Notice: Transcript is always slightly enhanced over the live video.
(If the shoe does not fit, don't wear it.) There is very very very good news. I mean that from the bottom of my heart. You are not activists.
Alice Paul and the suffragists alongside her that would pay any price, were activists. There was no personal price that they would not pay to achieve their goal. They did not do what was convenient, they calculated what was necessary, and they paid the price.
That is anathema to todays so called activists. Utterly, explicitly, forecefully forbidden. Literally incomprehensible, today, in the US outside of the few fighting global warming by placing and keeping their very lives in the way of Ecocide. These exceptions prove the rule.
There are no activists today.
There were activists in Tahrir Square several years ago. There was no personal price they would not pay to achieve their goal. They expected it would cost their very lives these young people. Exactly because they were willing to pay that price the onlookers of the world could not stand to see that price exacted and rose and demanded of the leaders of the world that their lives be saved by meeting their demands. And they were.
There was only one group for whom Gandhi had utter contempt and that was those who would not happily risk or give their own lives when justice demanded it. I've written weeks ago of the law of social change which is the law of paying the price, the law of suffering. This is an immutable law. And yet for the last 40 or 50 years those that call themselves activists, the most educated in our society, almost always from affluent or relatively affluent backgrounds, are in ferocious, catatonic, psychotic, clinical denial of this law.
It is said that patriotism is the refuge of scoundrels. No, activism in the United States since the late sixties is the refuge of scoundrels. It is where one goes for zero personal accountability, the approval of one's peers in excoriating anyone and everyone except those in the same group, holding oneself and ones group to 0 standards, certainly not the historical standards of true activism, and certainly not the standards of results.
The Washington DC not many years ago there was Ngo after Ngo, activist after activist, rapturously involved in historically doomed,, tepid, comfortable, self serving 'activism' to supposedly Save Darfur.
Fact, the leading such group, "Save Darfur," was headed by a pleasant fellow. At times that I deemed it constructive and appropriate I clearly, honestly, forthrightly and vehimintly confronted the total hopelessness, the total inadequacy, of the strategies and tactics that were being attempted by this group.And indeed, as was patently obvious to anyone that WANTED to see the truth... they saved not one Darfuri, but they had a nice time, got lots of press, had nice confortable jobs for years, added to their resumes, got credit on their college degrees....
Several years later I saw the head of this preeminent Save Darfur group outside a supermarket. Actually, he saw me and wanted to speak. To his credit he said to me, why were you so hard on us? I said, just as when a Dr. hangs out a shingle proclaiming that they are a Dr., thereby setting life and death expectations for those who choose to enter, you did the same by calling your group Save Darfur. You set an expectation that impacted millions of people and yet you planned and attempted nothing that would ever come close to saving those people. This is a moral problem that I had a duty to those brothers and sisters in Darfur to attempt to confront. This is a moral failing I had a duty to you to try and bring to your clear attention, and I felt that you were not seeing it, as a result of active denial or otherwise.
Again, to his credit, he replied with astonishing candor, James, he said, I had no idea how to save the people in Darfur. I give him credit for the candor, but he still had no idea the horror of what he was saying. And I find him completely representative of the activism in the United States, or what considers itself activism, be it for stopping global warming, preserving some shred of democracy, or freeing the Palestinians while there is still a living Palestinian left.
The left in the United States adores excoriating the right in this country for their denial, especially in the subject area of global warming. The denial on the right is nothing compared to the denial on the left of their own irresponsibility, non-solidarity with those they purport to be fighting for, lip service, self serving efforts that have the certainty of not achieving the stated goals but only of serving the egos and other gratifications of the so called activists.
The left's denial near incomprehensible. This is not slender from me. This is not condemnation. It is an opportunity to seriously consider it, thereby it is an offer of liberation.
King, Gandhi, any and all of the true activists, in their own way lived, believed, and articulated that someone that would not risk their very life, happily, in the service of justice for their fellow human being, was already Dead. None of the 2015 activists that I see are anything of the sort.
None or few are hypocrites on purpose. They've been taught and learned well a lie. They've been taught a means of behavior that is not activism, but they've been told in word and deed for 40 or 50 years that it is.
If King, Gandhi, Jesus, and the like are correct that cowardice is living death, and by my life and words I believe that they are, then I am not slandering, I'm attempting as they did, to offer Life, to the activist, and to those they think they are serving..
A person is not living who is not ready to give their life for the justice of their fellow human beings, to paraphrase Dr. King.
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