An Under Current - Democratic Underground

H2O Man

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Sun Mar-27-11 12:29 PM
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An Under Current

{1} “....Yes, but Mississippi this week, Philly-NY next week; it's hard until early April ….”
--Tom Hayden; letter to H2O Man; March 25, 2011.

A couple of my Good Friends from the Democratic Underground community have asked me “what's happening?” with the series of interviews I had begun in January, with Mark Rudd. The second interview I've planned is with Tom Hayden, and I had hoped to have it completed in February. However, scheduling issues have not allowed for the interview to be complete ….yet.

I've considered the option of doing another interview in between. There are several other individuals who I am planning to do interviews with, that I think (hope!) will be of interest to this internet community. In fact, this series of interviews is being conducted specifically for the Democratic Underground – because I recognize that large segments of the people here are either “old hands” at community organizing, or are “younger hands,” with the potential to do the yeoman's work needed to build a decentralized national organization to promote the Democratic Left.

I also believe that there are some people who visit this site who oppose such a concept, and who prefer the idea of the Democratic Left falling in line behind the party's national “leadership.” We inhabit very different realities. I respect the idea that there is room for all Democrats on this forum. My goal is to help organize the Democratic Left. Perhaps after that, we can break bread with the moderates and conservative democrats.

That I am not substituting a different interview before Hayden may seem rigid to some here. Likewise, my ideas on organizing the Left before conducting business with others may seem rigid. In my own mind's eye, it is simply following a road map in the often confusing maze of the socio-political realities of 2011.

{2} “Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children, the angering of the orderlies in the front parlor of the charnel house. We could not, so help us God, do otherwise.....
“We act against the law at a time of the Poor People’s March, at a time moreover when the government is announcing ever more massive paramilitary means to confront disorder in the cities. It is announced that a computerized center is being built in the Pentagon at a cost of some seven millions of dollars, to offer instant response to outbreaks anywhere in the land; that moreover, the government takes so serious a view of civil disorder, that federal troops, with war experience in Vietnam, will have first responsibility to quell civil disorder. The implications of all this must strike horror in the mind of any thinking man.
“The war in Vietnam is more and more literally brought home to us. Its inmost meaning strikes the American ghettos; in servitude to the affluent. We must resist and protest this crime.'
Daniel Berrigan; Catonville Nine; Federal Court trial; October, 1968.

On May 17, 1968, a group of Catholic anti-war activists took 378 “draft files” into a parking lot in Catonsville, Maryland, placed them in a basket, and burned them with home-made napalm. The leader of the group was Father Daniel Berrigan, a Jesuit who, along with his brother Phillip, were friends with then presidential candidate, Senator Robert F. Kennedy.

When facing a lengthy sentence in federal prison for the Catonsville protest, Daniel opted to “go underground.” FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was obsessed with finding Berrigan, who would appear unexpectedly at various anti-war protests, then disappear before Hoover's forces could apprehend him.

To Hoover's dismay, Daniel Berrigan would connect with members of the infamous Weather Underground. One of his letters to members of the Weather Underground is featured in Harrison Salisbury's powerful book, “The Eloquence of Protest: Voices of the 1970s” (Houghton Mifflin; 1972). A couple of paragraphs stand out:
“I'm trying to say that when people look about them for lives to run with and when hopeless people look for hope, the gift we can offer others is so simple a thing as hope. As they said about Che, as they said about Jesus, some people, even to this day, he gave us hope. ….Instead of thinking of the underground as temporary or exotic or abnormal, perhaps we are being called upon to start thinking of its implications as an entirely self-sufficient, mobile, internal revival community, so that the underground may be the definition of our future. ….
“When madness is the acceptable public state of mind, we're all in danger; all in danger for we are under the heel of former masters as under the heel of new ones. … The question now is what we can create.”
Besides studying the tactics and teachings of Daniel and Phillip Berrigan, and having the chance to know and work with a number of their friends, one of the most important opportunities I have had was communicating with both of the brothers. Never in person, but through letters and phone calls. In the past few weeks and months, I've been thinking about the bold message of hope they communicated to those seeking refuge from the madness of a society addicted to violence and warfare.

{3} “Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God, and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my nation. The great initiative in that war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours.”
--Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.; A Time to Break Silence (Beyond Vietnam); April 4, 1967.

When Martin Luther King worked for “civil rights,” he faced that rabid opposition of sick individuals who refused to recognize the humanity of non-white American citizens. When King began connecting the civil rights movement with the war in Vietnam, and began calling for a massive change in the economic system in our country, he became the target of larger forces, those who capitalize on the suffering and even violent death of millions of their brothers and sisters around the globe.

In response, King had planned a “Poor Peoples' Campaign,” in which he planned to have thousands of poor folks – black, brown, red, yellow, and white; young and old; of all religions or no religion – occupy the city of Washington, DC, to highlight not only the evil of the Machine, but to shine the light of hope that is the human potential.

For many within the Democratic Left, his “A Time to Break Silence” remains the greatest message of the reality of our times ….. it is surely as relevant today, as it was in 1967. Yet, the stress and confusions of today have blurred our ability to connect with King's vision of the “next step” – the Poor Peoples Campaign.

Perhaps what is required is for a small group of individuals to serve as a the fuse for the peaceful powder keg of inert citizens. Maybe the need is for a dozen individuals, including some who are “high profile,” to overturn the psychological tables in the temples in Washington, DC. Not to call people to Washington for a few hour picnic protest, where there are a few fiery speeches, and then people go home. But rather, to concentrate the poverty that the Machine is churning out into a Tent City. To have people hopeful enough that they will be invested in a movement that may result in incarceration for some. To revive the spirit of Martin Luther King. To bring the current of the growing “underclass”above ground.

Peace,
H2O Man