This wonderful essay marks the passing of James Foreman with a great discussion about the difficulty of creating change, and questions whether simply recreating the Right's communication machinery is enough. Wonderful essay, wonderful thinking.
Body and Soul: "Walk together, children. Don't you get weary".
I also struggle against the simplified and non-threatening story of Rosa Parks she hears in school: One day Rosa Parks got tired of being demeaned -- or maybe her feet just hurt -- and she said no. She refused to budge. And that changed everything.
Girl power! Let's make a Disney movie starring Raven!
Oh, Lord, no. Not at all. In the first place, Rosa Parks wasn't even the first black person arrested for refusing to move to the back of the bus. That act of defiance had to occur several times before anyone beyond the community where it happened heard about it. Sometimes courage better be its own reward, because that's all the reward it's going to get. Equally important, it's an insult to Rosa Parks, and a gross distortion of how much hard work and knowledge underlies change, to portray her as a simple seamstress suddenly moved by an instinct for self-actualization.
A single line in a tribute to James Forman in today's Washington Post haunts me:
You have to constantly think about what it is you are really fighting for, Jim taught us.
We still don't do enough of that.Some of the smartest commentary I have read since the election has focused on the need to create an equivalent of the machine conservatives began to build after Goldwater's defeat in 1964. I more or less agree with that, but a couple of things about the idea nag me. The first is the assumption that you can tell the truth using the same techniques as a lie machine. I have my doubts. If we have a model, it's not the right-wing's method of perpetrating lies, it's the civil rights movement's methods of revealing the truth.
The second problem is more fundamental. I think there is too much concern with the machine, and not enough with what goes in the machine.
We need to think about, write about, talk about, what we're really fighting for. Not what scraps and compromises we can get. What we're fighting for.
I'd like to think that James Forman would have appreciated a good man's cri de coeur, and reminded us that the advantage of dealing with brutal people whose actions are completely indefensible is that we're constantly reminded of what we're fighting against.
That's not enough, but it's a start.
