unPoliceYrMind

The following quote from Paolo Freire is helpful for understanding why some poor people support the Republicans, like Bush/McCain/Palin, whose programs reinforce the inequalities and hierarchies that keep people poor…

“”When [people’s] efforts to act responsibly are frustrated, when they find themselves unable to use their faculties, people suffer. “This suffering due to impotence is rooted in the very fact that the human equilibrium has been disturbed”[5] But the inability to act which causes people’s anguish also causes them to reject their impotence, by attempting “… to restore [their] capacity to act. But can [they], and how? One way is to submit to and identify with a person or group having power.” By this symbolic participation in another person’s life, [men have] the illusion of acting, when in reality [they] only submit to and become a part of those who act.[6] Populist manifestations perhaps best exemplify this type of behavior by the oppressed, who, by identifying with charismatic leaders, come to feel that they themselves are active and effective. The rebellion they express as they emerge in the historical process is motivated by that desire to act effectively. The dominant elites consider the remedy to be more domination and repression, carried out in the name of freedom, order, and social peace (that is, the peace of the elites). Thus they can condemn — logically from their point of view — “the violence of a strike by workers and [can] call upon the state in the same breath to use violence in putting down the strike.”[7]”“