Inspiration for handling the future: Against Discouragement By Howard Zinn

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http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/052505M.shtml

 

Against Discouragement

By Howard Zinn

Tom Dispatch

Wednesday 25 May 2005

In 1963, historian Howard Zinn was fired from Spelman College, where he was

chair of the History Department, because of his civil rights activities. This

year, he was invited back to give the commencement address. Here is the text of

that speech, given on May 15, 2005.

I am deeply honored to be invited back to Spelman after forty-two years.

I would like to thank the faculty and trustees who voted to invite me, and

especially your president, Dr. Beverly Tatum. And it is a special privilege to

be

here with Diahann Carroll and Virginia Davis Floyd.

But this is your day - the students graduating today. It's a happy day

for you and your families. I know you have your own hopes for the future, so it

may be a little presumptuous for me to tell you what hopes I have for you, but

they are exactly the same ones that I have for my grandchildren.

My first hope is that you will not be too discouraged by the way the

world looks at this moment. It is easy to be discouraged, because our nation is

at

war - still another war, war after war - and our government seems determined

to expand its empire even if it costs the lives of tens of thousands of human

beings. There is poverty in this country, and homelessness, and people without

health care, and crowded classrooms, but our government, which has trillions

of dollars to spend, is spending its wealth on war. There are a billion people

in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East who need clean water and

medicine to deal with malaria and tuberculosis and AIDS, but our government,

which has thousands of nuclear weapons, is experimenting with even more deadly

nuclear weapons. Yes, it is easy to be discouraged by all that.

But let me tell you why, in spite of what I have just described, you must

not be discouraged.

I want to remind you that, fifty years ago, racial segregation here in

the South was entrenched as tightly as was apartheid in South Africa. The

national government, even with liberal presidents like Kennedy and Johnson in

office, was looking the other way while black people were beaten and killed and

denied the opportunity to vote. So black people in the South decided they had to

do something by themselves. They boycotted and sat in and picketed and

demonstrated, and were beaten and jailed, and some were killed, but their cries

for

freedom were soon heard all over the nation and around the world, and the

President and Congress finally did what they had previously failed to do -

enforce

the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. Many people had said: The

South will never change. But it did change. It changed because ordinary people

organized and took risks and challenged the system and would not give up. That's

when democracy came alive.

I want to remind you also that when the war in Vietnam was going on, and

young Americans were dying and coming home paralyzed, and our government was

bombing the villages of Vietnam - bombing schools and hospitals and killing

ordinary people in huge numbers - it looked hopeless to try to stop the war. But

just as in the Southern movement, people began to protest and soon it caught

on. It was a national movement. Soldiers were coming back and denouncing the

war, and young people were refusing to join the military, and the war had to

end.

The lesson of that history is that you must not despair, that if you are

right, and you persist, things will change. The government may try to deceive

the people, and the newspapers and television may do the same, but the truth

has a way of coming out. The truth has a power greater than a hundred lies. I

know you have practical things to do - to get jobs and get married and have

children. You may become prosperous and be considered a success in the way our

society defines success, by wealth and standing and prestige. But that is not

enough for a good life.

Remember Tolstoy's story, " The Death of Ivan Illych. " A man on his

deathbed reflects on his life, how he has done everything right, obeyed the

rules,

become a judge, married, had children, and is looked upon as a success. Yet, in

his last hours, he wonders why he feels a failure. After becoming a famous

novelist, Tolstoy himself had decided that this was not enough, that he must

speak out against the treatment of the Russian peasants, that he must write

against war and militarism.

My hope is that whatever you do to make a good life for yourself -

whether you become a teacher, or social worker, or business person, or lawyer,

or

poet, or scientist - you will devote part of your life to making this a better

world for your children, for all children. My hope is that your generation will

demand an end to war, that your generation will do something that has not yet

been done in history and wipe out the national boundaries that separate us

from other human beings on this earth.

Recently I saw a photo on the front page of the New York Times which I

cannot get out of my mind. It showed ordinary Americans sitting on chairs on the

southern border of Arizona, facing Mexico. They were holding guns and they

were looking for Mexicans who might be trying to cross the border into the

United States. This was horrifying to me - the realization that, in this

twenty-first century of what we call " civilization, " we have carved up what we

claim is

one world into two hundred artificially created entities we call " nations " and

are ready to kill anyone who crosses a boundary.

Is not nationalism - that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary, so

fierce it leads to murder - one of the great evils of our time, along with

racism, along with religious hatred? These ways of thinking, cultivated,

nurtured,

indoctrinated from childhood on, have been useful to those in power, deadly

for those out of power.

Here in the United States, we are brought up to believe that our nation

is different from others, an exception in the world, uniquely moral; that we

expand into other lands in order to bring civilization, liberty, democracy. But

if you know some history you know that's not true. If you know some history,

you know we massacred Indians on this continent, invaded Mexico, sent armies

into Cuba, and the Philippines. We killed huge numbers of people, and we did not

bring them democracy or liberty. We did not go into Vietnam to bring

democracy; we did not invade Panama to stop the drug trade; we did not invade

Afghanistan and Iraq to stop terrorism. Our aims were the aims of all the other

empires of world history - more profit for corporations, more power for

politicians.

The poets and artists among us seem to have a clearer understanding of

the disease of nationalism. Perhaps the black poets especially are less

enthralled with the virtues of American " liberty " and " democracy, " their people

having

enjoyed so little of it. The great African-American poet Langston Hughes

addressed his country as follows:

You really haven't been a virgin for so long.

It's ludicrous to keep up the pretext...

You've slept with all the big powers

In military uniforms,

And you've taken the sweet life

Of all the little brown fellows...

Being one of the world's big vampires,

Why don't you come on out and say so

Like Japan, and England, and France,

And all the other nymphomaniacs of power.

I am a veteran of the Second World War. That was considered a " good war, "

but I have come to the conclusion that war solves no fundamental problems and

only leads to more wars. War poisons the minds of soldiers, leads them to

kill and torture, and poisons the soul of the nation.

My hope is that your generation will demand that your children be brought

up in a world without war. It we want a world in which the people of all

countries are brothers and sisters, if the children all over the world are

considered as our children, then war - in which children are always the greatest

casualties - cannot be accepted as a way of solving problems.

I was on the faculty of Spelman College for seven years, from 1956 to

1963. It was a heartwarming time, because the friends we made in those years

have

remained our friends all these years. My wife Roslyn and I and our two

children lived on campus. Sometimes when we went into town, white people would

ask:

How is it to be living in the black community? It was hard to explain. But we

knew this - that in downtown Atlanta, we felt as if we were in alien

territory, and when we came back to the Spelman campus, we felt that we were at

home.

Those years at Spelman were the most exciting of my life, the most

educational certainly. I learned more from my students than they learned from

me.

Those were the years of the great movement in the South against racial

segregation, and I became involved in that in Atlanta, in Albany, Georgia, in

Selma,

Alabama, in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and Greenwood and Itta Bena and Jackson. I

learned something about democracy: that it does not come from the government,

from on high, it comes from people getting together and struggling for

justice. I learned about race. I learned something that any intelligent person

realizes at a certain point - that race is a manufactured thing, an artificial

thing, and while race does matter (as Cornel West has written), it only matters

because certain people want it to matter, just as nationalism is something

artificial. I learned that what really matters is that all of us - of whatever

so-called race and so-called nationality - are human beings and should cherish

one

another.

I was lucky to be at Spelman at a time when I could watch a marvelous

transformation in my students, who were so polite, so quiet, and then suddenly

they were leaving the campus and going into town, and sitting in, and being

arrested, and then coming out of jail full of fire and rebellion. You can read

all

about that in Harry Lefever's book Undaunted by the Fight. One day Marian

Wright (now Marian Wright Edelman), who was my student at Spelman, and was one

of

the first arrested in the Atlanta sit-ins, came to our house on campus to

show us a petition she was about to put on the bulletin board of her dormitory.

The heading on the petition epitomized the transformation taking place at

Spelman College. Marian had written on top of the petition: " Young Ladies Who

Can

Picket, Please Sign Below. "

My hope is that you will not be content just to be successful in the way

that our society measures success; that you will not obey the rules, when the

rules are unjust; that you will act out the courage that I know is in you.

There are wonderful people, black and white, who are models. I don't mean

African- Americans like Condoleezza Rice, or Colin Powell, or Clarence Thomas,

who

have become servants of the rich and powerful. I mean W.E.B. DuBois and Martin

Luther King and Malcolm X and Marian Wright Edelman, and James Baldwin and

Josephine Baker and good white folk, too, who defied the Establishment to work

for

peace and justice.

Another of my students at Spelman, Alice Walker, who, like Marian, has

remained our friend all these years, came from a tenant farmer's family in

Eatonton, Georgia, and became a famous writer. In one of her first published

poems,

she wrote:

It is true --

I've always loved

the daring

ones

Like the black young

man

Who tried

to crash

All barriers

at once,

wanted to

swim

At a white

beach (in Alabama)

Nude.

I am not suggesting you go that far, but you can help to break down

barriers, of race certainly, but also of nationalism; that you do what you can -

you don't have to do something heroic, just something, to join with millions of

others who will just do something, because all of those somethings, at certain

points in history, come together, and make the world better.

That marvelous African-American writer Zora Neale Hurston, who wouldn't

do what white people wanted her to do, who wouldn't do what black people wanted

her to do, who insisted on being herself, said that her mother advised her:

Leap for the sun - you may not reach it, but at least you will get off the

ground.

By being here today, you are already standing on your toes, ready to

leap. My hope for you is a good life.

 

 

Howard Zinn is the author with Anthony Arnove of the just published

Voices of a People's History of the United States (Seven Stories Press) and of

the

international best-selling A People's History of the United States.