Current Usage
Today, the phrase is regularly used in mainstream left movements such as the 2003 demonstrations against the Iraq War. It is the title of a 1980 book about mass media and the New Left by former student activist Todd Gitlin. Rightist commentators have also used the phrase to argue for such causes as U.S. condemnation of Islamic violence. The phrase is a poster tagline for the 2007 film Battle in Seattle and it is repeatedly chanted in the film. President Barack Obama used the phrase during demonstrations in Tehran over the outcome of Iranian elections in June, 2009. During the 2011 Wisconsin protests, protesters in Madison, WI chanted the phrase often in reference to the large national media presence and worldwide positive response. Protesters also chanted the phrase while being arrested and removed from the Capitol the morning of the first vote on the law they were protesting. Occupy Wall Street protesters chanted the phrase on October 1, 2011, when NYPD barricaded and arrested citizens on the Brooklyn Bridge in one of the largest mass-arrests of nonviolent demonstrators in US history.
Read more about this topic: The Whole World Is Watching
Famous quotes containing the words current and/or usage:
“The current flows fast and furious. It issues in a spate of words from the loudspeakers and the politicians. Every day they tell us that we are a free people fighting to defend freedom. That is the current that has whirled the young airman up into the sky and keeps him circulating there among the clouds. Down here, with a roof to cover us and a gasmask handy, it is our business to puncture gasbags and discover the seeds of truth.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“I am using it [the word ‘perceive’] here in such a way that to say of an object that it is perceived does not entail saying that it exists in any sense at all. And this is a perfectly correct and familiar usage of the word.”
—A.J. (Alfred Jules)