Chris Hedges: "Hope" Speech

Comment

Comment by Todd Parola on January 11, 2012 at 3:40pm

This clip of Chris Hedges is from the December 16, 2010 Veterans For Peace rally in Lafayette Square. It occurs to me that these are the kind of words, and this, the spirit that we should consider commemorating Martin Luther King with.

I wonder about the Marxian assessment that "religion is the opiate of the masses," and as a skeptical Unitarian, like cross-examining the Buddha's awakening (as just another illusion), I wonder at the commitment we share in ensuring that our acts of conscience are more than palliative rituals; band-aids and opiates for our own existential crises. 

It is no small thing to maintain a house of prayer, peace, and community. It's actually a pretty awesome thing. And as an interfaith or meta-faith community, we are the truest microcosm of the larger forces of identity, ideology, and economy that are shaping  .... what? How should I finish the sentence? I want to say that we are shaping the future, but in fact we, as an institution, or as a leading community in the broader global community of positive liberal peoples, we seem barely able to shape our present. But as a fellowship we have an advantage in knowing, accepting and navigating difference. But how to use it?

How can we address Hedges critique of "Hope" in America? The possibility that we, the USA are the face of militaristic corporate fascism abroad in the world. The possibility that our international political and industrial foot print is doing more bad than good. (Shucks. That's what I want my Unitarianism to do ...)

How do we settle ourselves in the face of corporate and political forces that have resulted in perpetual war; the highest incarceration rate of all industrialized nations; an infant mortality rate among the lowest in the top 33 economies of the industrialized world; an exploding disproportionate distribution of wealth; an electoral and judiciary system which seems to be in the pocket of these titanic corporate interests?    

The pragmatist would ask would life be "better" without those forces? And by what alternate system would you rectify these burgeoning failings of the American Dream? (Surely western industrialism has raised more people into a more comfortable and healthy standard of living than any other human phenomenon in history?) And then he or she might wonder: Is it the "Dream" of universal "middle class" comforts itself that we need to take a look at?

Whatever it is we do, I'm pretty sure it won't help matters to point fingers. We're all a part of a culture that wants too much of everything, and wishes to pay for nothing. We enjoy comforts and indulge desires for things that were once the privilege of Royalty (tea, chocolate, cinnamon, pepper) - all thanks to reckless rapacious capitalism... or something like. 

I do not think trying to fix the myriad evil symptoms of our existence is the be-all role of a large liberal faith organization - which is largely what our Social Justice efforts are. While some of these may be helpful for a few hundred or a maybe a few thousand people at a time, I see these efforts as largely sentimental, and ineffective against the larger forces of willful ignorance, trained helplessness, and submission to industrial powers that are shaping the minds, politics and economies of 21st C earth.

I think that Unitarians and other free thinkers must start to work on a completely new scale to consider potential threats to humanity and prospective action: We need schools and media outlets. We need to set aside popular attitudes of moral and cultural equivalency and firmly espouse a form of love and critique that accepts the pragmatic superiority of scientific  humanism and rationalism to solve problems. If you think you need to prove this yet to yourself, I think it can't be too hard to come up with some tools for doing personal inventories of how we think on such matters.

While considering media, I also wonder to myself if the power of