On your marks, set, 2005 go !!

Before you know it, the New Year has tossed you back into the daily treadmills of social reproduction. There is no time for making sense of it all, whether the natural disaster in Southeast Asia (http://www.alertnet.org), daily deaths in Iraq (http://www.iraqbodycount.net) a new series of reality shows (no need to find out more), or, the meaning of loneliness (http://www.harbour.sfu.ca/~hayward/van/v... Out of habit, you join the rush to buy and hand out Christmas gifts. Under the tree you are at a loss whether to sing a carol, watch the Grinch who stole it all, or to lay a CD. You try to be reflective and look back on a year gone by and you might be inclined to make a resolution for the new one. Don't forget to be happy at midnight and to make a toast with some imitation Champagnes, made from a mix of domestic and imported wines.

Now its early January and you got this whole season wrapped up and behind you, 2005 is ready to go ahead. But where it is supposed to go to remains an open question. Perhaps this is the time to sprinkle some political spice into your year. Meaning what? Meaning, to look sharply at yourself and to ask 'how political was I last year?' Chances are, few of us where half as political as we could have been. In 2004, the need to think and act politically was greater than it has been since the Vietnam War. Then as now, warfare has surpassed welfare as a dominant characteristic of global superpower, whether an aspiring, assuming or temporarily actual one. Today, with essentially only one such power on the globe, a semi-permanent state of warfare appears to have settled in, under a guise of self-defence. This new phase of political disorder can been as triggering the need for significantly stepped-up democratic action. Action in opposition to an unleashed neo-imperial agenda which is clouded in a fog of undefined, increasingly violent form of globalization.

Political action aimed at re-asserting democracy as a genuinely popular vision and project, based on consciousness of political purpose and possibility, requires ongoing initiatives, broad in social basis and deep in system transcending actions. Warfare globalization thrives when political protest and dissent are weak at the international level; it succeeds when national opposition is sporadic or irrelevant in its impact. As 2005 unfolds, the limits of capitalist globalization become increasingly evident: ecological, economical, social and politically limits are reaching and violently transgressed (see: http://www.ebookad.com/eb.php3?ebookid=1... ). These limits impact upon you and me, us and them, stronger there, weaker elsewhere. As we are affected in similar ways yet in varying degrees by the ravages, insults, violence and disgraces caused by warfare globalization, our ability, interest in or preparedness fro political resistance will equally vary. 2005, the year of the rooster could bring many wake-up calls for democratic political change; change of the mainstream political body of the nation state and increasingly, change outside and beyond the states' traditional geographic and class confines. It is time to let the rooster out of the box, welcome 2005!

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