Artists in Times of War The Bomb Disobedience and Democracy: Nine Fallacies on Law.
Women were important and respected in Iroquois society. Families were matrilineal. That is, the family line went down through the female members, whose husbands joined the family, while sons who married then joined their wives’ families. Each extended family lived in a “long house.” When a woman wanted a divorce, she set her husband’s things outside the door.
Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.
The first large-scale revolt in the North American colonies took place in New York in 1712. In New York, slaves were 10 percent of the population, the highest proportion in the northern states, where economic conditions usually did not require large numbers of field slaves.
From time to time, whites were involved in the slave resistance. As early as 1663, indentured white servants and black slaves in Gloucester County, Virginia, formed a conspiracy to rebel and gain their freedom.
His friend and fellow writer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, agreed, but thought it futile to protest. When Emerson visited Thoreau in jail and asked, “What are you doing in there?” it was reported that Thoreau replied, “What are you doing out there?
In the summer of 1863, a “Song of the Conscripts” was circulated by the thousands in New York and other cities. One stanza: We’re coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more We leave our homes and firesides with bleeding hearts and sore Since poverty has been our crime, we bow to thy decree; We are the poor and have no wealth to purchase liberty.
It turned out to be the most bizarre election in the nation’s history. Al Gore received hundreds of thousands of votes more than Bush, but the Constitution required that the victor be determined by the electors of each state. The electoral vote was so close that the outcome was going to be determined by the electors of the state of Florida. This difference between popular vote and electoral vote had happened twice before, in 1876 and 1888.
This unequal treatment, this developing combination of contempt and oppression, feeling and action, which we call “racism” – was this the result of a “natural” antipathy of white against black? The question is important, not just as a matter of historical accuracy, but because any emphasis on “natural” racism lightens the responsibility of the social system. If racism can’t be shown to be natural, then it is the result of certain conditions, and we are impelled to eliminate those conditions.
The Tonkin incident – the supposed attack on American destroyers by North Vietnamese torpedo boats near the coast of Vietnam – became the excuse for the swift American escalation of the colonial war that the French had lost in 1954 and that the United States had taken over.
The human consequences of Reagan’s budget cuts went deep. For instance, Social Security disability benefits were terminated for 350,000 people. A war hero of Vietnam, Roy Benavidez, who had been presented with the Congressional Medal Of Honor by Reagan, ‘Was told by Social Security officials that the shrapnel pieces in his heart, arms, and leg did not prevent him from working. Appearing before a congressional committee, he denounced Reagan.
The system, in its irrationality, has been driven by profit to build steel skyscrapers for insurance companies while the cities decay, to spend billions for weapons of destruction and virtually nothing for children’s playgrounds, to give huge incomes to men who make dangerous or useless things, and very little to artists, musicians, writers, actors. Capitalism has always been a failure for the lower classes. It is now beginning to fail for the middle classes.
We used military force to establish American power in Cuba and Puerto Rico, in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, in Central America, in Hawaii and the Philippines.
In the Mexican War, a skirmish between Mexican and American troops on the Texas-Mexico border led President Polk to state that “American blood has been shed on American soil,” and to ask Congress for war. Actually, the encounter took place in disputed territory, and Polk’s diary shows that he wanted an excuse for war so the United States could take from Mexico what the United States coveted, California and the whole Southwest.
The leaders of early Boston were gentlemen of considerable wealth who, in association with the clergy, eagerly sought to preserve in America the social arrangements of the Mother Country.
No new social class came to power through the door of the American revolution. The men who engineered the revolt were largely members of the colonial ruling class.
For Indians there has never been a clear line between prose and poetry. When an Indian studying in New Mexico was praised for his poetry he said, “In my tribe we have no poets. Everyone talks in poetry.” There.
Then Gregory lowered his voice, suddenly serious. “But it looks like we got to do it the hard way, and stay down here, and educate them.
It is pretended that, as in the Preamble to the Constitution, it is “we the people” who wrote that document, rather than fifty-five privileged white males whose class interest required a strong central government. That use of government for class purposes, to serve the needs of the wealthy and powerful, has continued throughout American history, down to the present day. It is disguised by language that suggests all of us – rich and poor and middle class – have a common interest.
Black civil rights activists in the South were among the first to resist the draft. SNCC’s Bob Moses joined historian Staughton Lynd and veteran pacifist Dave Dellinger to march in Washington against the war, and Life Magazine had a dramatic photo of the three of them walking abreast, being splattered with red paint by angry super-patriots.