Evidence Of Things Unseen: The Rise of a New Movement

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Instead of looking down our noses at the Europeans, we should be Europeanizing our approach to work, vacations and leisure time -- and for that matter, Canadianizing our approach to health care. How's that for a progressive platform -- longer vacations for all!

Instead, because of cultural brainwashing, a recent survey showed that 19 percent of Americans thought they already were in the top 1 percent income bracket, and another 20 percent believed they would be eventually. That's what watching too much television in the center of empire can do to your head, and why the struggle is a cultural one, not simply political or economic, but a battle over how images and demons and fantasies are produced and wired into our consciousness.

But there are unseen resources in our history that can fortify us for this struggle. Thankfully, historians like Howard Zinn have shown us a "people's history" that is just as important to restore as our cultural and environmental resources.

There were those who opposed the original aggression and broken treaties against the indigenous on these lands. We honor their example. There were Americans who opposed slavery, who opposed annexation, who opposed the wars with Cuba and Mexico, who opposed the subordination of women. We honor them in our lives today. The Sierra Club was founded here, the Abolitionists, the NAACP, the Suffragettes, the Populists, the emigrant workers of Lowell who marched for bread and roses, they are present here today. We have deep roots in movements against monoliths, monocultures, monomaniacs and mammon.

Today the converging movements are in sync with the larger body of public opinion, and spilling over into the mainstream. We see this in the phenomenal growth of MoveOn.org, the grassroots support for Howard Dean, for Dennis Kucinich, in the growing fear and loathing of the Pentagon, the White House and Fox News.

Despite the spin, despite the play on our patriotic feelings, despite the legitimate worries about terror, a majority of Americans -- and a strong majority of Democrats -- are questioning the purpose of Iraq, the credibility of the administration, the needless deaths, the unexpected costs, and sacrifice of our domestic needs on the altar of empire. Dissent has even appeared among military families and GIs on the battlefield, angry about the callous manipulation of the body count to justify the President's pledge that the military mission is "accomplished." Dissent within the military is a sign that the end is beginning.

Because public opinion is moving, the Democratic presidential candidates are changing their themes in a positive direction. Just last year, the corporate centrists of the Democratic Party were counseling the candidates to support the President's war, to divorce themselves from any allegiances to the 60s, to wait for the Iraq war to end amidst cheering in Baghdad, and then somehow defeat the president on incremental issues like prescription drugs for the elderly. Talk about out of touch.

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