It's like the old-timers always said: Don't quit before the miracle happens.
While the Arab Spring showed that people can still accomplish the impossible, our political debate was frozen in corporate cynicism. Now everything has changed. For the United States, spring came in autumn. Who says miracles don't happen?
Like a Prayer
A few months ago I prayed for something. Granted, it wasn't the kind of prayer that's sanctioned by any ecclesiastical authority. And, okay, maybe it wasn't exactly a "prayer." I guess the technical term for it would be "blog post." But trust me, it was a prayer.
I'd been asked to write something for the Fourth of July, and I wrote we have to fight a new war, a "war of independence from corporate politics." To be honest, those words felt Utopian even as I wrote them. Still, I never doubted them. The words were born out of the desperate sense that so many of us shared, a sense that our society is collapsing. And that it will keep on collapsing unless we change the way we think.
I wasn't arguing for any particular policy or platform. "The problem isn't just with politicians, or even the system," I said then. "The problem is dependence itself."
Oh, come on. How starry-eyed can you get? Stop depending on politicians? Declare psychic and political independence from celebrity-driven politics and media-made leaders? I'd always considered myself a realist, but this was almost embarrassingly idealistic.
Except for the fact that it happened.
Passionate Intensity
Like so many others, I had grieved and raged over the lack of commitment displayed by good people. Cynics, robber barons, and American warlords are hard at work degrading - and downgrading -- this country. In a strange set of parallels, we were reenacting the stories of the Third World countries we'd invaded. Like them, we were becoming a nation where servile or fearful politicians served a cynical oligarchy while the people's way of life died all around them.
Some might call it karma -- or simply "payback."
But whatever you call it, the forces of hate and greed were running wild. The "two-party" system seemed to offer nothing in response except a) posturing, b) surrender, and c) a politics of compromise that seemed to amount to little more than... well, see "a)" and "b)", above. Good people were fighting for better policies, and I tried to play my part. But too many of us focused on the prose of politics and not its poetry.
Meanwhile, too many politicians got lazy quoting Bill Clinton's hack line: Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. It can be, of course. But before our eyes, the "good" became the enemy of the "perfect" and the mediocre became the enemy of the good. Then the cynical became the enemy of the mediocre, and democracy began to die.
Meanwhile the other side gained its momentum with every passing month, fueled by a pseudo-populist movement ginned up by corporate-funded political hacks. A nation that had rejected the politics of greed and oligarchy at the ballot box was even more suffocated by it than before. No wonder so many people were uninspired, discouraged, despondent. Some people quoted William Butler Yeats:
The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
The good people who did burn with passionate intensity were in danger of turning the torch on themselves. " The game is over," wrote Chris Hedges. "We lost. The corporate state will continue its inexorable advance until two-thirds of the nation is locked into a desperate, permanent underclass."
As boom times came back to Wall Street, depression -- emotional as well as economic -- entombed the majority. But the suffering of the majority turned invisible inside the Beltway, as politicians debated deficits in a broken economy. It was like debating water conservation while the house burned down.
The Condition of Everything
Miles of commentary have been written about the Occupy movement. As the occupations gained steam, people criticized them for their lack of specific policy demands. But they were right not to issue specific demands. They were declaring independence from a frame of mind, a set of assumptions that led to passive acceptance of an unacceptable system.
And they had passionate intensity.
I've told this story before, but I'll tell it again: When Occupy DC marched down K Street, in the early days of the movement, a young security guard asked an older one what they were protesting. "I'm not sure," said the older man. "But I think they're objecting to ..." He circled his hands to indicate the environment around him. "... the condition of everything."
By objecting to the condition of everything, the Occupiers changed the political dialog in this country. By rejecting leaders and insisting on self-governance through General Assemblies, they taught us by example how to escape emotional dependence. Like William Butler Yeats, they understood that you can't distinguish the dancer from the dance.
One of the movement's most articulate and forceful advocates is Chris Hedges.
Recalling Democracy
The Wisconsin uprising had been going on for months, even in the dark days of July. The miracle of Wisconsin is that it's still going on. People there occupied their capitol to protest laws designed to break the middle class, laws written by corporate America's "ALEC" division. Then they mounted recall efforts against recently elected GOP State Senators, reducing their majority and draining resources from their coffers.
Now Gov. Walker is facing a recall. The struggle in Wisconsin isn't about "Democrats" against "Republicans." It's about resisting politicians that are wholly-owned subsidiaries of corporate America.
The people of Wisconsin showed the country how to resist. Now they're showing us how to persist.
And just this month, Ohio voters rejected an ALEC-inspired initiative to strip that state's workers of rights. Maine voters rejected a move to overturn election-day registration, another attempt to restrict the ability of lower-income citizens to vote. And Mississippi rejected a definition of prenatal rights so extreme that many anti-abortion advocates were disturbed by its implications for the rights, health, and safety of women.
Like I was saying: Miracles.
Radical Innocence
But elections aren't the point. They can be a reflection of the change we need, but they're not the change itself. The real changes are personal. "When I remake a song," said Yeats, "it is myself that I remake." The Rolling Stones said "It's the singer, not the song."
We misunderstood our own power. We were being distracted and manipulated by fear and anger. Our minds, our souls, were being manipulated by what the Native American poet and activist John Trudell calls "the mining of the essence." One of the reasons we were powerless is that we believed we were powerless. That's even true economically. "All money is a matter of belief," said Adam Smith.
We needed to push our fear and anger away to see the obvious truths all around us: The corporations rule our political process. That our democracy is dying. That Wall Street is filled with people who broke moral (and sometimes actual) laws and forced the rest of the country to pay the price. We had to see with fresh eyes.
"All hatred driven hence," wrote Yeats, "the soul recovers radical innocence."
Our political process has become too cynical. Even reasonable and very moderate ideas favored by a majority of Republican voters, as well as others -- a breakup of five or six too-big-to-fail banks, a public option health plan that's only available to one American in twenty -- were declared impossible.
We needed an infusion of radical innocence, the innocence of Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela. We sometimes think of innocence as something childlike and weak. But innocence has great power. Innocence changes the world.
We needed that radical innocence, and we got it. What we do with it now is up to us.
Can we commit ourselves to moving forward, to persevering against all odds? The future's unwritten. But we know what's happening right now. The political dialog has shifted in a way that seemed impossible a few months ago. I don't know how you feel about that, but I know how I feel.
I feel thankful.
Follow Richard (RJ) Eskow on Twitter: www.twitter.com/rjeskow
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Only the last two lines are quoted in the article because the rest creates a world view that is just too negative to support the overall optimistic point of the article. The poem was written in 1919, at the end of WWI, which spawned a whole literary movement based on the world view described in this stanza. For Yeats, the only result could be a "second coming," but not a rise of "radical innocence" that one might envision as emanating from the second coming of the Prince of Peace:
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
[lines omitted here]
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Sorry, not a very pleasant outlook in this poem.
"September 1913."
What need you, being come to sense,
But fumble in a greasy till
And add the halfpence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer, until
You have dried the marrow from the bone,
For men were born to pray and save:
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave
(lines 1-8).
Such a portrayal is incorrect. Chris Hedges is a proponent of Sheldon Wolin's theory of "inverted totalitarianism." Under Chris' theory, the corporate controlled nature of the American political structure is a fait accompli, and it will only continue to get worse. He does say, "The game is over. We lost." I believe that, by saying that, he only means that there is no hope left for changing anything from inside the system because it has already been taken over by corporate totalitarians. My impression is that he has been and remains openly supportive of effecting change through external means. His embrace of the OWS movement is therefore totally consistent with his prior views and represents no change of heart, as strongly implied by the article.
Still, your point is well taken and I could've phrased it a little differently. Hedges deserves that.
We need not fear "Birds Eye Foods", "John Deere", "Kodak" nor the trader on wall street.
The true enemy is the union boss that attends OWS encampments and tells these kids how to think. Equivalently, the progressive think tank "scholar" who has his entire life built upon the "Only Government Knows Best For You and Me!" philosophy that our country fell for in 2008.
Hope, pray all you want. This little excursion call OWS is destined for a footnote in an eighth grade textbook.
Now is the time for all progressives making their living in the progressive persecution posse to learn how to contribute to society.
As a conservative, I would welcome an increase in my tax rate to ensure that these destructive forces are provided with opportunities to study mathematics, physics, engineering and medicine as we need productive people to get out of the mess that they've created.
The people of America have written this event off much like they would treat their children when they dented up Dad's new car. A lesson.
And, of cource, a self aggrandizing attemt to speak for "The People of America" - pretty sick, I mean, clinically.
Fox news is all lies. The people that watch Fox all are racist too.
Last, can't we all just sing together? Here are the lyrics: "Only government knows best for you and me!" "Oh!"
Seriously, Alex.. open your mind up to who is Orwellian among the parties. We need to get the country back.
folks are just getting slowly used to the idea of how much real power they do have.
We shall have a winter pause. A breath in, a long, slow deep inhalation.
And then, in the spring of 2012, a tsunami of humanity, taking back what was theirs all along.
Even though I loved it, as details slowly fade from acute memory, it will probably be remembered succinctly by two words that didn't even appear, two words that I mistakenly thought I saw instead of the bold typed words Passionate Intensity. At first glance, I thought it said Passionate Integrity, and I thought to myself that this suits them very well, the OWS people. I believe they have a clarity of vision that risked being lost, a vision of what is good -- they have Passionate Integrity -- and for that they have my admiration.
http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/11/defense-business-board-pentagon-wall-street?page=1
Now maybe I hope - we will use it & use it wisely - if not for us then for our children.
I think I get what you & he are saying, similar to Bertrand Russel, "The whole problem with the world is that fools & fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts."
I like what Russel wrote because it speaks to the intolerance for ambiguity so common in authoritarian thinking. (Please see the tendency, identified by Bob Altemeyer et al, of Right-Wing Authoritarians to exhibit cognitive errors & symptoms of faulty reasoning - there's also a RWA assessment scale if anyone is interested).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-wing_authoritarianism
The People OWS movement may contain a wide array of concerns however one idea remains constant, Corporatism is unhealthy for a living democracy.
When the Russell–Einstein Manifesto was introduced, it began:
"I am bringing the warning pronounced by the signatories to the notice of all the powerful Governments of the world in the earnest hope that they may agree to allow their citizens to survive."
It ended with:
"Remember your humanity, & forget the rest."
The Peoples OWS movement continues in this tradition.
A healthy dose of cynicism is fine (& even beneficial). The problem, as I see it, is when the cynicism is nothing more than a sortof lazy pessimism demonstrated. A persistent pessimism is a symptom of severe depression. These types of slackers also identify as having a severe lack of curiosity about the world. This loss of interest & curiosity leads to apathy, indifference, or as Henry David Thoreau wrote, "Most men lead lives of quiet desperation & go to the grave with the song still in them."
Life is a performance Art - a feast of movement - & big part of its beauty is we never know what is going to happen next.
I give many thanks & much respect to the OWS movement! It is, when all has been said & done, a movement of Peoples. It is, when all has been said & done, in direct opposition to an illogical insistence (con job) that Corporations are equivalent to People. It's not a mistake that the selling of America's soul by the highest court in the land was the precursor & ultimately led to the movement.