An insightful and inspiring reflection of a youth’s personal transformation against the backdrop of momentous events, when the world is pivoting with even greater upheaval and turmoil yet to come. The piece was written shortly after the author attended World Can’t Wait’s Emergency Teach-In in New York on October 30th.
The Little Idealist in All of Us
I have a confession to make, for the past few years; my inner idealist has been under attack. What’s an “inner idealist”?, you may be asking yourself.
My inner idealist is the voice inside of me that speaks up at all the most inconvenient times. It pipes up with its objections as I’m watching the violent images of a war waged in the name of a lie. It’s been known to make its point by producing hot angry tears, the kind that linger at the brims of my unbelieving and unblinking eyes, the kind that sometimes spill down my cheek.
“This doesn’t have to be this way! You can change it, you can do something!” it loves to preach. But it soon quieted down. You see it was under attack, and its attacker was apathy.
I looked around and noticed that not only did other people not seem to have an inner idealistic voice, I noticed that they did not appreciate mine either.
“When I was your age,” they told me, “I was an idealist too. I thought I could change the world. Hey don’t you have any other interests? You”re getting yourself all worked up.”
These words were at first treasonous to my little idealist. She huffed and puffed and rebuked these attacks pretty energetically. But a strange thing happened after a while… The voice began to grow lower, and eventually it was replaced with a new feeling… a deep and heavy dread.
The new feeling was not alone. It had a voice too; you may know it as doubt or disillusionment.
“How can you change things?” it nagged me smugly.
“People don’t care. Look around you. Nobody’s doing a damn thing. They know about it, but people just don’t care. This thing is hopeless. And seriously, why don’t you develop some other interests? Isn’t the new season of Desperate Housewives starting?”
My inner idealist had once crawled up and lodged itself in my throat with the unrelenting conviction that things did not have to be this way. But it had begun to wash away as I faltered in its protection. I had become complacent. It had ceased to be.
I have struggled, as others have struggled with what seems to be an uphill battle for many of us watching helpless as we are bombarded with violence, uncertainty, and the ominous harbingers for what lies even further down the road.
Coupled together with the never-ending barrage of bad news we are assailed with on a daily basis, is a tacit message–you are powerless.
I believe that most of all, we are really watching each other. I was talking with a teacher the other day that said she was astonished by one boy’s response to a discussion on current events they were having in class. The student, a 14 year-old 8th grader in her class told her that he simply could not believe she was telling the truth about things like torture, war, and secret prisons. When she asked him why, he replied simply;
“Well I just don’t believe those things are really happening. If they were people would be doing something about it.”
My inner idealist, bruised and battered, gave its last little plea one day a few months ago as I flipped through a copy of the New York Times. I saw an ad-World Can’t Wait-Drive out the Bush Regime! it read, its bold letters staring up at me. I looked at it for a good five minutes before it really registered that all the while I had been feeling helpless, people had been organizing, fundraising and taking real steps to stop the things I had been crying about and had long since given hope on.
The more I thought about it that night, the louder my poor weakened idealist started to shout in my head. Its voice had returned, and it echoed, vibrated and sent flutters of indignation, hope and determination into my heart and into my veins.
I am here to tell you that it’s not hopeless. I am here to sound the battle call for your inner idealist. Disillusionment can make you believe that idealism is a human defect and a form of frailty but I’m here to tell you that its there, that it lays within you still, undetected, dormant and powerful. You don’t always know it but it sometimes hides under the blanket of safety that doubt and disbelief provide for it, when it’s just been attacked for too long.
Throughout history, we have continued learning, our theories, knowledge and understandings of the world have evolved alongside with our ability to refine our notions into facts. As our understanding of the truth changed, our behavior changed.
A Teach-In, an educational forum where people could be given the facts and the truth in a way where it was not thrown at them, but explained to them, could alter the actions of people around the country, by altering the root of action itself-understanding.
“If we cannot understand, we cannot act.”
We are a generation that has an unprecedented amount of information coming at us from all angles, but a severe deficit in actual understanding. People are given opinions without being told the perspectives they are born of, people are shown circumstances without being given pretext or context.
Despite the fact that ties between Saddam Hussein and 9-11 have been openly deemed nonexistent by President Bush himself, a recent CNN poll found 43% percent of Americans still believe Saddam Hussein was personally responsible for September 11th.
Those kinds of numbers do not signify an unwillingness to face the truth, they point to something much bigger, something incredibly more insidious than just the simplified idea that Americans are just not concerned with reality. Detachment on this kind of scale can only be achieved by an almost criminal failure on the part of the government and the media in educating people about the world their tax dollars are being use to mold. The only way to combat an atmosphere of confusing and demagogic rhetoric is to aggressively educate. Throughout history tyrannical governments have used disinformation to disarm people from making decisions that are in their own best interest.
On Monday night, the launch of World Can’t Wait’s national teach-in campaign began. I sat down anxious and excited to hear from five speakers, all experts in their field. I am well aware of the litany of crimes committed by the Bush administration, so I did not expect to learn many new things, but I was looking forward to the prospect of even more people having a chance to walk away with a greater understanding.
The first speaker Les Roberts co-authored a recent lancet study placing the Iraqi civilian casualty number at 650,000. Just when I thought that could not be bad enough, I listened to Roberts in horror as he described in lucid detail the spin hits that were systematically placed on and carried out on both studies he has done on this subject.
I hold my bachelors degree in Journalism. My exposure to news leaves little room for naivety when it comes to the vicious world of spin, but I still found myself genuinely aghast at the degree of blatant deception Mr. Roberts described that night. For example, he talked about one instance involving the Washington Post in which a reporter he had interviewed with went on to write an article starkly contradicting the information Roberts had given him on the study.
When it comes to this level of disinformation taking place within the media, I literally am dumbstruck. Regardless of my experience, however limited within this field–before hearing this account by Roberts, (which I did double check) I admit that its been hard for me to accept that this kind of blatant, agenda-pushing lying goes on; carried out by professionals in the most respected of newspapers.
As children, teenagers and adults, the idea of a free and independent press here in America has been echoed countless times. But after hearing Roberts speak, I realized once again the part in which education plays in debunking the myths that are necessary to spurn the kind of action that I had been desperately waiting to see in other people. The absence of which, had delivered a serious blow to my hopeful inner-idealist. As human beings we base our knowledge on past experiences. Until we are exposed to something, we are incapable of really coming to grasp with the enormity of a concept that contradicts a belief we have held pretty consistently throughout our lives.
Amazingly enough, the next speaker, Bill Goodman continued to pull a rug from underneath me that I had believed to be gone for ages. Goodman, an attorney for Guantanamo Bay prisoners gave detail after horrifying detail of the conditions that prisoners are subjected to, in a degree of candor that I have not seen in the hours and days of coverage I have watched on the subject.
When people debate the details of torture in terms that make people objects and in which the subjects of torture are never given human faces, it may anger and scare you.
But to place a human face on the people involved in these stories, is to be delivered a metaphorical kick to the gut, because you”re being presented with the actual barbarousness of a subject discussed by talking heads on television who make no effort to really impart their viewers with a real understanding.
I knew torture was wrong when I walked into the event that night, but hearing Goodman explain the terms of the Military Commissions Act, redefined my sense of urgency when it comes to driving out the Bush regime.
The military commissions act, was described by news media as a “compromise”, brokered and signed upon by John McCain, the most outspoken critic of torture that exists in congress–a former POW himself.
Goodman described what the Military commissions act means from the perspective of one Maher Arar, the Canadian software engineer who, despite the Canadian government’s urgent pleas, was sent by the United States to Syria, where he would surely be subjected to vicious torture.
Next up to speak was Cristina Page, author of “How the Pro-Choice movement saved America”. I personally do not think I would have an abortion because of my own personal beliefs, but I have never agreed with the idea that I have any kind of say over what another human being or woman does with their body. Nor have I ever realistically believed that I could honestly, definitively, pinpoint what I would do if I was put into that situation.
I always thought the Pro-Choice movement was centered on abortion, and the legitimacy of the procedure, treatment and not prevention. I felt a bit suspicious of that, since I tend to favor the avoidance of any kind of drastic medical maneuvering if it can be prevented.
So, I”ll admit I was so shocked, honestly, with how many misconceptions I had about that movement, most of which I recognize now that I had held subconsciously. Sometimes we do not even recognize the unfounded bias within ourselves because we have held it for so long and because of how strongly it’s been reinforced.
Until now there was a part of me that, in line with common sense thinking, that imagined that those at the forefront of the Pro-Life movement would take the necessary steps to lessen abortion rates as needed, using the proven methods laid out by causal studies that draw undeniable parallels between what lowers those rates and what doesn’t.
In actuality the Pro-Life movement has sacrificed life as its priority in the name of religious and ideological battles that are more concerned with depravity than saving life.
The Pro Life movement actively rejects solutions that could possibly save pain, heartache and the lives it claims to protect. Just as understanding precedes behavior, it is necessary to observe the behavior of those around us honestly, in order to understand the wisdom it is working from. Up until now I had not been exposed to the fact that the Pro Life movement’s actions do not match the beliefs it purportedly stands for.
The second to last speaker Larry Everest, was for me one of the most inspirational of the night, but he too also made a very powerful distinction that really underlined the urgency of this campaign to drive out the Bush Regime.
One of the strongest factors in the demobilization and complacency in people today has been their belief that playing by the rules laid out to us by politicians, we can gain footing and reverse this the steady advance down a crash course most people currently accept our country has been on for the past few years.
Everest even pointed out the difference between the movements against both the Iraq and Vietnam wars, two conflicts whose names, likeness, and nature, have become increasingly synonymous for US aggression gone horribly wrong. A fundamental difference between the anti-war movement generated by the Vietnam was and the anti-war sentiments expressed today is that the Vietnam war was unquestionably seen as immoral by its objectors, while the Iraq war is ubiquitously characterized by its objectors as a poorly executed mistake. Finally the most inspiring part of Everest’s speech was to me, his appeal to the audience’s inner idealist. He spoke loudly to mine. He recalled a portion of Henry Kissenger’s memoir in which Kissenger wrote about the Vietnam War protesters. Kisssenger remarked in his memoir that a “small group” of radical people had successfully encircled the US Government at the time and forced it to move.
Looking out into the crowd, Everest made his impassioned plea. I heard it loudly and so did my inner-idealist, which I am proud to report is as healthy as ever, alive and speaking loudly once again. Mr. Everest and the voice of my inner idealist, which I have come to also know as the voice of my heart, are the voices I believe lay in different degrees of dormancy in all of us….
Truth can come in many forms, shapes sizes and colors. That night it came in the form of five passionate speakers, but its voice resounded because of its familiar message.
“Do something,” it said. “This doesn’t have to be this way. You can change it, you MUST do something.”