Great essay Micah. The Gantz quote is a perfect sum up. You cannot will things to change and you have to underrstand there are NO shortcuts. Change is long and hard and will advance only as far as people want it to.
But also how hard it is to know what is the right action or organizing strategy. Randy Kehler didn't know that his speech at a War Resisters League conference would touch Dan Ellsberg in just the right way to cause him to start copying the Pentagon Papers. The intense despair that so many antiwar activists felt during the late 60s and early 70s as nothing they did seemed to be enough--they couldn't know at the time how their efforts were constraining Nixon. Same with the Nuclear Freeze movement of the early 1980s (started in part by Randy) which appeared to fizzle out with little to show for its massive mobilization efforts, but in fact we now know it constrained Reagan and the other war hawks from escalating the US placement of mid-range nukes in Europe and led to a deal with the Soviets to pull their mid-range nukes out.
Of course, as Ellsberg and many others point out, the US power structure responded to the Vietnam antiwar movement by ending the draft, moving to an all-volunteer (aka poverty draft) army and shifting US war strategy around aerial bombing and more recently drone warfare, making it easier for us to spend 20 years pounding dust in Afghanistan. Paradoxes abound.
Great essay Micah. The Gantz quote is a perfect sum up. You cannot will things to change and you have to underrstand there are NO shortcuts. Change is long and hard and will advance only as far as people want it to.
But also how hard it is to know what is the right action or organizing strategy. Randy Kehler didn't know that his speech at a War Resisters League conference would touch Dan Ellsberg in just the right way to cause him to start copying the Pentagon Papers. The intense despair that so many antiwar activists felt during the late 60s and early 70s as nothing they did seemed to be enough--they couldn't know at the time how their efforts were constraining Nixon. Same with the Nuclear Freeze movement of the early 1980s (started in part by Randy) which appeared to fizzle out with little to show for its massive mobilization efforts, but in fact we now know it constrained Reagan and the other war hawks from escalating the US placement of mid-range nukes in Europe and led to a deal with the Soviets to pull their mid-range nukes out.
Of course, as Ellsberg and many others point out, the US power structure responded to the Vietnam antiwar movement by ending the draft, moving to an all-volunteer (aka poverty draft) army and shifting US war strategy around aerial bombing and more recently drone warfare, making it easier for us to spend 20 years pounding dust in Afghanistan. Paradoxes abound.