#solidaritymessage to Ukraine, Bosnia, And Anyone Demonstrating Anywhere!

Hello this is a solidarity message to Ukraine, Bosnia and anyone demonstrating anywhere! My name's Mihalis Eleftheriou, I'm an activist and founder of the Language Transfer project. I was in Tahrir in Egypt, I started occupy buffer zone in Cyprus and I'm currently in Turkey working with activists here. I've been a full time activist since all of this kicked off in Tunisia in 2010. We're all following you, involved and emotional and worried and I had some thoughts I wanted to share with you. It's both frustrating and painful to see the same thing happen over and over again since 2010. One death after another, until they are just numbers but of course we know they're not. It's very difficult to see us, and I say 'us' because of course this is the same fight the world over, make the same mistakes over and over and seeing the powers at be making the same tricks over and over again. Right now, in spite of the sadness and the indignation that you're experiencing, you probably feel the euphoria of being connected than ever with those who you are demonstrating with, but they will quickly divide you, because this is the system, and we don't take that down when we change a government. We don't change very much at all when we change a government. When you sit down to play Monopoly, you know it's going to end badly, it's the game. it doesn't matter if you change the banker. The game ends badly. That's inbuilt. You try to play, you try to win, maybe you try to cheat a little bit, but you know it's going to end badly. When we come together to protest we are generally protesting the rules of the game and not the game itself. This is natural. Our minds have grown in this world too and there are so many things we wouldn't think to question. But now, when we are on the street and all normality has gone up in smoke, it's the time when we can envisage a world that makes sense -- not a utopia, simply a world that makes sense. A world where we use science and technology to fulfill our needs as humans and our issues evolve into spiritual ones instead of consumerist ones, a world with high autonomy and participation in society for the individual, a world in which we work together to use our intelligence and knowledge to deal efficiently and quickly with the many looming dangers shadowing over us from climate change to environmental damage to food shortages and our happiness. The idea that some of us must be poor, the idea that we have to fight for resources, is a lie. We can all live in great abundance and rejuvenate the planet at the same time, it is well within our means and all you have to do is to survey the technology around you and start to imagine how it could be used if money didn't exist and only common sense did. We will never see it in this system. We will only see how much money we are getting, how much taxes we are paying, and how much they are stealing. We need to step back, far far back, and realize that it's a system and its norms that create and promote the undesirable behavior we are protesting against. We need to create a system based on healthier values, which promotes healthier behavior, like cooperation and love, for it is these values that makes us healthy and if it's these values that make us healthy, then it's this that humans were built for, not competing with one another. We shouldn't shed any more blood asking for solutions within this system or promoting some party or another, we need to set our minds to creative non-violent resistance whilst we begin to plan and build an alternative world to this one. This system has given us a lot but has exhausted our capacity for environmental and social damage. We need to think afresh, we need to disconnect from it, we need to think just in terms of what we have and what we know and what we can do with it all to live better. We're all in this together... even those of us that hate each other, we're all in this together. There's no healthy country in this system, no country will be ok until the world is ok, this is one fight. No people will enjoy true freedom until we all do, we are really all in this together. We need to stop fighting each other, we need to start discovering, we need to educate ourselves and one another, we need to realize the true nature of what connects us -and it's our mutual needs- which is very thing they are using to divide us, we need to realize this, and we need to realize it quickly.