[Remarks to the first in a series of "Last Sunday" community gatherings in Austin, TX, November 26, 2006.]
We billed Last Sunday as a place for people to come together to explore the intersections of the political, artistic, and spiritual. The idea came out of conversations among friends: Eliza Gilkyson, a singer/songwriter with interests in politics and spirituality; Jim Rigby, a minister who has a knack for stirring up trouble, theologically and politically; and me, a professor involved in a variety of political groups.
There are lots of organizations and movements taking up issues that we care about. Last Sunday was designed not to compete with those, but to create a different kind of space, where people could bring all aspects of themselves for conversation and connection. The name plays off the "First Thursday" tradition on South Congress Avenue, with perhaps an invocation of the Last Supper for some, though I want to be clear that none of us has any messianic inclinations.
We hope people will not only listen to what comes from the stage, but connect with friends and allies in the hall. We hope that existing progressive projects will be strengthened and that new ideas will emerge from those conversations.
So, there's no hidden agenda tonight. We're not recruiting or selling anything. Like so many, we're just hungry for that conversation, that connection, that sense of community.
Okay, but what is Last Sunday really about?
All the conversations that Eliza, Jim, and I had in planning this gathering eventually came back to a core point: Hard times are on the way, coming sooner than most of us expected, and we're not ready for them.
We started with the recognition that for all its affluence and military power, the United States is in many ways a society in collapse. On all fronts -- politically, economically, culturally and most important, ecologically -- we are in trouble. We live in an increasingly callous culture that exploits sexuality and glorifies violence; embedded in a house-of-cards economy built on orgiastic consumption, deepening personal and collective debt, and an artificially inflated dollar; at the end of an imperial era that is grinding to a disastrous demise -- and, as if that weren't enough, looming behind all those crises is the recognition of the consequences of humans too-long ignoring the unraveling ecological fabric that makes life possible.
That's the bad news.
Here's the worse news: In this country, we do not have the cultural, economic, or political institutions in place to deal with these cascading crises.
Here's the even worse news: We don't have a lot of time left to build the institutions we need.
If one agrees with this view of the world to any degree, it seems to me there are two options for those of us with privilege.
1. We can seal ourselves off in gated communities (at the personal and/or the national level) with the highest walls and sharpest razor wire we can afford, hunker down with what we have acquired, and hope that somehow the collapse will be far enough off (in time and/or geography) that it won't touch us. Or,
2. We can get to work on making the human connections necessary to build the institutions we need to deal with what some call "the great correction" that is coming.
To some that may sound overly dramatic, maybe even alarmist. But for many of us, the alarms have already gone off, and this kind of analysis resonates in our hearts and our heads. It feels like what is happening, and it's consistent with what we know about the world. Even with that conviction, it's difficult to say all this in public, to risk being ridiculed as histrionic or hysterical. But that naming of the crisis is, I believe, one of the most creative acts we can undertake today. In 1957, Albert Camus explained:
"To create today is to create dangerously. Any publication is an act, and that act exposes one to the passions of an age that forgives nothing."
Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center. His latest book, All My Bones Shake: Radical Politics in the Prophetic Voice, will be published in 2009 by Soft Skull Press. He also is the author of Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007); The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege (City Lights, 2005); Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (City Lights, 2004); and Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream (Peter Lang, 2002). Jensen's articles can be found online at http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/index.html.
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