Chris Hedges

from quotesgram.com

Rise up lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number!
Shake your chains to earth, like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you --
Ye are many, they are few!         Percy Bysshe Shelley

Why do you stand
they were asked, and
Why do you walk?

Because of the children, they said, and
because of the heart, and
because of the bread.                 Daniel Berrigan

To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.
What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places - and there are so many - where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.
And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory. Howard Zinn

My notes from a session with Chris Hedges when he spoke at Chautauqua in July, 2013.

• my Dad was a Presbyterian Minister
• An outspoken supporter of the Civil Rights
• GBLT rights supporter from the late 60's
• Church harsh on him for his GBLT activism
• in one of his last services he conducted Easter service for the GBLT community
• he believed marriage is a sacrament between two committed people who love each other
• All liberal institutions have collapsed
• What happened?
• How was it that progressive forces have been destroyed?
• More people died for labour rights in the US than any other country!
• WW1 broke out - the collapse of the Eastern Front - no support in the US for the war
• the first instance of mass communication being used to win Americans over to a position they initially resisted. It reconfigured American society persuading people by emotional appeal rather than using logic or reason
• The effectiveness of mass communication - very few are able to resist - even intellectuals have succumbed
• The proliferation of mass communication - the creation of black publicity
• has instituted the psychosis of permanent war where the dreaded Hun becomes the dreaded red
• Severe repression of criticism, for one - the Swedish-American labour activist Joe Hill hung on trumped up charges
• Madison Avenue inculcates consumer mentality, American society is contaminated by a culture of lies
• The systematic destruction of radical forces, reducing change to mere incremental reform
• Howard Zinn's History of America, birthed of his awareness of 'the voices never heard!' 
• In our day people like Noam Chomsky shut out from the mainline media streams
• Numerous mechanisms to shut people out
• All of the openings in American history were radical - the suffrage movement, the labour movement, the civil rights movement
• and yet now the Civil Rights movement has been gutted with the recent Supreme Court decision
• Predatory class has no impediment
• No self imposed limits on capitalism - everything is a commodity
• We live in a global system of Neo-feudalism
• We moved from an empire of production to an empire of consumption
• Clinton /Obama - politicians who 'feel your hurt but instigated NAFTA; the deregulation of the media, the gross civil violations of NSA'
• Once in the street - you are worth nothing
• In prison prisoners paid $1 an hour - an economic commodity
• Corporate funding equal in Democratic as in Republican
• We have undergone a corporate coup d'état  - and they have won
• Democratic Party would be on the far right in Europe
• The systematic killing of descent
• There is no way to vote against Goldman Sacks
• Global oligarchy
• Drones, privatized armies. Night raids in our own cities
• Don't play the game
• We must recapture the moral imperative of radical movements
• The question is not how do you get the right people to rule, the matter is how do you get the people who rule to be afraid
• America is a deeply violent culture
• The Christian Right - fundamentalists once reluctant to become political - the celebration of grasping the cross with the gun - target the vulnerable, blame the demise of society on gays, trade unionists, feminists,
• Bankrupt liberalism
• We have systematically killed radicalism
• Occupy movement gave expression to the majority
• Health care should be a million miles from capitalism, but in the US we are trying to marry the two. It is a moral degeneration where private insurance companies hold young sick children hostage
• Richestan - where the rich live separate from America and yet rule America
• Corporations are systems of death - formal mechanism; our formal channels of governments can't stop them.
• Corporations are colour blind
• Speaking truth to power - a faith responsibility
• We have nothing else less than civil disobedience to defend us
• Faith that the good draws the good - the essence of faith
• The power of the powerless is that truth can be recognized when it takes to the streets
• We must stand up for what is right; it is not impractical - it is a very lonely walk
• Like Martin Luther King we must 'take non-violence as my lawfully wedded wife'
• The poor have been abandoned by the liberal class
• We cannot go back to where we were
• A material diminishing is not a spiritual diminishing
• The government is frightened
• The government doesn't even trust the police to protect them
• They trust private corporations like NSA
• Keep doing the good you are doing
• Draw the good to the good
• The truth we speak is accessible to the frontline defenders - ie the police
• MSNBC the same as FOX except with a different spin
• The voices are there, hidden but out there
• Read Cicero, don't tune out the voices like Jeremiah Wright, Noam Chomsky and Ralph Nader