Getting Angry

There are plenty of things to get angry about. One of the things I get angry about is the threats we all face, whether we know about them or not, to our freedom. Our liberty is not really threatened by the Sandinistas or brown-skinned people coming over the border; those are just diversions thought up by the ruling class. It's threatened by zealous colonels, incompetent businesses, neutered media, and citizens unwilling to be eternally vigilant. We could all do with more pith and vinegar. Here is my list of some things we should be angry about in these troubling days of the American empire:

1. PBS recently repeated the Bill Moyers program on the secret government in America (known euphemistically as the "intelligence community"). He clearly showed a long history of presidential deception, culminating in the Iranamok mess. Why aren't people angry about how Reagan and his cabal subverted the Constitution to achieve their illegitimate ends? Why haven't they called for the impeachment of this silly man? Iranamok was more of a threat to freedom than any regime in Nicaragua.
2. Michael Douglas, in the movie Wall Street, boasts that 1% of American families hold 50% of American wealth - $5 trillion dollars. I've heard similar figures from other sources. Such economic concentration subverts political liberty and equality. If it's true that he who has the gold makes the rules, then it stands to reason that in a democracy more people, not fewer, should have that gold. We should trash the myth of the free market and redistribute the wealth, wealth that was generated by every worker in this country.
3. If we expand our education system to include not just schools but also the media, then we should be angry about how much we have been kept in the dark. It's hard not to believe that there's been a conspiracy to create a pliant citizenry by not giving them the intellectual tools to make reasoned choices. As the two Thomases, Jefferson and Paine, pointed out, uninformed citizens are clay for despots; in our time, clay for Republicans.

Anger can be destructive if it turns to rage. Rage is a kind of giving-up: of perspective, of humor, of love; it takes its final form in a stiff allegiance to principle or ideology. The anger I'm speaking about is closer to indignation and a vigorous skepticism, indignation about injustice, skepticism about the official explanation. Voting is the lowest form of this anger; committed participation is the highest. And we must remember that the touchstone for this anger is the Constitution, its enumerated liberties, its energy for equality. If we forget that, we subvert our own reason for being.

Sliding

Education And Morals