Michael Ventura: *You* Are the Hope

There's a lot of fear going around, and with good reason. And a lot of paralysis – people who see the trouble we're in, but are too depressed to act. A lot of folks just stick their heads in the sand, not wanting to know anything more, hoping that, if they just mind their own business, sooner or later everything will be all right. When writers like me pile on facts to demonstrate just how much trouble we're in, a not uncommon response is: "But surely there's hope. Show us the hope!" I answer: "You're the hope. Your response is the hope. If you're not the hope, there is no hope." "But what can I do? What can we do?"

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First, there is the fundamental doing of swallowing one's fear and facing just how much trouble we're in. Stacking federal courts with fanatical far-right judges means trouble for a generation. A Congress that allows business lobbies to write our laws means bad trouble for working families. Allowing the CIA to kidnap whom it chooses and ship them for interrogation to countries that practice torture "without case-by-case approval from the White House or the State or Justice Departments" (The New York Times, March 6) – that guts the Bill of Rights, and without the Bill of Rights we've got nothing but trouble. PATRIOT Act I and the pending PATRIOT Act II – more such trouble. Education forced to conform to religion, and a public education system that produces an ignorant citizenry – terrible trouble. "According to a National Governors Association report, four in 10 public school graduates are unprepared for college or jobs beyond entry level" (The Week, March 4). That's 40% of our public-ed kids in deep, deep trouble. Reports that the Army, Marines, and National Guard have been unable to fill recruitment quotas, while our soldiers are overworked in Iraq and the White House makes noises about Iran – that's a draft, sure as hell, and big trouble for our kids. (According to a recent Rolling Stone article, the plan is to draft females as well as males, ages 18 to 33.) Letting the deficit bulge and the dollar drop, until countries that hold our paper muse openly on the instability of our economy and the insecurity of U.S. investments – if they stop musing and start doing, our economy will be in major trouble. Gas prices rising wildly on gas-dependent citizens debted-out to the max, with nowhere to turn if interest rates rise sharply, and little or no savings to fall back on – that's more trouble than most families can bear. Voting machines that leave no paper trails, elections that can no longer be depended upon – oh yeah, trouble. And the cherry atop this poisonous sundae: taking no steps whatever to deal with climate change and its possibly drastic outcome – which may turn out to be trouble on a scale we can barely imagine.

After facing such facts, a second difficult "doing" is necessary – call it "the doing of perspective." Trends, no matter how forceful, always change. Paradigms always molt. That is the nature of things. The momentum of the far right can't last and is not all-powerful. Their plan to dismantle Social Security has stalled. Recent polls show Americans increasingly frightened of our national debt. Conservative Utah is fighting the phony No Child Left Behind mandates. This month, Tiffany Muller, the first openly gay officeholder in Kansas, successfully fought off a rabidly anti-gay challenge to her seat on Topeka's City Council. Britain's magazine The Economist (March 5), citing the instability of our housing bubble, strongly suggests that now Americans would do better to rent than buy houses. Trends, big and little, change. For better or worse. Which is where you come in. The point of perspective is: not to be hypnotized by the seeming power of what is. Right in front of you, in your space, there's the power to do something about all this – the power to push the inevitable change toward the better.

Which invokes a tough third kind of doing – asking a question that, when I asked it of myself, made me very uncomfortable: How much time are your convictions worth? Two hours a day? One? Two a week, a month? A vote every four years? How much time is it worth to you to live in a free and just country? On the answer to that question the future of the United States depends. Donating money to causes is fine and necessary, but it doesn't get you off the hook; active human energy is what generates change. How much time is it worth to you, to live in a free and just country? I figure: two hours a day. Minimum. (If you're poor and have children – one hour. If you're working three jobs – a half-hour. What can you do in a half-hour? Make a few phone calls.)

You're too busy for that? And you're asking me about hope?

The rest at:

http://www.austinchronicle.com/issues/dispatch/2005-03-18/cols_ventura.html

that they no longer have a clue as to what true life struggles are really about. Guess it takes a BushCo takeover of America to even start to wake um up. At least it's a start.

...shut off first, before their eyelids flutter open...