Change the Script
A People’s Intervention
Calling in “An Enemy of the People”
The world’s a stage, and the stage is a world. The world’s script writers, the leaders of corporations and governments have scripted the sixth mass extinction, and we all have our roles to play as consumers, workers, and political pawns in the drama of the unraveling of life on earth. Extinction Rebellion was formed to bring together people who reject the roles assigned to us in this tragedy, people who want to envision and script and perform a different drama with a more just denouement for the world.
In the last year, XR NYC has modeled the rescripting of the world drama with interventions in public rituals of theater, opera, athletics, and worship.
In our May Rebel gathering we will workshop an even more radical intervention in a classical script. The famous town meeting scene in Ibsen’s famous play, “An Enemy of the People”, (AEOTP) will be re-scripted by Extinction Rebels, including YOU. We will propose, explain, question, and debate different roles for ourselves and our comrades in the stories of our lives and our world.
In the play, AEOTP, Dr. Stockman calls a town meeting to explain the danger of the industrial water pollution that is fatally poisoning the town’s source of prosperity, its famous baths. In that meeting popular democracy fails to bring the community closer to truth, justice, and commonweal when the townsfolk vote to silence, denounce, and expel the whistleblower. Extinction Rebellion has adopted Sociocracy as an experiment in communal governance that gives voice to all stakeholders, including holders of minority views.
How could this story play out if the community in the meeting were to reject a chair who is more interested in “moderation” than truth; if the meeting were to reject majority-rule voting, in favor of a people’s assembly process that hears all voices?
Rebels are invited to participate in making a different story for the final acts of AEOTP. Can this town meeting end with the scientist, the mayor, the press, and the people remaining in solidarity and in conversation seeking truth and equity and wellbeing for all?
Climate scientist Lindsay Luchinsky and actor Nate Smith will help us prepare our intervention.