The Day That Shook The World

I am not going to discuss the elections today. I've expressed my feelings on that subject, in probably tedious detail. Anyway, today happens to be the day on which three of my favorite things happened:

1) In the current Gregorian calendar, the October Revolution of 1917 started today, November 7, when the Red Guard in Petrograd took over government facilities in a virtually bloodless overthrow of Kerensky's regime. The act of workers rising up to overthrow the exploitative ruling class -- and successfully maintaining their own state, however deformed it became -- has given hope to other oppressed groups for decades. RIP.


2) Fittingly, Lev Davidovich Bronstein (Leon Trotsky -- he took the name of a former jailer whose passport he stole when he escaped) was also born on November 7, 1879 in the Gregorian calendar, and went on to lead the Petrograd Soviet during the Revolution and become head of the Red Army. This is a picture from when he was sentenced to four years in Siberia, before the revolution. I think of it as "foxy Trotsky." Yeah, I'm a little twisted.

3) My roomie was born today, a lot more recently. She has not led any revolutions (yet) but I don't doubt she will at some point. She has a pretty powerful loathing of the bourgeoisie. After the pie-dropping incident of last weekend we decided that the world can be divided into the people who would eat the pie off the floor and the people who wouldn't, and that we didn't really have time for the people who wouldn't. She added that she can also make this decision "as soon as someone says the word 'golf.'" We get along very well. :) I'm alternately finishing this post and frosting her cake while humming the Internationale. That may be a little Marie Antoinette of me, but you can't live an uncontradictory life under capitalism...