"If the twenty-first century turns out to be as barbaric as the twentieth, then my voice could just be one voice in a wilderness, wedded to the discourses of democracy that just turned out to be marginal and impotent. If things turn out a bit better than that, then I would want to be a part of the same intellectual chorus as Whitman, Du Bois, Dewey. Fundamental commitments to democracy, of course, but mine is a Christian voice with a Chekhovian tragicomic twist, representing the African Americans' attempt to come to terms with the dark side of modernity."
- Cornel West
It's hard to believe, but this blog is actually serious. This blog is legit. This blog is serious and legit. So is your blog. Your blog is serious and legit. You don't even have to have a blog. Let's just say your text is legit, however you want to define text. Because, because what we're talking about here is not some inconsequential and empty advertisement. We are talking about democracy. Democracy. That word by itself contains so much, implies so much, demands so much. It's something, I think, we as Americans take so much for granted.
From 1941-1945, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party executed 6 million Jews. 6 million, 2/3 of the total population of Jews in Europe. Consider one, just one Jewish man at Auschwitz. He walked into the gas chamber and felt the the terror of suffocation in the moments of his death. What we are talking about is the years that man should have lived. Take those ghost years, the years that man grows old in peace and dies in the comfort of his bed. Those ghost years must animate the living experience of our 21st century democracy; the life that was not lived must, at the very least, serve as a reminder of how easily shit can go sideways.
The foundation of our country begins with European men stuffing black bodies into ships, squished bodies like sardines, swimming, you might say, in their own excrement, and sailing them across the sea to work as slaves in the new world. But the punishment didn't end in the 17th century or the 18th or the 19th or the 20th century. As Mr. West alludes to above, the 20th century, that sunrise of modernity, included the systematic lynching of black men and women, jim crow and separate but equal. Of course the injustice continues today. To say, "we have a black president, so everything is cool," is just as ridiculous as saying, "we have a black president, but nothing has changed." A lot has changed for the better, but a lot hasn't changed for shit.
Consider the reporter Jacobo Timerman, born in the Ukraine, moved with his family to Argentina in 1928, when he was five. Jacobo Timerman became the publisher and editor of the newspaper La Opinion in 1971. In his articles, he wrote of the basic value of human rights and freedom of the press. In 1977, a military dictatorship in Argentina kidnapped, imprisoned and tortured Jacobo Timerman because he refused to be silenced by a repressive, vindictive government. And for his refulsal he was tortured for thirty months in an Argentian prison. Jacobo Timerman was lucky, he was eventually freed and not "disappeared" for good. I would wager to say Jacobo Timerman has a keen sense of the importance and urgency of democracy. You can read about his life in "Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number".
But in all of this misery there is every reason to be hopeful. There are so many things that can be improved in our world and therefore so many different ways to go about improving it. The woman who creates a business focused on selling only locally produced goods. Another woman who works with severely depressed individuals, helping them avoid the landmines of atrophy and suicide. The parents who raise their children in Irvine, teaching them tolerance, and the acceptance of difference, to love people of all backgrounds as long as they prove themselves worthy of love.
I realize that my hopefulness and willingness to embrace many different approaches to solving the problems we face will put me at odds with many who either believe shit is already too fucked up to fix or believe that there are one or two central problems that lie at the bottom of the others. I disagree, I see the planet's possibility in the independent music of San Francisco and Northern Michigan. I believe there are many answers, and we all have to start where we are comfortable.
I tried to bite off more than i could chew tonight. Bare with me as I work all this shit out. As Cornel West says, ""...I'm just trying to make sense of the world and love folks before I die."
Anthony
John Coltrane
(how incredibly fresh is the drummer's jacket? he was wearing that shit in 1963.)
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