thoughts on the fourth

so last night i was at my towns fireworks and as i was looking at all the people there, be they rich or poor, being so happy and (to be very cliche and reference my own blog's title) it made me think of this quotation by žižek:

Let me tell you a wonderful, old joke from Communist times. A guy was sent from East Germany to work in Siberia. He knew his mail would be read by censors, so he told his friends: “Let’s establish a code. If a letter you get from me is written in blue ink, it is true what I say. If it is written in red ink, it is false.” After a month, his friends get the first letter. Everything is in blue. It says, this letter: “Everything is wonderful here. Stores are full of good food. Movie theatres show good films from the west. Apartments are large and luxurious. The only thing you cannot buy is red ink.” This is how we live. We have all the freedoms we want. But what we are missing is red ink: the language to articulate our non-freedom. The way we are taught to speak about freedom— war on terror and so on—falsifies freedom. And this is what you are doing here. You are [the occupy wall street protestors]  giving all of us red ink. -slavoj žižek

this quotation i thought accurately represented what i saw, blissful ignorance. now, i don't mean ignorance in a derogatory way at all, all i mean is that most of those people (i would assume) can't imagine a true alternative to our current system. sure you can imagine a huge, controlling government or a stateless society but one can't easily imagine a society free from the limitations of capital. and since people cannot imagine a true alternative to capital they lack "the language to articulate...[their] non-freedom" since to understand the woes of something, you must also understand the lack of those very woes. and it is for this reason that those people still support the system that causes the aforementioned woes. maybe next fourth things will be different.