We’re back . . . and now for something completely pedantic.
A few days ago, Rob and I went to see Guerrilla, which is an engrossing documentary about the nineteen seventy-four kidnapping of Patricia Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army, a radical left-wing terrorist cell operating in California at that time. Although you might think my liberal sympathies would lay with a group whose initial ransom demand was that the Hearst family feed all of the needy people in California for a month (and subsequently negotiated for food distribution to a much smaller group of worthy recipients), I actually find the idea of social and/or political transformation through violence horrifying. No matter how lofty the ideals, violence and anguish will taint the results. Indeed, a riot broke out as the food was being distributed.
Much of America is a schizophrenic disaster today because, no matter what values our politicians give lip service to, we are a country that was violently created and brutally carved out of the wilderness. Resentment from the descendents of the Native Americans we killed and the Africans we enslaved and the Confederate soldiers we vanquished exists to this day, twisting obscenely the fabric of our society and mocking our national identity.
It’s painful to be an idealist because there are no answers, easy or otherwise, to problems such as this. It’s impossible for progress to come without pain. Gandhi’s nonviolent revolution didn’t leave his country in any better shape than our bloody one. Today, I had a conversation in the waiting room of the auto mechanic with a black woman who expressed a desire to move to an organic farm in middle of nowhere. Our society, she said, is too crazy and getting worse because it’s run by rich white people who have insulated themselves from the ramifications of their actions . . . even from knowledge of those ramifications. They are in denial. On her organic farm, she plans to insulate herself from the rich white people. She is in denial.
I think the only solution is for people everywhere to start realizing that it’s a small world, and we’re all stuck on it together. Everything we do affects everyone else, and vice versa. Every social or racial or religious or national group we brand as an enemy means that many more people have just branded us as an enemy. Every country we invade for no reason means more terrorists are going to come and kill us or the soldiers we have stationed there. And for every soldier who is killed, the remaining ones terrorize the population they’re supposed to be liberating that much more.
This may be simplistic and obvious, but it happens over and over again. Obvious it may be, but there is also a steep learning curve.
The kidnappers of Patty Hearst (and Patty Hearst herself, once she began to sympathize with her captors’ views) called the American government a fascist insect, a phrase that conjures the image of Mussolini or George W. Bush crouching on a blade of grass. “Death to the fascist insect!” was how they ended their transmissions: a grandiose proclamation. I have taken to calling the current administration fascist because, by definition, it pretty much is. And it’s not inconceivable that “the people” might pull themselves away from their televisions and start standing up to it.
I just hope they don’t kidnap any heiresses because, frankly, they aren’t very well suited to wearing those black berets. And machine guns are so last year.
