Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Laura Gottesdiener

Fight Back Bank of America March, March 15, 2012
Photo: Stacy Lanyon

I used to work in media as a journalist, and I felt like I knew I wanted to be writing different stories, but I didn’t know how to tell them, and I didn’t know how to get out of the narratives that I felt like everyone was telling. I wanted to learn how to talk about this world in terms of what it could be instead of what it is right now from other people who were living differently and who were so visionary.

I think it’s so important because I think that if we were able to see for one day without advertising and without mainstream media and without all of these forces that obscure reality what our world actually looks like, we would be so outraged that there would be a revolution immediately, so what I’m doing here is trying to show that there are real alternatives in terms of the way we think, not just in terms of alternative economic or political structures but alternative ways of thinking about the world.

I hope this brings about a world where we don’t accept things that are told to us about us, so that we have the space to construct our identities and our needs in response to what we actually think and feel. I hope it brings about a world where people don’t feel that no matter where they turn they are playing a role they don’t want to be playing. More concretely, I hope this brings about a world where everybody has their needs met because we have enough resources and wealth for everybody’s needs to be met one hundred times over, and I don’t know what it will look like from an environmental stand point because that one is really fucked. I hope that we bring about a world where people like me, who have had a lot of the world forced to look like me, can learn to back off, so other people get the world to look like them. 

 Interview by Stacy Lanyon
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