Poop Shute

What The World Needs Now...
A Rant On the State of the World

Burt Bacharach would have you believe it's "love, sweet love."

I agree, but I think there's more. I think it's more guys like ABBIE HOFFMAN.

I just finished watching CHICAGO 10, a fantastic documentary about the 1968 Chicago Riots, and the trial that followed. I wish you would go rent it and watch it, America, but I won't pretend that you will.

I was moved to tears for many more reasons than one. There was actual footage of the riots, which were brutal and jarring to watch. There was the farce of a trial, re-enacted by some very talented voice actors from the actual official transcripts. All worthy of tears, but not why I cried.

Worse than all that, it highlighted for me what we are sorely lacking today; Radical Activism.

More than lacking the presence of the thing itself, we have watered down that term to be all but meaningless. It used to mean guys who lived and worked outside the system and lived to shake up that system, and push us out of our comfort zones. They made us questions things, everything, down to the very nature of the system itself. I'm talking about guys like Abbie Hoffman and Allen Ginsburg. Go back further in history and find people like Martin Luther King and Cesar Chavez. Go back EVEN further and you'll find the men who stirred shit up on purpose by drafting and signing the Declaration Of Independence. Yeah, that's right. I said it. Our founding fathers were RADICAL ACTIVISTS.

Now people on the all-day Noise... er, I mean News channels, will occasionally toss out terms like "radical activist judges" when it comes to a judge who might disagree with a historical precedent or two.

A judge? Someone who has eaten, shat and breathed The System for years, and clawed their way up through it, becoming it, to get where they are today. THAT is the closest thing to a "radical activist" that we can come up with?!? No, I'm sorry. Unacceptable. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying judge's are bad guys, but I am saying that they couldn't have gotten where they are unless they played the game, and successful players of the political game are not radical. Ever.

TANGENT: And while I'm at it; as much as I enjoy Barack Obama's rhetoric and public persona, I'm not seeing much of that change he was talking about. Nor am I surprised, really. All I mean to say is, simply by virtue of getting elected at all in this country, he couldn't really be that "radical" or "activist."

Truth be told, I know radicals are out there. Guys like Morgan Spurlock, and the guys over at Last Chance For Animals, and many many other organizations and individuals are out there, bucking convention and chipping away at corruption. But in the golden age of radical activism Abbie Hoffman had rock star acclaim. Spurlock, and guys like him, are on the fringe, mostly preaching to the choir, and easily written off. The media followed Abbie Hoffman's every move. They had to. Whether you loved him or hated him, you wanted to know what he was up to.

But not today. We don't follow our radicals anymore. In the modern 24-hour news cycle we'd much rather hear about yet another school-shooting, or another celebrity death, or worst yet: Obama's dream date with his wife and we want to hear about these things for days on end, in every permutation possible. We listen until we've memorized it down to the minutiae. and we'll do that with every piece of Un-news they throw at us so long as it fits with our idea of what is safe, uncomplicated, and unchallenging. We don't want a pop culture figure to tell us where and how we're wrong, and we certainly don't want to elevate that figure to rock star status.

We'd rather be massaged and rebranded and soothed by flashy new Orwellian vocabulary than actually stop and think.

As a country we're apathetic. I personally am not, but I fully recognize that living in this culture that most certainly IS apathetic has done severe damage to the attitude I once had. It's so easy, living here in the good old USA, to feel crushed by it. Swallowed. Subdued.

You can almost hear the voice of the masses talking to you. Really? You're angry about X or Y thing that is happening on a wide scale? Meh. What can you do? Clearly, none of us care, so why should you? I mean, really, what are you going to do about it? Give up. It's so much easier. Here, have a Big Mac and a Diet Coke and settle in for some Fox News. And don't forget to special order your extra large burial casket. Never hurts to plan ahead...

Speaking of death, at his funeral, the Rabbi of the synagogue that Hoffman had attended as a child said that Hoffman's history of antic protest was in the prophetic tradition to "comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable."

I like that. Has a nice ring to it. But who does that now? Michael Moore? I don't think so. He lies and misrepresents left and right. His tactics are suspect, making him just another game-player with different stripes. Bill Maher? Maybe. He's never seemed a game player, and always seems ready to point out game-playing when he spots it. I do so enjoy his consciousness-raising rants... but, I don't know. Despite having a decent following, he still doesn't seem to be doing much beyond squawking a lot. He's entertainment, he's not actually DOing anything that I can see. And don't even think about suggesting somebody like Bono. He does some good work throwing his money and fame behind a cause or two, but that's not really activism either, is it? He's also not in-your-face enough. In that regard, Bill Maher makes Bono look like a sniveling punk.

The sad thing is as I continue my ranting about what we're missing I keep hearing the words of Mahatma Gandhi bouncing around in my head:

"You must be the change you wish to see in the world."

Hmm. So, if I wish there was a huge, polarizing, stir-shit-up activist in the world...

Crap.

I guess I have a lot of work to do.