I watched Jon Stewart on Bill Moyers’ Journal last night. It was very enjoyable. I won’t say that it made me swell with hope for America but I definitely can understand what Glenn Greenwald is talking about.
I wasn’t planning on posting today, and fortunately, I don’t really need to beyond these few paragraphs, because this comment last night from DCLaw1, in response to yesterday’s post, perfectly describes what I think is the critical point:
Stewart on Moyers’ Journal
I’m watching Moyers’ Journal, and Jon Stewart is the guest, with Josh Marshall from TPM to follow. It’s caused me to reflect on the fairly recent past, and I am getting an almost cellular sense that something very profound is beginning to bud.
I have to say that a remarkably intimate, yet expansive, community of thought seems to be forming across television, film, and the Internet. There’s a rather quiet, yet intense, movement of thought and expression building. It focuses not so much on any particular ideology (“right” or “left”), but on a common, critical-mass thirst to dispel the deception, irrationality, and utter hubris that has been corroding our proud country for what seems like an eternity.
An undeniable intellectual and social confluence is rapidly gaining momentum and solidarity. This solidarity is amazingly organic, not hierarchical — its only guide is the sixth sense of skepticism, outrage, and, yes, reason. It transcends party. It is oceanic, atmospheric. An intellectual, moral, societal, and psychological gestalt as ancient as humanity itself, kept underfoot by a long winter, but indelibly germinating once again with the thaw.
It is literally everywhere now. The voices of blindness and rage cannot shake me anymore. I haven’t felt such hope in a very long time.
Do you feel hopeful?
