the downtrodden protester scrubbed from the wall outside the courthouse’s entrance within days. Only an ominous dark shadow of the aggressive judge and the beaten protester remains.

If this dark shadow doesn’t tell the story of our times, I don’t know what does. As someone said after the artwork was washed off the courts’ wall: The stain remains.

The powers-that-be can scrub away a Banksy image, censor and arrest us all they like for protesting against the genocide of the Palestinian people, but the stain of the colonizers’ actions toward the ordinary people will never fade away. As the Irish-speaking group Kneecap said in an X post: “You can’t wash away genocide… Your complicity will always remain.”

There is bright red blood splatter on the protester’s placard in the original image, the protester’s own blood shed because of the judge’s evil actions. In the same manner, no matter how hard the Royal Courts of Justice (Ha!) tries to cover for the UK’s support of genocide, blood stains from the ethnically cleansed victims of Gaza will remain on their hands. No amount of “scrubbing” (censoring) or “whitewashing” (using propaganda/hasbara to cover up lies) will ever wipe away the people’s memory of how red those blood stains were.

It’s time for us all in the West to give up trying to lie our way out of our war crimes. The stain remains no matter how violently a country acts toward their own people who courageously keep pointing out the stain of genocide. Trying to shut down mass protests by censoring an organization such as Palestine Action and proscribing it as a “terrorist group” does nothing to hide the UK government’s past or present war crimes. In fact, it only adds to the government’s growing list of crimes against humanity...

 

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A most creative way to protest Trump's recent visit to Scotland.

Unlearning Hopelessness

by C.A. Matthews

Seen on X: https://x.com/aashisjo/status/1947314052016824491

@DrNeenaJha Seriously what do we do?? We’ve protested, boycotted, campaigned, donated, written articles, pressured our government & institutions

@aashisjo What do we do? We organize real action, not performances. We disrupt the empire by refusing to work. We do not ask them to stop, we force them to stop.

 

While I was pruning back the dying raspberry canes in our organic garden, I contemplated just how hopeless the task was. The monsoon rain dumps this season had encouraged more raspberry canes and briers to grow than usual, then further rains drowned half of them with the excessive water around their roots. The out-of-control new brier growth was choking some of the older fruit bearing ones.

Why bother? I thought. I should give up now and avoid any more scrapes and scratches.

But I didn’t give up. I kept on until the task was finished. Why? Because I happen to like eating raspberries. I helped plant the first small canes in our garden, and they’d graciously had fed me (and others) over the years. So, I gritted my teeth and kept pruning. I vowed not to give up on them, especially when they needed my help the most.

Gardening is very much like fighting the unjust system we live in. Sometimes things go well, but most of the time it’s chaos and all hands-to-the-pumps—or pruning shears. Raspberries and other living things can be as unpredictable as the powers-that-be who control and punish us whenever we deviate from their plans. But we can’t give up on fighting back against the oligarchs no matter how tough things get. We’ve got to keep on hacking through the jungle and prune those briers. We’ve got fruit to harvest.

There’s been a lot of talk among psychologists and therapists about learned helplessness. Learned helplessness is when we believe we cannot change painful circumstances, so we stop trying and just endure what’s happening. 

This “just enduring” behavior describes the actions of the majority of humankind in the year 2025, in my opinion. We are enduring, but we’re not growing and producing fruit that will feed ourselves and others now and in the future. We’ve thrown in the towel along with our gardening secateurs, and because of that choice to give up, our circumstances will not change for the better.

Some psychologists believe that it’s actually learned hopelessness or a hopeless depression that keeps us from fighting back against painful circumstances. It’s easy to understand why and how depression sets in. Have you ever scrolled through your social media stream to check out the headlines or look at the memes?

No wonder it's called doomscrolling! 

While the odds of us succeeding in our goals to make the world a better place for all may be astronomical, we can at least try to fight the corrupt system and make some things better, right? The challenge is that we’ve heard too many horror stories and learned from others how hopeless the fight has become for them. We start to believe that it’s hopeless to even try and change things...

 

To learn more about how to unlearn hopelessness and keep up the fight against the corrupt status quo, please continue reading the rest of this article on Substack. Just copy or click on this link: 

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This article is the 531st blog posting of The Revolution Continues. We began in June 2015, and we're still going strong. Please keep reading, sharing, and subscribing to help TRC continue for another ten years. 

You can make a donation at https://paypal.me/camatthews or Buy Me a Coffee or Ko-fi. Every little bit helps since this is my only source of income. Thank you.

Scratch The Surface

 

Scratch The Surface

by C.A. Matthews

We watched a mystery program recently where the antique dealer sleuth was asked to solve the puzzle of what happened to an older woman’s inheritance that supposedly was “right in front of her.” As the old woman sat leaning on her cane, the sleuth asked if she could see the cane. The sleuth took a nail file and scratched the head of the cane, flaking off some of the paint covering it. Hidden under several layers of paint was a solid gold ornament—the woman’s inheritance. The sleuth had cracked the puzzle. Scratching the surface revealed a treasure.

If only everything was as golden underneath its surface!

If you scratch the surface of the current crop of duopoly candidates for the White House, you probably won’t like what you find underneath. It’s about as far from gold as you can get!

There’s no secret to the shallowness of Donald Trump. The whole world experienced his narcissism in his first time in office, so is there any need to rehash it? After his recent experiences in court, nobody—and I mean nobody—really wants to see what’s underneath the Trumpster Fire’s surface. We’re all agreed: It ain’t pretty.

The same could be said of Kamala “The Cackler” Harris. Harris has been compared to former president Barack Obama who in a recent biography was described as being “hollow at its core” or an empty vessel. That means there’s essentially nothing underneath those insane giggles and grins of Harris. There’s no guiding principles or firmly held beliefs. She’s held together by a willingness to do whatever the oligarchs want her to do. Mark my words, what billionaires want Harris to do for them isn’t going to be of help to any of us ordinary folks...

 

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The Fight

 

 The Fight

by C.A. Matthews

 

Nowadays there are so many things coming at us all at once—climate disasters, political disasters, personal disasters—that it sometimes becomes so overwhelming that all you want to do is shout, “ENOUGH ALREADY! LEAVE ME ALONE!”

Only once you’re free from the stress will you be able to walk away from everything with your fingers in your ears and your eyes closed as you curl up with your favorite blanket in a corner of your bed like you did when you were three years old and then forget that the world even exists.

Too bad the world never forgets about you.

The world has a way of finding us no matter how much we try to hide from it, like it or not. It won’t leave us alone if we have half a brain cell or even a tiny gram of integrity. It will call to us and plead with us to take part in its happenings. It will call to us saying, “Help me get rid it of these evil and immoral elements and replace them with just and moral ones.”

And we’ll feel obligated to do so, until it all becomes too much for us again. Then we’ll curl up in a fetal position and sob, “Enough! Please?”

I’ve been hovering over the “Enough!” cliff edge for quite some time now, so I really appreciated reading Caitlin Johnstone’s latest poem. Here it is in case you haven’t read it yet...

 

To read the rest of this article, click on this link to go to our Substack page: https://therevolutioncontinues.substack.com  There you'll also see the related article and video links, all the images, and be able to leave comments. You can subscribe to receive the weekly blog post in your email box as well. Subscribe today! Power to the people!