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WHY BOTHER? GETTING A LIFE IN A LOCKED-DOWN LAND |
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Chapter Nine: GUERRILLA DEMOCRACY The ideal function of the American system is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Yet as we grope our way through our third century, the system in reality increasingly endangers human life, denies personal liberty, and represses individual happiness. We live now with dishonest politics, disinformed and disinforming media, disconnected cultures, disjointed economics, dysfunctional communities and disrespected citizens. To attempt to repair such conditions without a morally conscious politics makes as much sense as trying to revive a body without a heart. This is not romanticism, idealism or naivete, just basic political anatomy. That we have come to accept a politics that offers no choice save between our acquisition of abusive power or our submission to it speaks only to the depths of our condition; it says nothing about that which is possible. This condition has been largely the result of limits we have voluntarily accepted for ourselves. To those who would rule, manipulate, and lie to us, we have replied with remarkable apathy, repeated acquiescence, and utterly reliable consumption. These are precisely the responses that power seeks. If we wish to change events there is no better place to start than to change our own reaction to them, to declare that a politics lacking justice, equity, decency, and compassion is no longer acceptable. Economics, efficiency, perception, and brutish power calculations no longer suffice. The bottom line has bottomed out. The most radical act of individualism in which one can engage today is to come together with other individuals -- as church, neighborhood, city, and organization -- in order to uncover the biggest secret our leaders keep from us -- that we are not alone. We could ask the questions, raise the concerns, and share the ambivalences that might illuminate the way to a wiser and more just community. We could fill the air with the sound of voices not afraid to speak of decency and encourage those who profess to guide us -- politicians, writers, academicians, and preachers -- to join in our concerns rather than continue to lease their moral authority as though it were just another apartment on the market. What would this look like? It might mean a coalition of conscience formed by the religious, by socially concerned business people, and by non-profit organizations to give the community a moral opinion on political questions and to set moral standards for politicians. It might mean a city or community coming together to discuss and discover common ground. It might mean academicians demonstrating their political conscience as well as their political facileness. It might mean children being taught once again what being a citizen and having a constitution is about. It might mean reporters treating ideas as news. It might mean a media more critical of the corrupt and less sarcastic about the idealistic. It might mean compiling indicators of a good and just society as well as those of a prosperous and efficient one. It might mean a country that asked why as often as it asked when and how much, and a culture that was concerned about the way something was done as well as what that something was. Finally, it might be a country that, just in time, paused to ask a question it had almost forgotten: what is the right, just, moral thing for us to do? And we might find that by just asking that question, we had already become a better people. *** Below the surface, things are happening. At a moment when both of the old parties are using increasingly disreputable means to reach their ends, there is a new politics of transformation arguing not only that the ends don't justify their means, but that the means help define the ends. You cannot, in short, have a decent society without a decent politics -- a principle that Gandhi described as being the change that we wish to see. Green thinker John Rensenbrink describes the politics of transformation as "a non-violent evolutionary method of seeking fundamental change. The change sought is in the direction of a consensus-building democracy, a community-based and ecologically sustainable economy and a person-centered social policy." Such a social policy insists that the "freedom, mutual responsibility, and identities of all citizens are nurtured, respected, and celebrated." In Rensenbrink's view:
This is a big order and one that not only breaks with elite political thought but goes well beyond that of traditional radical left politics. It also goes beyond conventional politics for its blends the political with the personal. Says Rensenbrink, "The goal is not just to replace existing power with another power but to alter the way power is exercised." Political transformers, therefore, believe that not only must political power change, but the politician and the citizen as well -- those exercising power and those affected by it. As in the decades before the American revolution -- and during the civil rights. environmental, and women's movements -- the catalytic legislative body must be the congress of our own hearts and minds. One model for transformational politics is the Green political movement. Started in Germany in the early 1980s, the Green Party from the beginning intended to change not only what was done but how it was done. German Green Petra Kelly called the Greens an "anti-party party" that stood for "shared power" rather than "power over." In 1987, Kelly said, "Just repairing the existing system cannot be the solution for the Green parties. Our aim is non-violent transformation." Not since the rise of the social welfare state has a political idea captured such rapid and far-flung interest. Today there are Green parties in more than 85 countries -- without the direction of any centralized organization. It just happened, the way really important things often do. Although ecological concerns are high on the agenda, the Greens are far more than simply an environmental party. For one thing, you cannot get far into environmental issues without stumbling upon the rest of the world. You begin to see, in Kelly's words, that "there is a profound relationship between the fact that women and children are attacked, beaten and raped, and the fact that nuclear war and ecological catastrophe threaten our planet." And once you understand this, you begin to see that the inter-connectedness extends not only to apparently disparate phenomena but to the various strata at which they occur. Politics becomes no longer a simple matter of voting or debating "issues" but a pattern of personal habits and responsibilities. At this point, the antiseptic and puerile dichotomies of the talk shows, presidential campaigns, and think tanks start to seem vacuous at best, destructive at worst. The transformational politics of the Greens stands in stark contrast to that of the two major American parties because it demands not only a central place for the individual but for the exercise of individual will and responsibility. In this it echoes both America's transcendentalists and Europe's existentialists. From the former comes the notion of ecological unity. As Emerson said, "the world globes itself in a drop of dew." From the latter comes a rejection of predestination and the concomitant need for people to form their own morality and then to act upon it. Together. they eschew false icons of authority, celebrate free will, and propose that we use it wisely. It is a far more difficult politics than one that is merely carried out on a trading floor where promises, like shares of stock, are exchanged for money. But it is infinitely more optimistic as well. In Kelly's words, with such a politics we can begin "fighting for hope." What would a transformed society look like? It might be one in which we:
And it might be one that avoided what Gandhi called the "seven deadly social sins":
*** As during other moments of great tension, a spontaneous combustion of imagination has been occurring in places small and large as we discover how wrong we have been and how it doesn't have to be like that. The growth of innovative and cross-cultural spirituality, the ethic of voluntary simplicity, the rise of holistic medicine, the broad acceptance of ecological principles, the revival of college activism, and the transformational press have all been signs of a quiet storm building on the plains of the American soul. This storm broke in the fall of 1999, leading to uprisings on campuses, in Seattle and Washington, and at the political conventions. The protests encompassed both specific complaints and a generic critique. Although the corporate media paid little attention, some of the most dramatic revolts occurred on scores of college campuses as students organized against sweatshops and on behalf of campus employees, attempting to force academia to live up to its lofty words. Thousands of students independently decided to bother -- to confront the immutable armies of the law. The reports came from all over:
The major anti-globalization protests that followed brought a reaction from police and government as brutal, anti-democratic and unconstitutional as has been seen in recent America. Dr. Richard DeAndrea reported from Seattle:
The Washington demonstrations brought more of the same. Reported Augusta Gilman of the Independent Media Center:
By the time of the GOP convention in Philadelphia, the government had dispensed with even the pretension of constitutional procedure. At the peak of the demonstrations, organizers reported:
A leader of the Ruckus Society was arrested while walking along a city street and charged with possession of an instrument of crime, obstruction of justice, obstructing a highway, failure to disperse, recklessly endangering another person and conspiracy. A judge set bail at $1 million. Joseph Rogers, a Quaker peace volunteer and President of the Mental Health Association of Southeast Pennsylvania, witnessed correctional officers tightening the handcuffs of protesters until their hands became blue. When Rogers asked the guards to loosen the cuffs, the guards replied. "This will teach them a lesson, this will teach them to come to Philly." Rogers was removed from his cell and cuffed from his left hand to his tight ankle. "I told them I was diabetic but they threw me to the ground so they could cuff me. I was told to hop but my damaged knee prevented me. They dragged me to my cell." Other arrestees reported being isolated, verbally abused, punched, kicked, thrown against walls, bloodied, and dragged naked across floors or through a "trash trough" containing refuse, spittle and urine. Said Paul Davis of ACT UP:
I cannot find in either my memory or in the modern record much that is close to the brutality and lawlessness exhibited by our government during these demonstrations. On other hand, seldom have so many so swiftly decided to become engaged -- not merely to petition or stand in the street but to risk tear gas, rubber bullets, sordid imprisonment, and torture, and to be personally and politically transformed. It wasn't just the young. One of the most remarkable events of the Washington demonstrations occurred with only one cop and a handful of media in attendance -- as 700 steelworkers gave a warm standing ovation to the student activists in their midst. From the generational schisms of the 1960s to the hard-hatted Reagan-Democrat antipathies of the 1980s, it had become widely assumed that students and union members were the Serbs and Albanians of American politics. But the sweatshops abroad and the neo-robber barons at home took care of that -- to the point that a burly George Becker, International President of the Steelworkers, could stand before his members and declare, "These are my sons and granddaughters. This is my family." And the members applauded. "Every generation has to reestablish itself," said Becker; "Each generation is tested again and again on its resolve." Looking at the students in the hall, he remarked, "We know that when we pass the mantle, it will be in good hands." Such a change from antipathy to apathy to the mobilization of melded conscience often happens in far more mundane ways than might be imagined. Even Martin Luther King hesitated when asked by sleeping car porter E. D. Nixon whether he would join what would become the Birmingham bus boycott. Nixon called King back a few days later, and the minister said he would help out. "That's good," said Nixon, "because we've scheduled a meeting in your church." If you ask activists how they became involved, you often get answers like these:
Some activism has deeper but far from distant roots. Green activist Rob Hager recalls that "When I was young I used to read books about Thomas Jefferson and others ... The concept of justice came to have meaning to me, as much an art form as music or film." Ellen Thomas, who has helped maintain a continuous round-the clock White House vigil for global nuclear disarmament since 1981, remembers the movie Gandhi and The Day After as influencing her. Also the songs of the Beatles, Joan Baez, and Pink Floyd. "For most of my young adulthood I was raising children in places where most people thought I was slightly demented because I wasn't happy with the way the world works." Then she took part in a demonstration that "changed my life completely; I gave up my job and joined a vigil." Michele Colburn recalls:
Mark David Richards, the son of evangelical missionaries, told me:
Author Steven Shafarman recalls:
Jan Levine Thal traces her activism to various sources:
And so the brave, the exceptional, the engaged start out much like all the rest of us. They would have remained much like all of us were it not for a few experiences, a few words, a few songs that made them see life in a different way and want to do something about it. Saints, someone said, are just sinners who try harder. Sometimes democracy's guerrillas take just a small piece of our disabled and distorted culture to revive -- a school, a neighborhood. an untried idea, or some group of people the larger society has rejected. These activists will tell you they are not politicians, but in their very choice of community over institutions they have become another cell of transformational politics. And they instinctively accept the notion that John L. McKnight put well in a 1987 issue of Social Policy.
Here are some of the characteristics McKnight found among associations in contrast to institutions:
Erich Fromm makes a similar distinction between irrational and rational authority, the former more often found in institutions and the latter in associations:
*** Because of its belief in the importance of the how as well as the what one does, the politics of transformation throws up unexpected ideas, tests unexpected approaches and forms unexpected alliances. There is nothing inexorable about ideological history. The Republicans were once the party of civil rights; Woodrow Wilson was a racist. Democrats have been both hawks and doves. New Deal labor voters became Reagan Democrats. Liberals ran from Joe McCarthy as a few conservatives stood up to him. Conservationists were once often political conservatives and today's advocates of organic farming span the political spectrum. So one shouldn't really be too surprised, despite what we have been taught, if unexpected alliances develop, if new issues submerge old enmities, if new possibilities drown out old cliches. It doesn't mean we have turned to mush. It means, rather, changing circumstances and an acceptance of the true variety of human nature, of human history, and of the human spirit. Traveling along the American political and cultural fault line I keep bumping up against anomalies -- being forced to choose between abstract policy and specific decency, between the way it was and the way it is, between the matter that annoys us and the one that might kill us. It seems odd, yet it is right there in the midst of the anarchy, anger, ambivalence, and angst of unsettled America that one finds most strongly those traits of character, individuality, and stubbornness that got us through our first few centuries. It is messy, and it can be cruel, wrong, and dumb, but it has something that the talking heads, with their self-serving pleas for a "civil society" and their dainty rules of "public discourse," cannot approach: the robust vigor of a democratic spirit trying honestly to find its way. To survive in such a politics you must have set strongly one's own footings. The listless exchange of purloined bromides that often passes for debate will not suffice; nor will hiding in some safe corner with only the unalienated invited, nor speaking in sacred halls with supercilious sophistry. You have to know what you believe and not merely -- as with the inner party of American culture -- what you are meant to believe. Such rooted beliefs and values need not be inconsistent with respect, friendliness or decent debate as long as we treat our beliefs and values as benign tools and not as weapons, as long as we seek to convince and not bully, as long as we claim only a fair share of the truth. These are not, however, limits accepted by our leaders who daily rob us and then urge us to blame others; who speak of social harmony and build economic dissonance, who seek "one nation" while driving wedges between us. We can, as those in charge would like, continue to define ourselves primarily by neatly described identities -- either natural or acquired. We can remain interminably and ineffectually absorbed and angry about the particulars of infinite special injustices. Or we can ask what is it that makes our society seem so unfair to so many who are so different? If the young Hispanic in Watts and the militia member in Montana and the mother of six in Dorchester share untended miseries, might not those miseries share some common origins? Can we find universal stories in particular pain? If we can, it is the beginning of true change. There is a lusty tradition in American politics of citizens of disparate sorts, places, and status coming together to put power back in its proper place. At such times, the divides of politics, the divisions of class, the contrasts of experience fade long enough to reassert the primacy of the individual over the state, democracy over oligopoly, fairness over exploitation, and community over institution. This could be such a time if we are willing to risk it, and one of the soundest way to start is to trade a few old shibboleths for a few new friends. *** 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." The unwitting dead -- universities, newspapers, publishing houses, institutes, councils, foundations, churches, political parties -- reach out from the past to rule us with fetid paradigms from the bloodiest and most ecologically destructive century of human existence. What should be merely portraits on the wall of our memories run our lives still, like parents who retain perpetual hegemony over the souls of their children. Yet even as we complain about and denounce the entropic culture in which we find ourselves, we are unable to bury it. We speak of a new age but make endless accommodations with the old. 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. To accept the full consequences of the degradation of the environment, the explosion of incarceration, the creeping militarization, the dismantling of democracy, the commodification of culture, the contempt for the real, the culture of impunity among the powerful and the zero tolerance towards the weak, requires a courage that seems beyond us. We do not know how to look honestly at the wreckage without an overwhelming sense of surrender; far easier to just keep dancing and hope someone else fixes it all. 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 have lost much of what was gained in the 1960s and 1970s because we traded in our passion, our energy, our magic and our music for the rational, technocratic and media ways of our leaders. 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. 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 rebel not as a last act of desperation but as a first act of creation.
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