To The Communards of March 4th

A sealed note to the communards of March 2010

From The Brilliant

Thanks to you the world has opened up, again—tired folks were reminded that energy is generative, not finite, and the size of your ambitions has been shown to exceed the University. There is a beginning of a twisting road, without a foreseeable end, with beautiful vistas and shadowy cul-de-sacs.

In the past the brilliant attacked capitalism at its strongest, pointing out that even the upper and middle classes – the people who were supposed to benefit from the system – even those people led lives of misery and impoverishment. The school occupations are the latest chapter of that story. And the communiques, full of toothy poetry, point out that debt is the only consistent product of a university education, that the university – the gleaming icon of personal betterment and fulfillment – is no longer good for either the “creation of a cultured and educated citizenry,” nor for the economic benefits that used to go with a degree. That the university becomes just one more way of categorizing people, defining one more type of inmate, a different control group for the experiments that are constant, ubiquitous.

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