Wednesday December 22, 2004 at 2:26 PM
Individually engaging, collectively powerful
Appearing in Seen Elsewhere
Trying to clear out some of the accumulation of the past year and came across these. Individually engaging, collectively powerful, I encourage you to consider them in-total.
- Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle…Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
- Frederick Douglas
Letter to an abolitionist, 1853
- Those in public office have let us know that they consider their task to be a manipulative one: confidence-building and grief management. Politics, the politics of a democracy — which entails disagreement, which promotes candor — has been replaced by psychotherapy. Let’s by all means grieve together. But let’s not be stupid together. A few shreds of historical awareness might help us understand what has just happened, and what may continue to happen. “Our country is strong,” we are told again and again. I for one don’t find this entirely consoling. Who doubts that America is strong? But that’s not all America has to be.
- Susan Sontag
The New Yorker, Sept 24, 2001
- The failure of Democratic politicians and public thinkers to respond to popular discontents…allowed a resurgent conservatism to convert public concern and hostility into a crusade to resurrect social Darwinism as a moral philosophy, multinational corporations as a governing class, and the theology of markets as a transcendental belief system….Their stated and open aim is to change how America is governed – to strip from government all its functions except those that reward the rich and privileged benefactors….It is the most radical assault on the notion of one nation, indivisible, that has occurred in our lifetime. I’ll be frank with you: I simply don’t understand it – or the malice in which it is steeped….And I don’t know how to reconfigure democratic politics to fit into an age of sound bites and polling dominated by a media oligarchy whose corporate journalists are neutered and whose right-wing publicists have no shame.
- Bill Moyers
speaking at the Take Back America Conference
Washington D.C. June 4, 2003
