corrente

I met a nutjob at the library this morning, ranting and raving about getting the US out of the UN. I’ve met these types before, old Birchers and suchlike. But, after I clubbed him to the ground with a copy of Das Kapital, I got to thinking. Leah has been posting on framing our values, and how we can hook it so it’s simple and straightforward, but comprehensive and based on what's worked before. The ravings of this neo-Bircher made me remember that MLK always framed the struggle for justice and freedom and an end to poverty in GLOBAL terms, not simply national ones. The IWW is a GLOBAL union. We talk about GLOBAL warming. The Bu’ushites are concerned with maintaining American dominance, spreading “freedom and democracy” at the point of a gun, and on their own terms, which are mainly to support their thirst for oil and minerals. Maybe it’s time we started speaking more globally. Tresy’s relocation to Canada, Rob’s British passport, our friend Yank in London, all make this a global frame. Maybe that’s one approach that needs more air.

I searched around for the right words, and thought of Carl Sagan, and then found that Tad Daley has some thoughts on exactly this meme in his anti-inaugural address:

The picture taken by the Voyager spacecraft from beyond Pluto shows our planet as a tiny speck, almost completely lost in the glare of the Sun. Carl Sagan wrote of this photograph: " Look at that dot. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of lived out their lives. ... Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot."

We advocate a global policy agenda that reflects the truth of Earth from space. We compare the radiant blues and greens of our fragile planet to the blackness of the cosmos, and recognize the infinite preciousness of our lonely home. We insist that the Whole Earth is perhaps something greater than the sum of its parts.

We believe that the pursuit of "vital national interests" ought to be accompanied by a calculus of transnational interests. We suspect that an expanded ethic of planetary patriotism and allegiance to humanity may be no less than the Great Story of the 21st Century.

We stand in the tradition of what the great psychologist Erik Erikson called an "all-human solidarity." We see the first glimmerings of what the great political scientist Robert C. Tucker calls an "ethic of specieshood." We are the vanguard of what Voltaire called "the party of humanity."

Whole thing at: An Alternative Inaugural Presidential Address

How can blogs help create this “all-human solidarity” on this little blue pea in space? Before Bushco makes it a smoking cinder? And you know what I heard on the radio this morning driving into town? A "newsperson" (I forget which) saying something like "Christian conservatives have issued notice today that certain cartoons contain immoral messages..." and, as I switched stations to public radio, I longed for the day I would hear an announcer say "Godless socialists issued notice today that the revolution is here..." Global problems--solved by religion? Or caused by religion? And how to make the struggle both local and global? Ugh. I'm headed for home, a bottle of stout and the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.