Source: consciously.org
Our daily gestures, even the seemingly most trivial ones, exert an influence on someone else. Each of them is a political choice, which today no longer concerns the simple electoral vote, but involves our behavior, relationships with others, even our purchases. Buying a T-shirt is an action that has consequences for a worker in the southern hemisphere. The way we spend our money involves populations far from us, the food we eat affects the environment we live in and other beings we live with on this planet, the way we raise our children affects our and our their approach to life.
Unfortunately, awareness of the relationship between our daily choices and their real consequences on others is clouded. The t-shirt we buy becomes nothing more than a garment to wear, the food we eat is reduced to being considered only a food to be consumed. Raising a child becomes no longer a matter of breast milk, time, cuddles and willingness to listen, but passes through the possession and use of a series of objects that want to convince us to be “indispensable”: bottles, pacifiers, cots, furniture , artificial milks and baby food, teddy bears, prepackaged toys: all things that distance the child from the mother, from contact with people and “educate” him from an early age to depend on objects, to be a “good consumer”.
This state of affairs exists thanks to a series of elements: today it is considered important to know the macroeconomic processes that animate the joust of capitalism, while little importance is attributed to individual choices. All this favors the maintenance of the status quo and induces the individual not to doubt their choices. Just gather a lot of information and work consistently with your vote, but at the supermarket nothing is questioned. What hinders the change is certainly the dose of cynicism that we inject ourselves: the choices of the individual are insignificant, they say. It seems to us then that everything we do alone can do nothing in the face of the chaos of the world and the great forces that determine the fate of women and men. Since most people look away, it seems useless to make individual and responsible choices. But it is not enough to put a cross on a ballot paper, it is not enough to “get informed” by watching TV, it is not enough to know that the world is like this and it is not enough to have ideas to contribute to change: we must also implement it, starting with our life everyday.
The conditionings that keep us “quiet” are deeper than it may seem. The acquiescence to power, the fear of change, the reluctance to take a stand outside the chorus are also rooted in alienation from ourselves, from our authentic feelings and from our healthier instincts: an alienation that has been built in us since as children, placing a series of barriers that prevent us from perceiving the nature around us, from entering into connection with other human beings and with our own feeling. Regaining possession of the simple pleasures of a rediscovered physicality, freeing ourselves of barriers such as shoes or clothes to recover direct contact with the earth, with nature, with our natural physiological condition of human beings, is a way to regain energy and return to essential, to simple things,
The desire to try to achieve this awareness has prompted us to create this meeting point.
The spirit of “Consciously” is represented by the image of the logo. The three monkeys who in the traditional imaginary refuse to confront reality, covering their ears, eyes and mouth, have now decided to turn the page: listening, observing and telling.
Consciously” means hearing the voices of those who want to speak but are not heard, it means removing the earplugs that prevent us from hearing the cries of those who cannot scream and hear through the walls that separate the pain of others from our daily life , built on purpose to envelop us in the silence of indifference, of the cynicism that we have been taught and that makes us repeat that
“the situation is much more complicated and you certainly won’t change it” .
This is why we believe that the personal growth of each of us and the awareness of the importance of our daily actions are so important: talking about them and discussing them has an enormous educational value.
Recognizing the strength of dialogue and confrontation, we have arranged this possibility on five Thematic Forums, through which to promote knowledge of issues such as solidarity economy and sobriety, degrowth and ecology to finally realize the subtle economic violence that people suffer both near us and far from us, and how much dignity can be sold off through a simple T-shirt or cup of coffee;
the expression of bodily freedom, or the beauty of living the relationship with one’s body without cultural burdens that limit its expressive potential and require the constant – and obvious – use of clothes and shoes; ethical vegetarianism
, of which the Vegan lifestyle is the highest expression (eating animals is really “necessary” as they tell us? And “meat and fish” are empty words to indicate dishes like others or is it a way to forget that were that meat and fish once lifelong subjects violently transformed into lifeless commodities for human satisfaction?); Experience parenting and growth
maturing together as children and as parents, through respect for our feelings and instincts without being confused by all the prejudices that the social system wants to instill in us and of which it wants to make us unconscious instruments of perpetuation;
human rights , constantly trampled on in various parts of the world, animal rights , still far from being recognized and anti- speciesism as a continuation of a discourse that wants to eliminate all discrimination, be it gender, ethnicity, age , of sexual orientation and, the latter still socially approved, of species.
We are therefore waiting for you to look for the path towards ever greater awareness and to reach the “critical mass” that gives the impetus for a change that, in our small way, can transform the world.