It’s hard to retain optimism.
I read a lot of history books (am I a masochist?) so it has become obvious to me that we have been going backward as a genuine civil-ization for quite a while.
I’ve just finished reading A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE WORLD by Chris Harman (a companion book to Howard Zinn’s fabulous A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES). It explains how we got where we are today, and it doesn’t end well, because the industrial/capitalist society that has been wrested into place by the power brokers amongst us doesn’t appear to be heading in a direction that will end well for anybody, including the myopic power brokers.
Time and again, a great many of us have decided to resist, revolt, and push back against the inexorable avarice of subjugating “overseers”– and time and again, no matter how long the struggle or the number of casualties, the power brokers have always won. As a sad result, we are on a collision course with extinction on a massive scale — human, fauna, flora, insect. And we’re responsible. Not the rapacious, sociopathic power brokers. WE ARE. Because we have not stood together as a united front to stop SUPPORTING them with our blood, sweat, tears, and cash. (I’m guilty of shopping at Amazon and, on the rarest of occasions, Wal-Mart.)
The greedy aren’t looking beyond their own self-interested lifetimes
And sometimes it seems that most of us aren’t, either. Personally, I’m tempted as hell to say, “I only have another twenty years or so here (if that), why should I bust my chops trying to make things any better? I should retire and let the younger generations take over the task I’ve been doing for most of my life, so I can enjoy what’s left of the time I have here.”
But I can’t.
Mark Twain wrote, “People call me a pessimist in my old age, but I’m not. I am an optimist who did not arrive.”
He also wrote, “There is no sadder sight than a young pessimist, except an old optimist.”
That’s it. I’m sad! I’m beyond sad; I frequently find myself on the verge of despair. We flattered our species by naming it homo sapiens (wise man, knowledgable man). We certainly have knowledge, but we don’t use it wisely.We rationalize our cruelty, our ability to look the other way when others are suffering. Too many of us ignore the subjugation of other human and non-human beings. In essence, we allow the rape and pillage of the only home we have.
But we haven’t always! City/states, national and international boundaries, divisive religions, industrialization and capitalism are just seconds old when you consider the total span of time our species has inhabited Mother Earth. Up until the last two centuries, we didn’t have the technology or the tools to utterly subdue and subjugate the planet to our will. Our most recent ancestors had to be indoctrinated and then coerced (under the lash and under the gun too many times to elaborate here) to “adapt” to the world our overlords designed to keep them in the catbird’s seats. They are the ones telling us to jump, and most of us are simply responding, “Yes, sir! How high?”
Why is that?
There are far more of us than there are of them. And there are more women and people of color on our side, too. We outnumber the greedy rich hundreds of millions to one! This is why I remain optimistic and “in it to win it”!
Toward the end of A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE WORLD, the author writes (italics are mine), “The conquest of the world by capitalism has speeded up the historical process enormously. There was more change to the lives of the great majority of the world’s population in the 20th century than in the whole preceding 5000 years. Such sheer change of speed meant that again and again people were trying to cope with new situations using ideas that reflected recent experience of very different ones. They had (just) decades to undergo a transformation in their ideas comparable to that which took the bourgeoisie (the middle class) in Europe 600 years. The fact that at the end of the century the process was not complete cannot be interpreted as proving it was not still underway.
“The history of the 20th century was the history of successive generations of people, ever larger in number, resisting the logic of subjection to the world of competitive capital accumulation…. The struggles carried out then will be repeated by sections of the billions-strong working class of the new millennium. Out of these struggles will emerge new attempts to remould society around the values of solidarity, mutual support, egalitarianism, collective cooperation and a democratically planned use of resources. The ruling classes of the world, like their predecessros, will do their utmost to thwart these attempts and will, if necessary, unleash endless barbarities so as to hang on to what they regard as their sacred right to power and property. They will defend the existing capitalist order to the end — even if it (requires) the end of organised human life.
“There is no way to tell in advance what the outcome of such great conflicts will be. That depends not only on the clash of objective class forces but also on the extent to which there emerges within the expanded ‘universal’ working class a core of people who understand how to fight and how to win their fellows to this understanding. There will be no shortage of groups and movements in bitter opposition to one or other aspect of the system. Its very barbarity and irrationality will ensure this in the future as in the past. But the history of the 20th century shows that these elements can only be truly effective when they crystallize into revolutionary organisations dedicated to challenging the system in all its aspects... The Irish revolutionary James Connolly once pointed out, ‘The only true prophets are those who carve out the future.'”
I am still doing my best to carve out a future we can survive, feel safe in, and begin to be truly proud of. We cannot continue down the same road if we expect to get somewhere else.
COURAGE!
