John wrote:
> I'm with Doug and with Nathan Newman, who has repeatedly argued
> here that reliance on the courts and on legalistic strategies of
> making change is a big mistake.
There is one piece of law that grassroots organizing and electoral politics as usual could never have gotten us: the Bill of Rights. That's essentially a reminder that America did have revolution. At no other time, it seems to me, have Americans supported the Bill of Rights in enough numbers and with enough militancy to get them passed.
<blockquote>Threats of censorship elicit different reactions from students who hail from different parts of the country. Less than half of the students from the South (48 percent) agree that newspapers should be allowed to publish freely without government approval of a story, as compared with 54 percent of Northeastern students and 53 percent of Midwestern students. Suburban students (47 percent) are also less likely to agree with that right to publish than their cohorts from urban high schools (54 percent) or rural high schools (52 percent). High school students from the South and the West feel only a bit more intensely than their cohorts from other regions that the First Amendment goes “too far” in the rights it guarantees. So, 36 percent of students from the South and 37 percent of students from the West agreed with that statement, as compared with 34 percent from the Northeast and 32 percent from the Midwest who said they agreed that the First Amendment goes too far.
"The Future of the First Amendment," February 2005, <http:// firstamendment.jideas.org/latestresearch/wp1_finding1.php></blockquote>
And that's the First Amendment. Ask them about the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments, and what would they say?
Yoshie Furuhashi <http://montages.blogspot.com> <http://monthlyreview.org> <http://mrzine.org>