Eugene Coyle wrote: > > Carrol, please elaborate on your sentence: "Remember, mass > movements need a > > > > negative at their center."
I'll try. First consider a great song -- great, that is, in any context in which it reflects an ongoing action, kind of boring as an entertainment: We shall not be moved! Now try a thought experiment. a) The effect of 100,000 letters sent to Congress asking for a single-payer health plan. Actually, I suspect that has alreay happened -- perhpas several times over. b) 100,000 people around the nation, in grou0sd of 10 or 15 to two or three housand, blockading the entrance to hospital business offices or insurance company headquarters, singing We shall not be moved. With perhaps various signs such as "No more medical bills" or "Tell your physcian to go to hell" or whatever else individual bockaders dream up. And _if_ you got to a hundred thosuand, you would also be attracing all sorts of auxiliary actions, mostly but not all of them rather tame. And study groups would be springing up, some of which would be moving into action on quite separate issues. Some of those separate issues would be giving local ruling classes one big pain in the neck. And it's fun to say No in Thunder. It's not much fun to demonstrate for a complex piece of legislation the exact meaning of which will not be known in any case until a hostile bureaucracy (hositle to the leislation that is) puts it into effect. And look up the speech that made Mario Savio famous -- the one about throwing one's body on the machiene. What positive demand was he making, and could it have been put in a two-minute speech or a sign in a march! Or consider "No pasaran" vs What?? "Bring the Troops Home" sounds "positive," but one can see its negative core if you remember the question reporters would pose to demonstrators early in the mvement against the Vietnam War: Well, what _should_ 'we' do.?" The only real answer to that is someting along the lines of Get a transportation expert to tell you how." The real substance, then, of that 'positive' demand is "We won't cooperate anymore!" Is that a start at least? Carrool _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
