[lit-ideas] A Cure for What Ails Us
- From: John McCreery <mccreery@xxxxxxx>
- To: democratsabroadjapan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, DemsAbroad@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, PCDA@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2004 12:23:40 +0900
Didn't sleep too well last night. Woke up this morning feeling blue.
Read the latest polls and felt sick to my stomach. Then, via Working
for Change (http://www.workingforchange.com) I stumbled on a voice from
my past, that unrepentant old leftist,
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040920&s=zinnHoward Zinn
(http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040920&s=zinn) This is what he
said.
" In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in
comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to
stay involved and seemingly happy?
I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we
should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The
metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose
any chance of winning. To play, to act, is to create at least a
possibility of changing the world.
There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment
will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the
sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's
thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by
the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible."
He then goes on to remind us of Russia's multiple revolutions, the fall
of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War, the convulsions that have
shaken China, from Mao to Deng Xiao-ping. He could, equally, have
pointed to Ghandi, Mandela, Martin Luther King. This is not the world I
grew up in, and in some respects it is, in fact, a better world. Even
without the wonderful new toys that technology has provided, it's a
world in which equality regardless of race or gender is an idea so
firmly established, if as yet largely unrealized, that those who would
take us back to a world in which us white men kept "niggers" and
"kikes" and women and "fags" in their place sound bizarre--their day as
the voices of common sense is done. And why? Because a few people
looked at what seemed like immovable institutions and said to
themselves, even if the process is slow and painful, we can, little by
little, become an irresistible force. They were right.
John L. McCreery
International Vice Chair, Democrats Abroad
Tel 81-45-314-9324
Email mccreery@xxxxxxx
>>Life isn't fair. Democracy should be. <<
To learn more about Democrats Abroad, see these websites
In Japan: http://www.demsjapan.jp
Worldwide: http://www.democratsabroad.org
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