Heroin Skateboards professional skateboarder Chris Pulman has ignited a crucial conversation, challenging the status quo and prompting us to question our complicity in the myriad crises gripping humanity.
From the devastating specters of genocide and war to the pervasive issues of inequality, poverty, and homelessness, Pulman contends that our world is ensnared in a web of discrimination where none should exist.
Pulman posted, "Are we complicit? Complicit in what?
There is cause for concern throughout our species. From genocide and war to inequality, poverty and homelessness. There is discrimination in myriad forms where there should be none.
The systems employed to create a better society are broken or have never worked fairly. The many forms of hierarchy, religion and ‘democracy’ only ever serve a few.
By our compliance we are supporting one or many of these systems. Every time we follow the rules they make we are complicit in the harm that they do.
Those who are alert and determined to make change invest their faith in campaigning, or lobbying or protest.
Of all these methods, only protest is truly effective.
But, the methods of protest have been largely ineffective in themselves. Often too easy to be reframed as inconvenient, leftist, silly. Always framed that way by those that stand to lose the most if any change were effected.
If you want to create change, you need to directly affect the decision makers.
Our politicians couldn’t care less about gallery protests and social media. As far as votes go, the protestors are not their voters so they can be ignored or derided. The companies that we work for and buy from create so much ‘need’ that they have made themselves artificially essential to our lives and therefore immune from our opinions. Both structures represent a portion of society which ‘farms’ the rest of us for our labour and our spending power.
In our progressively secular world we realise that there is no posthumous reward for acting in a morally correct way. Tricked by the belief that all work is ‘good’ and that in order to conspicuously demonstrate our virtue we purchase objects to display our wealth. We continue to be farmed; cogs in a machine which only benefits its owners.
If you really want those at the top to take notice, cease, or limit your engagement with their exploitation.
If you’re unable to get their attention directly, through mass disruption and causing actual damage (never forget that they value property over human life) then withhold your labour and consumerism; the only things you have of value, in their eyes…"