Summer of Love…
27 August 2008 - 27 אב 5768 by Huw
NYONE Else fascinated by the idea that Obama has ties to 60s-era radicals? Admittedly: these are ties that are meaningless to his politics. The man is as centrist as John McCain (as far as Washington goes). Of course, Ayers is only as radical as most 60 year old hippies.
For the last 40+ years the right has been using any attachment to 1968 as a terrorist tool to burn fear into the hearts of Americans.
Of course: this only works on adults. Because there is good news out in the world:
Beginning January 2006, a movement to revive Students for a Democratic Society took shape. A small group of high school and college students reached out to former members of the “Sixties” SDS, to re-envision a student movement in the United States. They called for a new generation of SDS, to build a radical multi-issue organization grounded in the principle of participatory democracy. Several chapters at various colleges and high schools were subsequently formed. On Martin Luther King, Jr. Day of 2006, these chapters banded together to issue a press release that stated their intentions to reform the national SDS organization. In the press release, the SDS called for the organization’s first national convention since 1969 to be held in the summer of 2006 and to have it preceded by a series of regional conferences occurring during the Memorial Day weekend. These regional conferences would also be the first of their kind since 1969, and on April 23, 2006, SDS held a northeast regional conference at Brown University.
Within its first year and a half, the new SDS has grown to include hundreds of chapters and thousands of members. SDS has bulit an impressive list of ally organizations, with which it works on issues locally ranging from Worker’s rights to Climate Change. The organization has developed a deep commitment to strategy, mentorship and peer training, which has focused a new generation of student radicals on the fundamentals of movement building.
How come your host is willing to blog this and not get into Democrat vrs Republican power politics? Cuz I think the early Christians would have connected with SDS. Only the Pagan Romans in NT would have liked the Democrats or the Republicans (see comments below).
I agree with you that our country’s political machine is at best mediocre and at worst a source of great evil and corruption in the world, and that Christians should consider themselves citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven first and foremost, but don’t you think this is a little harsh?: “Only the Pagan Romans in NT would have liked the Democrats or the Republicans.” I read your blog almost every day because I think it is one of the best articulations of the gospel on the internet, but I thought this was a little much. I know that Obama’s policies aren’t radical and I disagree with many of them, but even if you don’t get the Obama thing, I don’t think it’s fair to dismiss the thousands of people electrified by Obama’s rhetoric for service, hope, change, justice, equality as “pagan Romans.” I just watched a YouTube video of college students like myself who put together an a capella version of will.i.am’s “Yes We Can” song (with the words of Obama’s New Hampshire speech), and I continue every day to be impressed by the effect the Obama campaign is having on my peers. I know he’s not the first politician to inspire young people, but isn’t the point that young people are inspired? That Obama’s life story and words confirm in me my own passion for social justice and help me to understand for once how this can also be interchangeable with the words “civic duty”? That this is part of my story as an American and not just as a lover of God?
I just finished reading a three-part history of Britain by Simon Schama, and he quoted someone who said in response to a question about what Winston Churchill did for the war effort, “Talk about it.” Churchill may have been a slightly hypocritical out-of-touch elitist semi-racist imperialist but his speeches brought together a generation of people when they needed to be united, when they needed to come together and survive, despite the Blitz, despite the temptation to give up. Schama argues that at the very least, Churchill’s impassioned rhetoric meant that Jewish schoolchildren in Britain were not rounded up into sports stadiums to be sent to Auschwitz like in Vichy France. He may have been part of an unconscienceable, reactionary political system, but that’s no excuse to just immediately write off the power of symbolic leaders to call us to justice and freedom and unity– whether or not you “get” it yourself. It’s certainly not an excuse to label anyone who does as equivalent to Pontius Pilate.
Schama’s personal favorite Briton of the 20th century though was not Churchill, but George Orwell. One quote he cites from him might be appropriate here: “To be loyal both to Chamberlain’s England and to the England of tomorrow [his socialist England] might seem an impossibility, if one did not know it to be an everyday phenomenon… [to this day,] it gives me a faint feeling of sacrilege not to stand to attention during ‘God Save the King.’ That is childish, of course, but I would sooner have had that kind of upbringing than be like the left-wing intellectuals who are so enlightened that they cannot understand the most ordinary emotions.” I’m not saying insinuating that of you, whom I respect greatly, but I will say that I am tired of the cynicism of others who share my political/social opinions and their quickness to be frustrated with any imperfect sign of hope and change.
I thank you deeply for your compliments. I pray I will be worthy of them!
I also thank you for your critique and my apologies for not explaining my point. I’m not comparing anyone in the USA to Pilot. Here’s my reasoning: (We did this in a class at Church…)
Name the groups of persons mentioned in the Gospels:
Disciples (and/or “Believers”)
Jews
Pharisees
Sadducees.
Zealots
The Roman Army (+ Herodians +Sadducees = local Govt)
The sick.
Scribes + Lawyers
Demoniacs
Jesus’ direct family.
Samaritans.
A few disparate Gentile groups.
There is one group - that held sway over all these persons. It is a *central* group in the Gospels (and in the Epistles). But it is never mentioned.
Which group are we (Modern, N. American, Middle Class - or even lower class - and Upper Class, largely white, but a few other races are represented as well) most like?
We are most like the group not mentioned at all: the group that sent the Army in to oppress the Jews, the group that propped up Herod, the group that took the wealth away in taxes. In many cases we could care less about the ins and outs of politics in some tiny little corner of our empire (where God is now living in the flesh). The revolution started in that oppressed corner was aimed *exactly* to topple our towers. The message of inclusion, protection, equality was aimed exactly at our heads. The message that “Jesus is Kyrios” is subversive exactly to our leader - and only by inference to those petty kings we’ve set up in other parts of the empire. We are living in the modern centre of the Roman Empire - even up here in slowly dying impoverished Buffalo. We might like to imagine ourselves as publicans or Pharisees, or like tax collectors and harlots, but we’re not even in the story yet.
And neither party is set up to topple our system of oppression. Instead, both parties are set up to support our system of oppression - albeit with different means; means which we may like or dislike in the ways that some Romans preferred The Republic to Caesar.
I see in the SDS - in the activism of Students (some are supporting Obama and some not) a much greater amount of hope than I do in Obama or Hillary or, certainly, McCain. But the hope I see in SDS (etc) has nothing to do with Democrats or Republicans. And, let us be clear: only recently are the Democrats on “our” side. They could just as easily switch later. The SDS represents now (as it did in the 60s) an appeal to direct democracy, and a toppling of our own towers. The folks in the 1960s largely lost site of that: the oppression America makes on the rest of the world was forgotten, for some reason, as the Baby Boomers all became Yuppies and did cocaine and voted for Reagan.
Maybe (only maybe) this generation won’t loose sight of the ultimate end of the struggle. But neither party would dare ally itself with that struggle’s ends - save only as a means to more votes which, in the final tally, are all votes against that struggle.
I think the Church - the revolutionary community that was sharing all things in Acts - would most identify with that struggle because that Church did something no one else had ever done: celebrated the Kingdom not as something to struggle for but as something to be *lived* now, here. I don’t need to topple a gov’t tower just to win my rights. My rights are from God - Gov’t can’t take ‘em or giver ‘em - and my rights, my property, my freedoms are all best used in laying them down and giving them to you.
That’s the Kingdom. That’s the world the SDS (etc) is struggling to achieve - but they don’t see it when they look at any church - because we’ve all signed up for a party. So when they look at us, they don’t say “See how they love each other!!!!” Rather, they say, “they are part of the problem we have to overthrow…”
That’s our fault: because we’re Romans.
I agree with basically everything you’ve said– and America definitely is Rome in today’s version of the gospels. Don’t get me wrong– Dorothy Day & Peter Maurin will always be much more fundamental to my political philosophy than any Democrat or Republican. But I just don’t think that means that everyone we admire or support has to be one of the “Jews” of the scenario– I think we can be good citizens of the Kingdom, squarely not “pagan Romans,” and still support a righteous centurion or two. I hope this clarifies what I meant. Thanks for responding– and thanks again for your blog which always inspires thought and questions.