by Cheryl Abraham
I must confess, my brain, my
heart, and my conscience are on “overload.” Every day I am bombarded
with the latest outrage, the latest sad and sick news, the latest abomination
created, controlled, manufactured, and contributed for and by the Bush
regime. My levels of anger, frustration, anxiety, fear and worry are
at an all time high. My sense of injustice is so raw at this point that
the daily trip into this zone is a painful adrenaline ride. Many days
I feel as if I am in a battle zone, the Bush regime’s war on terror
is also waging a war on my sanity and on my life, but then I see the
pictures and read the stories of the suffering of the Iraqi people at
the hands of the U.S. military
and their own people
and this sobers me up from that self absorbed thought, so do the stories
of the vets from Winter Soldier testimonies, as if I have anything
to complain about, as if almost anything in my life I am experiencing
could quantify as terror.
It is not as if I am a hapless
victim of this overwhelming amount of “terrifying” information.
I choose to listen daily to AirAmerica radio, I choose to rent and watch
documentaries sure to make my blood pressure rise, and I choose to go
to my computer as much as I can throughout the day, read vast amounts
of articles and commentaries, and then double check the information
when I have time, and even when I don’t have the time, (which tends
to create conflicts in other facets of my life). No one is forcing me
to do these things. I do them all under the power of my own free
will. I frequently and daily pass on the information that I think worthy,
often to the annoyance of those on my email lists. I also watch mainstream
media just to see what it misses instead of what it informs me of. I
get my cynical rocks off watching the inane, redundant, stupefying junk
that the news media passes off as “information”. It is fully within
my own personal power to “turn off” and turn away from the reality
we all face.
Many people I know choose to
turn off, they adhere to Thomas Gray’s advice, “Where ignorance
is bliss, tis folly to be wise,” after all every one of us has a lot
to deal with just living our regular lives. A lot of people I know feel
that any feelings of responsibility for what our government is doing
is just too much of an added burden, and they wonder why I bother, that
just the fact that they are going to vote in this election is enough:
they”ll have done their civic duty, and that’s all that’s required.
Unfortunately the reality we face requires much, much more than passively
casting a vote, or voicing our dissent at next weekend’s dinner party.
Facing Reality
Why is it so important to face
the reality we find ourselves in? Jung said it best, “Consciously analyzed
suffering produces growth while letting nothing roll besides the good
times produces stagnation and delusion,”
Delusion, what a wonderful description of the seemingly endless capacity
for people to ignore reality. And just what is it that the vast majority
of us are deluding ourselves about?
We delude ourselves when we
think that what is happening will just magically “go away” with
the next president. We delude ourselves when we think that an election
is the cure for what ails us. We delude ourselves when we deny our own
individual responsibility in changing the trajectory of where our country
is headed. We delude ourselves when we think that nothing can be done
to stop what is happening. We delude ourselves when we think that the
“War on Terror” is only a war on evil crazy terrorists.
This delusion may feel blissful,
but it is a dangerous delusion because as it says in The Call of World
Can’t Wait,
“That which you will not resist and mobilize to stop, you will learn
– or be forced – to accept.”
What are the things that you will learn – or be forced- to accept?
What have you already accepted and at some level have stopped questioning?
Recently I attended a showing
of the film “American Blackout” and during the discussion that
followed the film I stated the possibility that there may be no election
at all considering the unprecedented
powers that George Bush has put into play to declare martial law. One person in the room said that stating
such a thing shows why there is no powerful anti-war movement, that
such statements turn people off and make me sound crazy. In deference
to the “vibe” in the room I let this man have his say without argument
only because every one else was rolling their eyes at his rant, but
to those reading this who agree with what he was trying to say, let
me ask you this: ten years ago did you think in your wildest paranoid
“government is evil” fantasy that this country and your president, would lie us into
war with a sovereign
nation, or codify torture,
abolish habeas corpus rights,
squash the posse comitatus
act, spy on Americans, or that a “Principals Committee,”
made up of top level people in a presidential administration would gather
together and outline and approve the use of “combined” interrogation
techniques – TORTURE — on terrorist suspects, and these leaders of
YOUR COUNTRY would sit together in a room to openly discuss torture
techniques, to approve of them, and then work together to circumvent
and manipulate the law so that the archaic and ineffective practice of torture, which is absolutely illegal, could then become “legal” and
there would be no accountability for those who had approved it or practiced
it? If I had whipped out my crystal ball in 1998 and told you this was
where Reaganism, conservatism, neo-cons, corporate greed, and a do-nothing
congress, and a do-nothing American public and more would lead this
country, you would have said I was nuts – crazy – a conspiracy theorist,
yet these facts are a very small taste of the very reality we, you and
I, face here in 2008. And it’s not a conspiracy theory if it is FACT.
This Must End
The reality is that these revelations
while horrifying on their own, point to a future of even more horrifying
consequences if we as individuals, and as a nation of people do not
put a stop to these outrages. Delusion and denial are no longer an option.
We must demand justice for what has happened, we must work to change
what is happening right now, and we must prevent war with Iran, we must
prevent the deaths and torture of more untold numbers of people, we
must bring the criminal Bush regime to accountability, and we must work
together for a sustainable peaceful future.
So, how the hell do we do that?
We know the media isn’t going to help us, we know that the democrats
aren’t going to do it, and damn if we aren’t pretty wrapped up in
our daily lives, so how can we bring the spinning wheels of horror to
a screeching halt? Well, you”re going to have to step up. You, your
family, your neighbors, your friends, and this nation of peoples, frankly,
they”re going to have to step up. World Can’t Wait says in its FAQ
page:
We’re talking about tens of
thousands going into the streets with a clear standard — BRING THIS TO A
HALT — and a spirited
call to others to join this. Our recent statement envisions “a
great wave of people unleashed from the huge reservoir of people who
are deeply distressed over the direction in which the Bush regime is
dragging the country and the world, moving together on the same occasion,
making, through their firm stand and their massive numbers, a powerful
political statement that could not be ignored: refusing that day to
work, or walking out from work, taking off from school or walking out
of school — joining together, rallying and marching, drawing forward
many more with them, and in many and varied forms of creative and meaningful
political protest throughout the day, letting it be known that they
are determined to bring this whole disastrous course to a halt by driving
out the Bush Regime through the mobilization of massive political opposition.”
That kind of protest
could and would make a difference. It would begin to galvanize into
an active political and moral force the millions who hate the way things
are going but are now paralyzed. The possibility of turning things around
and onto a much more favorable direction would take on a whole new dimension
of reality. This would send a different message to the whole world.
Face it: no great change has
ever been won without protest, without people acting “from
the bottom up” to set a new agenda, without struggle, without
upheaval. No. The protests in 2002 and 2003 didn’t succeed in preventing
the Iraq war, but they let the whole world know that Bush was acting
in the face of huge public opposition. They put him on the moral defensive.
And they helped to set terms for the future – as the ugliness of the
war got revealed and people increasingly have come to oppose it. The
problem is not that our actions have had no impact; it’s that we
have not acted up enough. A new season of upsurge must start now,
one that sets out to reverse the whole direction in which this society
is now hurtling, and to dramatically change the course of history.
The stakes now are too high
to keep going through the motions of protest as usual — politics that
say: the people in government exercise power and make the corresponding
decisions and our only role is to protest certain things they do. Instead,
we need to act on the truth that when people take massive and independent
political action, they can change things very profoundly. People in
the 60’s did not ask the liberal Democrats then in office for permission
to fight for civil rights and Black liberation or to protest the war.
They just did it, mobilizing millions and effectively saying in the
immortal words of Bob Dylan that “your sons and daughters are beyond
your command.” The whole ethos of a generation and a country changed.
As it says in The Call of World Can’t Wait: “We need
more than fighting Bush’s outrages one at a time, constantly losing
ground to the whole onslaught. We must, and can, aim to create a political
situation where the Bush regime’s program is repudiated, where Bush
himself is driven from office, and where the whole direction he has
been taking society is reversed. We, in our millions, must and can take
responsibility to change the course of history”..This will not be
easy. If we speak the truth, they will try to silence us. If we act,
they will try to stop us. But we speak for the majority, here and around
the world, and as we get this going we are going to reach out to the
people who have been so badly fooled by Bush and we are NOT going to
stop.
The point is this: history
is full of examples where people who had right on their side fought
against tremendous odds and were victorious. And it is also full of
examples of people passively hoping to wait it out, only to get swallowed
up by a horror beyond what they ever imagined. The future is unwritten.
WHICH ONE WE GET IS UP TO US.”
So, when are
you going to step up?
Cheryl Abraham is a member
of the Steering Committee of the Seattle chapter of World Can’t Wait.