Revolutionary Change isn't meant to be read cover to cover. It's intended as a reference book on movement building that will hopefully stimulate discussion about the best way to accomplish change.
I was 62 when I first started blogging to promote my first book The Most Revolutionary Act: Memoir of an American Refugee. I was dumbfounded by the overwhelming response I received. It made me realize that nine years of living overseas had given me a unique perspective on the political forces controlling my native country.
I divide the book into five parts. The first, "My New Life in New Zealand ," briefly discusses my reasons for emigrating and the political and social features that make this country uniquely different from the US . Part II, "Capitalism's Last Gasp," examines the train wreck global capitalism and class society have imposed on the planet. Part III, "Psychological Oppression: the Role of Corporate Media," talks about the phenomenon of psychological oppression and the role of mainstream media in preserving the status quo. Part IV, "Making Change," explores how political change is likely to come about, with a particular emphasis on why American leftists and progressives find it so difficult to engage the working class. Part V, "The Endgame," makes a few predictions about post-capitalist society
Part I My New Life in New Zealand
October 14, 2002 : The Day I Became an Expatriate
Originally published March 6, 2011 in OpEdNews http://www.opednews.com
Vietnam , Watergate and My First Attempt to Emigrate
When I finally left the US in October 2002, I had been thinking of emigrating for many years. I had even made a prior attempt to live overseas. In June 1973, I shipped all my belongings to England , intending to start a new life there. Many Americans of my generation left the US in the early seventies, for Canada , Europe and more remote parts of the world. Most were draft-age men refusing to be sent to Vietnam . A few were women involved in illegal abortion clinics before the 1973 Roe v Wade Supreme Court decision legalized pregnancy termination. Many were artists and intellectuals like me, disillusioned by the extreme political corruption that was exposed by the Pentagon Papers and later the scandals over Watergate, CIA domestic spying and Nixon's apparent use of US intelligence for his own political purposes.
In 1973, I myself was totally apolitical. My decision to leave the US had little to do with Vietnam or Watergate. My disillusionment stemmed more from watching rampant consumerism overtake the humanist values I had grown up with -- the strong family ties, deep friendships and involvement in neighborhood and community life that were so important to my parents' and grandparents' generation.
During my eighteen month stay in England, it was deeply gratifying to meet people in London and Birmingham who could care less about owning "stuff" they saw advertised on TV. People who still placed much higher value on extended family, close friendships and the sense of belonging they derived from their local pubs, trade unions, neighborhood sports clubs, hobby groups, and community halls. All of these historic fixtures of American life had virtually disappeared by 1973.
The Murder that Turned My Life Upside Down
A downturn in the British economy in late 1974 forced me to return home to complete my psychiatric training. While I never abandoned my dream of living overseas, my time in Europe had politicized me. I still scanned the back pages of medical journals for foreign psychiatric vacancies. However in my spare time, I also joined grassroots community organizations seeking to improve political and social conditions in the US .
Believing Nixon was an aberration, I was naively optimistic about the ability of community organizing to thwart the corrupting influence of powerful corporations over federal, state and local government. It never occurred to me the institutions of power themselves were deeply corrupt and had been for many years.
As I in write in The Most Revolutionary Act: Memoir of an American Refugee, the truth came crashing down on me in 1987, when I joined a coalition to create a Seattle African American museum. Owing to my financial and social standing as a physician, this struck a raw nerve somewhere in the power elite. What started as a barrage of prank calls, break-ins and stalking by unsavory looking strangers, progressed to attempts on my life and an affair with an undercover agent who railroaded me into a psychiatric hospital.
The hospitalization nearly cost me my medical license. Yet it was the 1989 murder of one of my patients, an African American postal worker and union activist, that turned my world upside down. The brutal murder -- the autopsy photos revealing that Oscar Manassa was beaten before being thrown from the fifth floor of the Seattle YMCA -- was upsetting enough. However the event that opened my eyes to the total breakdown of the US political system was the seizure of the police evidence by a little known branch of US intelligence known as the Postal Inspectors. Their illegal actions effectively blocked a homicide investigation.
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