Since some people liked my earlier post called “8 Things I Wish I’d Known (or Remembered) When I Was a Leftist,” I’ve written a sequel of sorts, about the valuable lessons I did learn back then.
None of this is deep or profound (except maybe some stuff I quote from other people) but these insights have stood me in good stead during my time here on “the other side.”
#5: Cops have to give you their badge number
OK, so that makes me sound tougher than I was/am. Unlike a lot of my former friends, I never had the guts to get arrested for civil disobedience.
(Note: we were NOT those masked guys you see smashing up the Starbucks at G20s. Violence was a no-no, even when it was swirling around us, like during the riot that capped off the 1988 Unconvention.)
However, I picked up some practical information about lawyers, jail and similar miscellany, not all of which was unsavory. Siding with Poland’s Solidarity made us the enemies of every “progressive” (read: pro-Soviet) group in town; it also taught me how a movement goes from grassroots to government, while striving to stay true to transcendent principles. (Tea Partiers, take notes.)
Look: while I don’t share Abbie Hoffman’s motives, Steal This Book nevertheless includes sound tips on, for example, choosing shotguns for home defense. The laws of ballistics, and of the universe in general, are operative whatever your political leanings.
Facts are facts, even if they’re being spouted by a hippie. The key (and frequently forgotten) word is “facts.” Take what’s true and useful from every source.
(And I have had occasion to demand a badge number recently, come to think of it…)
#4: Newspapers can’t be trusted
Until I started going to protests, I’d never been involved in events that got reported in the media. So it was disconcerting to pick up a newspaper the following morning and read a story about a demonstration I’d attended that got all the details ever so slightly off, from the number of demonstrators to the issues themselves. And sometimes not “slightly,” either.
In the larger scheme of thing, this slapdash reporting didn’t matter as much then as it does to me now, as a lesson in media literacy. From a newspaper squib to lengthy, live broadcasts of dramatic events as they unfold, what you’re looking at represents only the slenderest sliver of reality. 9/11 “troothers” can “study” footage of the twin towers for the rest of their lives – they will never see inside the buildings and witness the thousands of cause-and-effect incidents occurring simultaneously, every single second, at the molecular level on up. Such deceptively intense “studying” is the opposite of knowledge.
And if you’re a reporter writing “the first draft of history,” you don’t have a previously printed or videotaped source to anchor your brain. You’re it. Now. Stuff is swirling around you. Your feet hurt, your mortgage payment’s due, and you’re still thinking about the city council meeting you left an hour ago.
The average reporter is just a sleep deprived, not-very-well-read guy on a strict deadline. Accepting that gave me a healthy skepticism about the utility (but not the fun) of “fisking,” of overly analyzing media reports, hoping to find a few “gotchas.”
Sometimes reporter make “mistakes” that are intentional, and that’s criminal, and needs to be exposed.
But sometimes they’re just dorks.
#3: “It costs us a fortune to keep Gandhi poor”
And that was one of his devotees talking.
That insider knew (unlike the gullible, adoring public) that maintaining Gandhi’s sizable retinue, busy compound — simply “keeping up appearances” — required regular donations from billionaire industrialists.
Then as now, it was fashionable for lefties to idolize Gandhi and other progressives superstars. In those pre-internet days, most of us had an excuse. The likelihood of my stumbling across, say, an old-ish number of Commentary was astronomically low; it was only after I left the left, and became a rabid web user, that I discovered foreign correspondent turned film critic Richard Grenier’s searing instant classic, “The Gandhi Nobody Knows”:
I penned something last week about the perils of hero worship. However, the romanticization of poverty is another temptation we need to guard against as well.
It is easy to glorify poverty if – as did one Catholic progressive of my former acquaintance – you happened to live in the last rent-controlled apartment in Toronto, and so could “afford” to work at a leftwing paper on your four-figure salary. She considered herself one of “the people,” even though she was a member of a privileged family, had a fine education and therefore, unlike her neighbors, she had the option of leaving “the slums” anytime.
(This peculiar frame of mind is examined in great detail in Peter Schweizer’s book Do As I Say.)
I was one of the only real “poor people” many of my comrades in disarmament had ever worked with. The notions these middle class co-eds had about “the poor” were noble, lofty — and deeply delusional. When I told them so, they informed me I was wrong. I clearly just hadn’t read the right books…
Poverty is expensive. An entire “non-profit” industry of “agencies” and charities is deeply invested in spreading the idea that entire families are living in bus shelters and/or penniless Vietnam vets are shooting up truck stops or whatever. When I worked at a nominally apolitical but default progressive charity, thousands of donor dollars were spent putting together a major media event to unveil the latest study the charity had underwritten, showing a “shocking rise in the city’s poverty rate” (P.S. send money!)
That “shocking” increase, revealed on only a single slide in the lengthy PowerPoint presentation? One percentage point.
Have you ever noticed how the “homeless” only exist when there’s a “rightwinger” running your city, state or country? Or that we’ve spent billions “fighting homelessness” for the twenty-five years and yet “homelessness” still apparently persists (except when it doesn’t)?
Poverty costs money. And it makes money too.
#2: Don’t expect a thank-you note
This week, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his new Minister of the Environment announced their commitment to developing the “ethical oil” reserves in Western Canada.
They didn’t mention him by name, but the “ethical oil” idea is Ezra Levant’s. The one-time “Mo-toon” publisher’s new book of the same title is having the kind of impact on government policy that activists on the left (or, in Levant’s case) the right fantasize about.
And rarely achieve.
If you didn’t think your work would have any influence, you’d be psychotic to keep slogging away. However, if you spend too much time composing your Nobel Peace Prize speech or pondering who will play you in the biopic, snap out of it for your own sanity…
I see from my signature on the flyleaf that I bought Jim Forest’s book Making Friends of Enemies in 1989. Forest works for the multi-faith peacenik group, the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR). (When he was very much younger, he was the “young activist” to whom Thomas Merton addressed the talismanic letter I’ll talk about next…)
Alfred Hassler, who once worked for the FOR, told Forest a story about something that happened in the early 1950s, just after the Korean War. I never forgot this story, and even remembered how it was laid out on the page before I took my dusty copy down from the high shelf this afternoon.
Make of it what you will:
#1: “Do not depend on the hope of results”
My feelings about Thomas Merton have evolved. Like a lot of Catholic activists (male and female) I developed a bit of a crush on the (way too) prolific writer/Trappist monk cum hermit. Years later, I learned that he’d broken his vows by having an affair with a nurse he’d met while making a rare trip “into town” for medical treatment – a fact his more rabid fans still try to play down.
Eventually, I came to agree with the psychiatrist who’d scolded Merton:
The first line, however, has echoed in my mind ever since:
#5: Cops have to give you their badge number
OK, so that makes me sound tougher than I was/am. Unlike a lot of my former friends, I never had the guts to get arrested for civil disobedience.
(Note: we were NOT those masked guys you see smashing up the Starbucks at G20s. Violence was a no-no, even when it was swirling around us, like during the riot that capped off the 1988 Unconvention.)
However, I picked up some practical information about lawyers, jail and similar miscellany, not all of which was unsavory. Siding with Poland’s Solidarity made us the enemies of every “progressive” (read: pro-Soviet) group in town; it also taught me how a movement goes from grassroots to government, while striving to stay true to transcendent principles. (Tea Partiers, take notes.)
Look: while I don’t share Abbie Hoffman’s motives, Steal This Book nevertheless includes sound tips on, for example, choosing shotguns for home defense. The laws of ballistics, and of the universe in general, are operative whatever your political leanings.
Facts are facts, even if they’re being spouted by a hippie. The key (and frequently forgotten) word is “facts.” Take what’s true and useful from every source.
(And I have had occasion to demand a badge number recently, come to think of it…)
#4: Newspapers can’t be trusted
Until I started going to protests, I’d never been involved in events that got reported in the media. So it was disconcerting to pick up a newspaper the following morning and read a story about a demonstration I’d attended that got all the details ever so slightly off, from the number of demonstrators to the issues themselves. And sometimes not “slightly,” either.
In the larger scheme of thing, this slapdash reporting didn’t matter as much then as it does to me now, as a lesson in media literacy. From a newspaper squib to lengthy, live broadcasts of dramatic events as they unfold, what you’re looking at represents only the slenderest sliver of reality. 9/11 “troothers” can “study” footage of the twin towers for the rest of their lives – they will never see inside the buildings and witness the thousands of cause-and-effect incidents occurring simultaneously, every single second, at the molecular level on up. Such deceptively intense “studying” is the opposite of knowledge.
And if you’re a reporter writing “the first draft of history,” you don’t have a previously printed or videotaped source to anchor your brain. You’re it. Now. Stuff is swirling around you. Your feet hurt, your mortgage payment’s due, and you’re still thinking about the city council meeting you left an hour ago.
The average reporter is just a sleep deprived, not-very-well-read guy on a strict deadline. Accepting that gave me a healthy skepticism about the utility (but not the fun) of “fisking,” of overly analyzing media reports, hoping to find a few “gotchas.”
Sometimes reporter make “mistakes” that are intentional, and that’s criminal, and needs to be exposed.
But sometimes they’re just dorks.
#3: “It costs us a fortune to keep Gandhi poor”
And that was one of his devotees talking.
That insider knew (unlike the gullible, adoring public) that maintaining Gandhi’s sizable retinue, busy compound — simply “keeping up appearances” — required regular donations from billionaire industrialists.
Then as now, it was fashionable for lefties to idolize Gandhi and other progressives superstars. In those pre-internet days, most of us had an excuse. The likelihood of my stumbling across, say, an old-ish number of Commentary was astronomically low; it was only after I left the left, and became a rabid web user, that I discovered foreign correspondent turned film critic Richard Grenier’s searing instant classic, “The Gandhi Nobody Knows”:
I cannot honestly say I had any reasonable expectation that the film would show scenes of Gandhi’s pretty teenage girl followers fighting “hysterically” (the word was used) for the honor of sleeping naked with the Mahatma and cuddling the nude septuagenarian in their arms. (Gandhi was “testing” his vow of chastity in order to gain moral strength for his mighty struggle with Jinnah.) When told there was a man named Freud who said that, despite his declared intention, Gandhi might actually be enjoying the caresses of the naked girls, Gandhi continued, unperturbed. Nor, frankly, did I expect to see Gandhi giving daily enemas to all the young girls in his ashrams (his daily greeting was, “Have you had a good bowel movement this morning, sisters?”), nor see the girls giving him his daily enema. Although Gandhi seems to have written less about home rule for India than he did about enemas, and excrement, and latrine cleaning (“The bathroom is a temple. It should be so clean and inviting that anyone would enjoy eating there”), I confess such scenes might pose problems for a Western director…After reading that, I started to think there was something to be said for “making the whole world blind” after all…
I penned something last week about the perils of hero worship. However, the romanticization of poverty is another temptation we need to guard against as well.
It is easy to glorify poverty if – as did one Catholic progressive of my former acquaintance – you happened to live in the last rent-controlled apartment in Toronto, and so could “afford” to work at a leftwing paper on your four-figure salary. She considered herself one of “the people,” even though she was a member of a privileged family, had a fine education and therefore, unlike her neighbors, she had the option of leaving “the slums” anytime.
(This peculiar frame of mind is examined in great detail in Peter Schweizer’s book Do As I Say.)
I was one of the only real “poor people” many of my comrades in disarmament had ever worked with. The notions these middle class co-eds had about “the poor” were noble, lofty — and deeply delusional. When I told them so, they informed me I was wrong. I clearly just hadn’t read the right books…
Poverty is expensive. An entire “non-profit” industry of “agencies” and charities is deeply invested in spreading the idea that entire families are living in bus shelters and/or penniless Vietnam vets are shooting up truck stops or whatever. When I worked at a nominally apolitical but default progressive charity, thousands of donor dollars were spent putting together a major media event to unveil the latest study the charity had underwritten, showing a “shocking rise in the city’s poverty rate” (P.S. send money!)
That “shocking” increase, revealed on only a single slide in the lengthy PowerPoint presentation? One percentage point.
Have you ever noticed how the “homeless” only exist when there’s a “rightwinger” running your city, state or country? Or that we’ve spent billions “fighting homelessness” for the twenty-five years and yet “homelessness” still apparently persists (except when it doesn’t)?
Poverty costs money. And it makes money too.
#2: Don’t expect a thank-you note
This week, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his new Minister of the Environment announced their commitment to developing the “ethical oil” reserves in Western Canada.
They didn’t mention him by name, but the “ethical oil” idea is Ezra Levant’s. The one-time “Mo-toon” publisher’s new book of the same title is having the kind of impact on government policy that activists on the left (or, in Levant’s case) the right fantasize about.
And rarely achieve.
If you didn’t think your work would have any influence, you’d be psychotic to keep slogging away. However, if you spend too much time composing your Nobel Peace Prize speech or pondering who will play you in the biopic, snap out of it for your own sanity…
I see from my signature on the flyleaf that I bought Jim Forest’s book Making Friends of Enemies in 1989. Forest works for the multi-faith peacenik group, the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR). (When he was very much younger, he was the “young activist” to whom Thomas Merton addressed the talismanic letter I’ll talk about next…)
Alfred Hassler, who once worked for the FOR, told Forest a story about something that happened in the early 1950s, just after the Korean War. I never forgot this story, and even remembered how it was laid out on the page before I took my dusty copy down from the high shelf this afternoon.
Make of it what you will:
There was a famine in China, extremely grave. At the time, Communist China was shelling two islands, Quemoy and Matsu, military bases in Taiwan, a US ally. Another war seemed about to start in Asia. Many people in the US thought the thing to do was to use nuclear weapons against China, and we now know that this was what the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff were recommending to President Eisenhower.
The FOR response to all this was to launch a campaign for famine relief in China. We manufactured thousands of small cotton sacks, not even as a big as a postcard, with a draw string at one end and, on the other, a mailing label addressed to the President. The message on these little sacks was, “If thine enemy hunger, feed him. Send surplus grain to China.” We invited people to put some grain or breakfast cereal in these sacks and mail them to the White House. (…)
A lot of churches took part, and after some time there was even a story about it on the front page of The New York Times. But months passed, interest dropped and finally we gave it up. The White House “made no comment,” as they say. No surplus food was sent to China. (…)
Twenty years later, I happened to meet someone who had been a member of Eisenhower’s staff. He recognized my name and told me that the FOR campaign, which we thought had been entirely ignored at the White House, had in fact been discussed at three separate cabinet meetings! (…) At the third meeting, President Eisenhower turned to the cabinet member responsible for the Food for Peace program and asked, “How many of those grain bags have come in?” The answer was 45,000 plus tens of thousands of letters.
Eisenhower’s response was to say to the Pentagon people that if that many Americans were trying to find a conciliatory solution with China, it wasn’t time to launch a war with China. The proposal was vetoed.
Of course there was no letter to us from the President thanking us for helping him make up his mind, and there was no press conference to announce the decision not to go to war. For many years we thought what we had done had been a complete failure. It was just a chance encounter that revealed to us that, while we had failed in one way, we had helped accomplish something else that saved millions of lives.
#1: “Do not depend on the hope of results”
My feelings about Thomas Merton have evolved. Like a lot of Catholic activists (male and female) I developed a bit of a crush on the (way too) prolific writer/Trappist monk cum hermit. Years later, I learned that he’d broken his vows by having an affair with a nurse he’d met while making a rare trip “into town” for medical treatment – a fact his more rabid fans still try to play down.
Eventually, I came to agree with the psychiatrist who’d scolded Merton:
“You want a hermitage in Times Square with a large sign over it saying ‘Hermit.’ “A man of his time – the 1950s and 60s – Merton felt obliged to comment on the political events of the day, including the inner workings of the peace movement. Even during my “crush” phase, as an admittedly low-level hands-on activist, I balked at the nerve of a cloistered monk with zero experience as an organizer, doling out advice on tactics and strategy. So I was both enchanted and annoyed by his famous “Letter to a Young Activist” at the time, and my feelings today are just as ambiguous.
The first line, however, has echoed in my mind ever since:
Do not depend on the hope of resultsAnd much of the “Letter” offers timeless wisdom. (Your mileage may vary…):
…you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. (…)
The big results are not in your hands or mine, but they suddenly happen, and we can share in them; but there is no point in building our lives on this personal satisfaction, which may be denied to us and which after all is not that important.
The great thing, after all, is to live, not to pour out your life in the service of a myth: and we turn the best things into myths. (…)
The real hope is not in something we think we can do, but in God who is making something good out of it in some way we cannot see. If we can do His will, we will be helping in the process. But we will not necessarily know all about it beforehand.
Article printed from NewsReal Blog: http://www.newsrealblog.com
URL to article: http://www.newsrealblog.com/2011/01/13/5-things-i-learned-as-a-leftist-that-are-still-mostly-true-1/
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