Can you feel it? The gathering energy of a really big, dangerous and life-threatening storm?
The right is ramping up their storm-making machines, lifting up racists masquerading as patriots and seeding the atmosphere with threats and intimidation. To add to the growing sense of danger, we’ve all-but abandoned the idea that we should care for the most vulnerable amongst us, and are even about to punish those left outside in the winds and cold rain of health crisis and personal need.
What is wrong with us as a people? Why have we submitted so eagerly to these evil warlocks, these warpigs, these demons of our lesser natures, these monsters calling down storm after storm upon our heads? Is this cold, harsh, angry land the one we really want to live in?
Sometimes it’s tempting to wallow in this mystery, this terrible belief that so many Americans have that we’re in a harsh world where we all must be afraid, where it is human nature to cheat and steal and lie and fight. However, a great post at Unscrewing The Inscrutable had this challenge from Belledame at Fetch Me My Axe:
First, as a political activist and/or idealist, what are you fighting for? (as opposed to, what are you fighting against).
Which Alon Levy answers with:
It’s hard to explain exactly what I’m fighting for, since I’m too much of a generalist to say something like “gender equality.” I think the best way to characterize my liberalism is as a philosophy that stresses the importance of equal rights and equality of opportunity but not of results. Unlike libertarians, who prefer to focus on negative liberties, I think that the government can and should enforce equal rights in a variety of ways, including equal pay laws, public education, anti-trust laws, and a social safety net. But still, my underlying view is very individualistic, and ultimately what I want is a society that makes it easier for the individual to thrive, regardless of what his/her socioeconomic background is.
That is a liberalism many of us could get behind. I think it’s a liberalism that is more fundamentally “American”, and more in tune with our founding documents and the real history of this country. It’s more in line with who we most fervently want to be than the pinched, angry and hateful political philosophy we’ve been living under for far too long. So many Americans have been hearing only one side of our story. We hear only about cutthroat competition, about people who lift themselves up by their bootstraps. For years we’ve heard only a twisted retelling of our history, of our nature, a story cobbled together by some spawn of Ayn Rand and Thomas Hobbes. It’s a myth … nobody lifts themselves up alone.
In Belledame’s challenge, she also asks what stories motivate activists. What fairy tales or myths motivated us as children? I enjoyed stories of people who worked together in dangerous environments, stories like the children in Wrinkle in Time who solve problems with the help of mysterious strangers. Stories of the colonists in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, who find strength in themselves and each other to rebel against tyranny. In the early days of this country, in many communities people found ways to work together with the original inhabitants of this country, took inspiration from the government of the Haudenosaunee to build a structure where disparate states could form a central common government. This history was buried by the land-greedy likes of President Jackson and Davy Crockett, but it’s part of our history none-the-less.
Our history is the collision of these two competing stories. THIS activist is going to keep telling that lesser-known story. This country is a country that includes numerous people who want us to take care of each other. A people who believe in education and fair wages and hope for the future. There are more of us than there are of the angry haters, deep in our hearts. We are the people who fought for emancipation and sufferage … the people who protested when confronted by our government’s crimes against those who lived here before us. We are the people who raised our neighbor’s barns, who helped the family next door who’s house had burned down. We’re the people who formed bucket brigades, who worked together to build a schoolhouse. We are the people who fought for immigrants to feel welcome in this land that our ancestors had come to uninvited when they came here uninvited. We may have been the ones working the long hours, struggling to feed our children, fighting to learn how to live in a strange land and speak a language we didn’t understand, but we’ve always found a way to help one another. It is among the poor, the unique and the outcasts that one often finds the greatest community.
I believe that the country we should be working toward is one that invests in its people. I believe that government is the way we express our hopes and belief in each other, and it’s far past time that we started using it again. I believe that the myriad variations in our races and cultures and faiths enrich us all, that we can all learn from each other, better ourselves by being open to “others”. I believe that real national security is grounded in a public health system that works, a regulatory system that ensures that businesses are required to act responsibly, that they clean up the byproducts of their business. We can better secure our borders though a robust and open diplomacy rather than belligerent militarism, by an open embrace of the rule of law, even laws established over sovereign nations. I believe that none of us are free unless all of us are free to make our own choices about our bodies, unless all of us are free to follow the voice inside of us that tells us where we can find love, no matter what “tradition” demands.
Activism is born in stories, as Rebecca Solnit told the graduates at the Department of English at the University of California at Berkeley:
I thought of these things with the tools with which we English majors graduate into the world – not the tools that enable you to splice genes, cantilever bridges, or make piles of money, but those that enable you to analyze, to see patterns, to acquire a personal philosophy rather than a jumble of unexamined, hand-me-down notions; those that enable you not to make a living but maybe to live. This least utilitarian of educations prepares you to make sense of the world and maybe to make meaning; for one way to describe the great struggle of our time is as the endeavor to become a producer of meanings rather than a consumer of them – in an age when meaning as advertising and marketing, as others’ definitions of pleasure and terror, is daily forced down our throats.
To make meaning, to change the world, or just to read it thoughtfully (which can itself be insurrectionary)… And never has our world been so overloaded, so rapidly changing, and so full of surprises that require us to change our minds, rethink possibilities, and then do so again; never has it required such careful reading. In my own case, the kind of critical reading I first learned to do with books, then with works of art, turned out to be transferable to national parks, atomic bombs, revolutions, marches, the act of walking – a skill transferred not only to feed my writing but my larger path through the world.
It’s not just about protests and marches and legislation … change grows from stories, from our ability to use our imaginations to see the world through another person’s eyes. Change and a better, stronger nation can grow from compassion, compassion which we can attain by listening to the stories told by people different from ourselves, stories that we can imagine ourselves in, if only we take the time to imagine a different beginning for ourselves and a better future for us all.
The frightened and hateful amongst us will mock these stories, write it off as immature and soft-hearted. They are wrong. Human history isn’t solely about conflict and war and bloodshed and hatred. Human history is about families gathering together into villages, villages into towns, and towns into cities. Our race builds more than it destroys. We create beautiful things and sing wonderful songs and learn each other languages so we can trade with each other and learn from each other. This isn’t a soft, naive way of looking at the world, it’s a clear way of looking at our world, looking at it by refusing to surrender to fear and hatred.
Isn’t that a world we all want, for ourselves and our neighbors? Why don’t we start fighting back, working to make it real?
All great movements start with a story of a better world – Liberal Street Fighter
