Image by Lily Rhoads via Flickr
The Essays of The Man From the North by Rivera Sun
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Originally published December 14, 2016
November 14, 2017
We are serving ourselves up on silver platters to the oligarchs and giant corporations. We have apples of misinformation in our mouths and sprigs of patriotic parsley tucked behind our ears. Must we complacently acquiesce to being pot-roasted pigs? Rise up!
The situation is more than intolerable . . . it is ridiculous . . . it is obscene. Our citizenry behaves like swine in the feedlots of the giant corporations and their rich owners. We eat the swill they slop down of toxic food, poisonous lies, mind-numbing media, and soul-crushing policies of oppression. We roll in the muck too moribund to rise up and organize for life, liberty, and love!
Have you ever seen a wild boar? Hairy, black, powerful, untamed, muscular? Have ever seen the wild sow, alert, protective and nurturing of her young? Have you seen the natural liveliness and intelligence of the lithe, quick piglets raised in woodlands and meadows, not muck and feedlots?
Are you content to live out your days, numbed and enslaved, slated for the slaughterhouse? To be destined only to put profits into rich people’s pockets? To be basted in lies and roasted in the fire of injustice? To be carved up slice-by-slice and devoured by gluttons? To condemn your children to the same fate?
Before there were masters and owners, overseers and butchers, merchants and chefs, the pig was wild, untamed, and free. It chose where it roamed. It ate when hungry. It rested when tired.
It is said that the pig is more intelligent than the dog. Yet, most of its species is enslaved to the greed of human cravings. The human being is allegedly far more intelligent than the swine, and yet, under the surface of our acculturation, are we not locked in feedlots of work, rent, bills, and debt? Are not our whole lives one long production line for rich people’s profits? Is not our freedom as equally illusory as the pig’s, lasting only as long as no one attempts to break free?
These are unsettling questions. But when abattoirs and silver platters await us, perhaps we ought to be uneasy. Perhaps we ought to be eyeing the holes in the fences. Perhaps we ought to be discussing what would happen if we all refused to go quietly to the slaughterhouse. Perhaps we ought to fast from the swill and let the pinch of hunger sharpen our eyes to the truth.
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The Roots of Resistance
The Roots of Resistance is here . . . and you can join in the fun of the Community Publishing Campaign to launch this novel into the world! Be the first to read the book! Pick up copies for friends! Support Rivera Sun and connect this novel to people far and wide.
[…]
All of your favorite characters from The Dandelion Insurrection are back! Charlie Rider and Zadie Byrd Gray may have won a revolution, but “they’ve got more problems than centipedes have legs” – as lawyer Tansy Beaulisle puts it.
[…]
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The Roots of Resistance – Community Publishing Campaign
Rivera Sun on Nov 9, 2017
Author Rivera Sun is launching the Community Publishing Campaign for The Roots of Resistance, sequel to The Dandelion Insurrection. Find out more and get the book here. Support the campaign, get a book for yourself and for friends, enjoy this personal message from Rivera Sun, and tell others that this great new novel is here! Find Rivera Sun’s other works at www.riverasun.com.
Author/Actress Rivera Sun syndicated by PeaceVoice, is the author of The Dandelion Insurrection and other books, and the Programs Coordinator for Campaign Nonviolence. http://www.riverasun.com
The Man From the North is a fictional writer in Rivera Sun’s novel, The Dandelion Insurrection. The novel takes place in the near future, in “a time that looms around the corner of today”, when a rising police state controlled by the corporate-political elite have plunged the nation into the grip of a hidden dictatorship. In spite of severe surveillance and repression, the Man From the North’s banned articles circulate through the American populace, reporting on resistance and fomenting nonviolent revolution. This article is one of a series written by The Man From the North, which are not included in the novel, but can be read here.
from the archives:
Chris Hedges: The Power of Propaganda
The Problem is Civil Obedience by Howard Zinn
Don’t Let the “Welfare Kings” Pick Your Pockets by Ralph Nader
How Big Corporations Game Our Democracy Into Their Plutocracy by Ralph Nader
Dandelion Salad 
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Updated: added a video for The Roots of Resistance.
The word “we” is used freely in Sun’s excerpt, but a “we” is not so easily achieved. How can you and I inspire and organize the others? Too many of them identify with their oppressors, or see their problems as solely their own. Too many think only of choosing a lesser oppression, as though the lesser oppressor could be trusted to not worsen. And too many of them are lured into fighting against mere symptoms of the underlying root problems, lured into believing those symptoms =are= the whole problems. Some who are half awake believe themselves to be fully awake. But personally, =I= know better, of course.
Well, this is fiction designed to inspire others. Have you read The Dandelion Insurrection yet? I highly recommend it. It’s so exciting it is hard to put down, but also you don’t want it to end. So, now there is a sequel out, The Roots of Resistance. Can’t wait to read it.
This essay among the others written by The Man From The North is a continuation of The Dandelion Insurrection.
Poignant video; strong message.
Truthfully, I know we are all different and unique, and that is the point! Each according to their own lights. Leadership resides in strength of purpose and self-knowledge.
We live best by example, not according to the cunning, creepy tricks of ‘persuasion.’ PR is no way to conduct a life or a community, an economy or any country. That is simply obsequious puppetry.
Authenticity is the courage to become oneself.
Thanks for watching the video, David. It was beautifully made.