Our choice is not between war and peace but between life with dignity or without
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of living a life with dignity over the binary of war and peace.
Subcomandante Marcos suggests that true choice lies not simply in the avoidance of conflict but in the fundamental quality of our existence. A life filled with dignity is paramount, and the struggles people face can often reduce their existence to mere survival without meaningful respect or autonomy.
In practice
During a peace rally, I quoted, 'Our choice is not between war and peace but between life with dignity or without' to highlight the importance of respecting human rights.
The word of the oldest of the old of our peoples didn't stop. It spoke the truth, saying that our feet couldn't walk alone, that our history of pain and shame was repeated and multiplied in the flesh and blood of the brothers and sisters of other lands and skies.
Always, since our birth, we've insisted on another way of doing politics. Now, we had the chance to do it without arms, but without stopping being Zapatistas; that's why we keep the masks on.
The powerful have invoked God at their side in this war, so that we will accept their power and our weakness as something that has been established by divine plan. But there is no god behind this war other than the god of money, nor any right other than the desire for death and destruction... Today there is a “NO” which shall weaken the powerful and strengthen the weak: the “NO” to war.
In our dreams we have seen another world, an honest world, a world decidedly more fair than the one in which we now live. We saw that in this world there was no need for armies; peace, justice and liberty were so common that no one talked about them as far-off concepts, but as things such as bread, birds, air, water, like book and voice.
All life is energy and we are transmitting it at every moment. We are all little beaming little signals like radio frequencies, and the world is responding in kind.
Listen; this world is the lunatic's sphere , _x000D_ Don't always agree it's real, _x000D_ Even with my feet upon it And the postman knowing my door _x000D_ My address is somewhere else.
The supreme crime of the church to-day is that everywhere and in all its operations and influences it is on the side of sloth of mind; that it banishes brains, it sanctifies stupidity, it canonizes incompetence.
Freedom of speech...Freedom of worship...Freedom from want...Freedom from fear.
The three Divine are in this hierarchy, First the Dominions, and the Virtues next;_x000D_ _x000D_ And the third order is that of the Powers. The in the dances twain penultimate_x000D_ _x000D_ The Principalities and Archangels wheel; The last is wholly of angelic sports._x000D_ _x000D_ These orders upward all of them are gazing,_x000D_ _x000D_ And downward so prevail, that unto God_x000D_ _x000D_ They all attracted are and all attract.
When I was fifteen, all I wanted was to go off to some other world, a place beyond anybody’s reach. A place beyond the flow of time.” - But there’s no place like that in this world. - Exactly. Which is why I’m living here, in this world where things are continually damaged, where the heart is fickle, where time flows past without a break.
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