Final – Option B
The world has not changed a great deal over the past 30 years. People are still divided by ethnicity, gender, and income then discriminated against on those divisions. We still have summer vacations and family get togethers. We have learned that our existence depends on the Earth and have implemented many ways to work with Mother Nature instead of against it. America is still the most powerful country. The institutions of society are still in place although there have been some shifts between and within the institutions. We have not been to war for 28 years and there are no major disputes that would lead to it in the near future. We are doing are best to live at peace with our bothers and sisters and share what mother earth has provided for all of us.
I am now 56 years old, I expect to live at least another 30years. My oldest child is 28 and recently given me a grandchild. My youngest child is 24 and is finishing up a graduate program in Australia. My partner and I did not get unioned until after we had all our children and never had the marriage ceremony. Back then we were rebels, but now that kind of relationship is normal. Men and women still have their defining features and specific roles in society, but it is much more integrated than it used to be. The differences actually help promote peace instead of breeding violence. The issues of ethnicity were really bad after the immigration laws in America shut out everyone who was not from a wealthy country. The backlash was intense and the riots along the Mexican border were like massacres. Then most of the high power government officials were thrown out of office and things changed the laws were rewritten we tried to help the people we hurt, but it is still a struggle to rebuild and integrate the cultures into one. Poverty is still rampant in our area and the homeless rate has skyrocketed in warmer areas. Most of the homelessness is by choice, so many people are trying to start from scratch to do things different or have just made a choice to live free.
We had a big scare and some really tough times about 10 years ago. Our energy resources were no longer available. We had been looking for alternative sources for a long time, but none of them were convenient or universal so they were not implemented. Finally, it got so bad that we were not able to live. Many people died and others could not maintain any quality of life. In order survive we used all the energy sources available. In some areas solar power was the best, wind in others, water in others, some bio waste and even nuclear energy generated by the natural power sources. It is still being changed in some places, but over all things are now running smoothly. We have learned to use everything we can and keep it going. There is no chance of running out because we have various sources. We are really taking care of the Earth we live in. The fresh water is being preserved and not polluted the way it used to be. So many factories were closed that people got used to a more natural and common standard of living. Everyone recycles, tries to reuse things, and over all consumption has been greatly reduced. All my neighbors have a garden and we share or trade things. Most of us sew our own clothes. A lot of people use public transportation, but own cars for special occasions. The fuel is produces by our own household waste. Things have definitely changed for the better, even if it is a little more work and partnership.
The government has changed because of the change in officials; most of the previous laws have been thrown out. We have freedom of choice in our daily lives. The main law is against direct violence towards another person or group. International relations are the main focus of our government and they are doing a wonderful job. We have a large military who mostly engages in peace keeping and community building all over the world including right here at home. Things have really been given back to the people.
The structural institutions of society still include the family, government, education, religion, economy, and the media. They are still the backbone of what we do and how we do it. Family, education, and economy are the most pertinent. The government, religion, and media have taken a back seat. They have their own purpose and place. They do not try to control individual lives. Family and education are the teachers of the ways of the world. We earn how to live at one with the world and to continue to become better people. The economy is a major factor in what we do and how we do it. Money is not as important as it used to be, but it is still a major factor in life.
No war! We have not had a war since Bush invaded the Middle East. We were after the oil that eventually spilled out into the ocean. That was the beginning of the resource and environmental crisis that sparked the devastation and eventually a change for the better in the world. Song Lyrics by AZlyrics.com.
Imagine there's no heaven. It's easy if you try, No hell below us. Above us only sky. Imagine all the people living for today. Imagine there's no countries, it isn't hard to do. Nothing to kill or die for and no religion too. Imagine all the peopleLiving life in peace. You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. I hope someday you'll join us and the world will be as one. Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can. No need for greed or hunger a brotherhood of man .Imagine all the people sharing all the world.
Love is but a song we sing and fear's the way we die. You can make the mountains ring or make the angels cry. Though the bird is on the wing and you may not know why. Come on people now, smile on your brother, everybody get together, try to love one another right now. Some may come and some may go and we will surely pass. When the one that left us here returns for us at last. We are but a moment's sunlight, fading in the grass. If you hear the song we sing, you will understand. You hold the key to love and fear in your trembling hand. Just one key unlocks them both, you know it's there at your command.
Tuesday, May 1, 2007
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
BELIZE NEWS
U.S. news displays the international relations between Belize and the U.S. The
highlighted stories include issues of criminality, the environment, and culture. Stories from major papers focused on ecological issues while smaller local papers focused on cultural issues.
The first article was published in The New York Times on Aril 15, and features the Cotton Tree Lodge as an eco-friendly resort. The establishment uses place specific materials and adventures, like cacao trees and chocolate making, as a lure for tourists. The resort also focuses on the local culture and traditions of cacao growers. Planting trees and preserving the reef and rainforest are main goals of this resort and others like it.
The next article from MSNBC discusses criminal charges being brought against a company, its executives and employees. Hi-Tech Pharmaceuticals of Norcross, Ga. has been successful in the dietary supplement industry. The company has now been accused of mob like activity and operating an illegal Internet pharmacy in Belize. The lab in Belize is described as substandard and unsanitary. Another article from The Morning News, a paper in Arkansas, discusses more criminal activity. A man who was scheduled to appear in court on charges of manufacturing methamphetamine fled the US to Belize, but was captured by U.S. Marshals and a bail bondsman. These two stories show an attempt to use Belize as a safe haven for criminal activity. The cases here are failures of that attempt, but there may be many more that may have succeeded and are endangering the citizens of Belize.
The Guardian, highlights Andy Palacio as a wonderful Garifuna singer. The music is described as gently soulful. The music tells stories of the slave trade era and has a stirring blend of Garifuna rhythms and reggae. Your Hub, out of Denver CO, draws attention to the Macky Travel Film Series presentation of "Worlds of the Maya". This presentation explores ancient Belize and Guatemala as well as today's isolated villages, with age-old rituals and ceremonies. These two papers show that the culture in Belize has an amazing history and is still thriving if we pay attention.
http://travel.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/travel/15journeys.html
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17742469/
http://www.nwaonline.net/articles/2007/04/12/news/041307bzcourt.txt
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/filmandmusic/story/0,,2055640,oo.html
http://denver.yourhub.com/Boulder/Events/Theater/Event~293494.aspx
highlighted stories include issues of criminality, the environment, and culture. Stories from major papers focused on ecological issues while smaller local papers focused on cultural issues.
The first article was published in The New York Times on Aril 15, and features the Cotton Tree Lodge as an eco-friendly resort. The establishment uses place specific materials and adventures, like cacao trees and chocolate making, as a lure for tourists. The resort also focuses on the local culture and traditions of cacao growers. Planting trees and preserving the reef and rainforest are main goals of this resort and others like it.
The next article from MSNBC discusses criminal charges being brought against a company, its executives and employees. Hi-Tech Pharmaceuticals of Norcross, Ga. has been successful in the dietary supplement industry. The company has now been accused of mob like activity and operating an illegal Internet pharmacy in Belize. The lab in Belize is described as substandard and unsanitary. Another article from The Morning News, a paper in Arkansas, discusses more criminal activity. A man who was scheduled to appear in court on charges of manufacturing methamphetamine fled the US to Belize, but was captured by U.S. Marshals and a bail bondsman. These two stories show an attempt to use Belize as a safe haven for criminal activity. The cases here are failures of that attempt, but there may be many more that may have succeeded and are endangering the citizens of Belize.
The Guardian, highlights Andy Palacio as a wonderful Garifuna singer. The music is described as gently soulful. The music tells stories of the slave trade era and has a stirring blend of Garifuna rhythms and reggae. Your Hub, out of Denver CO, draws attention to the Macky Travel Film Series presentation of "Worlds of the Maya". This presentation explores ancient Belize and Guatemala as well as today's isolated villages, with age-old rituals and ceremonies. These two papers show that the culture in Belize has an amazing history and is still thriving if we pay attention.
http://travel.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/travel/15journeys.html
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17742469/
http://www.nwaonline.net/articles/2007/04/12/news/041307bzcourt.txt
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/filmandmusic/story/0,,2055640,oo.html
http://denver.yourhub.com/Boulder/Events/Theater/Event~293494.aspx
Saturday, April 7, 2007
BELIZE CONT.......3
Many projects have been established in Belize. Some are focused in medical and health issues while others are concerned with the environment or technology and some give aid to children and families. The combination of these programs will create an environment for economic growth and improved living conditions. An example of an environmental project is the Rio Bravo Conservation and Management Area (RBCMA or Rio Bravo). The goals include conservation of the natural heritage of Belize, wise use of its natural resources, practical application of principles focused on linking conservation of tropical forest with the development of sustainable land uses leaving the forest and its environmental values intact. RBCMA uses scientific research, environmental education, professional training and promotion of environmental awareness in order to acquire development plans like ecotourism, sustainable timber extraction, carbon sequestration, and extraction of non-timber products such as chicle, thatch and palm. Other environmental programs include marine protected areas throughout the reef area. Some animals being researched and protected include manatees, sea turtles, Corals, and grouper fish. Some programs focus on rainforest, one researcher is using 50 or more tarantulas surgically implanted with radio transponders to map and quantify degradation. The Belize Botanic Garden protects the floral biodiversity of Belize by existing as an information resource for the community, government, industry and science. They also aim to cultivate, promote, research and enable the research of tropical flora and its conservation with an emphasis on our native species and their habitats. Unicef has two major programs focused on youth; the Enhancing Holistic Child Development program which includes parenting education projects, promotion of male involvement in childcare, and the establishment of community-based and nationwide initiatives to prevent domestic violence and the Enabling Environments for Adolescent Development program which includes support to adolescent participation initiatives, child-friendly schools, "second chance" education projects and reproductive health. Caricom is involved in a number of diverse programs including Caribbean Renewable Energy Development Program (CREDP), Mainstreaming Adaptation to Climate Change (MACC), Pan Caribbean Partnership against HIV/AIDS (PANCAP), UWI-CARICOM, Information Communication & Technology, and International Standard Book Number (ISBN). Many small organizations do a big part such as Marla's House of Hope, which is a safe-haven for physically and sexually abused kids, and rural health nurses, or RHNs, who travel administering vaccinations to pregnant mothers and young children and The Jaden Foundation a non-profit, non-faith based organization aimed at improving the lives of Belizean children through education, vocational training and scholarships. Two major organizations with ongoing programs are Plenty (http://www.plenty.org/belizeprojects.htm) and the Peace Corps (http://belize.usembassy.gov/peace_corps.html or http://www.peacecorps.gov/)BELIZE CONT.......2
Access to food, housing, health care, and other necessary or goods and services vary greatly between rural and urban areas, as well as by socioeconomic status. The most serious health threats in Belize have long been Malaria and Enteritis. Enteritis is an inflammation of the small intestine. These medical problems are very serious and treatment is not always available. Rural areas are especially lacking in availability of medical treatment. One major set back in heath care in the area is lack of qualified personnel. There has been a school for nursing and medical technicians, but no school of medicine. Many people who study abroad never return home. Most doctors and dentists in the area are from foreign countries. The overall health of Belizeans has improved over the past 25 years since it has been an independent nation. In 2005 life expectancy was seventy-two years (Unicef). The death rate was 4.7 per 1,000 in 2003(CSO). One factor in the quality of life, housing arrangements, vary throughout the country. In cities building are usually wood and provide for small families, there are issues with necessities such as sewer systems, many city households are not connected to the system. In rural area large families may live in small, family built dwelling with no water, sewage, or electricity. In the mid 1980’s average salary of an employee was Bz$6,000 or about US$3,000.
Education is very important to any areas economy and future. In Belize formal education is managed by joint partnership of church and state with one being more involved at times and visa versa. Primary education for children ages 5 to 14 is required. Secondary and postsecondary education is often restricted by socioeconomic factors. The demand for education outstripped the capacities of the churches to provide it. By the 1970s, the Belizean government had assumed the leading role in establishing new schools, especially at the secondary and tertiary levels; the government conceived of education as an essential tool in the peaceful struggle for independence. The expansion of educational opportunities outstripped the state's resources, leading to an intensified reliance on external aid mostly provided by the United States.
BELIZE CONT.......
The colonial history of Belize is interconnected to the countries economy and political past. During the 1600’s Spain and other European nations struggled for power in the New World. In 1670, the Godolphin Treaty between Spain and England verified English possession of countries that were already occupied by England. Boundaries were unclear and there continued to be disputes. In 1779 the Spanish forced the British to leave the area, however, the Spanish never settled in the region and the British always returned to expand their trade and settlement. The disagreements between the European nations greatly affected the established Mayan and Garifuna people. The interaction between these four culturally diverse peoples has developed in to Belizean culture and relations. In the Mid 1800’s there were power struggles between planters and superintendents, which eventually led to the settlement of Belize in the Bay of Honduras to be declared a British colony called British Honduras. The area became a crown colony under which Britain retained control over defense, foreign affairs, internal security, various administrative and budget matters, and internally governed by a British-appointed governor and a locally elected assembly. Throughout the 1600 – 1800’s time the forestry industry was an important economic resource. The forestry industry's control of land and influence in colonial decision making held back the development of agriculture and the diversification of the economy. The industry continued to stifle agriculture and kept much of the population dependent on imported foods. Mahogany and logwood were the main types of timber being harvested. The forestry industry held the concentration of wealth which meant that the colony's economy was determined in London. Workers in mahogany camps were treated like slaves. Labor conditions included workers receiving rations of inferior flour, mess pork and tickets to be exchanged at the commissaries, instead of cash wages. Due to these conditions, workers and their families suffered from malnutrition and were continually in debt to their employers. The poor responded with a series of demonstrations, strikes, petitions, and riots that marked the beginning of modern politics and the independence movement. It was the beginning of a long campaign to gain an elected legislature that led to internal self-rule in 1964. The People's United Party (PUP) lead the campaign and have essentially defined the nationalist agenda in Belize. The PUP, with leader George Price, has won all but one national election in Belize since 1954. Belize had close, friendly relations with the United States, which was a leading trading partner and principal source of foreign investment and economic assistance. In the anticipation of independence the colony's name was changed to Belize in1973. Belizean independence was officially gained on September 21, 1981.
Belize’s colonial and political histories are strongly tied to the countries economy. Under colonial administration, the economy was centered on a succession of single raw commodities--logwood at first then mahogany in the 1800s, and finally sugar in the mid-1900s. Belize’ economy is now more diverse with areas in agriculture, manufacturing, and tourism. Agriculture is dominated by three crops--sugar, citrus fruits, and bananas. Sugar refining and garment industries lead the manufacturing area. One reason for the economic diversification was an adjustment program implemented by the government. Belize has also been a recipient of foreign aid. In 1983, the United States Agency for International Development opened an office in Belize and in the following 7 years Belize received $94 million in development assistance. In 1990 Belize had a debt of 158 million. Two Belizean dollars are worth one US dollar. Belize’s total GDP was about 2 billion in 2005 ranking them 163rd in the world. Overpopulation does not seem to be an economic problem in Belize; it is one of the least densely populated countries in the Americas. The rate of annual growth was estimated at 3 % in the 1980s, and averaged 8.5 persons per square kilometer in 1991.
Belize’s colonial and political histories are strongly tied to the countries economy. Under colonial administration, the economy was centered on a succession of single raw commodities--logwood at first then mahogany in the 1800s, and finally sugar in the mid-1900s. Belize’ economy is now more diverse with areas in agriculture, manufacturing, and tourism. Agriculture is dominated by three crops--sugar, citrus fruits, and bananas. Sugar refining and garment industries lead the manufacturing area. One reason for the economic diversification was an adjustment program implemented by the government. Belize has also been a recipient of foreign aid. In 1983, the United States Agency for International Development opened an office in Belize and in the following 7 years Belize received $94 million in development assistance. In 1990 Belize had a debt of 158 million. Two Belizean dollars are worth one US dollar. Belize’s total GDP was about 2 billion in 2005 ranking them 163rd in the world. Overpopulation does not seem to be an economic problem in Belize; it is one of the least densely populated countries in the Americas. The rate of annual growth was estimated at 3 % in the 1980s, and averaged 8.5 persons per square kilometer in 1991.
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
SDS Port Huron Statement
This statement still rings loud and true. Yes, some things have changed and we have had some improvement. However, the main ideals in this statement have not been embraced and carried out in society to their full extent. No matter how delusional it may seem, I am still hopeful for a better world.
Original Statement - http://www3.iath.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Manifestos/SDS_Port_Huron.html
Port Huron Statement
Introduction: Agenda for a Generation
We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.
When we were kids the United States was the wealthiest and strongest country in the world; the only one with the atom bomb, the least scarred by modern war, an initiator of the United Nations that we thought would distribute Western influence throughout the world. Freedom and equality for each individual, government of, by, and for the people--these American values we found god, principles by which we could live as men. Many of us began maturing in complacency.
As we grew, however, our comfort was penetrated by events too troubling to dismiss. First, the permeating and victimizing fact of human degradation, symbolized by the Southern struggle against racial bigotry, compelled most of us from silence to activism. Second, the enclosing fact of the Cold War, symbolized by the presence of the Bomb, brought awareness that we ourselves, and our friends, and millions of abstract "others" we knew more directly because of our common peril, might die at any time. We might deliberately ignore, or avoid, or fail to feel all other human problems, but not these two, for these were too immediate and crushing in their impact, too challenging in the demand that we as individuals take the responsibility for encounter and resolution.
While these and other problems either directly oppressed us or rankled our consciences and became our own subjective concerns, we began to see complicated and disturbing paradoxes in our surrounding America. The declaration "all men are created equal..." rang hollow before the facts of Negro life in the South and the big cities of the North. The proclaimed peaceful intentions of the United States contradicted its economic and military investments in the Cold War status quo.
We witnessed, and continue to witness, other paradoxes. With nuclear energy whole cities can easily be powered, yet the dominant nation-states seem more likely to unleash destruction greater than that incurred in all wars of human history. Although our own technology is destroying old and creating new forms of social organization, men still tolerate meaningless work and idleness. While two-thirds of mankind suffers under nourishment, our own upper classes revel amidst superfluous abundance. Although world population is expected to double in forty years, the nations still tolerate anarchy as a major principle of international conduct and uncontrolled exploitation governs the sapping of the earth's physical resources. Although mankind desperately needs revolutionary leadership, America rests in national stalemate, its goals ambiguous and tradition-bound instead of informed and clear, its democratic system apathetic and manipulated rather than "of, by, and for the people."
Not only did tarnish appear on our image of American virtue, not only did disillusion occur when the hypocrisy of American ideals was discovered, but we began to sense that what we had originally seen as the American Golden Age was actually the decline of an era. The worldwide outbreak of revolution against colonialism and imperialism, the entrenchment of totalitarian states, the menace of war, overpopulation, international disorder, supertechnology--these trends were testing the tenacity of our own commitment to democracy and freedom and our abilities to visualize their application to a world in upheaval.
Our work is guided by the sense that we may be the last generation in the experiment with living. But we are a minority--the vast majority of our people regard the temporary equilibriums of our society and world as eternally functional parts. In this is perhaps the outstanding paradox; we ourselves are imbued with urgency, yet the message of our society is that there is no viable alternative to the present. Beneath the reassuring tones of the politicians, beneath the common opinion that America will "muddle through," beneath the stagnation of those who have closed their minds to the future, is the pervading feeling that there simply are no alternatives, that our times have witnessed the exhaustion not only of Utopias, but of any new departures as well. Feeling the press of complexity upon the emptiness of life, people are fearful of the thought that at any moment things might be thrust out of control. They fear change itself, since change might smash whatever invisible framework seems to hold back chaos for them now. For most Americans, all crusades are suspect, threatening. The fact that each individual sees apathy in his fellows perpetuates the common reluctance to organize for change. The dominant institutions are complex enough to blunt the minds of their potential critics, and entrenched enough to swiftly dissipate or entirely repel the energies of protest and reform, thus limiting human expectancies. Then, too, we are a materially improved society, and by our own improvements we seem to have weakened the case for further change.
Some would have us believe that Americans feel contentment amidst prosperity--but might it not better be called a glaze above deeply felt anxieties about their role in the new world? And if these anxieties produce a developed indifference to human affairs, do they not as well produce a yearning to believe that there is an alternative to the present, that something can be done to change circumstances in the school, the workplaces, the bureaucracies, the government? It is to this latter yearning, at once the spark and engine of change, that we direct our present appeal. The search for truly democratic alternatives to the present, and a commitment to social experimentation with them, is a worthy and fulfilling human enterprise, one which moves us and, we hope, others today. On such a basis do we offer this document of our convictions and analysis: as an effort in understanding and changing the conditions of humanity in the late twentieth century, an effort rooted in the ancient, still unfulfilled conception of man attaining determining influence over his circumstances of life.
Values
Making values explicit--an initial task in establishing alternatives--is an activity that has been devalued and corrupted. The conventional moral terms of the age, the politician moralities--"free world," "people's democracies"--reflect realities poorly, if at all, and seem to function more as ruling myths than as descriptive principles. But neither has our experience in the universities brought us moral enlightenment. Our professors and administrators sacrifice controversy to public relations; their curriculums change more slowly than the living events of the world; their skills and silence are purchased by investors in the arms race; passion is called unscholastic. The questions we might want raised--what is really important? can we live in a different and better way? if we wanted to change society, how would we do it?--are not thought to be questions of a "fruitful, empirical nature," and thus are brushed aside.
Unlike youth in other countries we are used to moral leadership being exercised and moral dimensions being clarified by our elders. But today, for us, not even the liberal and socialist preachments of the past seem adequate to the forms of the present. Consider the old slogans: Capitalism Cannot Reform Itself, United Front Against Fascism, General Strike, All Out on May Day. Or, more recently, No Cooperation with Commies and Fellow Travelers, Ideologies Are Exhausted, Bipartisanship, No Utopias. These are incomplete, and there are few new prophets. It has been said that our liberal and socialist predecessors were plagued by vision without program, while our own generation is plagued by program without vision. All around us there is astute grasp of method, technique--the committee, the ad hoc group, the lobbyist, the hard and soft sell, the make, the projected image--but, if pressed critically, such expertise in incompetent to explain its implicit ideals. It is highly fashionable to identify oneself by old categories, or by naming a respected political figure, or by explaining "how we would vote" on various issues.
Theoretic chaos has replaced the idealistic thinking of old--and, unable to reconstitute theoretic order, men have condemned idealism itself. Doubt has replaced hopefulness--and men act out a defeatism that is labeled realistic. The decline of utopia and hope is in fact one of the defining features of social life today. The reasons are various: the dreams of the older left were perverted by Stalinism and never re-created; the congressional stalemate makes men narrow their view of the possible; the specialization of human activity leaves little room for sweeping thought; the horrors of the twentieth century symbolized in the gas ovens and concentration camps and atom bombs, have blasted hopefulness. To be idealistic is to be considered apocalyptic, deluded. To have no serious aspirations, on the contrary, is to be "tough-minded."
In suggesting social goals and values, therefore, we are aware of entering a sphere of some disrepute. Perhaps matured by the past, we have no formulas, no closed theories--but that does not mean values are beyond discussion and tentative determination. A first task of any social movement is to convince people that the search for orienting theories and the creation of human values is complex but worthwhile. We are aware that to avoid platitudes we must analyze the concrete conditions of social order. But to direct such an analysis we must use the guideposts of basic principles. Our own social values involve conceptions of human beings, human relationships, and social systems.
We regard men as infinitely precious and possessed of unfulfilled capacities for reason, freedom, and love. In affirming these principles we are aware of countering perhaps the dominant conceptions of man in the twentieth century: that he is a thing to be manipulated, and that he is inherently incapable of directing his own affairs. We oppose the depersonalization that reduces human being to the status of things--if anything, the brutalities of the twentieth century teach that means and ends are intimately related, that vague appeals to "posterity" cannot justify the mutilations of the present. We oppose, too, the doctrine of human incompetence because it rests essentially on the modern fact that men have been "competently" manipulated into incompetence--we see little reason why men cannot meet with increasing the skill the complexities and responsibilities of their situation, if society is organized not for minority, but for majority, participation in decision-making.
Men have unrealized potential for self-cultivation, self-direction, self-understanding, and creativity. It is this potential that we regard as crucial and to which we appeal, not to the human potentiality for violence, unreason, and submission to authority. The goal of man and society should be human independence: a concern not with image of popularity but with finding a meaning in life that is personally authentic; a quality of mind not compulsively driven by a sense of powerlessness, nor one which unthinkingly adopts status values, nor one which represses all threats to its habits, but one which has full, spontaneous access to present and past experiences, one which easily unites the fragmented parts of personal history, one which openly faces problems which are troubling and unresolved; one with an intuitive awareness of possibilities, an active sense of curiosity, an ability and willingness to learn.
This kind of independence does not mean egotistic individualism--the object is not to have one's way so much as it is to have a way that is one's own. Nor do we deify man--we merely have faith in his potential.
Human relationships should involve fraternity and honesty. Human interdependence is contemporary fact; human brotherhood must be willed, however, as a condition of future survival and as the most appropriate form of social relations. Personal links between man and man are needed, especially to go beyond the partial and fragmentary bonds of function that bind men only as worker to worker, employer to employee, teacher to student, American to Russian.
Loneliness, estrangement, isolation describe the vast distance between man and man today. These dominant tendencies cannot be overcome by better personnel management, nor by improved gadgets, but only when a love of man overcomes the idolatrous worship of things by man. As the individualism we affirm is not egoism, the selflessness we affirm is not self-elimination. On the contrary, we believe in generosity of a kind that imprints one's unique individual qualities in the relation to other men, and to all human activity. Further, to dislike isolation is not to favor the abolition of privacy; the latter differs from isolation in that it occurs or is abolished according to individual will.
We would replace power rooted in possession, privilege, or circumstance by power and uniqueness rooted in love, reflectiveness, reason, and creativity. As a social system we seek the establishment of a democracy of individual participation, governed by two central aims: that the individual share in those social decisions determining the quality and direction of his life; that society be organized to encourage independence in men and provide the media for their common participation.
In a participatory democracy, the political life would be based in several root principles: that decision-making of basic social consequence be carried on by public groupings;
that politics be seen positively, as the art of collectively creating an acceptable pattern of social relations;
that politics has the function of bringing people out of isolation and into community, thus being a necessary, though not sufficient, means of finding meaning in personal life;
that the political order should serve to clarify problems in a way instrumental to their solution; it should provide outlets for the expression of personal grievance and aspiration; opposing views should be organized so as to illuminate choices and facilitate the attainment of goals; channels should be commonly available to relate men to knowledge and to power so that private problems--from bad recreation facilities to personal alienation--are formulated as general issues.
The economic sphere would have as its basis the principles:
that work should involve incentives worthier than money or survival. It should be educative, not stultifying; creative, not mechanical; self-directed, not manipulated, encouraging independence, a respect for others, a sense of dignity, and a willingness to accept social responsibility, since it is this experience that has crucial influence on habits, perceptions and individual ethics;
that the economic experience is so personally decisive that the individual must share in its full determination;
that the economy itself is of such social importance that its major resources and means of production should be open to democratic participation and subject to democratic social regulation.
Like the political and economic ones, major social institutions--cultural, educational, rehabilitative, and others--should be generally organized with the well-being and dignity of man as the essential measure of success.
In social change or interchange, we find violence to be abhorrent because it requires generally the transformation of the target, be it a human being or a community of people, into a depersonalized object of hate. It is imperative that the means of violence be abolished and the institutions--local, national, international--that encourage non-violence as a condition of conflict be developed.
These are our central values, in skeletal form. It remains vital to understand their denial or attainment in the context of the modern world.
The Students
In the last few years, thousands of American students demonstrated that they at least felt the urgency of the times. They moved actively and directly against racial injustices, the threat of war, violations of individual rights of conscience, and, less frequently, against economic manipulation. They succeeded in restoring a small measure of controversy to the campuses after the stillness of the McCarthy period. They succeeded, too, in gaining some concessions from the people and institutions they opposed, especially in the fight against racial bigotry.
The significance of these scattered movements lies not in their success or failure in gaining objectives--at least, not yet. Nor does the significance lie in the intellectual "competence" or "maturity" of the students involved--as some pedantic elders allege. The significance is in the fact that students are breaking the crust of apathy and overcoming the inner alienation that remain the defining characteristics of American college life.
If student movements for change are still rarities on the campus scene, what is commonplace there? The real campus, the familiar campus, is a place of private people, engaged in their notorious "inner emigration." It is a place of commitment to business-as-usual, getting ahead, playing it cool. It is a place of mass affirmation of the Twist, but mass reluctance toward the controversial public stance. Rules are accepted as "inevitable," bureaucracy as "just circumstances," irrelevance as "scholarship," selflessness as "martyrdom," politics as "just another way to make people, and an unprofitable one, too."
Almost no students value activity as citizens. Passive in public, they are hardly more idealistic in arranging their private lives: Gallup concludes they will settle for "low success, and won't risk high failure." There is not much willingness to take risks (not even in business), no setting of dangerous goals, no real conception of personal identity except one manufactured in the image of others, no real urge for personal fulfillment except to be almost as successful as the very successful people. Attention is being paid to social status (the quality of shirt collars, meeting people, getting wives or husbands, making solid contacts for later on); much, too, is paid to academic status (grades, honors, the med school rat race). But neglected generally is real intellectual status, the personal cultivation of the mind.
"Students don't even give a damn abut the apathy," one has said. Apathy toward apathy begets a privately constructed universe, a place of systematic study schedules, two nights each week for beer, a girl or two, and early marriage; a framework infused with personality, warmth, and under control, no matter how unsatisfying otherwise.
Under these conditions university life loses all relevance to some. Four hundred thousand of our classmates leave college every year.
The accompanying "let's pretend" theory of student extracurricular affairs validates student government as a training center for those who want to live their lives in political pretense, and discourages initiative from the more articulate, honest, and sensitive students. The bounds and style of controversy are delimited before controversy begins. The university "prepares" the student for "citizenship" through perpetual rehearsals and, usually, through emasculation of what creative spirit there is in the individual.
The academic life contains reinforcing counterparts to the way in which extracurricular life is organized. The academic world is founded on a teacher-student relations analogous to the parent-child relation which characterizes in loco parentis. Further, academia includes a radical separation of the student from the material of study. That which is studies, the social reality, is "objectified" to sterility, dividing the student from life--just as he is restrained in active involvement by the deans controlling student government. The specialization of function and knowledge, admittedly necessary to our complex technological and social structure, has produced an exaggerated compartmentalization of study and understanding. This has contributed to an overly parochial view, by faculty, of the role of its research and scholarship; to a discontinuous and truncated understanding, by students, of the surrounding social order; and to a loss of personal attachment, by nearly all, to the worth of study as a humanistic enterprise.
There is, finally, the cumbersome academic bureaucracy extending throughout the academic as well as the extracurricular structures, contributing to the sense of outer complexity and inner powerlessness that transforms the honest searching of many students to a ratification of convention and, worse, to a numbness to present and future catastrophes. The size and financing systems of the university enhance the permanent trusteeship of the administrative bureaucracy, their power leading to a shift within the university toward the value standards of business and the administrative mentality. Huge foundations and other private financial interests shape the under financed colleges and universities, making them not only more commercial, but less disposed to diagnose society critically, less open to dissent. Many social and physical scientists, neglecting the liberating heritage of higher learning, develop "human relations" or "morale-producing" techniques for the corporate economy, while others exercise their intellectual skills to accelerate the arms race.
Tragically, the university could serve as a significant source of social criticism and an initiator of new modes and molders of attitudes. But the actual intellectual effect of the college experience is hardly distinguishable from that of any other communications channel--say, a television set--passing on the stock truths of the day. Students leave college somewhat more "tolerant" than when they arrived, but basically unchallenged in their values and political orientations. With administrators ordering the institution, and faculty the curriculum, the student learns by his isolation to accept elite rule within the university, which prepares him to accept later forms of minority control. The real function of the educational system--as opposed to its more rhetorical function of "searching for truth"--is to impart the key information and styles that will help the student get by, modestly but comfortably, in the big society beyond.
The Society Beyond
Look beyond the campus, to America itself. That student life is more intellectual, and perhaps more comfortable, does not obscure the fact that the fundamental qualities of life on the campus reflect the habits of society at large. The fraternity president is seen at the junior manager levels; the sorority queen has gone to Grosse Pointe; the serious poet burns for a place, any place, to work; the once-serious and never-serious poets work at the advertising agencies. The desperation of people threatened by forces about which they know little and of which they can say less; the cheerful emptiness of people "giving up" all hope of changing things; the faceless ones polled by Gallup who listed "international affairs" fourteenth on their list of "problems" but who also expected thermonuclear war in the next few years; in these and other forms, Americans are in withdrawal from public life, from any collective effort at directing their own affairs.
Some regard these national doldrums as a sign of healthy approval of the established order--but is it approval by consent or manipulated acquiescence? Others declare that the people are withdrawn because compelling issues are fast disappearing--perhaps there are fewer bread lines in America, but is Jim Crow gone, is there enough work and work more fulfilling, is world war a diminishing threat, and what of the revolutionary new peoples? Still others think the national quietude is a necessary consequence of the need for elites to resolve complex and specialized problems of modern industrial society--but then, why should business elites help decide foreign policy, and who controls the elites anyway, and are they solving mankind's problems? Others, finally, shrug knowingly and announce that full democracy never worked anywhere in the past--but why lump qualitatively different civilizations together, and how can a social order work well if its best thinkers are skeptics, and is man really doomed forever to the domination of today?
There are now convincing apologies for the contemporary malaise. While the world tumbles toward the final war, while men in other nations are trying desperately to alter events, while the very future qua future is uncertain--America is without community impulse, without the inner momentum necessary for an age when societies cannot successfully perpetuate themselves by their military weapons, when democracy must be viable because of its quality of life, not its quantity of rockets.
The apathy here is, first, subjective--the felt powerlessness of ordinary people, the resignation before the enormity of events. But subjective apathy is encouraged by the objective American situation--the actual structural separation of people from power, from relevant knowledge, from pinnacles of decision-making. Just as the university influences the student way of life, so do major social institutions create the circumstances in which the isolated citizen will try hopelessly to understand his world and himself.
The very isolation of the individual--from power and community and ability to aspire--means the rise of a democracy without publics. With the great mass of people structurally remote and psychologically hesitant with respect to democratic institutions, those institutions themselves attenuate and become, in the fashion of the vicious circle, progressively less accessible to those few who aspire to serious participation in social affairs. The vital democratic connection between community and leadership, between the mass and the several elites, has been so wrenched and perverted that disastrous policies go unchallenged time and again....
The University and Social Change
There is perhaps little reason to be optimistic about the above analysis. True, the Dixiecrat-GOP coalition is the weakest point in the dominating complex of corporate, military, and political power. But the civil rights, peace, and student movements are too poor and socially slighted, and the labor movement too quiescent, to be counted with enthusiasm. From where else can power and vision be summoned? We believe that the universities are an overlooked seat of influence.
First, the university is located in a permanent position of social influence. It's educational function makes it indispensable and automatically makes it a crucial institution in the formation of social attitudes. Second, in an unbelievably complicated world, it is the central institution for organizing, evaluating and transmitting knowledge. Third, the extent to which academic resources presently are used to buttress immoral social practice is revealed, first, by the extent to which defense contracts make the universities engineers of the arms race. Too, the use of modern social science as a manipulative tool reveals itself in the "human relations" consultants to the modern corporations, who introduce trivial sops to give laborers feelings of "participation" or "belonging," while actually deluding them in order to further exploit their labor. And, of course, the use of motivational research is already infamous as a manipulative aspect of American politics. But these social uses of the universities' resources also demonstrate the unchangeable reliance by men of power on the men and storehouses of knowledge: this makes the university functionally tied to society in new ways, revealing new potentialities, new levers for change. Fourth, the university is the only mainstream institution that is open to participation by individuals of nearly any viewpoint.
These, at least, are facts, no matter how dull the teaching, how paternalistic the rules, how irrelevant the research that goes on. Social relevance, the accessibility to knowledge, and internal openness--these together make the university a potential base and agency in a movement of social change.
Any new left in America must be, in large measure, a left with real intellectual skills, committed to deliberativeness, honesty, reflection as working tools. The university permits the political life to be an adjunct to the academic one, and action to be informed by reason.
A new left must be distributed in significant social roles throughout the country. The universities are distributed in such a manner.
A new left must consist of younger people who matured in the postwar world, and partially be directed to the recruitment of younger people. The university is an obvious beginning point.
A new left must include liberals and socialists, the former for their relevance, the latter for their sense of thoroughgoing reforms in the system. The university is a more sensible place than a political party for these two traditions to begin to discuss their differences and look for political synthesis.
A new left must start controversy across the land, if national policies and national apathy are to be reversed. The ideal university is a community of controversy, within itself and in its effects on communities beyond.
A new left must transform modern complexity into issues that can be understood and felt close up by every human being. It must give form to the feelings of helplessness and indifference, so that people may see the political, social, and economic sources of their private troubles, and organize to change society. In a time of supposed prosperity, moral complacency, and political manipulation, a new left cannot rely on only aching stomachs to be the engine force of social reform. The case for change, for alternatives that will involve uncomfortable personal efforts, must be argued as never before. The university is a relevant place for all of these activities.
But we need not indulge in illusions: the university system cannot complete a movement of ordinary people making demands for a better life. From its schools and colleges across the nation, a militant left might awaken its allies, and by beginning the process towards peace, civil rights, and labor struggles, reinsert theory and idealism where too often reign confusion and political barter. The power of students and faculty united is not only potential; it has shown its actuality in the South, and in the reform movements of the North.
The bridge to political power, though, will be build through genuine cooperation, locally, nationally, and internationally, between a new left of young people and an awakening community of allies. In each community we must look within the university and act with confidence that we can be powerful, but we must look outwards to the less exotic but more lasting struggles for justice.
To turn these mythic possibilities into realities will involve national efforts at university reform by an alliance of students and faculty. They must wrest control of the educational process from the administrative bureaucracy. They must make fraternal and functional contact with allies in labor, civil rights, and other liberal forces outside the campus. They must import major public issues into the curriculum--research and teaching on problems of war and peace is an outstanding example. They must make debate and controversy, not dull pedantic cant, the common style for educational life. They must consciously build a base for their assault upon the loci of power.
As students for a democratic society, we are committed to stimulating this kind of social movement, this kind of vision and program in campus and community across the country. If we appear to seek the unattainable, as it has been said, then let it be known that we do so to avoid the unimaginable.
This text, made available by the Sixties Project, is copyright (c) 1993 by the Author or by Viet Nam Generation, Inc., all rights reserved. This text may be used, printed, and archived in accordance with the Fair Use provisions of U.S. Copyright law. This text may not be archived, printed, or redistributed in any form for a fee, without the consent of the copyright holder. This notice must accompany any redistribution of the text. The Sixties Project, sponsored by Viet Nam Generation Inc. and the Institute of Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville, is a collective of humanities scholars working together on the Internet to use electronic resources to provide routes of collaboration and make available primary and secondary sources for researchers, students, teachers, writers and librarians interested in the 1960s.
Original Statement - http://www3.iath.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Manifestos/SDS_Port_Huron.html
Port Huron Statement
Introduction: Agenda for a Generation
We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.
When we were kids the United States was the wealthiest and strongest country in the world; the only one with the atom bomb, the least scarred by modern war, an initiator of the United Nations that we thought would distribute Western influence throughout the world. Freedom and equality for each individual, government of, by, and for the people--these American values we found god, principles by which we could live as men. Many of us began maturing in complacency.
As we grew, however, our comfort was penetrated by events too troubling to dismiss. First, the permeating and victimizing fact of human degradation, symbolized by the Southern struggle against racial bigotry, compelled most of us from silence to activism. Second, the enclosing fact of the Cold War, symbolized by the presence of the Bomb, brought awareness that we ourselves, and our friends, and millions of abstract "others" we knew more directly because of our common peril, might die at any time. We might deliberately ignore, or avoid, or fail to feel all other human problems, but not these two, for these were too immediate and crushing in their impact, too challenging in the demand that we as individuals take the responsibility for encounter and resolution.
While these and other problems either directly oppressed us or rankled our consciences and became our own subjective concerns, we began to see complicated and disturbing paradoxes in our surrounding America. The declaration "all men are created equal..." rang hollow before the facts of Negro life in the South and the big cities of the North. The proclaimed peaceful intentions of the United States contradicted its economic and military investments in the Cold War status quo.
We witnessed, and continue to witness, other paradoxes. With nuclear energy whole cities can easily be powered, yet the dominant nation-states seem more likely to unleash destruction greater than that incurred in all wars of human history. Although our own technology is destroying old and creating new forms of social organization, men still tolerate meaningless work and idleness. While two-thirds of mankind suffers under nourishment, our own upper classes revel amidst superfluous abundance. Although world population is expected to double in forty years, the nations still tolerate anarchy as a major principle of international conduct and uncontrolled exploitation governs the sapping of the earth's physical resources. Although mankind desperately needs revolutionary leadership, America rests in national stalemate, its goals ambiguous and tradition-bound instead of informed and clear, its democratic system apathetic and manipulated rather than "of, by, and for the people."
Not only did tarnish appear on our image of American virtue, not only did disillusion occur when the hypocrisy of American ideals was discovered, but we began to sense that what we had originally seen as the American Golden Age was actually the decline of an era. The worldwide outbreak of revolution against colonialism and imperialism, the entrenchment of totalitarian states, the menace of war, overpopulation, international disorder, supertechnology--these trends were testing the tenacity of our own commitment to democracy and freedom and our abilities to visualize their application to a world in upheaval.
Our work is guided by the sense that we may be the last generation in the experiment with living. But we are a minority--the vast majority of our people regard the temporary equilibriums of our society and world as eternally functional parts. In this is perhaps the outstanding paradox; we ourselves are imbued with urgency, yet the message of our society is that there is no viable alternative to the present. Beneath the reassuring tones of the politicians, beneath the common opinion that America will "muddle through," beneath the stagnation of those who have closed their minds to the future, is the pervading feeling that there simply are no alternatives, that our times have witnessed the exhaustion not only of Utopias, but of any new departures as well. Feeling the press of complexity upon the emptiness of life, people are fearful of the thought that at any moment things might be thrust out of control. They fear change itself, since change might smash whatever invisible framework seems to hold back chaos for them now. For most Americans, all crusades are suspect, threatening. The fact that each individual sees apathy in his fellows perpetuates the common reluctance to organize for change. The dominant institutions are complex enough to blunt the minds of their potential critics, and entrenched enough to swiftly dissipate or entirely repel the energies of protest and reform, thus limiting human expectancies. Then, too, we are a materially improved society, and by our own improvements we seem to have weakened the case for further change.
Some would have us believe that Americans feel contentment amidst prosperity--but might it not better be called a glaze above deeply felt anxieties about their role in the new world? And if these anxieties produce a developed indifference to human affairs, do they not as well produce a yearning to believe that there is an alternative to the present, that something can be done to change circumstances in the school, the workplaces, the bureaucracies, the government? It is to this latter yearning, at once the spark and engine of change, that we direct our present appeal. The search for truly democratic alternatives to the present, and a commitment to social experimentation with them, is a worthy and fulfilling human enterprise, one which moves us and, we hope, others today. On such a basis do we offer this document of our convictions and analysis: as an effort in understanding and changing the conditions of humanity in the late twentieth century, an effort rooted in the ancient, still unfulfilled conception of man attaining determining influence over his circumstances of life.
Values
Making values explicit--an initial task in establishing alternatives--is an activity that has been devalued and corrupted. The conventional moral terms of the age, the politician moralities--"free world," "people's democracies"--reflect realities poorly, if at all, and seem to function more as ruling myths than as descriptive principles. But neither has our experience in the universities brought us moral enlightenment. Our professors and administrators sacrifice controversy to public relations; their curriculums change more slowly than the living events of the world; their skills and silence are purchased by investors in the arms race; passion is called unscholastic. The questions we might want raised--what is really important? can we live in a different and better way? if we wanted to change society, how would we do it?--are not thought to be questions of a "fruitful, empirical nature," and thus are brushed aside.
Unlike youth in other countries we are used to moral leadership being exercised and moral dimensions being clarified by our elders. But today, for us, not even the liberal and socialist preachments of the past seem adequate to the forms of the present. Consider the old slogans: Capitalism Cannot Reform Itself, United Front Against Fascism, General Strike, All Out on May Day. Or, more recently, No Cooperation with Commies and Fellow Travelers, Ideologies Are Exhausted, Bipartisanship, No Utopias. These are incomplete, and there are few new prophets. It has been said that our liberal and socialist predecessors were plagued by vision without program, while our own generation is plagued by program without vision. All around us there is astute grasp of method, technique--the committee, the ad hoc group, the lobbyist, the hard and soft sell, the make, the projected image--but, if pressed critically, such expertise in incompetent to explain its implicit ideals. It is highly fashionable to identify oneself by old categories, or by naming a respected political figure, or by explaining "how we would vote" on various issues.
Theoretic chaos has replaced the idealistic thinking of old--and, unable to reconstitute theoretic order, men have condemned idealism itself. Doubt has replaced hopefulness--and men act out a defeatism that is labeled realistic. The decline of utopia and hope is in fact one of the defining features of social life today. The reasons are various: the dreams of the older left were perverted by Stalinism and never re-created; the congressional stalemate makes men narrow their view of the possible; the specialization of human activity leaves little room for sweeping thought; the horrors of the twentieth century symbolized in the gas ovens and concentration camps and atom bombs, have blasted hopefulness. To be idealistic is to be considered apocalyptic, deluded. To have no serious aspirations, on the contrary, is to be "tough-minded."
In suggesting social goals and values, therefore, we are aware of entering a sphere of some disrepute. Perhaps matured by the past, we have no formulas, no closed theories--but that does not mean values are beyond discussion and tentative determination. A first task of any social movement is to convince people that the search for orienting theories and the creation of human values is complex but worthwhile. We are aware that to avoid platitudes we must analyze the concrete conditions of social order. But to direct such an analysis we must use the guideposts of basic principles. Our own social values involve conceptions of human beings, human relationships, and social systems.
We regard men as infinitely precious and possessed of unfulfilled capacities for reason, freedom, and love. In affirming these principles we are aware of countering perhaps the dominant conceptions of man in the twentieth century: that he is a thing to be manipulated, and that he is inherently incapable of directing his own affairs. We oppose the depersonalization that reduces human being to the status of things--if anything, the brutalities of the twentieth century teach that means and ends are intimately related, that vague appeals to "posterity" cannot justify the mutilations of the present. We oppose, too, the doctrine of human incompetence because it rests essentially on the modern fact that men have been "competently" manipulated into incompetence--we see little reason why men cannot meet with increasing the skill the complexities and responsibilities of their situation, if society is organized not for minority, but for majority, participation in decision-making.
Men have unrealized potential for self-cultivation, self-direction, self-understanding, and creativity. It is this potential that we regard as crucial and to which we appeal, not to the human potentiality for violence, unreason, and submission to authority. The goal of man and society should be human independence: a concern not with image of popularity but with finding a meaning in life that is personally authentic; a quality of mind not compulsively driven by a sense of powerlessness, nor one which unthinkingly adopts status values, nor one which represses all threats to its habits, but one which has full, spontaneous access to present and past experiences, one which easily unites the fragmented parts of personal history, one which openly faces problems which are troubling and unresolved; one with an intuitive awareness of possibilities, an active sense of curiosity, an ability and willingness to learn.
This kind of independence does not mean egotistic individualism--the object is not to have one's way so much as it is to have a way that is one's own. Nor do we deify man--we merely have faith in his potential.
Human relationships should involve fraternity and honesty. Human interdependence is contemporary fact; human brotherhood must be willed, however, as a condition of future survival and as the most appropriate form of social relations. Personal links between man and man are needed, especially to go beyond the partial and fragmentary bonds of function that bind men only as worker to worker, employer to employee, teacher to student, American to Russian.
Loneliness, estrangement, isolation describe the vast distance between man and man today. These dominant tendencies cannot be overcome by better personnel management, nor by improved gadgets, but only when a love of man overcomes the idolatrous worship of things by man. As the individualism we affirm is not egoism, the selflessness we affirm is not self-elimination. On the contrary, we believe in generosity of a kind that imprints one's unique individual qualities in the relation to other men, and to all human activity. Further, to dislike isolation is not to favor the abolition of privacy; the latter differs from isolation in that it occurs or is abolished according to individual will.
We would replace power rooted in possession, privilege, or circumstance by power and uniqueness rooted in love, reflectiveness, reason, and creativity. As a social system we seek the establishment of a democracy of individual participation, governed by two central aims: that the individual share in those social decisions determining the quality and direction of his life; that society be organized to encourage independence in men and provide the media for their common participation.
In a participatory democracy, the political life would be based in several root principles: that decision-making of basic social consequence be carried on by public groupings;
that politics be seen positively, as the art of collectively creating an acceptable pattern of social relations;
that politics has the function of bringing people out of isolation and into community, thus being a necessary, though not sufficient, means of finding meaning in personal life;
that the political order should serve to clarify problems in a way instrumental to their solution; it should provide outlets for the expression of personal grievance and aspiration; opposing views should be organized so as to illuminate choices and facilitate the attainment of goals; channels should be commonly available to relate men to knowledge and to power so that private problems--from bad recreation facilities to personal alienation--are formulated as general issues.
The economic sphere would have as its basis the principles:
that work should involve incentives worthier than money or survival. It should be educative, not stultifying; creative, not mechanical; self-directed, not manipulated, encouraging independence, a respect for others, a sense of dignity, and a willingness to accept social responsibility, since it is this experience that has crucial influence on habits, perceptions and individual ethics;
that the economic experience is so personally decisive that the individual must share in its full determination;
that the economy itself is of such social importance that its major resources and means of production should be open to democratic participation and subject to democratic social regulation.
Like the political and economic ones, major social institutions--cultural, educational, rehabilitative, and others--should be generally organized with the well-being and dignity of man as the essential measure of success.
In social change or interchange, we find violence to be abhorrent because it requires generally the transformation of the target, be it a human being or a community of people, into a depersonalized object of hate. It is imperative that the means of violence be abolished and the institutions--local, national, international--that encourage non-violence as a condition of conflict be developed.
These are our central values, in skeletal form. It remains vital to understand their denial or attainment in the context of the modern world.
The Students
In the last few years, thousands of American students demonstrated that they at least felt the urgency of the times. They moved actively and directly against racial injustices, the threat of war, violations of individual rights of conscience, and, less frequently, against economic manipulation. They succeeded in restoring a small measure of controversy to the campuses after the stillness of the McCarthy period. They succeeded, too, in gaining some concessions from the people and institutions they opposed, especially in the fight against racial bigotry.
The significance of these scattered movements lies not in their success or failure in gaining objectives--at least, not yet. Nor does the significance lie in the intellectual "competence" or "maturity" of the students involved--as some pedantic elders allege. The significance is in the fact that students are breaking the crust of apathy and overcoming the inner alienation that remain the defining characteristics of American college life.
If student movements for change are still rarities on the campus scene, what is commonplace there? The real campus, the familiar campus, is a place of private people, engaged in their notorious "inner emigration." It is a place of commitment to business-as-usual, getting ahead, playing it cool. It is a place of mass affirmation of the Twist, but mass reluctance toward the controversial public stance. Rules are accepted as "inevitable," bureaucracy as "just circumstances," irrelevance as "scholarship," selflessness as "martyrdom," politics as "just another way to make people, and an unprofitable one, too."
Almost no students value activity as citizens. Passive in public, they are hardly more idealistic in arranging their private lives: Gallup concludes they will settle for "low success, and won't risk high failure." There is not much willingness to take risks (not even in business), no setting of dangerous goals, no real conception of personal identity except one manufactured in the image of others, no real urge for personal fulfillment except to be almost as successful as the very successful people. Attention is being paid to social status (the quality of shirt collars, meeting people, getting wives or husbands, making solid contacts for later on); much, too, is paid to academic status (grades, honors, the med school rat race). But neglected generally is real intellectual status, the personal cultivation of the mind.
"Students don't even give a damn abut the apathy," one has said. Apathy toward apathy begets a privately constructed universe, a place of systematic study schedules, two nights each week for beer, a girl or two, and early marriage; a framework infused with personality, warmth, and under control, no matter how unsatisfying otherwise.
Under these conditions university life loses all relevance to some. Four hundred thousand of our classmates leave college every year.
The accompanying "let's pretend" theory of student extracurricular affairs validates student government as a training center for those who want to live their lives in political pretense, and discourages initiative from the more articulate, honest, and sensitive students. The bounds and style of controversy are delimited before controversy begins. The university "prepares" the student for "citizenship" through perpetual rehearsals and, usually, through emasculation of what creative spirit there is in the individual.
The academic life contains reinforcing counterparts to the way in which extracurricular life is organized. The academic world is founded on a teacher-student relations analogous to the parent-child relation which characterizes in loco parentis. Further, academia includes a radical separation of the student from the material of study. That which is studies, the social reality, is "objectified" to sterility, dividing the student from life--just as he is restrained in active involvement by the deans controlling student government. The specialization of function and knowledge, admittedly necessary to our complex technological and social structure, has produced an exaggerated compartmentalization of study and understanding. This has contributed to an overly parochial view, by faculty, of the role of its research and scholarship; to a discontinuous and truncated understanding, by students, of the surrounding social order; and to a loss of personal attachment, by nearly all, to the worth of study as a humanistic enterprise.
There is, finally, the cumbersome academic bureaucracy extending throughout the academic as well as the extracurricular structures, contributing to the sense of outer complexity and inner powerlessness that transforms the honest searching of many students to a ratification of convention and, worse, to a numbness to present and future catastrophes. The size and financing systems of the university enhance the permanent trusteeship of the administrative bureaucracy, their power leading to a shift within the university toward the value standards of business and the administrative mentality. Huge foundations and other private financial interests shape the under financed colleges and universities, making them not only more commercial, but less disposed to diagnose society critically, less open to dissent. Many social and physical scientists, neglecting the liberating heritage of higher learning, develop "human relations" or "morale-producing" techniques for the corporate economy, while others exercise their intellectual skills to accelerate the arms race.
Tragically, the university could serve as a significant source of social criticism and an initiator of new modes and molders of attitudes. But the actual intellectual effect of the college experience is hardly distinguishable from that of any other communications channel--say, a television set--passing on the stock truths of the day. Students leave college somewhat more "tolerant" than when they arrived, but basically unchallenged in their values and political orientations. With administrators ordering the institution, and faculty the curriculum, the student learns by his isolation to accept elite rule within the university, which prepares him to accept later forms of minority control. The real function of the educational system--as opposed to its more rhetorical function of "searching for truth"--is to impart the key information and styles that will help the student get by, modestly but comfortably, in the big society beyond.
The Society Beyond
Look beyond the campus, to America itself. That student life is more intellectual, and perhaps more comfortable, does not obscure the fact that the fundamental qualities of life on the campus reflect the habits of society at large. The fraternity president is seen at the junior manager levels; the sorority queen has gone to Grosse Pointe; the serious poet burns for a place, any place, to work; the once-serious and never-serious poets work at the advertising agencies. The desperation of people threatened by forces about which they know little and of which they can say less; the cheerful emptiness of people "giving up" all hope of changing things; the faceless ones polled by Gallup who listed "international affairs" fourteenth on their list of "problems" but who also expected thermonuclear war in the next few years; in these and other forms, Americans are in withdrawal from public life, from any collective effort at directing their own affairs.
Some regard these national doldrums as a sign of healthy approval of the established order--but is it approval by consent or manipulated acquiescence? Others declare that the people are withdrawn because compelling issues are fast disappearing--perhaps there are fewer bread lines in America, but is Jim Crow gone, is there enough work and work more fulfilling, is world war a diminishing threat, and what of the revolutionary new peoples? Still others think the national quietude is a necessary consequence of the need for elites to resolve complex and specialized problems of modern industrial society--but then, why should business elites help decide foreign policy, and who controls the elites anyway, and are they solving mankind's problems? Others, finally, shrug knowingly and announce that full democracy never worked anywhere in the past--but why lump qualitatively different civilizations together, and how can a social order work well if its best thinkers are skeptics, and is man really doomed forever to the domination of today?
There are now convincing apologies for the contemporary malaise. While the world tumbles toward the final war, while men in other nations are trying desperately to alter events, while the very future qua future is uncertain--America is without community impulse, without the inner momentum necessary for an age when societies cannot successfully perpetuate themselves by their military weapons, when democracy must be viable because of its quality of life, not its quantity of rockets.
The apathy here is, first, subjective--the felt powerlessness of ordinary people, the resignation before the enormity of events. But subjective apathy is encouraged by the objective American situation--the actual structural separation of people from power, from relevant knowledge, from pinnacles of decision-making. Just as the university influences the student way of life, so do major social institutions create the circumstances in which the isolated citizen will try hopelessly to understand his world and himself.
The very isolation of the individual--from power and community and ability to aspire--means the rise of a democracy without publics. With the great mass of people structurally remote and psychologically hesitant with respect to democratic institutions, those institutions themselves attenuate and become, in the fashion of the vicious circle, progressively less accessible to those few who aspire to serious participation in social affairs. The vital democratic connection between community and leadership, between the mass and the several elites, has been so wrenched and perverted that disastrous policies go unchallenged time and again....
The University and Social Change
There is perhaps little reason to be optimistic about the above analysis. True, the Dixiecrat-GOP coalition is the weakest point in the dominating complex of corporate, military, and political power. But the civil rights, peace, and student movements are too poor and socially slighted, and the labor movement too quiescent, to be counted with enthusiasm. From where else can power and vision be summoned? We believe that the universities are an overlooked seat of influence.
First, the university is located in a permanent position of social influence. It's educational function makes it indispensable and automatically makes it a crucial institution in the formation of social attitudes. Second, in an unbelievably complicated world, it is the central institution for organizing, evaluating and transmitting knowledge. Third, the extent to which academic resources presently are used to buttress immoral social practice is revealed, first, by the extent to which defense contracts make the universities engineers of the arms race. Too, the use of modern social science as a manipulative tool reveals itself in the "human relations" consultants to the modern corporations, who introduce trivial sops to give laborers feelings of "participation" or "belonging," while actually deluding them in order to further exploit their labor. And, of course, the use of motivational research is already infamous as a manipulative aspect of American politics. But these social uses of the universities' resources also demonstrate the unchangeable reliance by men of power on the men and storehouses of knowledge: this makes the university functionally tied to society in new ways, revealing new potentialities, new levers for change. Fourth, the university is the only mainstream institution that is open to participation by individuals of nearly any viewpoint.
These, at least, are facts, no matter how dull the teaching, how paternalistic the rules, how irrelevant the research that goes on. Social relevance, the accessibility to knowledge, and internal openness--these together make the university a potential base and agency in a movement of social change.
Any new left in America must be, in large measure, a left with real intellectual skills, committed to deliberativeness, honesty, reflection as working tools. The university permits the political life to be an adjunct to the academic one, and action to be informed by reason.
A new left must be distributed in significant social roles throughout the country. The universities are distributed in such a manner.
A new left must consist of younger people who matured in the postwar world, and partially be directed to the recruitment of younger people. The university is an obvious beginning point.
A new left must include liberals and socialists, the former for their relevance, the latter for their sense of thoroughgoing reforms in the system. The university is a more sensible place than a political party for these two traditions to begin to discuss their differences and look for political synthesis.
A new left must start controversy across the land, if national policies and national apathy are to be reversed. The ideal university is a community of controversy, within itself and in its effects on communities beyond.
A new left must transform modern complexity into issues that can be understood and felt close up by every human being. It must give form to the feelings of helplessness and indifference, so that people may see the political, social, and economic sources of their private troubles, and organize to change society. In a time of supposed prosperity, moral complacency, and political manipulation, a new left cannot rely on only aching stomachs to be the engine force of social reform. The case for change, for alternatives that will involve uncomfortable personal efforts, must be argued as never before. The university is a relevant place for all of these activities.
But we need not indulge in illusions: the university system cannot complete a movement of ordinary people making demands for a better life. From its schools and colleges across the nation, a militant left might awaken its allies, and by beginning the process towards peace, civil rights, and labor struggles, reinsert theory and idealism where too often reign confusion and political barter. The power of students and faculty united is not only potential; it has shown its actuality in the South, and in the reform movements of the North.
The bridge to political power, though, will be build through genuine cooperation, locally, nationally, and internationally, between a new left of young people and an awakening community of allies. In each community we must look within the university and act with confidence that we can be powerful, but we must look outwards to the less exotic but more lasting struggles for justice.
To turn these mythic possibilities into realities will involve national efforts at university reform by an alliance of students and faculty. They must wrest control of the educational process from the administrative bureaucracy. They must make fraternal and functional contact with allies in labor, civil rights, and other liberal forces outside the campus. They must import major public issues into the curriculum--research and teaching on problems of war and peace is an outstanding example. They must make debate and controversy, not dull pedantic cant, the common style for educational life. They must consciously build a base for their assault upon the loci of power.
As students for a democratic society, we are committed to stimulating this kind of social movement, this kind of vision and program in campus and community across the country. If we appear to seek the unattainable, as it has been said, then let it be known that we do so to avoid the unimaginable.
This text, made available by the Sixties Project, is copyright (c) 1993 by the Author or by Viet Nam Generation, Inc., all rights reserved. This text may be used, printed, and archived in accordance with the Fair Use provisions of U.S. Copyright law. This text may not be archived, printed, or redistributed in any form for a fee, without the consent of the copyright holder. This notice must accompany any redistribution of the text. The Sixties Project, sponsored by Viet Nam Generation Inc. and the Institute of Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville, is a collective of humanities scholars working together on the Internet to use electronic resources to provide routes of collaboration and make available primary and secondary sources for researchers, students, teachers, writers and librarians interested in the 1960s.
Saturday, March 17, 2007
BELIZE
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The country of Belize is situated on the Caribbean coast of Central America. The surrounding countries are Mexico and Guatemala. In the coastal waters of Belize lays coral reef and 450 islets that make up a 200 mile long barrier reef. The country covers about 8,800 square miles which includes forests, mountains, swamps, cities, and coastal areas. The rainy season is from June to November and the remaining part of the year is the dry season. Temperatures are warm with a mean of 70 to 80 degrees. Belmopan is the capital of Belize, it is located in the central part of the country and serves as a safe haven from hurricanes. Belize city is the main urbanized commercial area. Politically Belize is cut into six districts; Cayo, Belize, Corozal, Orange Walk, Stann Creek, and Toledo. The country was known as British Honduras until 1973. Independence from Britain was gained in September of 1981. The government is a parliamentary democracy and has a constitution with a bill of rights. The system is comparable to Canada's government. Belize recognizes Queen Elizabeth II as Head of State and a Belizean Governor-General represents her. The executive branch is made up of a Prime minister and cabinet while the legislative branch consists of a 9 member senate and a 29 member House of Representatives. There are two main political parties, the PUP or People's United Party and the United Democratic Party (UDP). Elections are held at least every 5 years and any citizen over eighteen has the right to vote. The national motto, Sub Umbra Florero, means under the shade I flourish.
Belize current population is about 300,000. This number is made up of a diverse group of people. There are four main historically and culturally different groups in the area. Creoles have a mixed heritage of European and African. The Mestizos heritage is a mix of Mayan and Spanish. The Mayan people are the original people from the Belize area. Garifuna people are of African and Carib decent and were originally from the Lesser Antilles islands. Finally, a small percent of the population is made up of present day immigrants from around the world. English is the official language of Belize, but many people speak several languages including Creole, Spanish, and Garifuna. The mix of people and culture is a result of the history of the original people in the area and the influx of European settlers.
Belize current population is about 300,000. This number is made up of a diverse group of people. There are four main historically and culturally different groups in the area. Creoles have a mixed heritage of European and African. The Mestizos heritage is a mix of Mayan and Spanish. The Mayan people are the original people from the Belize area. Garifuna people are of African and Carib decent and were originally from the Lesser Antilles islands. Finally, a small percent of the population is made up of present day immigrants from around the world. English is the official language of Belize, but many people speak several languages including Creole, Spanish, and Garifuna. The mix of people and culture is a result of the history of the original people in the area and the influx of European settlers.
Sites of info: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/bztoc.html
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