Re: Alex Cockburn vs. Michael Moore

[Thomas Kruse <tkruse@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

A couple of notes on "Nicaragua vs. Detroit".  I spent 1985-90 in Nicaragua,
often in war zones, saw a lot of the stuff mentioned in some of the
missives.  I also read the Moore article in the Nation (seems I get it here
before the west coast of the US).  I found the article wonderful, very much
to the point.

Lots of us did mountains of solidarity work in the 1980s.  Mostly the
arguments we took to people were moral ones: this is wrong, it must stop.
(Interestingly, a close Nicaraguan friend once told me: "You know why they
do all this shit to us [referring to the US war]?  Because of a *moral*
position we [FSLN] have staked out.")  Often, those arguments didn't have
the impact they might have precisely because, as Moore puts it, we weren't
talking to people or involved in their lives in any way other than
"moralizing" about Central America.  Often Central America activists had
absolutely no idea what was going on the US (the "Great U Turn", etc.).  All
true.

With some VERY important exceptions, of course.  For example the Labor
Committee on Central America, some of TecNica's labor delegations, community
based material aid through the Quijote Center, etc.  In the examples cited
there was, sometimes, more than "single issue" politics going on;
"connections" were being made; people were being listened to/worked with.
The point was made earlier: through those kinds of "connections" people take
good positions all around.  More committed to progressive movements in the
US --> more enraged by US wars in Central America; and vice versa.

As fodder for debate, erecting hierarchies of need are nifty (first stop the
rape, then attend to the fired friend).  Life, however, is seldom so neat;
choices seldom so tidy.  Posing them that way also positions us as
omniscient intervenors, as if today we could jet to Chiapas, tomorrow to the
neighborhood to attend to various injustices.  Usually, though, we just have
to do the best with what and who is before us.  And in working with my
students, for example, I find the best I can do is get them to just consider
some problem that touches them (or is of interest) and DO SOMETHING,
anything.  The notion of actually participating in a collective action of
some sort is so remote from their experience it is amazing.  Often they have
not even engaged what, at root, they might hope for in the world, much less
how to act on it.  In _Animal Dreams_, a book dedicated to the memory of
Benjamin Linder, Novelist/poet Barbara Kingsolver put it this way, in the
words of Hallie, her protagonist off to Nicaragua to defend the revolution:

"The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for.
And the most you can do is live inside that hope.  Not admire it from a
distance, but live right in it, under its roof.  What I want is so simple I
almost can't say it: elementary kindness.  Enough to eat, enough to go
around.  The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the
destroyers or the destroyed.  That's about it.  Right now I'm living in that
hope, running down its hallways and touching the walls on both sides."

Tom

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Tom Kruse / Casilla 5869 / Cochabamba, Bolivia
Tel/Fax: (011-591-42) 48242 (h) 22669 (w)
Email: tkruse@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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