human rights activists who are working under horrifying conditions.
In places like that, people never ask, What should I do? They
say, Here’s what I’m doing. What do you think about it? Maybe
they’d like reactions or suggestions, but they’re already dealing with
the problem. They’re not sitting around waiting for a magic answer,
which doesn’t exist.
When I speak to elite audiences, I constantly get asked, What’s
the solution? If I say obvious things like Pick your cause and go
volunteer for a group that’s working on it, that’s never the answer
they want. They want some sort of magic key that will solve
everything quickly, overwhelmingly and effectively. There are no
such solutions. There are only the kind that people are working on
in Massachusetts towns, in self-governing villages in India, at the
Jesuit Center in Colombia.
People who are actually engaged in dealing with the problems of
life, often under extreme repression and very harsh conditions,
sometimes just give up. You can find that too. But many keep
struggling effectively and bring about changes.
That’s been true in our own history. Right now we’re facing real
problems, like protecting the limited level of public medical care,
the Social Security system, environmental rights, workers’ rights.
But you don’t have to go very far back to get to the time when
people were trying to gain those rights. That’s a big change. It’s a
lot better to be protecting something than trying to get it for the
first time.
These rights are the result of popular engagement and struggle. If
there’s another way to achieve them, it’s been kept a dark secret.
But privileged audiences often don’t want to hear that. They want a
quick answer that will get the job done fast.
Manufacturing dissent
Michael Moore made a documentary film called Roger and Me and
produced a television series called TV Nation. In his book Downsize
This!, he says that what turns people off about the left is that it’s
boring, it whines too much, it’s too negative. Anything to that?