I appreciate the compliments, Mary. Thanks.
I am thinking about the importance of the message versus the importance of the messenger. The most successful bloggers and journalists spend a lot of time and effort building monuments to their own egos, and the more comforting and reassuring their message, the more K and R's and the more adulation. Hope you don't mind if I go off on a tangent here.
Do you know the story of Angelina Grimke?
I think we are always kissing ass to the "successful" - the "winners," the important people. We think that we need to win them over, and we think that we need to be successful or powerful in order to be heard. If we pay attention to how we see people, I think we will find that we all unconsciously treat the successful with a certain deference and respect, and are ever alert to people's status. We can't reconcile our need to admire and respect the successful with our politics, and maybe we should stop trying to do that.
I also think that we see the job as though we were salespeople - trying to market and popularize ideas - as opposed to truly reaching them - and we use the corporate sales and marketing and hierarchical model for doing that. The goals of those promoting reactionary political ideas is to get us to stop being leftists - or to be defeated and demoralized and invalidated - and to stop talking about left wing ideas. But that is under our control. We shouldn't let them take control, and when we are salespeople and personalities, we are taking the weaker position. Let them sell us on the wisdom of including Warren, for example, rather than taking a defensive position and assuming that unless we can win all over, we must therefore be wrong. We are free to stand firm, and speak the truth as we see it - popular or not, successful or not, admired or not.
If we take on the burden of selling people, and then see the winners - 10% of the population let us not forget - as being very important, as being the ones we need to sell, we always lose. When we change the message in order to be successful salespeople, or we seek to promote ourselves so that people will see us as successful and be more likely to "buy" our "product" from us, we cripple our effectiveness.
We are the "winners" right here, if you ask me. We should stop thinking of ourselves as nobodies, stop thinking that we have to kiss ass and convince anyone of anything. There are many people here - strong and courageous voices - who are the ones we should listen to, respect, see as leaders, who are not seeking any accolades or rewards. They are the "winners" in my world. What? They aren't wealthy? They don't have positions of power and status? They aren't popular? The aren't famous? What is it we think we don't have? They haven't sold my idiotic brother in law on their ideas? What is it that makes us think we are "losers," that we carry some enormous burden that is impossible to overcome?
Why do we kiss up to the successful - as measured by material success and status and credentials and dominance and popularity - while giving each other tentative and lukewarm support, and then spend so much time wringing our hands and questioning ourselves and making it all up as an impossible task against insurmountable odds?
We are slaves - slaves to weak thinking and false assumptions, and that expresses itself as a weak and groveling posture in life.
What the reactionaries are saying is that we are "losers" and therefore not to be listened to, and that there are only two ways to not be a "loser" - convert them to our ideas by selling them (ha good luck with that one suckers) or else embrace modern gentrified liberalism - be a "winner," materially successful and praised and rewarded and admired, be practical and realistic, and then do our political stuff on the weekend and be satisfied with feeling that we are good and superior persons doing good things and taking baby steps and all of the rest of that crap.
We should break those mental chains, resist the urge to become stars or somebodies, and resist the temptation to listen to people depending upon whether or not we see them as stars - as being somebodies, as having status or importance.
I mentioned Angelina Grimke because she never sought to build a career or bring fame to herself n or to be personally successful.
Angelina Grimke, along with her sister Sarah, were the first women in the United States to publicly argue for the abolition of slavery. Cultured and well educated, Angelina had gone north from South Carolina with her sister with firsthand knowledge of the condition of the slaves. In 1836 Angelina wrote a lengthy address urging all women to actively work to free blacks. The sisters' lectures elicited violent criticism because it was considered altogether improper for women to speak out on political issues. This made them acutely aware of their own oppression as women, which they soon began to address along with abolitionism. A severe split developed in the abolition movement, with some antislavery people arguing that it was the "Negro's hour and women would have to wait." The Grimkes refused to accept this idea, insisting on the importance of equality for both women and blacks. Angelina's sister became a major theoretician of the women's rights movement, challenging all the conventional beliefs about a woman's place. As to men, she demanded: "All I ask of our brethren is that they will take their feet from off our necks."
http://www.english.ilstu.edu/351/hypertext98/hankins/african/AGrimke.htmlAngelina Grimke Weld, abolitionist, and pioneer lecturer and author for woman’s rights, was the sister of Sarah Moore Grimke. Leaving Charleston, she became a Philadelphia abolitionist, joined the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, and wrote an abolitionist pamphlet An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South (1836), which caused a stir. Taking up woman’s rights as well, Angelina wrote a series of letters on the subject in the abolitionist Liberator. Sarah and Angelina’s pioneering lectures and writing on abolition and woman’s rights inspired Lucy Stone, Lucretia Mott, and others to take up both causes.
From a prominent South Carolina family, she was one of 14 children of John Grimke. He fathered both white and African-American children, which made his daughters sensitive to the injustices of slavery. Angelina left Charleston, joined her sister in Philadelphia and followed her into the Quaker faith. Angelina held abolition meetings for women in New York city and, accompanied by her sister, lectured to “mixed” (men and women) audiences, shocking behavior in its day. Their lectures created a sensation that landed the sisters at the center of the woman’s rights debate, provoking a rebuke from ministers against their “unwomanly behavior.” In 1838, Angelina married abolitionist Theodore Weld “out of meeting” and both sisters were expelled from the Quaker faith. Two days later, Angelina spoke passionately to a Philadelphia antislavery convention while a mob, who later burned the building, raged outside. The Welds retired from the antislavery circuit and settled first in New Jersey, then Massachusetts. Sarah made her home with them for the remainder of her life.
http://www.womenspeecharchive.org/women/profile/index.cfm?ProfileID=102Here are some excerpts from her speeches. I hope IO am not reaching too far here with this, But can you see how being free from any desire of self-promotion, she is also free to say things she could not otherwise say, and how relevant those things are to the political situation today?
Slavery dwells in our hearts -
Men, brethren and fathers - mothers, daughters and sisters, what came ye out for to see? A reed shaken with the wind? Is it curiosity merely, or a deep sympathy with the perishing slave, that has brought this large audience together? Those voices without ought to awaken and call out our warmest sympathies. Deluded beings! "they know not what they do." They know not that they are undermining their own rights and their own happiness, temporal and eternal. Do you ask, "what has the North to do with slavery?" Hear it -- hear it. Those voices without tell us that the spirit of slavery is here, and has been roused to wrath by our abolition speeches and conventions: for surely liberty would not foam and tear herself with rage, because her friends are multiplied daily, and meetings are held in quick succession to set forth her virtues and extend her peaceful kingdom. This opposition shows that slavery has done its deadliest work in the hearts of our citizens. Do you ask, then, "what has the North to do?" I answer, cast out first the spirit of slavery from your own hearts, and then lend your aid to convert the South. Each one present has a work to do, be his or her situation what it may, however limited their means, or insignificant their supposed influence. The great men of this country will not do this work; the church will never do it. A desire to please the world, to keep the favor of all parties and of all conditions, makes them dumb on this and every other unpopular subject. They have become worldly-wise, and therefore God, in his wisdom, employs them not to carry on his plans of reformation and salvation. He hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise, and the weak to overcome the mighty.
"A desire to please the world, to keep the favor of all parties and of all conditions, makes them dumb on this and every other unpopular subject."
Many persons go to the South for a season, and are hospitably entertained in the parlor and at the table of the slave-holder. They never enter the huts of the slaves; they know nothing of the dark side of the picture, and they return home with praises on their lips of the generous character of those with whom they had tarried. Or if they have witnessed the cruelties of slavery, by remaining silent spectators they have naturally become callous - an insensibility has ensued which prepares them to apologize even for barbarity. Nothing but the corrupting influence of slavery on the hearts of the Northern people can induce them to apologize for it; and much will have been done for the destruction of Southern slavery when we have so reformed the North that no one here will be willing to risk his reputation by advocating or even excusing the holding of men as property. The South know it, and acknowledge that as fast as our principles prevail, the hold of the master must be relaxed.
There is nothing to be feared from those who would stop our mouths, but they themselves should fear and tremble. The current is even now setting fast against them. If the arm of the North had not caused the Bastile of slavery to totter to its foundation, you would not hear those cries. A few years ago, and the South felt secure, and with a contemptuous sneer asked, "Who are the abolitionists? The abolitionists are nothing?" - Ay, in one sense they were nothing, and they are nothing still. But in this we rejoice, that "God has chosen things that are not to bring to nought things that are."
We often hear the question asked , What shall we do?" Here is an opportunity for doing something now. Every man and every woman present may do something by showing that we fear not a mob, and, in the midst of threatenings and revilings, by opening our mouths for the dumb and pleading the cause of those who are ready to perish.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4h2939t.htmlIsn't that interesting? She is tackling the same issues, facing the same stubborn resistance, that we are today.
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