Front Page Frankfurt, Germany

 

“Every airport we pass through today, at Hartford, CT, Washington D.C. and Frankfurt, Germany” I told Bernie on our way to Europe “has an Occupy event happening.”

When we arrived in Heidelberg, Bernie asked our host whether they had one.  They didn’t but 30 locations in Germany did.  She mentioned this when introducing him, which prompted him to talk about the Occupy movement.    Even though he called the protests arisings, while preparing a blog post on his talk, I referred to them as uprisings.  I’ve never heard anyone use the word arisings, but I have read newspapers using the term uprisings.  In his talk the next day, he corrected me, saying he specifically meant to use the less typical term.

Bernie leading workshop in Germany

 

 

 

I looked it up in the dictionary.  Broadly, “arising” and “uprising” are synonymous.  However, they have different senses.  Both arising and uprising have the word ascend listed as a definition.  However, while the definition uprising includes :

 

arising includes

Bernie feels that the relatively decentralized and spontaneous nature of these events may indicate a new social phenomenon that may be better described as an arising to the interconnectedness of life, rather than an uprising.  When we use the word uprise, we are usually talking about rising up against something.  But what can we wake up to if we see everyone as part of ourselves?

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