Notes Toward A Manifesto
Jun. 10th, 2003 05:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pantryslut(Or, talking myself out of political burnout. Yes, that means political content ahead. You've been warned.)
How much has the world changed in the past 30 years? Since I was born. In the last 40 years? 50?
How different my parents' lives were from mine. And theirs, from their parents, by grandparents.
We like to think of these changes in apolitical terms. Especially but by no means exclusively, the science fiction community likes to emphasize the speed of technological change.
(I've argued with one or two people about whether or not the pace of technological change is actually accelerating or decelerating - -think about the turn of the 19th century versus just 20 years later. But that's beside the point here.)
But it's not just technological change, is it? It's also political change.
Because you can't take the politics out of anything. It's not "over there." It's not what politicians do and regular people abhor. it's not even only the province of protestors and activists. It's not even merely the province of those who vote.
Think of the huge, monumental political changes that marked the 20th century, for better or worse or both. Think of the populations disenfranchised, who now wield political clout. Think of the political movements, now dead or marginalized.
And yes, think of the progress. Child labor abolished in the industrialized world. Jim Crow dismantled. Women, black people, and countless others, who got the vote.
(My great-grandmother was born without the right to vote. She lived into my 20's. We're one generation away from that being a living memory. Two generations from slavery in America being so.)
I hear so many activist types bemoaning "apathy." But I don't think it's apathy. I think it's a feeling of powerlessness.
I feel it, too.
But then, I look at the rate of change.
And now I'm thinking this: are we going to let people stall our political progress?
Would anyone let something stall our technological progress? No. In fact, some people might argue that it's impossible to do. You can complicate it, make stupid policy decisions, discourage it, but you can't stop it. Like water, dam it in one place and it'll flow somewhere else.
If we can convince ourselves that political progress is similarly impossible to stall, what might we accomplish in the meantime?
(P.S. I'm sure that to some ears, this sounds very Marxist. It's the march of history, revisited, isn't it? Cool.)
How much has the world changed in the past 30 years? Since I was born. In the last 40 years? 50?
How different my parents' lives were from mine. And theirs, from their parents, by grandparents.
We like to think of these changes in apolitical terms. Especially but by no means exclusively, the science fiction community likes to emphasize the speed of technological change.
(I've argued with one or two people about whether or not the pace of technological change is actually accelerating or decelerating - -think about the turn of the 19th century versus just 20 years later. But that's beside the point here.)
But it's not just technological change, is it? It's also political change.
Because you can't take the politics out of anything. It's not "over there." It's not what politicians do and regular people abhor. it's not even only the province of protestors and activists. It's not even merely the province of those who vote.
Think of the huge, monumental political changes that marked the 20th century, for better or worse or both. Think of the populations disenfranchised, who now wield political clout. Think of the political movements, now dead or marginalized.
And yes, think of the progress. Child labor abolished in the industrialized world. Jim Crow dismantled. Women, black people, and countless others, who got the vote.
(My great-grandmother was born without the right to vote. She lived into my 20's. We're one generation away from that being a living memory. Two generations from slavery in America being so.)
I hear so many activist types bemoaning "apathy." But I don't think it's apathy. I think it's a feeling of powerlessness.
I feel it, too.
But then, I look at the rate of change.
And now I'm thinking this: are we going to let people stall our political progress?
Would anyone let something stall our technological progress? No. In fact, some people might argue that it's impossible to do. You can complicate it, make stupid policy decisions, discourage it, but you can't stop it. Like water, dam it in one place and it'll flow somewhere else.
If we can convince ourselves that political progress is similarly impossible to stall, what might we accomplish in the meantime?
(P.S. I'm sure that to some ears, this sounds very Marxist. It's the march of history, revisited, isn't it? Cool.)
