It may not feel like it, but every day, you make history. Many people think that only extraordinary people make history, but that's simply not true. History is the study of massive trends and patterns in the behavior of ordinary human beings like you and I. All of our actions, in some small way change the world whether we want them to or not, and so, we are involved in the creation of history every time we act. Future generations will study and judge our actions, just as we study and judge the actions of previous generations. The question that you have to ask yourself is "How do I want to be viewed by history, by future generations, by my descendants?"
Imagine, for a moment, that you were somehow transported back into time, into the Southern United States in the 1950s, knowing everything that you know about how history has turned out. You have to decide whether to support the civil rights movement-at great personal risk, discomfort, and inconvenience-or to live complacently and indifferently, indirectly supporting segregation. What would you do?
Of course you would support the civil rights movement, even if it meant enduring incarceration, harassment, and brutality, even if it meant damaging your relationships with friends and family! Why? Because today, we all know how horrible and despicable racism is. In hindsight, it is difficult to see how any decent person could have tolerated segregation.
But many decent people did tolerate segregation. There were millions of decent people who opposed violence, who would never have personally harmed a black person, who may have even been black themselves, who nonetheless did absolutely nothing at all to stop a massive campaign of systematic violence and oppression directed at African-Americans. How could this have happened?
The truth is, good people can tolerate very bad things if they're born into bad societies. Even if you know that something isn't right, it takes a tremendous amount of courage to take action against it if most people in your society support it. If you do take action for what is truly just in an unjust society, chances are that you'll be threatened and viciously attacked, that you'll lose friends and alienate family, and that you'll become an outcast. This is the reason why so few people-even good people-are willing to confront injustice. They don't lack a sense of morality. They just lack courage.
And yet, amazingly, in every generation there are heroic people who are courageous enough to stand up against evil, at great personal cost. Many of these people can be found in our history books: Thomas Paine, Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King, Caesar Chavez, Susan B. Anthony, Malcolm X, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela... the list goes on. After they succeeded in their campaigns against injustice, these people were revered as heroes and glorified by history, and rightfully so.
We would all like to enter the history books alongside these moral visionaries, and not alongside the decent people who weren't brave enough to fight injustice. We would all like our children and grandchildren to be proud of what we did with our lives. We don't want them to be ashamed of us; we don't want them to think that we were too provincial, conformist, or weak to do the right thing. We want them to know that we made informed moral decisions, that we were able to free ourselves from the prejudices and mythologies of our time to see the truth. And so, we need to think about how people in the future will judge our actions.
Imagine that, somehow, you are transported forward in time. You find yourself in a history classroom; the year is 2107. What sort of things do you think the teacher will be saying about our time? Personally, I think that if society has undergone any sort of ethical progress by then, the teacher will probably be saying things like this: "In 2003, the United States government invaded Iraq in order to advance the political and economic goals of its ruling class, massacring thousands of civilians in the process. Historians estimate that the invasion caused 655,000 excess civilian deaths between 2003 and 2006 alone. This was one of worst cases of mass-murder of that era, and yet, few Americans took action to stop it." I can imagine the children being horrified and perplexed by the fact that anyone ever tolerated such atrocities. I can imagine them identifying with the anti-war protesters, as students now identify with the anti-fascist movement in Europe when they study the Second World War.
I can imagine the teacher saying: "In the early part of the 21st Century, the United States had the largest prison population in the world, even greater than the prison population of totalitarian states such as China. Over 2 million people were incarcerated, mostly for nonviolent and victimless offenses, and were forced to live in extremely degrading conditions. The government would also execute some of its prisoners. Sometimes, they would execute completely innocent people by accident." Again, children would be horrified, and wonder how decent people could have tolerated such abuses of human dignity.
I can imagine the teacher saying: "In the early part of the 21st Century, almost everyone ate meat, eggs, and dairy and supported vivisection and fur farming. Billions upon billions of animals were forced to live lives of unceasing torture in factory farms and fur farms to produce nonessential consumer products such as meat, dairy, eggs, leather, and fur. In these farms, animals spent their entire lives in cages so overcrowded that they couldn't even turn around, and endured disease, injury, and infection, extreme temperatures, violence with their cellmates, stress, and boredom before they were brutally slaughtered, often while still conscious. In laboratories, animals were electrocuted, mutilated, tortured, doused in toxic chemicals, and frequently killed. All of these animals were prevented from doing things that they would naturally have done for pleasure. They were separated from family members, often at birth, and were unable to move freely, unable eat, sleep, or mate as they chose to." I can imagine children feeling disgusted, indignant, and aghast upon learning that, in the past, people routinely supported the torture of beings that obviously had the capacity to feel pain. I can imagine the history class celebrating the animal rights movement, perhaps even glorifying the Animal Liberation Front and other militant groups as freedom fighters.
If you really could visit a history classroom of the future, if you were really forced to think rationally about the injustices of our time in a place where the mythology that justifies them no longer exists, how would you live your life differently? Would you still be complacent? Would you still be indifferent to the atrocities that are occurring all around you? Or would you find the courage to stand up for what is right, even in the face of adversity?
The choice is yours. Do you want to go down in the history books next to Thomas Paine, Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King, Caesar Chavez, Susan B. Anthony, Malcolm X, Mahatma Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela, or next to the millions of decent people who were complicit in horrible atrocities?
It's heartening to see that someone as young as this writer
(the bio says under 25) has got this much of the big picture figured out. Most of my social peers -- almost all with graduate degrees and quite "successful" in conventional terms -- see less of the truth than this writer. And what's worse: not only do they see less, they don't care that they see less. They think seeing the big picture is a waste of time, since it distracts from personal pleasure-seeking.
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Richard Mynick (2 articles, 4 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 1552 comments [255 recommended, 5 rejected]) on Friday, Feb 9, 2007 at 7:18:59 PM
History would not look upon political party line so strongly. I would bet it would read more like...
In the early 21st century the now obsolete two party system in the USA caused the delay of an ending to the Iraqi war. Iraq, a country drenched with terrorist groups and a dictator who committed heinous crimes against humanity, was given an opportunity to seek peace for the first time since the corruption by their then dictator and the former United Nations. The United Nations, it was found, supported the terrorists and the dictator in return for oil incentives received by the President of the United Nations. Political opportunists, such as former Senator John Kerry, took advantage of a disinherited public at the expense of his own troops. Mr. Kerry had a history of this going back to his over inflated war record and was considered a hero by the enemy in Vietnam and Iraq. Then President, Bush, followed the recomendations insisted upon by the former Democratic party and asked congress for an escalation for an eventual withdraw. This is in escence the same stratagy used by former president Nixon that succsessfully ended the conflict in Vietnam.Then President, Bush, followed the recommendations insisted upon by the former Democratic party and asked congress for an escalation for an eventual withdraw. This is in essence the same strategy used by former president Nixon that successfully ended the conflict in Vietnam. President Bush was then attacked in the typical partisan fashion that was the standard for the time. If we look at our history we now can see the connection between the elitist elected officials of the now defunct Democratic Party and their plantation background.
Both sides took their uninformed public for granted.
And so on.
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Bob Fitzgerald (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 62 comments) on Friday, Feb 9, 2007 at 8:40:42 PM
didnt you read the little bio line at the end of the article? i'm an anarchist. i think democrats are a part of the problem, im certainly not upholding their party line.
but to respond to your assertion about iraq. there's a few things you left out. for one, there was never any terrorist threat in iraq... until the US invaded, decimating the country, destroying its economy, and killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians. you mention saddam. the funny thing is, the US actively supported him during his worst crimes...giving him WMD.
oh and by the way... the oil for food scandal is a joke. the real scandal is that under US/UK sanctions--which made it illegal to sell food, medicine, and other essential products to Iraq--ended up killing half a million iraqi children under the age of 5 years old, and hundreds of thousands of others.
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david baake (4 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 2 comments) on Saturday, Feb 10, 2007 at 12:53:42 AM
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