June 19, 2011

• Even now there is hope for man

  Listen carefully to this and listen carefully to me.

  In every story, in every philosophy, in every work of literature, in every line of poetry, in every piece of art, in every religious text I think there is this singular underlying argument.  The question is simple. The answer is impossible.

  Is there hope for us?

  We see it all the time. Whether it be in the text of Ayn Rand or the words of Karl Marx. From the story of a sin carrying apple all the way up to the tale of a bespectacled wizard. It repeats again and again. Hegel, Kant, Jefferson, Einstein, Twain, Vonnegut. A Brave New World. Animal Farm, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Native Son.  Everybody weighs in. Everybody has an opinion. And they tend to fall into two camps.

  One camp believes that we are bad. If there is any hope then it is a shadow of a shadow of a hope. There are some good people. Heroes. But most people are weak. Most people are cowards.  Most people are sheep. Most people have forgotten what it means to care.

  The other believes just the opposite. That there is good all around us. That we are capable of so much. That most people when given a chance and the right circumstances will do the right thing. There is a lot of hope. If those bad apples amongst us don’t ruin it for the rest of us.

  I’ve always leaned closer to the second camp.

  At times though it is hard.  When you see people horde wealth while people starve, when you see people callously ignore the future of the planet for the pleasures of the moment, when you see us lock away in cages millions of people out of fear, when you see the man you helped elect continue a system of imperialism imposed by the predecessor he replaced whom you despised. It’s hard then to still believe in people. It’s hard not to think that there’s something broken in us and it may never be fixed.

  “There are no heroes left in man”

  Let me tell you a story.

  There was  a man named Mohamed Bouazizi who was a street vendor in Tunisia. He wanted to earn money so that he and his sister could go to college and get an education. He was harrassed by the police for years. Spat on. Beaten. Humiliated in public. His wares were taken away because he lacked the money to pay them the bribes he was expected to pay. 

  One day he couldn’t take it any more. He ran to the Governor’s office. He demanded his wars back. The governor would not see him. 

  Bouazizi would not be denied.

  On December 17, 2010, at 11:30 AM,  standing in the middle of the street at  the height of traffic Mohamed Bouazizi spoke these simple words: “how do you expect me to make a living?”  and then he lit a match and set the world on fire.

  When he died 5000 people attended his funeral. And they chanted these words “Farewell, Mohammed, we will avenge you. We weep for you today. We will make those who caused your death weep.“

  Protests built in Tunisia after Bouazizi set himself on fire. The police tried to crackdown on them. It only made the protests stronger. Images of the crackdown went out across Facebook and Youtube creating even more support. Strikes happened throughout the country including lawyers and other elites. The country ground to a halt. Some of the protests threatened to become violent. And finally President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali fled the country and resigned 28 days after Bouazizi’s martyrdom.

  It could have led to nothing. Another meaningless blip on the screen. Nobody cared much about a tiny country like Tunisia. People figured Ben Ali’s stupidity brought it upon himself. Nobody was frightened.  I remember reading an article on my twitter stream it was titled “What if a revolution happened in Tunisia and nobody noticed?”

  Somebody noticed.

  Meanwhile a couple countries over Egypt was having its own problems. A rash of police brutality and torture there was making its citizenry already uncomfortable. A man named Khaled Mohamed Saeed was brutally beaten and killed by the police. There were numerous witnesses and yet the police denied it and tried to cover up the killing. It looked like they would get away with it and it was just the same old same old. Nothing would change. An Egyptian man named Wael Ghonim who was living in America and working for the Google at time would not let it go. He secretly made a Facebook group titled “We are all Khaled Said”. The group eventually grew to have hundreds of thousands of followers.

  A protest was planned by many of the groups who had long protested the conditions of Egypt. It would take place in January 25th, their National Police Day.

  Egypt had had protests before. Like here in the United States there are often protests of the conditions. Sometimes they happen for a day or a weekend. Then people go home. They get back to work and go about their normal lives. Maybe it is enough to cause tiny adjustments. Maybe it helps people network with like minded individuals. Rarely does it turn into anything bigger. Rarely does it mean anything more. I doubt anyone who planned this protest knew it would turn out to be something quite different.

  On January 17th copying the Bouazizi incident and Egyptian man set himself on fire in front of the Egyptian parliament. 5 Others attempted to set themselves on fire. Then this happened:

   “I will not set myself on fire! If the security forces want to see me on fire let them come and do it!”

  Twenty-six year old Asmaa Mahfouz asked people to come with her to Tahir square on January 25th. And oh boy did they come. They came in hordes. They came in the masses. And they didn’t just come, they stayed. And the protest grew bigger and bigger. Hundreds of thousands. A million. More. They stood and they protested in Tahir square, stood against the tanks and the militia and the security forces all determined to stop them. The regime shut down the internet in fear. It changed nothing. The protests grew huger in city after city throughout Egypt.  And now the whole world was watching.

  Even then, the outcome was not certain. It could have all gone to shit in an instant. January 29th was the pivotal moment. The order came down from on high to use lethal force and live ammunition to disperse the crowd. The tanks were there. It could have been a massacre. It would have ended the protest. And fear would have driven away any likelihood of further. It could have happened then that the spark lit by Mohamed Bouazizi and fanned by Wael Ghonim, Asmaa Mahfouz and others might have been snuffed out. It was a remarkable moment in the history of Egypt and the history of the world. The story goes that young military officers were torn between their duty to their people and their duty to follow the orders of their superior and to enforce the laws. Some called their parents on their cell phones asking them what should they do? What was right? Their parents, themselves long time retired officers gave them a remarkable answer. In Egypt there is a tradition that the military is never to be used against the Egyptian people. It exists to serve them. So they told their children not to follow orders. Not to participate. Young soldiers came down from their tanks and joined the ranks of the protesters. And the military was forced to choose between rescinding the order, defying their government or having a veritable insurrection on their hands, seeing the start of a brutal and bloody civil war.

  “Never say there’s no hope! Hope disappears only when you say there’s no hope.”

  Egypt turned a small flame into a firestorm. The people of Egypt demanded change. And they GOT change.  On February 11, Hosni Musbarak President and dictator of Egypt who had ruled their nation for 30 years was forced to step down even after even the day before swearing he wouldn’t. On May 24th, Mubarak who had once been at the heart of international power, untouchable, unassailable, was ordered to stand trial for premeditated murder.

  The whole world was inspired by the events in Egypt. Protests broke out all over the place in the aftermath. Libya, Bahrain, Syria,Yemen, Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, Morocco, Oman, Gaza, The West Bank, on the borders of Israel, Kuwait, Lebanon, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Western Sahara, Côte d’Ivoire, Italy, Greece, China, Chile, London and Madison, Wisconsin. Some were small. Some were big. Some might have happened regardless of the events in the Middle East. But so many of the people taking place saw Egypt and Tunisia as an inspiration.

  To see what’s happening here you have to look at it in the greater context of recent history. In the decades that just passed throughout the world we’ve seen a total lack of accountability for people with power and money. We saw an economic crash that devastated the world economy. We saw illegal wars break out and a mysterious secret network of prisons run throughout the world where torture was a matter of course. We saw power consolidated and wealth remaining concentrated in just a few hands. And even when wrong doing was exposed. Even when administrations were changed. Nobody faced any sort of consequences. Bankers weren’t jailed for cheating people out of their homes. Investors weren’t punished for gambling with the money people needed to buy food. Oil Companies saw little consequence for letting oil pour unchecked into the Even Osama bin Laden remained uncaught for his violent killing of innocents. People were getting used to it. It was starting to get to be the norm. People just expected the major forces to play games with us as their pawns. It seemed like this was just the way things were going to be.

  Then Egypt changed the trajectory of society. If this President who was at the center of the games of power for thirty years could be laid low by the people he pretended to serve, maybe anybody could be. Maybe nobody was safe. Maybe change was POSSIBLE. Maybe people could awaken.Maybe there was hope.

  We don’t know what the ultimate consequences of these changes will be. Maybe it’ll all die down. Already we see many protests throughout the middle east brutally taken down by regimes determined to retain their power at all costs.

  But we already saw some signs of good. After Egypt, protests in Libya sparked a civil war. But when their leader Muammar Gaddafi spoke madness and threatened to bring great violence to all those who opposed him and it looked like a massacre was about to happen in Bengazhi as Gaddafi’s troops closed in. But then a remarkable thing happened. If the tales are true, many in Gaddafi’s government resigned in protest, and cried warning to the world of what might happen. They asked for help. And all around the world, all over the internet, people demanded that their government not allow a slaughter to continue. Even not trusting their government to do the right thing or for the right reasons. Even after the horrible illegal war in Iraq and even after the long endless conflicts in Afghanistan and drone attacks in Pakistan. People still decided that even giving authority to go to war to the untrustworthy powers of the world would be better than allowing the rebels to be slaughtered. And so the government reacted. A resolution was passed in the United Nations security council at the behest of the Arab League to authorize the use of force to save the civilians of Libya. Five nations abstained. No one said no. And a massacre was averted.

  “You underestimate the character of man.”

  We ask the question again and again. Are we good? Are we Just? It’s as if we’re asking… are we worth it?

  When I see these events *I* find myself convinced more and more. We are. We’re capable of such greatness and glory as to shake the heavens off its hinges. We split the atom. We built the internet. We created democracy. We created Justice. We created freedom. And we did not die doing it.

  And yet I can hear the other side still always there always arguing always denying. I heard a person comment on Egypt.. he said that Tahir was nothing but a big party and that those fools had no idea what they were getting into and were unready for the real hard work of building a nation.  A party? Over 800 people DIED in that party. And every one of them was at risk day after day.

  I heard another person argue that Egypt was all well and good but we Americans are too lazy and too busy eating our hamburgers and playing our playstations to ever stand up for ourselves in the same way. So many people chimed in in agreement. So many people thought the same. It could happen in Egypt but not here. Never here.

  I wonder at this sentiment. Can’t happen here? It DID happen here. What do they think the American revolution WAS? What do they think the civil war was for? Why do they think there WAS a civil rights movement? It happens all the time here. It never stopped happening here. People come together. People fight for what they believe in. People change the world.

  It happens everywhere. Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, the Gaza Peace Flotilla, Tianamen Square. Do people really think the Jesus was a fluke, that Moses was a once in a lifetime thing?  Good happens everywhere and all the time and not by accident.

  The other day I saw a congressmen take to twitter to ask if two people who love each other should be allowed to get married in the State of New York. And people came out of the woodworks to tell him YES. Yes they should. It is in things like this that I see hope everywhere. I think we’re worth it.

  “They are weaker than you think.”

  In Tahir, during the revolution, amidst all that talk of freedom and justice and of fairness and righteousness. A female reporter from the West was sexually assaulted. People who said they wanted peace did that to her. People who said they were there to fight for freedom did that.  What kind of monsters were they? The normal kind I’m afraid. The human kind. She was saved finally by a group of women from the crowd came to her defense and about 20 Egyptian soliders broke it up.

  In spite of it all, the other side isn’t wrong.  Those cynics with whom I so greatly disagree are not wrong. We are terrible. We do horrible things to one another again and again and again. You don’t get a Tahir unless you have a brutal Mubarak with security forces beating civilians. With every battle to overthrow a dictator you get a monstrosity like Abu Gharaib prison.  Every time the world comes together to end the horrors of the Holocaust… doesn’t that just show that there WAS a holocaust that needed to be ended? And how did it get so bad? For how many years did people turn a blind eye and hope for someone else to solve those problems? We wouldn’t have needed a civil war and a civil rights movement if there hadn’t been cruelty after cruelty, injustice after injustice done to people for no other reason than that they had the wrong colored skin. How many people are starving right now. How many future generations are being doomed by our inaction today?

  When people say that we are weak and we are flawed and we lack the courage of our convictions, that we are selfish and we are greedy and we are so very often too afraid to stand up for ourselves, they aren’t wrong.

  “Do not say this is how it has to be.”

  When you paint the question in such stark terms of A versus B, of good versus evil, there can be no answer. If you ask are we mostly evil or are we mostly good, as much as I would love to believe simply and without reservation that we are mostly good, anyone who approaches the question honestly and fairly cannot come to such a simple solution. No. There is only one answer to that question. And that is, it’s neither. We’re not just A OR B, one way or another. What we are is COMPLICATED.

  Humanity is complicated.

  We collections of a multitude of cells and a plethora of moments are complex. Every single instance is a chance for us to do good or to do ill, to help or to harm. Every single moment we make mistakes. Every single moment we learn. Every second of every day is a chance for us to go beyond ourselves, to be able to empathize… to catch a glimpse behind the eyes of another human being and see that unending complexity laid out before us and to try, just a little, to understand it. And with that understanding grows friendship, love, generosity, heroism, and justice.  We have that capacity within us to see into the windows of experiences that which we can never truly understand and know that they are beautifully complex and wonderfully extraordinarily different. 

  It’s in our complexity that I see hope.

  There are 7 BILLION of us now on this planet. To me that means 7 billion chances every second of every day to do good. 7 billion chances to say words that inspire, to give a helping hand, to be a hero, to save a life, to learn from a mistake, to become just that little bit stronger. 7 billion chances every second to be able to make someone smile. I’ll take those odds any day.

  “Even now there is hope for man.”

  Whatever happens to us there are countless countless instances of good in this world. They wont be erased by the end result. All the horrors we unleash will not undue the single moments of kindness we take a chance to give one another as a gift unsolicited asking nothing in return. The one doesn’t erase the other. There is no grand calculus. The good is real. And it matters. And we KNOW it matters. That’s why there’s hope.

  We only need to see it and be inspired by it to do good and to be better. We only need to try and understand each other and to see the complexity in us and to forgive one another when we do wrong. If we can do that then there’s no end to the good that can come about. There’s no reason why we can’t create a world of endless hope.

  I think that’s very possible.

  What do you think?

  • 10:03 pm
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