People who began movements and actually changed the world in dramatic fashion;
People who moved a government to grant and enforce equality for a small, oppressed minority;
People who stopped a major world power from making war on a small country;
People who forced the most powerful man in the world to quit his job in disgrace;
People who believed their hard work and sacrifice had created both a new and better world and, more importantly, had refined and affirmed a radical new model for social change: Henry David Thoreau's, Mohandas Ghandi's and Martin Luther King Jr.'s nonviolent civil resistance.
And now these people lament; perhaps even they weep. For we are facing again times of deep crisis; again destroying a small, helpless nation that posed no real threat to us based on the lies of the powerful who see only personal gain in their ventures.
We again face a corrupt, imperial president, who is really trying to eliminate any meaningful public role in governing our nation, but this time is aided by a hollowed, weakened and cowed Congress and an accomplice Supreme Court.
We again face oppression of minorities, our African American countrymen and women through severe and heartless economic privation combined with blatantly prejudicial law "enforcement"; gays and lesbians through vile, cynical and shameless manipulation of religious texts to generate hatred and fear; Latino (mostly) immigrants through an equally depraved rhetoric of hatred, coopting a frightened population's notions of economic insecurity that is actually imposed by the manipulators themselves; Muslims with only one word: terrorist.
And now we also face a return to calculated and government supported econcomic inequality and labor exploitation, eroding the middle class, furthering depriving the poor, and stacking the deck for future success against all but the priviledged among our youth.
So we ask with hope and dread: where are the young protestors this time? For we need their energy, their new ideas and their irresistible appeal. Why aren't they marching in the streets; surrounding the military recruitment offices on campus? Seattle was a smashing success, why did they quit? Why are they not taking action to stop the theft of their nation when they are the ones who will live longest under autocracy or fascism, the ones with the most to lose from their nation's successful looting?
I don't know the answers to these questions, except the first one. I know where they are. So do you.
Yes, they are massed together out in the streets, enduring hours and days of discomfort and sacrifice in all manner of weather:
Lined up outside the Apple Store, waiting to buy a new I-phone.
It's not their fault. This is what America has come to. WE taught them those priorities.
You should be weeping if you aren't.
(More later on the effective efforts of the bourgeoisie to seduce us into substituting material possession for all other types of fulfillment and even for democracy)
