'To the Next Generation of Rebel Voices'

Published at Campus Progress of the Center for American Progress

A small excerpt below:

Too often, the world seems impossible to change. The obstacles too grave,
solutions too hard to come by, apathy and ignorance too prevalent. These moments
of dejection have plagued progressives for generations.

“I start from the supposition that the world is topsy-turvy,” said the
iconic historian Howard Zinn in a 1970
speech. “[T]hat things are all wrong, that the wrong people are in jail and
the wrong people are out of jail, that the wrong people are in power and the
wrong people are out of power.” Surely, similar sentiments could be expressed by
any progressive-minded individual at any time in recent history. Such is life in
a world filled with injustice: prospects for
healthcare reform dimming, the Supreme Court handing
democracy over to corporations, young people going bankrupt because
they choose to go to college.

But what made Howard Zinn—the famous historian and activist who died
last week of a heart attack at age 87—so unique was his unceasing faith that
regular people can and should strive to make the world a better place.

"I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we
should not give up the game before all the cards have been played," Zinn wrote
in a 2004 essay, “The
Optimism of Uncertainty.” "The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not
to play is to foreclose any chance of winning. To play, to act, is to create at
least a possibility of changing the world."

Chomsky & Zinn

Don't miss Amy Goodman's joint interview with Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn.

Howard Zinn responds to Moveon

Howard Zinn responds.

"I'm disappointed in MoveOn. We are not politicians, we are citizens. Let the politicians advocate half-way measures if they choose, but only after they have felt the full force of citizens who speak for what is right, not what is winnable in a shameful timorous Congress. Timetables for withdrawal are not only morally reprehensible in the case of a brutal occupation (would you give a thug who invaded your house, smashed things up, and terrorized your children a timetable for withdrawal?) but logically nonsensical. If our troops are preventing civil war, helping people, controlling violence, then why withdraw at all? If they are in fact doing the opposite -- provoking civil war, hurting people, perpetuating violence -- they should withdraw as quickly as ships and planes can carry them home. If Congress thinks it must compromise, let it. But we should not encourage that. We should speak our minds fully, boldly and say what is right, whatever they decide to do..

"I would add this: To me it is tantamount to the abolitionists accepting a two-year timeline for ending slavery, while giving more money to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act.

The Others

In 2002 Howard Zinn wrote a great piece about the deaths of civilians from the countries on the other end of our guns, and how they were so often ignored by the media, and Americans as a whole.

I do believe that if people could see the consequences of the bombing campaign as vividly as we were all confronted with the horrifying photos in the wake of September 11, if they saw on television night after night the blinded and maimed children, the weeping parents of Afghanistan, they might ask: Is this the way to combat terrorism?

Surely it is time, half a century after Hiroshima, to embrace a universal morality, to think of all children, everywhere, as our own.

In this spirit I link to an article in today's Washington Post which pays humble tribute to a fallen civilian -- one of the "others" -- who has been killed in Iraq.

Unlike the U.S. soldiers who die in this conflict, the names of most Iraqi victims will never be published, consigned to the anonymity that death in the Iraqi capital brings these days