Meme as Resistance _ Juan Miguel Marquez

1st World country 

I lived outside of the US for most of my life, I got used to walking and biking everywhere. I've been living in NJ for 5 years now and I've never felt safe as a pedestrian. Despite having an amazing infrastructure for cars, American cities barely try to accommodate pedestrians, neither with safety or comfort. I've seen improvement, with new bike lanes, and safeguards in walkways, but the general trend seems to be building 'Stroads' to prioritize car owners.

It blows my mind that the 'Land of the free' limits your ability to freely move around in such a way, you're free to go where you want as long as you own a private vehicle, otherwise they'll make sure that public transport and pedestrian infrastructure is as inconvenient as possible

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How can memes act as a form of resistance and advocacy?

Memes are inherently short, visually engaging, shareable, massed produced and easy to understand.  Anything can be a meme, a photo, a video, text, a mashup of ideas or a drawing. Anything has the capacity to be shareable if it resonates with the right people. Memes are therefore an important tool to share ideas and give visibility to people's needs for change. 

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What is Patriarchy?

Based on belle hook's book and interview we can say that patriarchy is like an umbrella term to refer to the multiple interlocking societal mechanisms of oppression. This means that matters of social status, economic class, gender, sex, race and nationality are all connected and feed into each other to keep society in the way it is now. The concept of patriarchy assumes that men are inherently better and more important, that they are natural leaders that should take charge and 'Man up'.

This is obviously a flawed way of organizing our societies, because, despite the biological differences between men and women, at the end of the day we are all complex individuals with value that goes beyond the binary of biological sex. A patriarchal society highlights and pushes ideas of separation instead of unification to keep the current social structures strong and limit true change. 

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The Art of Activism Chapter 1 Quotes

"Political art tends to be  socially concerned, and 'activist' art tends to be socially involved"

I really like this quote. I've always seen newspaper cartoons or online comics pointing out and criticizing what's 'wrong with society', but that it's it only points it out, it doesn't really offer an alternative, solution or reasoning, just a simple "hey X thing is bad and I don't like it" . 'Activist' art on the other hand, is itself a tool for change, to do art is not necessarily the end goal, but is just a step on a larger  cause for change.

"But facts and truths don't speak for themselves. They need to be made into symbols and incorporated into stories that people can make sense of and care about. They need our help"

As chapter 1 of the book explained many times, simply stating statistics, footage or hard truths won't convince people to change. We humans act based on our feelings way more than our reason most of the time, so to make people empathize with your cause it is important to make them feel something that moves them and lights in then a desire to fight for real change. Art is an extremely powerful tool to share ideas, feelings and inspire people for this exact cause, it is a medium based on feelings and universal human truths.