Jane Addams, founder of Hull House, once asked, “How shall we respond to the dreams of youth?” It is a dazzling and elegant question, a question that demands an answer – a range of answers, really, spiraling outward in widening circles.
To me, activism requires you to try very hard to open your eyes to the world as it is. See as much as you can, knowing that whatever you see is going to be partial. That you possess a partial consciousness in an infinite and expanding universe.
If the logic of capitalism is “expand or die,” then either it has to die or the world has to die.
There’s something so remarkable in the intensity of taking care of somebody who can’t take care of him or herself. And then watching that little person bloom into adolescence.
I’ve said for thirty years that capitalism is an exhausted system. But now you can see the handwriting everywhere. And one especially horrifying part is the fiscal crisis.
Now you may like the images of long-haired hippies running in the streets throwing tear gas canisters, but we didn’t end the war. And that’s what we set out to do. What was not ended by the anti-war movement was ended by the Vietnamese. That’s our shame.
I thought in 1965 that my job was to convince most Americans to be against the war. So I spent summers knocking on doors, handing out literature, trying to talk to people who didn’t agree with me, trying to get them to see the war was wrong. And by 1968 a majority of Americans did oppose the war.
Martin Luther King was only an activist for 13 years and every year he changed and every year he became more radical. By the end he was calling for revolution. People don’t know this because they go to too many prayer breakfasts on his birthday.
I was indicted on two federal conspiracies. My wife was on the Ten Most Wanted list. That’s what fascism was going to look like. That’s what it did look like.
When someone who’s always been in your life is gone, it’s a stunning adjustment of your own identity.
The world spends two trillion dollars a year on military, and of that two trillion the United States spends one trillion. We have a bigger military than the rest of the world put together. We have 150 foreign military bases.
Your body’s always going through changes. It’s fattening or thinning or wrinkling or blotching, and the only thing you really have control over is putting some decoration on it.
In terms of my own behavior and activity, the funny thing about regrets and saying “I’m sorry,” is that there’s so much I would do differently and want to do differently moving forward.
If you read the literature of Soviet Communism, you see a dogma that’s chilling. On the other hand, if you read the literature of anti-communism, it’s every bit as dogmatic.
I don’t think saying “I was wrong here, I was wrong there” absolves you of anything particularly, nor does it get you into heaven.
The massive anti-war movement, which I was a part of and which was a major part of my life, never stopped the war in Vietnam.
I wanted a racially just society. I wanted to end wars. I wanted to end white supremacy. I wanted to create a world that was based on egalitarianism, sharing, racial justice.
Writing a memoir has a particularly excited sense of narcissism.
Art and activism can be symbiotic. They don’t have to be, of course; they can also be contradictory.
I taught. I lectured at universities. I spoke to my students. I spoke in certain public forums. But what I didn’t do was respond to microphones being thrust in my face and saying, what is your relationship with Obama and are you an unrepentant terrorist?
What do we hope to accomplish? What will help us realize our deepest dreams and desires? In what ways is education liberating, and in what ways can schooling be entangling and oppressive? Can learning be cast as a creative act, enjoyable and social, or is it always framed as competitive and brutal? What does it mean to be an educated person? What does it mean to be free? Awakened to fundamental and forbidden questions, a new world of possibilities heaves into view.