Reading Hedges - Change is inevitable; progress is optional

The only thing that doesn’t change is change itself which is inevitable and while change is inevitable, progress is optional. The insecure don’t like change as well as those who have vested interests in the status quo remaining the status quo, but the oppressed, the subjugated, those with a moral compass truer than others want change, hope for change, will work for change, and sometimes even deliberately and with intention make efforts to revolt. Revolutions can be nonviolent and they can be violent. Those based on moral principles more often will be nonviolent than violent and so if revolutionaries like Gandhi and Martin Luther King want to throw off the chains of their oppressors and permanently change the people in the world for the better they have purposely engaged in nonviolent revolutions.

Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco have done a great job describing four sacrifice zones in the United States where corporate capitalism out of control have destroyed whole communities such as the Pine Ridge Reservation in North Dakota, Camden, N.J. the poorest city in the United States, the state of West Virginia with its mountain top removal, and the farm workers in Immokalee, Florida. I have also made reference to the Village of Brockport where a small group of slumlords have converted the housing stock built from 1850 – 1920, beautiful single family homes, into tenements for high transient college students, then sought the dissolution of the village so they could advance their destruction of village neighborhoods with no restraint and compliance with building codes. In the last chapter of their book, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, Hedges and Sacco describe the need for and activities of  revolution. So far these activities have been nonviolent such as the Occupy Wall Street movement which has made the term “1%” the meme of the decade. Hedges writes:

“The vaunted American dream, the idea that life will get better, that progess is inevitable if we obey the rules and work hard, that material prosperity is assured, has been replaced by a hard and bitter truth. The American dream, we now know, is a lie. We will all be sacrificed. The virus of coporate abuse – the perverted belief that only corporate profit matters – has spread to outsource our jobs, cut the budgets of our schools, close our libraries, and plague communities with foreclosures and  unemployment. The virus has brought with it a security and surveillance state that seeks to keep us all on  a reservation. No one is immune. The suffering of the other, the Native American, the African American in the inner city, the unemployed coal miner, or the Hispanic produce picker is universal. They went first. We are next. The indifference we showed to the plight of the underclass, in Biblical terms our neighbor, haunts us. We failed them, and in doing so we failed ourselves. We were accomplices to our own demise. Revolt is all we have left. It is our only hope.” P. 227

We feel this in Brockport. Gone are the good jobs at Kodak with health insurance for our families. Young people are happy with a job at the Brockport Walmart working 28 hours a week at minimum wage and happy as a clam with Medicaid and food stamps. 25 and 30 year olds living with their parents and with no hope of being able to support a family of their own and live independently as their parents did. They are all around us and many living in our homes. The farm workers are sequestered in their camps afraid to come to town and we see the ICE SUVs rolling up our streets in the roads around us keeping us safe from what exactly? The news has us living in fear of terrorists cells in Lackawana while people are being arrested for  in DWI who can more easily kill us than any terrorist,  and property is being destroyed every weekend in our village by drunk college students. Comments left on this blog state that people in Brockport are arming at faster rates out of fear that our nation might take some further steps on gun control. Will this make us safer or put us more in peril. We don’t need to fear terrorists we more appropriately should fear our armed neighbors and their children.

Hedges writes further:

“Our decaying corporate regime has strutted in Portland, Oakland, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and New York sending its baton-wielding cops to clean up “the mess.” The state always employs the language of personal hygiene and public security in the effort to make us disappear. They think we will all go home and accept their corporate nation, a nation where crime and government policy have become indistinguishable, where nothing in America, including the ordinary citizen, is deemed by those in power worth protecting or preserving, where corporate oligarchs awash in hundreds of millions of dollars are permitted to loot and pillage the last shreds of collective wealth, human capital, and natural resources, a nation where the poor do not eat and workers do not work, a nation where the sick die and children go hungry, a nation where the consent of the governed and the voice of the people is a cruel joke.

            Get back in your cages, they are telling us. Return to watching the lies, absurdities, trivia, celebrity gossip, and political theater we feed you in twenty-four-hour cycles on television. Invest your emotional energy in the vast system of popular entertainment. Run up your credit card debt. Pay your loans. Be thankful for the scraps we toss. Chant back to us our platitudes about democracy, greatness, and freedom. Vote in our rigged corporate elections. Send your young men and women to die in useless, unwinnable wars that provide huge profits to the corporations. Stand by mutely as our legislators plunge us into a society without basic social services while Wall Street speculators loot and pillage.” Pp.232-233

And what is the hope in such a dystopian scenario? We have seen human dignity arise such as the Arab Spring and in the Occupy movement and demand that people organize to work together in a better way to realize the human potential of all human beings not just some at the expense of others. It begins with a raised consciousness that current operations are not right for all people and therein lies the seeds of injustice, suffering, and degradation.

Raised consciousnesses lead to a desire for right action, finding ways to change our key societal processes so that they better serve us all and not just some at the expense of others.

Right action, when successful, leads to celebration, contentment, peace, joy, and a desire for even further improvement. We will not stop as a species until the whole world has been saved from its own ignorance, selfishness, greed, and lust for power to manipulate the weaker for the benefit of the stronger. When all of humankind have achieved their full potential, then we will have brought about heaven on earth which is our birth right as humble participants in the great interdependent web of existence.

Editor's note: This is the last installment on the December, Brockporter Book Discussion group selection. It is hoped that people will read along and comment on the postings. Even if you have not read the book under discussion, your comments on the ideas are very welcome. The book for January is The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. The book for February has not been selected yet. Your nominations are welcome.