Sam Smith's review, Undernews, Nov. 10, featured an essay on how
Americans might get out of the mess the elite have put them in. Below is
the latter half, starting with an exploration of how the Solidarity
movement came to pass. I thought some might wish to comment upon his
observations.
Natalia
**GETTING THROUGH THE BAD TIMES**
"It is the struggle of a state in ludicrous pursuit of a nation that it
cannot seem to find. And, it is the struggle of a nation trying to find
a way to meet the state, not in the posture of supplicant or avenger,
but in the posture of free citizen."
Rensenbrink tells me that some of Solidarity's early organizing took
place on the trains that many of the workers rode to the shipyards,
where they had time to drink coffee and talk. In our own history, there
are innumerable examples of change owing a debt to the simple
serendipity of people of like values and sensibilities coming together.
For example, the rise of Irish political power in this country was aided
considerably by the Irish bar's role as an ethnic DMZ and a center for
the exchange of information.
CS Lewis says somewhere that we read to discover that we are not alone.
That discovery is a necessary for change as well. Part of the dreadful
force of southern segregation, for example, was that it prevented poor
whites and poor blacks from discovering how much they had in common.
We tend to discount the importance of unplanned moments because of our
fealty to the business school paradigm in which change properly occurs
because of a careful strategic plan, an organized vision, procedures,
and process. During the past quarter century when such ideas have been
in ascendancy, however, America has demonstratively deteriorated as a
political, economic, and moral force. In reality, many of the best
things happen by accident and indirection. While it may be true, as the
Roman said, that "fortune smiles on the well prepared" part of that
preparation is to be in the right place at the right time. In other
words, it is necessary to create an ecology of change rather than a
precise and often illusory process.
The beat generation understood this. Unlike today's activists they
lacked a plan; unlike those of the 60s they lacked anything to plan for;
what substituted for utopia and organization was the freedom to think,
to speak, to move at will in a culture that thought it had adequately
taken care of all such matters. To a far greater degree than rebellions
that followed, the beat culture created its message by being rather than
doing, rejection rather than confrontation, sensibility rather than
strategy, journeys instead of movements, words and music instead of
acts, and informal communities rather than formal institutions.
The full-fledged uprisings that followed could not have occurred without
years of anger and hope being expressed in more individualistic and less
disciplined ways, ways that may seem ineffective in retrospect yet
served as absolutely necessary scaffolding with which to build a
powerful movement.
One of these ways, for example, is music. Billie Holiday was singing
about lynchings long before the modern civil rights movement. And Rage
Against the Machine was engaging in anti-sweatshop protests some years
before most college student had ever heard of them.
Another way is found in the magic of churches. During the 1960s I edited
a newspaper in a neighborhood 75% black and mostly poor in which I came
to assume that churches were the sina qua non of positive change. We had
over a 100 of them in a two square mile area and you just came to rely
upon them as part of the political action, including the Revolutionary
Church of What's Happenin' Now and the Rev. Frank Milner, part-minister
and part-taxicab driver who would come to community meetings in an
outfit complete with clerical collar and a metal change-maker on his belt.
How important one church can be is illustrated with a little known story
from Birmingham Alabama. Responding to Rosa Parks' mistreatment,
sleeping car porter E.D. Nixon called up a young preacher and asked if
he could use his church for a meeting. The minister said he would think
about it. A few days later, Nixon called back and the minister agreed.
E.D. Nixon's reply was something like this, "Thank you Reverend King,
because we've scheduled a meeting at your church next Monday at 6:30 pm."
It is for such reasons we must learn to stand outside of history.
Quakerism, for example, prescribes personal witness as guided by
conscience - regardless of the era in which we live or the circumstances
in which we find ourselves. And the witness need not be verbal. The
Quakers say "let your life speak," echoing St. Francis of Assisi's'
advice that one should preach the gospel at all times and "if necessary,
use words."
There are about as many Quakers today in America as there were in the
18th century, around 100,000. Yet near the center of every great moment
of American social and political change one finds members of the Society
of Friends. Why? In part because they have been willing to fail year
after year between those great moments. Because they have been willing
in good times and bad -- in the instructions of their early leader
George Fox -- "to walk cheerfully over the face of the earth answering
that of God in every one "
The existentialists knew how to stand outside of history as well.
Existentialism, which has been described as the idea that no one can
take your shower for you, is based on the hat trick of passion,
integrity and rebellion. An understanding that we create ourselves by
what we do and say and, in the words of one of their philosophers, even
a condemned man has a choice of how to approach the gallows.
Those who think history has left us helpless should recall the
abolitionist of 1830, the feminist of 1870, the labor organizer of 1890,
or the gay or lesbian writer of 1910. They, like us, did not get to
choose their time in history but they, like us, did get to choose what
they did with it.
Would we have been abolitionists in 1830?
In 1848, 300 people gathered at Seneca Falls, NY, for a seminal moment
in the American women's movement. On November 2, 1920, 91 year-old
Charlotte Woodward Pierce became the only signer of the Seneca Falls
Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions who had lived long enough to
cast a ballot for president.
Would we have attended that conference in 1848? Would we have bothered?
Or consider the Jewish cigar makers in early 20th century New York City
each contributing a small sum to hire a man to sit with them as they
worked - reading aloud the classic works of Yiddish literature. The
leader of the cigar-makers, Samuel Gompers, would later become the first
president of the American Federation of Labor. And those like him would
become part of a Jewish tradition that profoundly shaped the politics,
social conscience, and cultural course of 20th century America. While
Protestants and Irish Catholics controlled the institutions of politics,
the ideas of modern social democracy disproportionately came from native
populists and immigrant socialists. It is certainly impossible to
imagine liberalism, the civil rights movement, or the Vietnam protests
without the Jewish left.
These are the sort of the stories we must find and tell each other
during the bad days ahead. But there is a problem. The system that
envelopes us becomes normal by its mere mass, its ubiquitous messages,
its sheer noise. Our society faces what William Burroughs called a
biologic crisis -- "like being dead and not knowing it." Or as Matthew
Arnold put it, trapped between two worlds, one dead, the other unable to
be born.
We are overpowered and afraid. We find ourselves condoning things simply
because not to do so means we would then have to -- at unknown risk --
truly challenge them.
Yet, in a perverse way, our predicament makes life simpler. We have
clearly lost what we have lost. We can give up our futile efforts to
preserve the illusion and turn our energies instead to the construction
of a new time.
It is this willingness to walk away from the seductive power of the
present that first divides the mere reformer from the rebel -- the
courage to emigrate from one's own ways in order to meet the future not
as an entitlement but as a frontier.
How one does this can vary markedly, but one of the bad habits we have
acquired from the bullies who now run the place is undue reliance on
traditional political, legal and rhetorical tools. Politically active
Americans have been taught that even at the risk of losing our planet
and our democracy, we must go about it all in a rational manner, never
raising our voice, never doing the unlikely or trying the improbable,
let alone screaming for help.
We will not overcome the current crisis solely with political logic. We
need living rooms like those in which women once discovered they were
not alone. The freedom schools of SNCC. The politics of the folk guitar.
The plays of Vaclav Havel. Unitarian church basements. The pain of James
Baldwin. The laughter of Abbie Hoffman. The strategy of Gandhi and King.
Unexpected gatherings and unpredicted coalitions. People coming together
because they disagree on every subject save one: the need to preserve
the human. Savage satire and gentle poetry. Boisterous revival and
silent meditation. Grand assemblies and simple suppers.
Above all, we must understand that in leaving the toxic ways of the
present we are healing ourselves, our places, and our planet. We must
rebel not as a last act of desperation but as a first act of creation.
/Portions of this talk come from Sam Smith's book "Why Bother?," which
deals with getting through the bad times including chapters on despair,
rebellion, personal witness, and guerrilla democracy./
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