[sustran] "Seven Sustainable Mayors": Profiles of Courage

ecoplan.adsl at wanadoo.fr ecoplan.adsl at wanadoo.fr
Sun Jul 11 22:11:26 JST 2004


Sunday, July 11, 2004, Paris, France, Europe

 

Reference: Craig Townsend's good note of 7/9/2004.

 

Dear Friends and Craig,

 

Your point about “emphasizing the actions of “great individuals” rather
than the collective actions of members of communities joining together
to make changes or oppose changes?” strikes my commoner, activist,
people loving, anarchist soul in more ways than you may think.  It also
brings up a point that has been lurking at the back of my mind even as I
go ahead with this.

 

My choice in these cases is “all of the above” – and certainly that in a
world in which we need more options for sustainability and social
justice.  By which I mean that, yes, we must be very careful not to
build a library of glowing profiles of seven Mussolini’s.  But at the
same time, one of the real accomplishments of people like Jaime Lerner,
Neil Goldschmidt, Michel Crépeau, Enrique Peñalosa, and yes even our not
always loved WTN award candidate Ken Livingstone,  and others whose
names are most agreeably starting to pop up here, has precisely been to
reach out well beyond the usual political constituencies and
bureaucracies and work directly with public interest groups and citizens
who are ready for change and ready to take an active role in making it
happen.

 

That said, we certainly have plenty of materials for a second and
probably at the end of the day more important Profiles of Courage, which
starts with communities, precisely as you suggest.  And there we have
seen some very interesting examples in our work with the Stockholm
Partnerships for Sustainable Cities –
http://www.partnerships.stockholm.se/jury_index.html - over the last
several years).

 

For dessert to this exchange, let me share with you this extract that
just slipped in over the transom, form the every energetic, always
passionate and always engaging Howard Zinn (thanks Soros!) It gives us a
nice fit for the rest.

 

Eric Britton

 

 

-----Original Message-----

From: Other News - Roberto Savio / IPS

[mailto:soros at topica.email-publisher.com] 

Sent: woensdag 30 juni 2004 20:44

To: metz at integerconsult.org

Subject: The Coming Revolt of the Guards

 

/Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited,
article

sent for information purposes./

 

The Coming Revolt of the Guards

 

 By Howard Zinn

 

The following are excerpts from A People's History of the United States

 

 

... the mountain of history books under which we all stand leans ... so

tremblingly respectful [in the direction] of states and statesmen and so

disrespectful, by inattention, to people's movements -that we need some

counterforce to avoid being crushed into submission.

 

        All those histories of this country centered on the Founding
Fathers

and the Presidents weigh oppressively on the capacity of the ordinary

citizen to act. They suggest that in times of crisis we must look to
someone

to save us: in the Revolutionary crisis, the Founding Fathers; in the

slavery crisis, Lincoln; in the Depression, Roosevelt; in the

Vietnam-Watergate crisis, Carter. And that between occasional crises

everything is all right, and it is sufficient for us to be restored to
that

normal state. They teach us that the supreme act of citizenship is to
choose

among saviors, by going into a voting booth every four years to choose

between two white and well-off Anglo-Saxon males of inoffensive
personality

and orthodox opinions.

 

        The idea of saviors has been built into the entire culture,
beyond

politics. We have learned to look to stars, leaders, experts in every
field,

thus surrendering our own strength, demeaning our own ability,
obliterating

our own selves. But from time to time, Americans reject that idea and
rebel.

These rebellions, so far, have been contained. The American system is
the

most ingenious system of control in world history. With a country so
rich in

natural resources, talent, and labor power the system can afford to

distribute just enough wealth to just enough people to limit discontent
to a

troublesome minority. It is a country so powerful, so big, so pleasing
to so

many of its citizens that it can afford to give freedom of dissent to
the

small number who are not pleased.

 

        There is no system of control with more openings, apertures, lee

ways, flexibilities, rewards for the chosen, winning tickets in
lotteries.

There is none that disperses its controls more complexly through the
voting

system, the work situation, the church, the family, the school, the mass

media -none more successful in mollifying opposition with reforms,
isolating

people from one another, creating patriotic loyalty.

 

        One percent of the nation owns a third of the wealth. The rest
of

the wealth is distributed in such a way as to turn those in the 99
percent

against one another: small property owners against the propertyless,
black

against white, native-born against foreign-born, intellectuals and

professionals against the uneducated and unskilled. These groups have

resented one another and warred against one another with such vehemence
and

violence as to obscure their common position as sharers of leftovers in
a

very wealthy country.

 

*****

 

        ... Madison feared a "majority faction" and hoped the new

Constitution would control it. He and his colleagues began the Preamble
to

the Constitution with the words "We the people .," pretending that the
new

government stood for everyone, and hoping that this myth, accepted as
fact,

would ensure "domestic tranquillity."

 

        The pretense continued over the generations, helped by
all-embracing

symbols, physical or verbal: the flag, patriotism, democracy, national

interest, national defense, national security...

 

*****

 

        The exile of Nixon, the celebration of the Bicentennial, the

presidency of Carter, all aimed at restoration. But restoration to the
old

order was no solution to the uncertainty, the alienation, which was

intensified in the Reagan-Bush years. The election of Clinton in 1992,

carrying with it a vague promise of change, did not fulfill the
expectations

of the hopeful.

 

        With such continuing malaise, it is very important for the

Establishment -that uneasy club of business executives, generals, and

politicos- to maintain the historic pretension of national unity, in
which

the government represents all the people, and the common enemy is
overseas,

not at home, where disasters of economics or war are unfortunate errors
or

tragic accidents, to be corrected by the members of the same club that

brought the disasters. It is important for them also to make sure this

artificial unity of highly privileged and slightly privileged is the
only

unity- that the 99 percent remain split in countless ways, and turn
against

one another to vent their angers.       How skillful to tax the middle
class

to pay for the relief of the poor, building resentment on top of

humiliation! How adroit to bus poor black youngsters into poor white

neighborhoods, in a violent exchange of impoverished schools, while the

schools of the rich remain untouched and the wealth of the nation, doled
out

carefully where children need free milk, is drained for billion-dollar

aircraft carriers. How ingenious to meet the demands of blacks and women
for

equality by giving them small special benefits, and setting them in

competition with everyone else for jobs made scarce by an irrational,

wasteful system. How wise to turn the fear and anger of the majority
toward

a class of criminals bred -by economic inequity- faster than they can be
put

away, deflecting attention from the huge thefts of national resources

carried out within the law by men in executive offices.

 

*****

 

        However, the unexpected victories even temporary of insurgents
show

the vulnerability of the supposedly powerful. In a highly developed
society,

the Establishment cannot survive without the obedience and loyalty of

millions of people who are given small rewards to keep the system going:
the

soldiers and police, teachers and ministers, administrators and social

workers, technicians and production workers, doctors, lawyers, nurses,

transport and communications workers, garbagemen and firemen. These
people

-the employed, the somewhat privileged- are drawn into alliance with the

elite. They become the guards of the system, buffers between the upper
and

lower classes. If they stop obeying, the system falls.

 

        That will happen, I think, only when all of us who are slightly

privileged and slightly uneasy begin to see that we are like the guards
in

the prison uprising at Attica expendable; that the Establishment,
whatever

rewards it gives us, will also, if necessary to maintain its control,
kill

us. Certain new facts may, in our time, emerge so clearly as to lead to

general withdrawal of loyalty from the system. The new conditions of

technology, economics, and war, in the atomic age, make it less and less

possible for the guards of the system -the intellectuals, the home
owners,

the taxpayers, the skilled workers, the professionals, the servants of

government- to remain immune from the violence (physical and psychic)

inflicted on the black, the poor, the criminal, the enemy overseas.

 

        The internationalization of the economy, the movement of
refugees

and illegal immigrants across borders, both make it more difficult for
the

people of the industrial countries to be oblivious to hunger and disease
in

the poor countries of the world.

 

*****

 

        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.

 

        The threat of unemployment, always inside the homes of the poor,
has

spread to white-collar workers, professionals. A college education is no

longer a guarantee against joblessness, and a system that cannot offer a

future to the young coming out of school is in deep trouble. If it
happens

only to the children of the poor, the problem is manageable; there are
the

jails. If it happens to the children of the middle class, things may get
out

of hand. The poor are accustomed to being squeezed and always short of

money, but in recent years the middle classes, too, have begun to feel
the

press of high prices, high taxes.

 

        In the seventies, eighties, and early nineties there was a
dramatic,

frightening increase in the number of crimes. It was not hard to
understand,

when one walked through any big city. There were the contrasts of wealth
and

poverty, the culture of possession, the frantic advertising. There was
the

fierce economic competition, in which the legal violence of the state
and

the legal robbery by the corporations were accompanied by the illegal
crimes

of the poor. Most crimes by far involved theft. A disproportionate
number of

prisoners in American jails were poor and non-white, with little
education.

Half were unemployed in the month prior to their arrest.

 

        The most common and most publicized crimes have been the violent

crimes of the young, the poor -a virtual terrorization in the big
cities- in

which the desperate or drug-addicted attack and rob the middle class, or

even their fellow poor. A society so stratified by wealth and education

lends itself naturally to envy and class anger.

 

        The critical question in our time is whether the middle classes,
so

long led to believe that the solution for such crimes is more jails and
more

jail terms, may begin to see, by the sheer uncontrollability of crime,
that

the only prospect is an endless cycle of crime and punishment. They
might

then conclude that physical security for a working person in the city
can

come only when everyone in the city is working. And that would require a

transformation of national priorities, a change in the system.

 

*****

 

        The prospect is for times of turmoil, struggle, but also

inspiration. There is a chance that ... a movement could succeed in
doing

what the system itself has never done -bring about great change with
little

violence. This is possible because the more of the 99 percent that begin
to

see themselves as sharing needs, the more the guards and the prisoners
see

their common interest, the more the Establishment becomes isolated,

ineffectual. The elite's weapons, money, control of information would be

useless in the face of a determined population. The servants of the
system

would refuse to work to continue the old, deadly order, and would begin

using their time, their space -the very things given them by the system
to

keep them quiet- to dismantle that system while creating a new one.

 

        The prisoners of the system will continue to rebel, as before,
in

ways that cannot be foreseen, at times that cannot be predicted. The new

fact of our era is the chance that they may be joined by the guards. We

readers and writers of books have been, for the most part, among the
guards.

If we understand that, and act on it, not only will life be more
satisfying,

right off, but our grandchildren, or our great grandchildren, might
possibly

see a different and marvelous world.

 

 

------------------------------------------------------------------------
----

-

"Other News" is a personal initiative seeking to provide information
that

should be in the media but is not, because of commercial criteria. It

welcomes contributions from everybody. Work areas include information on

global issues, north-south relations, gobernability of globalization.
The

"Other News" motto is a phrase which appeared on the wall of Barcelona's
old

Customs Office, at the beginning of 2003:"What walls utter, media keeps

silent". Roberto Savio

 

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