We are each other’s harvest

we are each other’s business

we are each other’s magnitude and bond.

—Gwendolyn Brooks

Former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright famously asserted that the United States is the one and only “indispensable nation.” “If we have to use force, it is because we are America,” she said. “We are the indispensable nation.”1

A benign interpretation of that extravagant claim might visualize the country as the protector of freedom, a shining city on the hill and a paragon of democratic values and human rights. A more execrable interpretation might see the United States astride the world like Colossus, holding itself exempt from international agreements (for example, on the environment, the international criminal court, women’s liberation, children’s rights, the elimination of racism and xenophobia, human rights, and nuclear disarmament), above the rules that govern all others, particularly concerning the use of lethal force against other nations or peoples. In her own mind Albright may have conflated the two: because we are the good guys, models of virtue and righteousness, our actions will always be good; because our actions are always good, we are not subject to ordinary restrictions that apply to every other nation and people, such as international law; because we are above the law, rules and statutes and sanctions are applied selectively, in our favor, and against the bad guys. Back to the start: We are the good guys. In other words, if the United States takes an action, it is by definition good. We are the indispensable nation—the naked narcissism is widely shared and entirely Trump-worthy.

All patriotism in all places includes the manufactured or imposed capacity to see similar sets of facts in dramatically different ways. Torture, rendition, imprisonment without trial, economic plunder of natural resources, seizure of strategic waterways, domination of the air and the seas, invasions and occupations, extrajudicial killings, assassinations, drone strikes, and the bombing of civilians—all of these atrocities and more are condemned as evil or embraced as good by the governing class and its “amen chorus” of nationalist/patriots depending on only one question: Who’s doing the deed?

For establishment politicians American exceptionalism is a catechism that must be spoken in order to enter “the spectrum of acceptable opinion”: if you’re not wearing an American flag pin and asking God to bless America above all others, if you’re not genuflecting before the altar of American exceptionalism, you’re banished from the arena with no right to speak at all.

The brilliant soliloquy by Will McAvoy (played by Jeff Daniels) on the TV show Newsroom shined a necessary light into that darkness. A hard-bitten reporter decides to cut the crap when a college student asks, “Why is America the greatest country in the world?” He points out that the United States is seventh in the world in literacy, forty-ninth in life expectancy, and one hundred seventy-eighth in infant mortality. “We lead the world in only three categories,” he asserts: number of incarcerated fellow citizens, military spending, and number of adults who believe in angels. The bit went viral as “America is not the greatest country in the world.”

“The American Dream” is the domestic twin of American exceptionalism, and it performs as a kind of social Rorschach test—it could mean a one-family home in the suburbs with a two-car garage to some, marital bliss plus two beautiful and above-average children to others, or a partridge in a pear tree. Maybe it’s job security or a career, good health or a pension when you’re old, a college education for the kids, or season tickets to the Bulls or the Warriors. Yes, yes, yes—achieving the American Dream includes picking up some or preferably all of the above. But the dream can also include rampant consumerism and unchecked acquisition, the freedom to acquire unlimited cash and shop till you drop. It surely implies mobility and climbing spryly up the social ladder ahead of the less worthy. Every cheery politician or run-of-the-mill billionaire will happily tell anyone who will listen: “I’m living the American Dream.” It’s a stuttering echo throughout the culture, the irresistible comfort food of all clichés—it may not be healthy, but it feels good going down.

One part sunny fantasy like the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, one part hackneyed chestnut, the American Dream is a contradiction and most often a deadly illusion—less a concrete, shared aspiration than a shadowy, shapeless phantom reminiscent of the corruption, longing, and despair at the hollow heart of Gatsby’s delusion. Because if the American Dream can mean absolutely anything, then it also means nothing at all.

Yes, the Statue of Liberty still stands in New York harbor with that raised torch and the well-known message of generosity and hope written by Emma Lazarus: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” And yes, that lovely sentiment is undermined daily by our domestic politics, the ugly reality of armed militiamen turning immigrants back at the border, massive detention camps, racial and ethnic and religious profiling, and calls for a national registry for Arabs and Muslims.

Rejecting the suffocating dogma and entangling repercussions of the American Dream is a step toward connecting with our own more authentic human hopes, our community plans and projects, our human-sized dreams and aspirations. If everyone would take a moment to gather in the assembly or the coliseum or the theater, the community center, park, or town square; if we would face one another more authentically, without masks, as who and what we really are, and, importantly, who we aspire to be in the world; if we could speak more directly and plainly to one another and share in just a few words our deepest dreams about how we want to live and where we want to go and what gives meaning to our lives—in that free space and from that wild diversity, a more honest and humane dream could surely emerge: out of many, one.

***

The revolutionary Martin Luther King Jr. was more than an American dreamer—he was an angry pilgrim who set himself on a righteous journey toward justice. He was still the energetic southern preacher of his earliest days in the movement, still the activist and nonviolent warrior, widening his focus to include economic as well as racial justice, world peace as well as nonviolence. In 1967 he wrote: “For years I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions of the society, a little change here, a little change there. Now I feel quite differently. I think you’ve got to have a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values.”2

His revolutionary dream was spelled out in sermons, speeches, books, and published writings from 1965 until he was assassinated in 1968. His vision of a better world linked racial equality with economic justice and bound those to the struggle for global justice and peace. In the last years of his life, Reverend King spoke consistently of combating the triple evils of racism, poverty, and war.

The official Martin Luther King Jr. story is a central part of the American myth, taught to schoolchildren and remembered at prayer breakfasts on the national holiday in his name: there was once a bad time in America when some terrible white people mistreated Black people, but then a saint came along with vision that would transfigure us; he had a dream and gave a speech; he led a boycott and then a march; he won a Nobel Prize. Now we all get along fine. Thank you, Martin Luther King Jr. It’s comforting, perhaps, but it rings false on every count.

Reverend King was an activist for only thirteen years of his short life, and the revolutions in his own thinking over that time were breathtaking. By 1965 he was exhausted and fearful, convinced that America could not be changed through protest alone. He had been defeated again and again—in Chicago, in Memphis—and his allies were rapidly abandoning him. When he demanded economic justice, organized the Poor People’s Campaign, and came out decisively against the invasion and occupation of Vietnam, most of his establishment associates (who had joined late in any case) turned away. He kept on; he stayed the course. By the time he was murdered on April 4, 1968, his approval rating in opinion polls had sunk below 35 percent.

“Insane generosity,” Albert Camus wrote in The Rebel, “is the generosity of rebellion.” It may be that man is mortal, he said, “but let us die resisting; and if our lot is complete annihilation, let us not behave in such a way that it seems justice!” Camus evoked a generosity that consistently refused unfairness and made no calculation as to what that refusal offered in return. “Real generosity toward the future,” Camus concluded, “lies in giving all to the present.” Giving it all, here and now, fully animating our moment in the light between those two infinities of darkness. “I can’t do everything,” we hear a friend lamenting. “Time is short, and I am small.” True. But can you do anything—anything at all? Anything is where you begin. King gave it all, a generous warrior for the future—our future.

The revolutionary King is not the one honored at Senate gatherings or congressional prayer meetings, but the man’s whole life remains important. The controversy over the King statue in the National Mall is emblematic: reactionary lawmakers complained that the commissioned statue made him look “angry.” Yes it did, and yes he was.

The title of his last book was Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?—an excellent question then, and a dramatically more urgent question today. Where do we go from here: chaos or community, socialism or barbarism, the end of capitalism or the end of Earth?

***

Enter the territory of agitation and organizing and movement building. A glance at history shows us that broad and deep transformations are always the result of mobilized popular movements, and that the exploited and oppressed are the true engines of social progress. Lyndon Johnson passed the most far-reaching civil rights legislation since Reconstruction, but he was never part of the rising Black freedom movement. Franklin Delano Roosevelt led significant legislative advances in workers’ rights and social welfare, but he was not part of the powerful labor movement of the time. And Abraham Lincoln, who issued the Emancipation Proclamation ending chattel slavery in the Confederacy, never belonged to an abolitionist party. These three presidents are remembered for Earth-shaking accomplishments, yet none of them acted alone, and in fact each was reacting to intense and sustained fire from below.

Thousands, tens of thousands, and millions right now are mobilizing to stoke those fires from below, to develop a shared faith that injustice can be opposed and justice aspired to, that human solidarity and connectedness can become a living force, that a spirit of outrage can be tempered with vast feelings of love and generosity, and that a full and passionate embrace of the lives we’re given can be combined with an eagerness to move forward toward a worldwide beloved community.

We are relentlessly told by the defenders of the status quo that whatever problems we encounter are personal and not social, and that any political problems will only be solved by the elite. Our job is to stare wistfully at the power we have little or no access to: the White House, the medieval auction block called the Congress, the Supreme Court, and more. These can be sites of struggle, to be sure, but if we become mesmerized or caught in their thrall we diminish our own confidence in ourselves and mishandle our own latent collective power, the power we have full access to: in the shop and the factory and the workplace, the neighborhood and the community and the street, the school and the classroom—which for ordinary people is more real and more relevant than the distant power shaped by wealth and theft.

We will not bring a social movement into being through willpower alone, but neither does it make sense to wait patiently for a movement to present itself, springing fully formed from the head of Zeus. The world we need and desire will be forged in action by people struggling for something better, working together in common cause, developing and transforming ourselves as we gather momentum and energy in the hopeful tradition of revolution. We must open our eyes, we must act, and we must rethink and start again. The painstaking work begins, and it can never really be finished.

Part of movement building involves breaking from the “TINA” trap: There Is No Alternative. The privileged and the powerful insist that we accept on faith that this is the best of all possible worlds, and that even with all of its imperfections, it is inevitable and, well, There Is No Alternative. The agitator and organizer, the activist and revolutionary posit alternatives, demonstrate in a thousand ways that the world as such is a choice, and then mobilize to reach for our dreams and demand the impossible.

Working together against war and empire and environmental degradation, struggling shoulder to shoulder for racial and gender justice, labor, and human rights, we search for and find our common interests as we expand our sense of expectation and possibility. Learning to talk and work together is itself a hopeful, rebel act in these difficult and exciting times. Struggles in the streets build cooperation and solidarity as we reject the neoliberal and austerity traps imposed by capital.

That possible other world is a world of socialism with participatory democracy and freedom, a world in which the needs of people come before profit and active participation is constantly mobilized. Explicitly rejecting capitalism is essential for movement-builders today—capitalism has no answers to the crises we face, and zombie capitalism, casino capitalism, Wizard-of-Oz capitalism is in fact the root of the problem. Insisting that the socialist alternative we fight for is inseparably tied to democracy is also indispensable—we must create a space where workers of every type plan, manage, and control in order to satisfy social needs. Authentic democracy mobilizes the capacities of working folks and the broad masses of people to define the society we want and need, embracing the revolutionary practice of simultaneously changing circumstances and changing ourselves.

We reject the logic of the rich and the powerful; we rethink and recast issues in more robust and humane frames; we connect the issues in order to find our natural allies and comrades and to develop a more comprehensive view. Whoever we are and wherever we work and play, we must remind ourselves that movements don’t make themselves. It’s up to each and all of us to arise every day with our minds set on freedom, and to commit to movement building as a regular and required part of what we do.

***

On the important issues of the last two centuries, America’s radicals from Ida B. Wells Barnett, Jane Addams, and Emma Goldman to John Brown, Harriet Tubman, Eugene Debs, and W. E. B. Du Bois have gotten it right by going to the root of matters. The legacy continued with the work of Ella Baker, Septima Clark, Shulamith Firestone, Gloria Steinem, Dorothy Day to Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X forty years ago and on up to today and the efforts of James Thindwa, Bill Fletcher, and Karen Lewis, Grace Lee Boggs, Ai-jen Poo, Naomi Klein, Medea Benjamin, Kathy Boudin, Michelle Alexander, Angela Davis, Kathy Kelly, Barbara Ransby, Asha Rosa, and Reyna Wences. Of course, as Ella Baker said of Reverend King, “Martin didn’t make the movement, the movement made Martin,” and it’s true: For every remembered leader there were thousands, tens of thousands, and millions putting their shoulders on history’s wheel and sharing a faith that injustice can be opposed and justice aspired to, a belief in human solidarity and connectedness as a living force, a spirit of outrage tempered with vast feelings of love and generosity, a commitment to open-ended dialogue where the questions are always open to debate, and a full and passionate embrace of the life we’re given combined with an eagerness to move forward striving to build a worldwide beloved community.

In 1894 Eugene Debs was jailed for six months for violating an injunction against supporting the Pullman Strike, and a hundred thousand people gathered in the rain in Chicago to greet him upon his release. He linked the cause of labor to the aspirations of the revolutionaries of 1776, and famously said, “If I could lead you into the Promised Land, I would not do it, for someone else would come along and lead you out.” And in that same year the philosopher John Dewey took a teaching position at the University of Chicago, and wrote to his wife that “Chicago is the place to make you appreciate at every turn the opportunity which chaos affords.”3

Chaos and opportunity—a constant contradiction in America, always another incongruity or disparity or dispute or deviation to look into, always a challenge, an opposition or an absurdity, and until the end of time another pathway opening. As I noted earlier, standing directly next to the world as such—the world we see and the places we take for granted—stands another world, a possible world, a world that could be or should be, but is not yet. And that’s surely a good thing because contradiction may save us. Nothing is settled, once and for all, everything is on the move and in the mix, and there’s much more to know, and to do. We’re in the middle of the muddle—right from the start.

In our pursuit of a world powered by love and reaching toward joy and justice, imagination is our most formidable and unyielding ally—the people’s common asset, an endowment to each one and the indispensable weapon of the powerless. Yes, they control the massive military-industrial complex, the sophisticated surveillance systems, the prison cells, and the organized propaganda—and these are on constant display as if to remind us every minute that there is no hope of a world without the instruments of death and oppression—and we have only our minds, our desires, and our dreams—and each other. And, yes, in a fixed war or a traditional conflict we are finished before we start. But it’s also true that there’s no power on Earth stronger than the imagination unleashed and the collective human soul on fire. In irregular combat or a guerrilla struggle that pits our free imaginations against the stillborn and stunted imaginations of the war-makers and the mercenaries, we will win.

When we choose life, we leap into the whirlwind with courage and hope. Hope is a choice, after all, and confidence a politics—our collective antidote to cynicism and despair. It’s the capacity to notice or invent alternatives, and then to do something about it, to get busy in projects of repair. I have a T-shirt that reads: “Depressed? Maybe it’s political.”

The future is entirely unknown and unknowable; optimism, then, is simply idle dreaming, while pessimism is no more than a dreary turn of mind—they are twins, two sides of the same deterministic coin. Both optimists and pessimists delude themselves into thinking they know for sure what’s coming. They don’t; no one does. The day before Rosa Parks sat down on that bus, Jim Crow was immutable; the day after, the Third American Revolution was unstoppable. The day before John Brown’s assault on Harpers Ferry, the end of slavery was impossible; the day after, abolition was inevitable. The day before the Zapatistas declared a state of war against Mexico from its small base in Chiapas, the idea of a peasant and indigenous-led civil resistance was unthinkable; now it is a model for actions across the globe. And had I been asked my advice on the day before Occupy Wall Street set up those tents, I’d have said it won’t be effective; the day after, I dived in headfirst.

Choosing hopefulness is holding out the possibility of change. It’s living with one foot in the mud and muck of the world as it is, while another foot strides forward toward a world that could be. Hope is never a matter of sitting down and waiting patiently; hope is nourished in action, and it assumes that we are—each and all of us—incomplete as human beings. We have things to do, mountains to climb, problems to solve, injuries to heal. We can choose to see life as infused with the capacity to cherish happiness, to respect evidence and argument and reason, to uphold integrity, and to imagine a world more loving, more peaceful, more joyous, and more just than the one we were given—and we should. Of course we live in dark times, and some of us inhabit even darker places, and, yes, we act mostly in the dark. But we are never freer as teachers and students, citizens, residents, activists and organizers, and artists and thinkers than when we shake ourselves free and refuse to see the situation or the world before us as the absolute end of the matter.

***

The planet is as it is—a mass of contradictions and tragedies; rich with beauty and human accomplishment, vicious with human denial; an organism that drains us and replenishes us at the same time, gives us life and kills us—and it’s asking us to dive in: study, imagine, ask queer questions, read, learn, organize, talk to strangers, mobilize, and display our ethical aspirations publicly. We might take a page from that great poet/teacher Walt Whitman:

Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number for men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul.4

Turn out all the lights and ignite a small candle in any corner of the room. That little light held aloft anywhere challenges the darkness everywhere. One candle. We can always do something, and something is where we begin. The tools are everywhere—humor and art, protest and spectacle, the quiet, patient intervention and the angry and urgent thrust—and the rhythm of and recipe for activism is always the same: We open our eyes and look unblinkingly at the immense and dynamic world we find before us; we allow ourselves to be astonished by the beauty and horrified at the suffering all around us; we organize ourselves, link hands with others, dive in, speak up, and act out; we doubt that our efforts have made the important difference we’d hoped for, and so we rethink, recalibrate, look again, and dive in once more.

The great rebel Rosa Luxemburg, jailed for her opposition to World War I, lived her life to that rhythm. She sent a letter from prison to a friend and comrade who’d complained to her that their revolutionary work was suffering terribly without Luxemburg’s day-to-day leadership. First, Red Rosa wrote, stop whining—excellent advice in any circumstance. She went on to urge her friend to be more of a mensch. Oh, I can’t define mensch for you, she said, but what I mean is that you should strive to be a person who loves your own life enough to appreciate the sunset and the sunrise, to enjoy a bottle of wine over dinner with friends, or to take a walk by the sea. But you must also love the world enough to put your shoulder on history’s great wheel when history demands it. Working that out may become for each and all of us a collective daily challenge—it’s also the way forward toward commitment and balance.

Choose life; choose possibility; choose rebellion and revolution. Be a mensch.

Demand the impossible!