Gold teeth and a curse for this town...
I just read a pretty good article by William Ayers, the once radical member of the Weather Underground who was convicted of a bombing in the '60s (No one was hurt) and the caricature of the "scary evil" that Palin and McCain tried to use to thwart Obama by association. The article is here but below is my favorite part:
"Yet hope-my hope, our hope-resides in a simple self-evident truth: the future is unknown, and it is also entirely unknowable.
History is always in the making. It’s up to us. It is up to me and to you. Nothing is predetermined. That makes our moment on this earth both hopeful and all the more urgent-we must find ways to become real actors, to become authentic subjects in our own history.
We may not be able to will a movement into being, but neither can we sit idly for a movement to spring full-grown, as from the head of Zeus.
We have to agitate for democracy and egalitarianism, press harder for human rights, learn to build a new society through our self-transformations and our limited everyday struggles.
At the turn of the last century, Eugene Debs, the great Socialist Party leader from Terre Haute, Ind., told a group of workers in Chicago, “If I could lead you into the Promised Land, I would not do it, because someone else would come along and lead you out.”
In this time of new beginnings and rising expectations, it is even more urgent that we figure out how to become the people we have been waiting to be."
Very good point, and it has pushed me further in the direction I've been headed for a while now. I'm not content with this inaction.
In the way those eyes I've always loved illuminate this place
Like a trashcan fire in a prison cell
Like the searchlights in the parking lots of hell
"Yet hope-my hope, our hope-resides in a simple self-evident truth: the future is unknown, and it is also entirely unknowable.
History is always in the making. It’s up to us. It is up to me and to you. Nothing is predetermined. That makes our moment on this earth both hopeful and all the more urgent-we must find ways to become real actors, to become authentic subjects in our own history.
We may not be able to will a movement into being, but neither can we sit idly for a movement to spring full-grown, as from the head of Zeus.
We have to agitate for democracy and egalitarianism, press harder for human rights, learn to build a new society through our self-transformations and our limited everyday struggles.
At the turn of the last century, Eugene Debs, the great Socialist Party leader from Terre Haute, Ind., told a group of workers in Chicago, “If I could lead you into the Promised Land, I would not do it, because someone else would come along and lead you out.”
In this time of new beginnings and rising expectations, it is even more urgent that we figure out how to become the people we have been waiting to be."
Very good point, and it has pushed me further in the direction I've been headed for a while now. I'm not content with this inaction.
In the way those eyes I've always loved illuminate this place
Like a trashcan fire in a prison cell
Like the searchlights in the parking lots of hell