Political activist

2008-06-24 23:19:55 (ID 104)

I think most of you know by now that I am strongly against the recently accepted surveillance bill, called by the regular people the "FRA law", FRA in short.

The bill - which is explained in English by The Local at http://www.thelocal.se/12370/ - is about monitoring every phone call, every email, every chat, every digital traffic passing the borders of Sweden. Due to technical reasons, pretty much all national traffic passes the borders, which means that everything will be monitored. And again, due to technical reasons, even traffic that has nothing to do with Sweden will quite often pass our borders and thus be monitored by our government.

I've been making flyers and me, my boyfriend and 10-15 people he's been able to get together have been putting these flyers on poles and walls in public places, daily ever since Friday. Trying to spread the word and make people realise this is actually happening and it's bad.

I had the most wonderful encounter today. As I left work I met up with my boyfriend and another friend, and we were about to walk from the tram to get our flyers onto poles in a new area. This random woman suddenly approached me and handed me my own flyer. We had our material hidden in bags at the time so she had no idea who we were, and the shock of seeing my own flyer in someone else's hand reaching for mine just made me say "thank you" and walk on. As she handed a flyer to my boyfriend he said with a smile "thank you, but we're handing those out as well", and then reality struck me and I explained to her that I was actually the one making the original PDF of what she's got in her hands.

It was an amazing encounter, and for half an hour we discussed the politics behind it all and it felt.. almost religious. Not quite like meeting Jesus (or Buddha or whatever name) himself, but at least like meeting another apostle. I was so happy to finally meet someone else actually doing something rather than just talking about it. When we explained to her of all that we've done this far she told us how much more ambitious she felt, and how she's going to keep on fighting much harder and much longer because of the inspiration we gave her. I admitted to her that seeing someone else being active was also an inspiration, or motivation, to me - especially the fact that she was twice our age and the first person over 30 I've actually seen give a damn about it. I regained some lost hope because of this meeting. It's not over yet. It's not too late. People do care.

We did reach a few frightening conclusions though.
1. None of us have a TV at home.
2. Everyone we've seen active is unemployed, besides me.

The conspiracy theories would say that making people work so many hours a day that all they want to do when they get home is watch TV is the most effective way of keeping the people away from their constitutional rights. It makes them not care. They'll let the government do almost any kind of stupid shit, as long as their TV shows still run. It makes me upset, angry, afraid and sad.

We exchanged phone numbers with this woman, and we told her to be at the big square tomorrow evening wearing black clothes and bringing a candle. Tomorrow evening at 9:21 PM it's been a week since they accepted the bill, and we're going to mourn the death of democracy, the death of integrity, the death of freedom of speech...

And four hours a day of spare time to spend on political activism is way too short. I've got no time at all to do all the things I need to do. What everyone needs to do. Why isn't anyone else doing anything at all?

nilli