A Radical Treasure

[CLANG]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/30/opinion/30herbert.html?em

///Snip///
Think of what this country would have been like if those ordinary people had never bothered to fight and sometimes die for what they believed in. Mr. Zinn refers to them as “the people who have given this country whatever liberty and democracy we have.”

Our tendency is to give these true American heroes short shrift, just as we gave Howard Zinn short shrift. In the nitwit era that we’re living through now, it’s fashionable, for example, to bad-mouth labor unions and feminists even as workers throughout the land are treated like so much trash and the culture is so riddled with sexism that most people don’t even notice it. (There’s a restaurant chain called “Hooters,” for crying out loud.)

I always wondered why Howard Zinn was considered a radical. (He called himself a radical.) He was an unbelievably decent man who felt obliged to challenge injustice and unfairness wherever he found it. What was so radical about believing that workers should get a fair shake on the job, that corporations have too much power over our lives and much too much influence with the government, that wars are so murderously destructive that alternatives to warfare should be found, that blacks and other racial and ethnic minorities should have the same rights as whites, that the interests of powerful political leaders and corporate elites are not the same as those of ordinary people who are struggling from week to week to make ends meet?
///End Snip///

We lost a great American. Too bad the "left wing media" for the most part ignored his passing.

[PDJane]

1. Acts of decency

seem to be radical acts.....

[CLANG]

2. Yup. What a sad state of affairs.

[truedelphi]

3. Great post there, PDJane.

If only Obama had spent as much time reading Zinn as that biography of Lincoln, we might be in a far beetter place as regards HCR, the Banks etc.