For me, sad but true, I find inspiration in some of the Founders. Sure, I know what they were really all about, but I also believe that the goal is to take the kernel of truth in their words and try to create a society no longer based on class. So, I read this [1] by Jefferson and think, "You got it. If this is what you dreamed, buddy, I know what my job is, to carry out this legacy. Sure, you were mistaken in many ways, but the kernel of truth is there and it's worth fighting and dying for."
I think of the history of struggles against slavery, Jim Crow, I think of slave autobiographies I read. I think of DuBois. I think of the injustice they faced and the fact that they kept on keeping on under far worse conditions that I could ever imagine with my cushy little life. I think of the women's suffrage struggle and the women's rights movements. I think of how they changed the world and my world better. I owe them. I owe my kids. I owe my "other sons". I owe the guy I meant in the unemployment office the other day. I owe the guy like him, sitting in an unemployment office in Duluth. I owe the people struggling under the u.s. reign of terror all over the world.
I come back to Jefferson. I refuse to concede that there is no moral vision in being a wonk! Sure, I know _all_ about enlightenment terror. I know about the violence of grand theory and metanarratives and the reign of terror imposed by 'science' -- or was it a reign of terror imposed by science in the hands of capitalist class warrors?
The generation which commences a revolution can rarely complete it. Habituated from their infancy to passive submission of body and mind to their kings and priests...their experience, their ignorance and bigotry make them instruments in the hands of the Bonapartes and Iturbides, to defeat their own rights and purposes. This is the present situation in Europe and Spanish America. But it is not desperate. The light which has been shed on mankind by the art of printing has eminently changed the condition of the world..It continues to spread... To attain all this, however, rivers of blood must yet flow and years of desolation pass over. Yet the object is worth rivers of blood and years of desolation, for what inheritance so valuable can man leave to his posterity?
--Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to John Adams (1823)
At 11:45 PM 11/6/2004, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>>m I the only one who was not particularly impressed by him? He seemed
>>nice. He had a nice story. He had nice credentials. And maybe he was good
>>in Illinois politics? I don't know.
>>--
>>Michael Perelman
>
>Barack Obama appealed to rich educated white voters by boasting of his
>responsibility for the welfare reform and placated working-class
>constituencies by emphasizing that he softened its blow:
"We live under the Confederacy. We're a podunk bunch of swaggering pious hicks."
--Bruce Sterling