If Ed starts trying to force-feed us politics, I’m our of here.

“Government being instituted for the common benefit, protection, and security, of the whole community, and not for the private interest or emolument of any one man, family, or class of men; therefore, whenever the ends of government are perverted, and public liberty manifestly endangered, and all other means of redress are ineffectual, the people may, and of right ought to reform the old, or establish a new government. The doctrine of nonresistance against arbitrary power, and oppression, is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind.”

As for your question — “are we in an unprecedented period of American history” — well, I’d take the long view and say the entire world has been dealing with an unprecedented level of technological and cultural change for the past hundred years — vastly improved powers of communication along with vastly improved means of violence. The crisis we’re going through now has to be seen in that context. It does seem, though, that our country is dealing with several unprecedented particulars right now, though. I do think we have an unprecedented level of incompetence in our current leadership, and the moral questions this realization raises are, I think, a new phenomenon to most Americans.

Ed, what I think you should do is write more about politics here. You have an audience — use it. I think this will give you the chance to test your ideas and build your confidence as a political thinker. I’d love to see the incidence of politically insightful postings here on edrants.com increase, and I have no fear that you’d sink into banality or reveal yourself to be ignorant. Just call the shots on what you read in the news the same way you call the shots on the books you read and the writers you meet, and see what happens.

These strategies all kind of depend on politicians who pay attention to letters, protests, and electoral politics. There is little provision in the Constitution for dealing with a government that resolutely refuses to listen to its people. (Except surreptitiously via wiretaps, that is.) And that’s the most frustrating part: in a world of rigid talking points and continual abuses of the public’s trust, nobody is listening. They don’t care.

Mass corporate media has certainly had a hand in this. Not only do they rarely cover substantive issues, or call bullshit on that which is bullshit, but they’ve let celebrity media coverage influence their political coverage. Scandals sell; the wholesale abrogation of citizen’s rights does not, apparently. Even when they do cover important topics, it’s so boring and painful, and mush-headed, and useless that it’s no wonder most turn away.

I don’t know what to do about any of this stuff, either.

While i recognize the very important role of public resistance, marches, and civil disobedience–and I keep that part of my life–I’m most motivated by creative activism, as opposed to resistant activism. It goes back to Gandhi’s “be the change you want to see” dictum. I’m interested in building new models for ways of being. I’m intersted in co-operatives, intentional communities, places like the Red Sun Press in Jamaica Plain, MA, that are worker-owned, consensus-based, environmentally sustainable with their use of inks and papers that serve a client base of mostly nonprofits. And they’ve been successful in their work for more than thirty years. Or the Haley House Bakery Cafe in Boston, where food comes from local, sustainable farms and it serves as a job-training/mentoring program for people with precarious employment
prospects (just out of prison or rehab, immigrants, etc.). And in the last 10 years, it’s also grown to be an important support for local artists and performers.

Once models like this exist–in part because we, you and I, create them and/or support them–it’s hard to justify doing business any other way. Models like this prove that you don’t have to be satisfied with warmongering corporations that loathe your civil liberties as representing the traditional business model.

As well, we literary types acknowledge the extraordinary power of words, and I believe it’s our responsibility to be truthtellers–to publicize, in a variety of mediums and styles, what real-life people (not statistics, not the ‘other’) are going through.

You have a public voice on this website, on your podcast, in your journalism; what you say does matter.