Monday, November 15, 2010

Vision

Upton Sinclair, Clarence Darrow, and Norman Thomas were among the many who built the league for Industrial Democracy. Students of League for Industrial Democracy gave birth to the New left through the SDS. We live now in the 21st Century, and we need vision and real time solutions - LID and SLID continues to be committed to take the lead, investigate and propose and adopt solutions.

It does seem that the American people are not just ready to take a leap, to take a risk and begin taking stock of where we are really, and what our true potential could be. But the truth is, we should be prepared to examine beyond what our current options of 'business as usual' politics and way of living, to even go beyond the old way of beinng proggressive or left. To seek an entirely new revoltionary outlook, and move forward into the future. Some of this requires stepping back and taking stock of what has been tried and failed, to what has been proposed and not tried while rejecting altogether what is not advancing humanity, compassion, justice and peace.

Why on this insistence on revolution? What about just plan ordinary reform? To be a progressive populist, isn't it just enough to rework the exiting system? There are clearly two defining reason for the need of revolution rather than reform.

Political systems and other human conventions can be likened t the computer hard drive. When it acumulates too much junk, malware and such, there comes a time when the only way it will run smoothly and as it should, it has to be be wiped clean and reformatted. Since human conventions and systtem are also creations of the human mind in the first place, and no humna mind is perfect, the system itself needs to reformatted and start afresh.


We have accumulated so many laws, interpreatations and revisions, it has become overlyy cumbersome. Taake for example, I come from a City that still has old west statutes in their law books. One of those makes it illegal for automobiles to be driven on main streets, as they scare horses and are a hazard too much. Obviously there are no horses, why has this statute never been removed? How many other laws are outdated yet stay on the books?

And the second comes from the Burmese Democracy movement

"A revolution which aims merely at changing official policies and institutions with a view to an improvement in material conditions has little chance of genuine success. Without a revolution of the spirit, the forces which produced the iniquities of the old order would continue to be operative, posing a constant threat to the process of reform and regeneration." Aung San Suu Kyi

So then, to be progressive and to be populist, we need to have vision and we need to have spirit. To paraphrase Tom Paine, If we are to cast off our enslavement, we cannot merely repeat the role of the system which we are currently oppressed by, but to cast it off completely and create anew one which is compassionate, just, free and peaceful.

--
Bro. Robert FMC
Franciscan
There is no way to peace, peace is the way

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