There Is A Storm Coming

"How can revolution arise without the aid of crisis? How can the Left break the unacknowledged vicious cycle of this reliance on calamity in the real circumstances of the present? The answer lies in finding crisis under disguise, not in the great collective catastrophes of war and economic ruin but in the hidden tragedies of individual anguish, fear, insecurity, and incapacity, repeated many millions of times over in the life of contemporary society. Almost everyone feels abandoned. Almost everyone believes himself to be an outsider, looking in through the window at the party going on inside. Flexibility—the watchword of the orthodoxy of markets and globalization—is rightly understood to be a code word for the generalization of insecurity. The parties that claim an historical connection with the Left are seen to oscillate between a shamefaced collaboration with this program of insecurity, in the hope that through growth it will generate resources that can be redirected to social spending, and a half-hearted, weakened defense of traditional social contracts. This fear, justified by plain fact, defeating hope, poisoning attitudes to the outsider, and expressing an immense and unredeemed waste of energy amounts to a crisis. It is lived out, for the most part silently, within the minds of individuals." - Roger Ebert

"Help, Michael Shannon is my father!" - A. O. Scott