create the possibilities to do things together can be severe. It’s only
if lots of people begin to do it, and do it seriously, that you get real
benefits.
T he same has been true of every popular movement that ever
existed. Suppose you were a twenty-year-old black kid at Spelman
College in Atlanta in 1960. You had two choices. One was: I’ll try to
get a job in a business somewhere. Maybe somebody will be willing
to pick a black manager. I’ll be properly humble and bow and
scrape. Maybe I’ll live in a middle-class home.
T he other was to join SNCC [the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee, a black civil rights group of the 1960s], in
which case you might get killed. You were certainly going to get
beaten and defamed. It would be a very tough life for a long time.
Maybe you’d finally be able to create enough popular support so that
people like you and your family could live better.
It would be hard to make that second choice, given the
alternatives available. Society is very much structured to try to
drive you toward the individualist alternative. It’s a remarkable fact
that many young people took that second choice, suffered for it and
helped create a much better world.
You’ve noted polls that indicate that 83% of the population regard
the entire economic system as “inherently unfair.” But it doesn’t
translate into anything.
It can only translate into anything if people do something about it.
T hat’s true whether you’re talking about general things—like the
inherent unfairness of the economic system, which requires
revolutionary change—or about small things.
Take, say, health insurance. In public, almost nobody calls for a
“Canadian-style” system. (T hat’s the kind of system they have
everywhere in the world—an efficient, nationally organized public
health system that guarantees health services for everyone and—if
it’s more serious than Canada’s system—also provides preventive
care.)
And yet according to some polls, a majority of the population is in
favor of it anyway, even though they’ve scarcely heard anybody
advocate it. Does it matter? No. T here’ll be some kind of insurance
company-based, “managed” healthcare system—designed to ensure