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[jfb]

Salon has a good article on the excellent film The Weather Underground. I know a lot of my friends are frustrated, and rightly so, by the Bush government's invasions of foreign countries, by its ongoing class war, by its shifty modus operandi and the media's general failure to report it. But the movie, among other things, reminds us that this isn't the only bad time America's had:

The Tet Offensive, beginning in January -- during which the North Vietnamese briefly occupied the U.S. Embassy in Saigon -- made clear that we were not only not winning the war, we might be losing it. In March, the men of Charlie Company, 11th Brigade, Americal Division, under the command of Lt. William Calley, massacred more than 300 unarmed civilians, including women and children, in the Vietnamese village of My Lai.

In April, the same month Rudd led the student uprising at Columbia, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis and black neighborhoods in more than 100 cities exploded in violent outrage. In May, the student-worker rebellion in Paris brought Charles de Gaulle's government to the brink of collapse. In June, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, who seemed likely to become the next president and had vowed to end the war, was assassinated in Los Angeles. In August, the shattered Democrats held their convention in Chicago and were upstaged by pitched street battles between radical demonstrators and Mayor Richard Daley's thuglike police force, while halfway around the world a different set of thugs, commanding Soviet tanks, rolled into Czechoslovakia to crush the "Prague Spring" reform movement.

All that in eight months.

And yet, most of us survived. Most of us are better off. It's not exactly soothing like a lullaby, but: Things can be very bad and still get better. Things can get better this time, too.

Re the "Current Music": My iPod's shuffle play can be downright spooky.

Comments

[jfb.livejournal.com]

Just so. I'm not saying things won't get worse, and I'm certainly not urging complacency--I don't think things will just get better on their own. I'm only making a case for hope.

Speaking of World Wars, I'll again point out Robert Muller's remarks from earlier this year, in which he described an "unprecedented public conversation" (http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0320/p11s01-coop.html) about the invasion of Iraq.

No, it hasn't prevented the US from forging ahead with war in Iraq - but it has definitely succeeded in engaging the US in conversation and giving the rest of the world a place to be heard.

It is tense, it is tough, it is challenging, but this kind of global conversation has not happened before on this scale - not before World War I or World War II, not before Vietnam or Korea. This is a stunning new era of global listening, speaking, and responsibility.

As he said, all that talking didn't stop the war. But he's right--the fact that we had a global debate about its legitimacy, before the fighting started, is astonishing.

We've got a long way to go before we're a world at peace. And in some respects--for example, ease of access to staggeringly destructive technology--we're sprinting backwards. But we need not to overlook the signs of progress.

(I should perhaps admit that based on Muller's personal web site (http://robertmuller.org/)(s (http://www.goodmorningworld.org/)) it's probably safe to assume he's insane. But, just like Gene Ray (http://www.timecube.com/), he's still right sometimes.)