"The momentum of the far right can't last" [View All]

[villager]

From Michael Ventura's latest "Letters at 3 a.m.:"

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?

Conviction without action is mere sentiment. History is not a spectator sport. You may let other people decide your fate because you're "too busy" to decide it for yourself, but you'll eventually participate, if only as flotsam swept away by the next historical wave. The pity of it is that your children – and they're all your children – will be swept away with you. Those photographs taken by doomed people watching the tsunami surge toward them on the beaches of the Asian Pacific – there's never been a more apt metaphor of what's about to happen to us, if we're "too busy." You're the solution, you're the hope. If you're not, there is no hope. As the Tao Te Ching puts it: "The journey of a thousand miles starts from beneath your feet."

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