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The
Worst and Best of Times
By Grace Lee Boggs
As we begin the New
Year it is the worst of times.
*We are quagmired in a illegal war in which over
600,000 Iraqis and nearly 3000 Americans have been
slaughtered and hundreds of billions of dollars
squandered - while our schools and infrastructures
crumble and millions are unemployed or underemployed
because giant corporations have outsourced our jobs to
countries where they can make
more profit with cheaper labor.
*Our heedless pursuit of material and technological
growth has created a planetary emergency. The ozone
layer is being depleted, temperatures are rising, polar
ice caps are melting, fisheries collapsing, species
vanishing.
*Inequality in the U.S. is now greater than in any
industrialized nation. Five percent of Americans own 59%
of all wealth while the bottom 20% own zero wealth.
*Under the guise of defense against terrorism, our
government has violated the Geneva Convention and the
U.S. Constitution, torturing detainees, suspending
habeas corpus, instituting warrant-less domestic
spying.
*Our media is owned and controlled by huge multinational
corporations who treat the American people as consumers
and audience rather than as active citizens.
*Our increasingly undemocratic and dysfunctional
political system has saddled us with a President who
has denied reality for so long that he can no longer
distinguish between facts and his personal fantasies.
BUT IT IS ALSO THE BEST OF TIMES.
*Americans are creating new forms of community-based
institutions (ESOPs, coops, community development
corporations, etc.) to give “we the people” ownership
and control over the way we make our living.
*Entrepreneurs are creating businesses in which the
health of the environment, the well-being of
communities, the empowerment of employees are all part
of the bottom line.
*Community and school gardens and farmers markets are
springing up everywhere as growing numbers of Americans
recognize the nutritional, ecological and economic
benefits of local food initiatives.
*State governments, Mayors and City Councils are
assuming the responsibility, abdicated by the federal
government, to reduce global warming pollutants through
innovative conservation measures and utilization of
clean, renewable sources of energy.
*Communities are asserting their right to
self-government by repudiating the concept of corporate
personhood which has enabled giant corporations to
override local decisions protecting health, safety,
family farms and the environment. www.poclad.org/
*Dozens of Western Pennsylvania townships have banned
corporate hog farms and the spreading of toxic sewage
sludge on farmland; two have actually revoked corporate
constitutional rights to override local decisions.
*Communities and counties in California have prohibited
further incursions from chain restaurants, the planting
of genetically engineered crops, and are exploring
ordinances revoking corporate constitutional rights in
their local jurisdiction.
*Voters in Northern California’s Humboldt Country have
approved a ballot initiative that bans non-local
corporate money in elections.
*Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma,
North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wisconsin have all
passed laws outlawing corporate ownership of farms.
*A movement to build a U.S. media that serves the needs
of active citizens in a democracy is in the making,
spearheaded by veteran journalist Bill Moyers and a new
generation of allied, independent media makers.
*In the 1999 “Battle of Seattle” tens of thousands of
individuals and groups, representing very diverse
sections of society, closed down the WTO. Since then
hundreds of thousands of individuals and groups from
around the world have gathered at World Social Forums
to make clear that “Another World is possible.”
* In the process of convening these global
demonstrations and gatherings and in these local
initiatives a new form of Democracy is being created
which is much more participatory, deliberative,
cooperative, consensual, more rooted in community and
more horizontal than the representative democracies
that were struggled for and
achieved within 19th and 20th century nation-states.
In these and other imaginative ways Americans are
beginning to build the movement to make the structural
changes projected by Dr. Martin Luther King 40 years
ago in “Time to Break the Silence” and “Where do we go
from here: Community or Chaos? “
These changes, King explained, must take us beyond
traditional Capitalism, which encourages cutthroat
competition and selfish ambitions and inspires men to be
more I-centered than Thou-centered, AND
Communism which reduces men to a cog in the
wheel of the state.
Everyone who cares about Democracy, Sustainability,
Community and living a life of purpose and meaning can
help build this new movement that is taking us beyond
traditional Capitalism and Communism.
That’s why, this is not only the worst but also the best
of times.
posted 28 December 2006 |
