March 21, 2021 | Freedom Rally Union Square Park NYC – Alison McDowell’s Speech | Wrench In The Gears |
“We stand for the children, the natural world, the not yet born”
“Spring is on the doorstep.
Each day the sun grows stronger, the days longer.
Winter is fading.
In Philadelphia, the snowdrops and daffodils are up.
I saw my first garter snake yesterday, got my hands in the soil, and felt very human.
We’ve made it through a long, hard year: reflecting, reckoning, and deepening.
We’ve fallen apart and been put back together.
We are raw and vulnerable, hopeful and powerful.
We have found one another.
Here at Union Square Park, we unite to face what John Trudell, leader of the American Indian Movement, described as a predator energy that seeks to mine the being part of human.
We do not shirk our responsibility to put our minds, bodies, and intelligence against this machine of tech-no-logic.
Who could have known it would be biometric passports?
QR codes?
E-carceration bracelets?
Robot police dogs?
We knew the age of surveillance capitalism was dawning, but none of us anticipated this trigger event that turned our world upside down last March.
Yet those of us with eyes to see and ears to hear and open hearts have been called to step forward with the gifts given to us by the creator and work to transmute this profanity into something sacred, a non-cybernetic future.
That future is not one where we live in a planetary computer or as characters in a virtual simulation.
That world is not one of bar-coded life.
That world does not run on cyborg avatar capitalism.
We see the choice between the two paths, one green and one scorched.
We know the choice we make, the stand we take today, will determine not just the course of our lives, but the lives of all other beings on this planet and those not yet born.
So I stand here now with you beautiful people in spirited resistance to the Great Reset, the Fourth Industrial Revolution, stakeholder capitalism, globalization 4.0, and impact investing.
The technocratic vision of society hatched at the Columbia school of Industrial Engineering in the 1930s will not come to pass.
Nor will the e-government “digital nation” solutionism birthed out of NYU’s GovLab and Harvard Kennedy School.
Nope.
We see you, you neoliberal policy wonks and Google data analysts who aim to steal our civic agency in the name of “what works” government.
Our vibrant cities will not be reduced to an indifferent networked panopticon, a biosecurity Operating System masquerading as government.
Their soulless smartness is no match for our symphonies, songs, dance, poetry, cuisine, street art, laughing children, and warm embraces.
Michael Bloomberg, Goldman Sachs, Stanley Druckenmiller, Paul Tudor Jones and the rest of the hedge fund crowd have no right to predictively profile us, put us on social-prescribing self-improvement pathways, track our compliance with wearable tech, and use that data to run pay for success finance deals profiting off misery.
Who do they think they are to impose digital identities and package us as asset backed securities; tranches of impact investments; human capital data commodities to be tracked as domesticated livestock with smart contracts through the spatial web of mixed reality?
The Davos elite have no right to foreclose the futures of children.
I call out the toxic alliance of the United Nations and Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum for the faux-progressive, gas-lighting cabal that it is.
Global poverty cannot be a profit center.
Our physical and mental health cannot be profit centers.
Hands off our education choices and our food choices, too.
Nature is not theirs to blanket in sensors and track for impact on data dashboards.
Our destinies are too magnificent to fit on puny blockchain ledgers.
Our life force belongs not to ESG portfolios but woven into complex tapestries of life that bind us to one another, to the land, and all beings enriching our lives from tiny microbes to spreading cottonwoods.
Our freedom struggle is for the preservation of natural, non-synthetic, life on mother earth.
With such freedom comes responsibility, to mend the immense hurts and deep wounds inflicted on society and nature over centuries.
We have arrived at a moment of supreme reckoning, where through an alchemy of love and faith we might manifest a future of healing and right relationship, where reciprocity is restored.
This is the work.
Look around, this is your community.
We build it together.
Let us stand united in faith, shared power, and love and strive to become ancestors worth claiming.”
Thank you Alison!