[Mb-civic] Against Discouragement By Howard Zinn

[Mike Blaxill]

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/052505M.shtml

Against Discouragement 
    By Howard Zinn 
    Tom Dispatch

    Wednesday 25 May 2005
In 1963, historian Howard Zinn was fired from
Spelman College, where he was chair of the
History Department, because of his civil rights
activities. This year, he was invited back to
give the commencement address. Here is the text
of that speech, given on May 15, 2005.


    I am deeply honored to be invited back to
Spelman after forty-two years. I would like to
thank the faculty and trustees who voted to
invite me, and especially your president, Dr.
Beverly Tatum. And it is a special privilege to
be here with Diahann Carroll and Virginia Davis
Floyd.

    But this is your day - the students
graduating today. It's a happy day for you and
your families. I know you have your own hopes for
the future, so it may be a little presumptuous
for me to tell you what hopes I have for you, but
they are exactly the same ones that I have for my
grandchildren.

    My first hope is that you will not be too
discouraged by the way the world looks at this
moment. It is easy to be discouraged, because our
nation is at war - still another war, war after
war - and our government seems determined to
expand its empire even if it costs the lives of
tens of thousands of human beings. There is
poverty in this country, and homelessness, and
people without health care, and crowded
classrooms, but our government, which has
trillions of dollars to spend, is spending its
wealth on war. There are a billion people in
Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East
who need clean water and medicine to deal with
malaria and tuberculosis and AIDS, but our
government, which has thousands of nuclear
weapons, is experimenting with even more deadly
nuclear weapons. Yes, it is easy to be
discouraged by all that.

    But let me tell you why, in spite of what I
have just described, you must not be discouraged.

    I want to remind you that, fifty years ago,
racial segregation here in the South was
entrenched as tightly as was apartheid in South
Africa. The national government, even with
liberal presidents like Kennedy and Johnson in
office, was looking the other way while black
people were beaten and killed and denied the
opportunity to vote. So black people in the South
decided they had to do something by themselves.
They boycotted and sat in and picketed and
demonstrated, and were beaten and jailed, and
some were killed, but their cries for freedom
were soon heard all over the nation and around
the world, and the President and Congress finally
did what they had previously failed to do -
enforce the 14th and 15th Amendments to the
Constitution. Many people had said: The South
will never change. But it did change. It changed
because ordinary people organized and took risks
and challenged the system and would not give up.
That's when democracy came alive.

    I want to remind you also that when the war
in Vietnam was going on, and young Americans were
dying and coming home paralyzed, and our
government was bombing the villages of Vietnam -
bombing schools and hospitals and killing
ordinary people in huge numbers - it looked
hopeless to try to stop the war. But just as in
the Southern movement, people began to protest
and soon it caught on. It was a national
movement. Soldiers were coming back and
denouncing the war, and young people were
refusing to join the military, and the war had to
end.

    The lesson of that history is that you must
not despair, that if you are right, and you
persist, things will change. The government may
try to deceive the people, and the newspapers and
television may do the same, but the truth has a
way of coming out. The truth has a power greater
than a hundred lies. I know you have practical
things to do - to get jobs and get married and
have children. You may become prosperous and be
considered a success in the way our society
defines success, by wealth and standing and
prestige. But that is not enough for a good life.

    Remember Tolstoy's story, "The Death of Ivan
Illych." A man on his deathbed reflects on his
life, how he has done everything right, obeyed
the rules, become a judge, married, had children,
and is looked upon as a success. Yet, in his last
hours, he wonders why he feels a failure. After
becoming a famous novelist, Tolstoy himself had
decided that this was not enough, that he must
speak out against the treatment of the Russian
peasants, that he must write against war and
militarism.

    My hope is that whatever you do to make a
good life for yourself - whether you become a
teacher, or social worker, or business person, or
lawyer, or poet, or scientist - you will devote
part of your life to making this a better world
for your children, for all children. My hope is
that your generation will demand an end to war,
that your generation will do something that has
not yet been done in history and wipe out the
national boundaries that separate us from other
human beings on this earth.

    Recently I saw a photo on the front page of
the New York Times which I cannot get out of my
mind. It showed ordinary Americans sitting on
chairs on the southern border of Arizona, facing
Mexico. They were holding guns and they were
looking for Mexicans who might be trying to cross
the border into the United States. This was
horrifying to me - the realization that, in this
twenty-first century of what we call
"civilization," we have carved up what we claim
is one world into two hundred artificially
created entities we call "nations" and are ready
to kill anyone who crosses a boundary.

    Is not nationalism - that devotion to a flag,
an anthem, a boundary, so fierce it leads to
murder - one of the great evils of our time,
along with racism, along with religious hatred?
These ways of thinking, cultivated, nurtured,
indoctrinated from childhood on, have been useful
to those in power, deadly for those out of power.

    Here in the United States, we are brought up
to believe that our nation is different from
others, an exception in the world, uniquely
moral; that we expand into other lands in order
to bring civilization, liberty, democracy. But if
you know some history you know that's not true.
If you know some history, you know we massacred
Indians on this continent, invaded Mexico, sent
armies into Cuba, and the Philippines. We killed
huge numbers of people, and we did not bring them
democracy or liberty. We did not go into Vietnam
to bring democracy; we did not invade Panama to
stop the drug trade; we did not invade
Afghanistan and Iraq to stop terrorism. Our aims
were the aims of all the other empires of world
history - more profit for corporations, more
power for politicians.

    The poets and artists among us seem to have a
clearer understanding of the disease of
nationalism. Perhaps the black poets especially
are less enthralled with the virtues of American
"liberty" and "democracy," their people having
enjoyed so little of it. The great
African-American poet Langston Hughes addressed
his country as follows:

    You really haven't been a virgin for so long.

    It's ludicrous to keep up the pretext...

    You've slept with all the big powers 
    In military uniforms, 
    And you've taken the sweet life 
    Of all the little brown fellows...

    Being one of the world's big vampires, 
    Why don't you come on out and say so 
    Like Japan, and England, and France, 
    And all the other nymphomaniacs of power.

    I am a veteran of the Second World War. That
was considered a "good war," but I have come to
the conclusion that war solves no fundamental
problems and only leads to more wars. War poisons
the minds of soldiers, leads them to kill and
torture, and poisons the soul of the nation.

    My hope is that your generation will demand
that your children be brought up in a world
without war. It we want a world in which the
people of all countries are brothers and sisters,
if the children all over the world are considered
as our children, then war - in which children are
always the greatest casualties - cannot be
accepted as a way of solving problems.

    I was on the faculty of Spelman College for
seven years, from 1956 to 1963. It was a
heartwarming time, because the friends we made in
those years have remained our friends all these
years. My wife Roslyn and I and our two children
lived on campus. Sometimes when we went into
town, white people would ask: How is it to be
living in the black community? It was hard to
explain. But we knew this - that in downtown
Atlanta, we felt as if we were in alien
territory, and when we came back to the Spelman
campus, we felt that we were at home.

    Those years at Spelman were the most exciting
of my life, the most educational certainly. I
learned more from my students than they learned
from me. Those were the years of the great
movement in the South against racial segregation,
and I became involved in that in Atlanta, in
Albany, Georgia, in Selma, Alabama, in
Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and Greenwood and Itta
Bena and Jackson. I learned something about
democracy: that it does not come from the
government, from on high, it comes from people
getting together and struggling for justice. I
learned about race. I learned something that any
intelligent person realizes at a certain point -
that race is a manufactured thing, an artificial
thing, and while race does matter (as Cornel West
has written), it only matters because certain
people want it to matter, just as nationalism is
something artificial. I learned that what really
matters is that all of us - of whatever so-called
race and so-called nationality - are human beings
and should cherish one another.

    I was lucky to be at Spelman at a time when I
could watch a marvelous transformation in my
students, who were so polite, so quiet, and then
suddenly they were leaving the campus and going
into town, and sitting in, and being arrested,
and then coming out of jail full of fire and
rebellion. You can read all about that in Harry
Lefever's book Undaunted by the Fight. One day
Marian Wright (now Marian Wright Edelman), who
was my student at Spelman, and was one of the
first arrested in the Atlanta sit-ins, came to
our house on campus to show us a petition she was
about to put on the bulletin board of her
dormitory. The heading on the petition epitomized
the transformation taking place at Spelman
College. Marian had written on top of the
petition: "Young Ladies Who Can Picket, Please
Sign Below."

    My hope is that you will not be content just
to be successful in the way that our society
measures success; that you will not obey the
rules, when the rules are unjust; that you will
act out the courage that I know is in you. There
are wonderful people, black and white, who are
models. I don't mean African- Americans like
Condoleezza Rice, or Colin Powell, or Clarence
Thomas, who have become servants of the rich and
powerful. I mean W.E.B. DuBois and Martin Luther
King and Malcolm X and Marian Wright Edelman, and
James Baldwin and Josephine Baker and good white
folk, too, who defied the Establishment to work
for peace and justice.

    Another of my students at Spelman, Alice
Walker, who, like Marian, has remained our friend
all these years, came from a tenant farmer's
family in Eatonton, Georgia, and became a famous
writer. In one of her first published poems, she
wrote:

    It is true -- 
    I've always loved 
    the daring 
    ones 
    Like the black young 
    man 
    Who tried 
    to crash 
    All barriers 
    at once, 
    wanted to 
    swim 
    At a white 
    beach (in Alabama) 
    Nude.

    I am not suggesting you go that far, but you
can help to break down barriers, of race
certainly, but also of nationalism; that you do
what you can - you don't have to do something
heroic, just something, to join with millions of
others who will just do something, because all of
those somethings, at certain points in history,
come together, and make the world better.

    That marvelous African-American writer Zora
Neale Hurston, who wouldn't do what white people
wanted her to do, who wouldn't do what black
people wanted her to do, who insisted on being
herself, said that her mother advised her: Leap
for the sun - you may not reach it, but at least
you will get off the ground.

    By being here today, you are already standing
on your toes, ready to leap. My hope for you is a
good life.

------------------------------------
    Howard Zinn is the author with Anthony Arnove
of the just published Voices of a People's
History of the United States (Seven Stories
Press) and of the international best-selling A
People's History of the United States.