As children we were taught that if we worked hard, we would make a lot of money, but if didn’t work, we would be poor. On television we saw heroes who saved the world. As we grew up, we studied because they said that this is good for us. At school, they teach you what you supposedly need to learn, but never tell you why. Curiosity is eradicated. You are not allowed to challenge the establishment, in short you don’t get taught what's really important. Students are graded and take exams to see who is best, to measure our skills.
We are graded to take the spot that has already been assigned to us in society: a job. A job that gives you barely enough to survive, and often one that you have not even chosen, but that has been given to you. You should accept it without questioning. In fact, you are lucky to have a job at all.
We find ourselves in a world in which success is opposed to essential values of humanity, such as solidarity and mutual support. Moreover, anything that does not promote competitiveness, selfishness and greed is seen as dysfunctional and against the markets. Immoral ideology is reinforced by the monopoly of the mainstream media, the instruments that create the necessary consensus around this unfair and unsupportive system.
Now that we know that we would have to give up our values in order to get to the top, what happens if we do not want to? Now that there is Internet, which is beyond the control of many, what if we start learning? Now there's a crowd that begins to think. You have created a youth that makes the effort to achieve their dreams, you have sketched for us a world that you knew was not real and now we want to create it. And the worst thing for you is that we are prepared for it. On the streets engineers, doctors, architects, philosophers, etc are protesting. They meet, talk and discuss alternatives.
This is why we, men and women, inhabitants of this planet, we have decided freely and fraternally to make our voices heard this May 12th, all over the world, to denounce the current condition of our planet, and demand the application of different policies, designed to encourage and promote the common good.
We condemn the current distribution of economic resources is such a way that only a very meager minority escape from poverty or insecurity. Future generations are condemned to receive a poisoned legacy due to environmental hazards caused for their benefit of too few. Democratic political systems, where there any, are empty of meaning almost entirely, have been put to the service of those who are only interested in increasing the benefit to their corporations or financial institutions, regardless of the future of the planet or its inhabitants.
We also condemn that the current crisis is not a natural accident. It was caused by the greed of those who have brought the world to this situation. With the help of an economic science that has lost its original sense of management for the common good, to become an ideology in the service of financial power, seeking to impose measures that stifle billions of people even more, without asking them, just stating that there is no other solution. How come we must leave our future in the hands of the same experts who are destroying it?.
But also, here and now, we're back. We are awake now, but not just to complain. Now we aim at the real causes of the crisis, their policies and their lies disguised as empty rhetoric. And we propose alternatives to their policies, offering relief to the current situation and move towards a more democratic world, where the values of liberty, equality, and fraternity prevail, the old dream of our ancestors who rose against oppression through the entire planet. A world where every man or woman is guaranteed the right to free pursuit of happiness, personal and in community.
For all this, for everything this spring represents, we will meet on May 12. Because we do not want to quit being persons, we are not numbers, we are free men and women.
