OpEd: Hunger strikes can be a tool for change.
. I was told that if I fasted, God would be impressed by my devotion and, as a result, look with kindness on those suffering from hunger.
But after sunset, I was bored, alone, and hungry in my childhood bedroom. My boyfriend at the time offered to treat me to chili at Wendy’s. I happily accepted, abandoning the fast eight hours before its end. After the fast ended, nothing changed. Thirteen years later, after noon on the second day of my solidarity fast with the taxi drivers, unable to stay awake at my desk in my home office, I laid down in bed and called my mother. Still religious and not yet accepting of my agnosticism, she asked if I was praying while fasting.“So what’s the point?” she asked. “Why would you fast if not to move God to action? How will you make a change?”
I thought of the Irish peasants fasting against their debtors, the climate activists outside the White House, the cabbies I had met and all that they’d lost. Absent political, economic, or social power, these hunger strikers turned to people power, linking arms in fasting against the government. In the words of political theorist and philosopher Amia Srinivasan, “There is a paradox in powerlessness. Collectivized, articulated, and represented, powerlessness can become powerful.
France Dernières Nouvelles, France Actualités
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