- I am in total agreement with this Howard Zinn's article;
REVOLT of THE GUARDS, in that we most certainly have given over our voice
and presence in the body politic/domestic/local/international; leaving
the decision making to the few. We also have been conditioned to look to
someone outside ourselves to save us-to deal with crisis! And so, whether
in our own local cities, towns, villages, we have as a result, little
to no idea of what legislation or what wheeling and dealing is going on
that will see tremendous burdens put on us. We the guards merely shuffle
and give over our ideas-input-study-to those in appointed or elected positions
hoping that they'll be men of good will-consceince and morals doing the
best by us. A nice thought but far from today's reality.
-
- No where is this more evident than in my own community.
Some 17yrs. ago a waste entity moved in and wrote their own meal ticket.
Though I was not residing here at the time, it didn't take long reading
the history to see just what had happened. An incinerator was slated for
the center of town. So, everyone jumps on board fighting this insanity
with the result being, that it was placed on the edge of town! The people
thought they'd won some sort of victory! Perfect ploy. In any event, though
people objected over the years at various meetings, the business of plunder
proceeded with a few glitches but nothing industry couldn't derail-or tie
up in court or executive closed door sessions. People are basically followers
and without a grassroots movement of any appreciable numbers-and only minuscule
funding its ended with the feeble voices of the 'few'.
-
- Here we are these 17yrs. later with the highest electric
costs (due to the incinerator) in the continental U.S., numerous health
issues, and an environment saturated with toxins! Millions upon millions
have been siphoned from the community with every charlatan and his brother
getting his grubby hands in the pie. The result being a city financially
on the ropes; what with having to borrow and bond to keep afloat. With
things in such disarray, the city was at the point of having someone ride
to the rescue. In enters a city manager, and others, all from out of state
or out of town to 'fix things'. It was rather alarming to hear the man
referred to as 'Savior'. True enough he may be just the person to deal
with the mess, but dangerous ideology this giving over such titles and
adulation! Shows you how damn shuffling and servile people are waiting
on someone anyone to deal with the crisis in their midst. Depending where
you reside this may be a chemical plant, hog farm, or massive dumping.
They usually choose places of little political clout-money-tourism or enclaved
havens for the pampered-powdered ones.
-
-
- Industry-or corporate greedsters are about one thing
and that's the bottom-line. They are not about morals, the environment
or people whining about their cancers or sick kids! They could care less.
Serving the stockholders-profits and quarterly profit sheets are their
holy grail. They don't live where they defecate! They are masters of planning,
knowing the big city slick sales pitch and the local yokels shady enough
to steal pennies off a dead man's eyes. Too late, it's realized when compromising
your values and integrity that the good times come to an end and those
who sold out for a quick buck-stocks-jobs-contracts-whatever; their neighbors
health, and their communities environment are into it up to their necks
and thus silenced and put out of the loop! Whose fault? You can point
the finger to local officials, state regulators and politicians; but mostly
the fault lies with the people. One must be an active citizen and not leave
or trust issues of serious consequences in the hands of the few. The ordinary
citizen is the most powerful force there is. Would that people together
realize their power, they wouldn't be fleeced, hoodwinked, poisoned and
taken to the cleaners. Everyone has a part. Some are natural leaders, others
organizers, or gifted in various ways to make their message heard. It won't
be done glued to the TV, or whining that one person can't make a difference!
"The duties of the individual towards himself are, in reality--duties
towards society?" Emile Duncein Think on this....why would you poison-fleece-ridiucle-label,
those who champion the cause of injustice in society when you yourself
would be most indignant and outraged if this were visited on you or yours?
Of course if one has no respect for himself and is without conscience or
soul it makes no matter what harm he sows.
-
-
- Tonight on the news there was a brief ten second spot
showing thousands gathered in a protest against the war in Italy. Washington
D.C. (not covered by major media) had 200,000 protesting in Oct. Same thing
all over the country and abroad. With corporate entities controlling the
media, much of what is being done is more of a preaching to the choir,
than reaching those most needed. We need to reach those in our own locales;
those bamboozled and programmed in believing the rhetoric of flags, yellow
ribbon, bomb them to hell crowd nothing can be done etc. Not, in your face
abusive confrontations, but reasoned prepared arguments. We should together,
work up a concise-simply understood statement as to why what is happening
with this military industrial complex draining us of billions, and how
globalization will see the ruin of us all. We need to address those who
make the dirty work possible for those sitting in gilded board rooms, lounging
on yachts or plotting plunder in bunkered war-rooms. The police, the firemen,
the local politicians and those in the military or thinking of joining.
Howard Zinn's article The COMING REVOLT OF THE GUARDS....shows why we've
come to the point we're at. "Society has no justification if it does
not bring a little peace to men...peace in their hearts and peace in their
mutual intercourse. If, then, industry can be productive only by disturbing
their peace and unleashing warfare, it is not worth the cost." Emile
Duncein ....JM.
-
- "...the mountain of history books under which we
all stand leans...so tremblingly respectful in the direction of states
and statesmen and so disrespectful, by inattention, to people's movements--that
we need some counterforce to avoid being crushed into submission. All those
histories of this country centered on the Founding Fathers and the Presidents
weigh oppressively on the capacity of the ordinary citizen to ACT. They
suggest that in times of crisis we must look to someone to save us: in
the Revolutionary crisis, the Founding Fathers, in the slavery crisis,
Lincoln; in the Depression, Roosevelt; in the Vietnam-Watergate crisis,
Carter. And that between occasional crisis everything is all right, and
it is sufficient for us to be restored to that 'normal' state. They teach
us that the supreme act of citizenship is to choose among saviors, by going
into a voting booth every four years to choose between two white and well-off
Anglo-Saxon males of inoffensive personalty and orthodox opinions.
-
- The idea of 'saviors' has been built into the entire
culture, beyond politics. We have learned to
- look to stars, leaders, experts in every field, thus
surrendering our own strength, demeaning our ability, obliterating our
own selves. But from time to time, Americans reject that idea and rebel.
These rebellions, so far, have been contained. The American system is the
most ingenious system of control in world history. With a country so rich
in natural resources, talent and labor power the system can afford to distribute
just enough wealth to just enough people to limit discontent to a troublesome
minority. It is a country so powerful, so big, so pleasing to so many of
its citizens that it can afford to give freedom of dissent to the smaller
number who are not pleased.
-
-
- There is no system of control with more openings, apertures,
lee ways, flexibilities, rewards for the chosen, winning tickets in lotteries.
There is none that disperses its controls more complexly through the voting
system, the work situation, the church, the family, the school, the mass
media-none more successful in mollifying opposition with reforms, 'isolating'
people from one another, creating patriotic loyalty. One percent of the
nation owns a third of the wealth. The rest of the wealth is distributed
in such a way as to turn those in the 99 percent against one another; small
property owners against the propertyless, black against white, native-born
against foreign-born, intellectuals and professionals against the uneducated
and unskilled. These groups have resented one another and warred against
one another with such vehemence and violence as to obscure their common
position as sharers of leftovers in a very wealthy country.
-
-
- Madison feared a "majority faction" and hoped
the new Constitution would control it. He and his colleagues began the
Preamble to the Constitution with the words "We the people...."
pretending that the new government stood for everyone, and hoping that
this 'myth' accepted as fact, would ensure "domestic tranquility".
The pretense continued over the generations, helped by all-embracing symbols,
physical or verbal: the flag, patriotism, democracy, national interest,
national defense, national security.....
-
- The exile of Nixon, the celebration of the Bicentennial,
the presidency of Carter, all aimed at restoration. But restoration to
the old order was no solution to the uncertainty, the alienation, which
intensified in the Regan-Bush years. The election of Clinton in '92, carrying
with it a vague promise of change, did not fulfill the expectation of the
hopeful.
-
-
- With such continuing malaise, it is very important for
the Establishment-that uneasy club or business executives, generals, and
politicos-to maintain the historic pretension of national unity, in which
the government represents all the people, and the common enemy is overseas,
not at home, where disasters of economics or war are unfortunate errors
or tragic accidents, to be corrected by the members of the same club that
brought the disasters!! It is important for them also to make sure this
artificial unity of highly privileged and slightly privileged is the only
UNITY--that the 99 percent remain SPLIT in countless ways, and turn against
one another to vent their angers. How skillful to tax the middle class
to pay for the relief of the poor, building resentment on top of humiliation!
How adroit to bus poor black youngsters into poor white neighborhoods,
in a violent exchange of impoverished schools, while the schools of the
rich remain untouched and the wealth of the nation, doled out carefully
where children need free milk, is drained for billion dollar aircraft carriers.
How ingenious to meet the demands of blacks and women for equality by giving
them small special benefits, and setting them in competition with everyone
else for jobs made scarce by an irrational wasteful system. How wise to
turn the fear and anger of the majority toward a class of criminals bred
by economic inequity-faster than they can be put away, deflecting attention
from the huge thefts of national resources carried out within the law by
men in executive offices.
-
-
- However, the unexpected victories even temporary of insurgents
show the vulnerability of the supposedly powerful. In a highly developed
society, the Establishment cannot survive without the OBEDIENCE and loyalty
of millions of people who are given small rewards to keep the system going:
the soldiers and police, teachers and ministers, administrators and social
workers, technicians and production workers, doctors, lawyers, nurses,
transport and communication workers, garbagemen and firemen. These people-the
employed, the somewhat privileged-are drawn into alliance with the 'elite'.
They become the GUARDS of the system, BUFFERS between the upper and lower
classes. If they STOP obeying, the system FALLS.
-
-
- That will happen, I think, only when all of us who are
slightly privileged and slightly uneasy begin to see that we are like the
GUARDS in the prison uprising at Attica expendable; that the Establishment,
whatever rewards it gives us, will also, if necessary to maintain its control,
kill us. Certain new facts may, in our time, emerge so clearly a to lead
to general withdrawal of loyalty from the system. The new conditions of
technology, economics, and war, in the atomic age, make it less and less
possible for the GUARDS of the system-the intellectuals, the home owners,
the taxpayers, the skilled workers, the professional, the servants of government
to remain immune from the violence (physical and psychic) inflicted on
the black, the poor, the criminal, the enemy overseas. The internationalization
of the economy, the movement of refugees and illegal immigrants across
borders, both make it more difficult for the people of industrial countries
to be oblivious to hunger and disease in the poor countries of the world.
-
-
- The system, in its irrationality, has been driven by
profit to build steel skyscrapers for insurance companies while the cities
decay, to spend billions for weapons of destruction and virtually nothing
for children's playgrounds, to give huge incomes to men who make dangerous
or useless things, and very little to artists, musicians, writers, actors.
Capitalism has always been a failure for the lower classes. It is now beginning
to fail for the middle classes.
-
- The threat of unemployment, always inside the homes of
the poor, has spread to white-collar workers, professional. A college education
is no longer a guarantee against joblessness, and a system that cannot
offer a future to the young coming out of school is in deep trouble. In
the seventies, eighties and early nineties there was a dramatic, frightening
increase in the number of crimes. It was not hard to understand, when one
walked through any big city. There were the contrasts of wealth and poverty,
the culture of possession, the frantic advertising. There was the fierce
economic competition, in which the legal violence of the state and the
legal robbery by the corporations were accompanied by the illegal crimes
of the poor. Most crimes by far involved theft. A disproportionate number
of prisoners in America jails were poor and non white, with little education.
Half were unemployed in the month prior to their arrest. A society so stratified
by wealth and education lends itself naturally to envy and class anger.
-
- The critical question in our time is whether the middle
classes, so long led to believe that the solution for such crimes is more
jails and more jail terms, may begin to see, by the sheer uncontrollability
of crime, that the only prospect is an endless cycle of crime and punishment.
They might conclude that physical security for a working person in the
city can only come when everyone in the city is working. And that would
require a transformation of national priorities, a change in the system.
-
- The prospect is for times of turmoil, struggle, but also
inspiration. There is a chance that....a movement could succeed in doing
what the system itself has never done--bring about great change with little
violence. This is possible because the more of the 99 percent begin to
see themselves as sharing needs, the more the guards and the prisoners
see their common interest, the more the Establishment becomes isolated,
ineffectual. The elites' weapons, money, control of information would be
useless in the fact of a determined population. The servants of the system
would refuse to work to continue the old, deadly order, and would begin
using their time, their space the very things given them by the system
to keep them quiet-to dismantle that system while creating a new one.
-
-
- The prisoners of the system will continue to rebel, as
before, in ways that cannot be foreseen, at times that cannot be predicted.
The new fact of our era is the chance that they may be joined by the GUARDS.
We readers and writers of books have been for the most part, among the
GUARDS. If we understand that, and act on it, not only will life be more
satisfying, right off, but our grandchildren, might possibly see a different
and marvelous world."
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