REVOLUTION?

The Antipodes for the purposes of this prose-poem consists of Australia and New Zealand. The last month of spring began yesterday in the Antipodes, that is, on 1 November 2010. I began this last month of spring by having my midnight snack, which for the purposes of this prose-poem, consists of a Dagwood sandwich and a bottle of Bundaberg sarsaparilla. Such sandwiches came into western popular culture in 1933, the same year that Hitler began to transform the Weimar Republic into the Third Reich. Such drinks from Bundaberg were first produced in 1960 in a family-owned business in Queensland. It was the same year I joined the Baha’i Faith.

While eating my Dagwood sandwich after an eight hour day of writing and research, I chanced upon the last half of a one hour doco entitled The Power of the Powerless.1 This prose-poem concludes with my commentary on that doco, a doco about a revolutionary period of time in Czechoslovakia when I had just finished: (a) my first year of teaching in a technical college in Perth Western Australia, (b) my first six months as a member of an elected Baha’i institution in the Perth suburb of Belmont, and (c) my first 25 years as an essayist and publicist, sometimes with success and sometimes with great frustration.-Ron Price with thanks to ABC1TV: 11:35-12:35 pm, 1 November 2010.

It happened so very fast
that Velvet Revolution,1
the collapse of a Warsaw
Pact government, giving
up power and dismantling
the single-party state. The
removal of barbed-wire at
the border and, now, two
decades later this freedom
is immersed in a popular
culture of fun and so many
new questions about what it
all means and where it is all
going in these years of a 3rd
millennium with many more
non-violent revolutions all
breaking-out and adopting
a colour and flower as their2
symbol, but what is this new
garden in our planetary and
globalizing small Earth, yes:
what does it all mean, Alfie?

1 the name given to the non-violent revolution in Czechoslovakia from 17/11/’89 to 29/12/89.
2 for an outline of the several revolutions in: Serbia(2000), Georgia(2003), Ukraine(2004), Kyrgyzstan(2005) and so many more see the 9 page article The Colour Revolution in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

Ron Price
2 November 2010