Some Things are Relative

When George Bush became president of the United States for the second time I remember lying on the floor in front of the TV sobbing uncontrollably. The wave of despair and misery that washed over me was palpable, even though I knew my life would go on, at least externally, in pretty much the same fashion as before. I would continue to live on my 10 acres in El Valle and irrigate my garden, orchard, and fields. I would continue to publish and edit La Jicarita News with my partner Mark, where we could pretty much print anything we wanted. Our kids would continue to attend public school and the college of their choice and pretty much say anything they wanted. When Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became president of Iran, I read a profile of a young Iranian writer who described sitting in his room in despair, holding his head in his hands. His life, already in a state of precariousness, would certainly not go on as before. If he continued to write what he wanted to write, he would probably end up in jail. If he continued to associate with those who believed in a secular, democratic Iran, he would probably end up in jail. And if his girlfriend continued to refuse to wear a jihib, she might be whipped or end up in jail.

His suffering is more profound. My suffering is complicated by my privilege. It is only because of where I live that I have the leisure and capacity to be writing this attempt to deal with what makes me suffer, the dichotomy of the tomato in the global society. While I struggle to reconcile my faith in the Marxist analysis of capitalism with a more postmodern, unhistorical exploration of how cultural conditions figure into the equation, the student in Iran is still very much aware of a systematic, historical process that controls and dominates his life, leaving not much room for worrying about how to appreciate the tomato.

Those of us who live in privileged American society, which is responsible for much of the oppression in places like Iran, seem incapable of figuring out how to smash the power elite after losing the will of the sixties and early seventies, when the political system seemed vulnerable, at least momentarily. Michel Foucault gave up the barricades for the San Francisco bathhouses and Abbie Hoffman killed himself. A young friend of mine, who is in her late twenties and graduated from Antioch, where I also went to college, doesn’t like to hear my stories of the sixties. My best one, about the time in Berkeley the cops surrounded our house with a swat team, looking for a fellow Antioch student who was on the run after being arrested in Cambridge at an anti-war demonstration and tying up the sheriff on Telegraph Hill when he tried to arrest him, bores her silly. She bristles when we complain about the lack of young people out in the streets protesting the invasion of Iraq or the prison at Guantanamo Bay. She says demonstrations are useless, that the mainstream media subverts the intent by refusing to cover them.

But then, after a month of student and worker riots in the streets of France the government capitulates and rescinds the law that caused the riots in the first place (a labor law that would allow employers to fire workers younger than 25 without cause). It took ten years of demonstrating in the streets of the U.S. before this country pulled out of Vietnam (and it’s debatable how much of our withdrawal was due to political unrest at home, see the Civil Disobedience blog) and millions of demonstrators in the streets of all the major cities didn’t deter George Bush from invading Iraq. Why did the French government respond so quickly to its student uprising? In France labor unions remain strong and viable and a force to be reckoned with, while here in the states the unions have largely been emasculated, through a calculated campaign by the power elite and because of internecine fighting and corruption in the unions themselves. So not only are we ignored in the streets, we have no organizations with any political clout that can actually threaten the status quo of the government. Our privilege extends only as far as the marketplace: We have the power to consume but lack the power to change anything. I can write and speak out about whatever I want but my words effect nothing. Internet blogs can appear on our computer screens in a blink of an eye but we can’t stop the bombing in Iraq and we can’t make sure no person goes to bed hungry.

A lot of us spend a lot of energy trying to figure out how this has happened and what we can do about it. That doesn’t stop us from continuing our own struggles that manifest in a million different ways, but it’s obviously not enough and periodically it results in the malaise that I am now struggling with. But, as the Mexican immigrants who took to the streets during the last election to agitate for immigration reform, like to remind us, “Si se puede”—if only fleetingly, if only temporarily, if only in the alleviation of the suffering of a few at the hands of many.

Solution: Hasta siempre liberación.