Where are our Weathermen?

This is a strange post.

First, a disclaimer: I don't like grand statements about "our times", how they're different or more important than what came before. I think history mostly repeats itself, with minor variations, because despite all our percieved advances humanity hasn't actually changed much since history first became history. Please keep this in mind, for while I try to avoid hyperbole, I'll doubtless engage in some of it anyway.

The current state of the United States is--and here's probably a moment of hyperbole--precarious. I won't be so presumptious as to argue this is a recent change; the United States has never been a great country (except in the sense of important), and that recognition, too, is nothing new. In fact, that's what concerns me the most about recent years. During the Bush administration the executive branch has become a bloated, corrupt arm that has seized as much power as it can, the legislature, even with a supposedly majority opposition, has laid over and played dead, and the judicial branch has publicly become a joke. The Constitution has been shredded, torture has become common-place, and prejudice, manipulation, smearing, and outright lying have become the order of the day.

The only thing really new about this is the blatancy of it. All of this has happened before, and often, in this country, as in every other; but it was kept secret, because if it was out in the open, governments thought, they would be stopped. The people would not stand for it, because what they were doing was contrary to every (superficial) declaration of justice and rights and morality that they were (superficially) designed to uphold. And for Americans Nixon seemed to prove that this was right. Watergate made clear the message: keep your dirty laundry in the dark.

If it was ever true--and I honestly don't think I would ever feel comfortable making a judgement on that--there is no doubt that it isn't now. The rule of law is gone. (Hyperbole.) Rather, the illusion of the rule of law is gone, or, better, the people no longer need the government to play nice to maintain the illusion. They maintain it on their own, without any help. Nobody fucking cares anymore. (Hyperbole.)

When people used to care, they moved. They made their opinions known. The Vietnam War brought witness to the power--or perhaps the lack--of the people. Before that, there was the Civil Rights Movement, and Suffrage, and Abolition, and others. It has been some thirty, forty years since we had a real Movement. And now, as commentators predict a crisis of epic proportions, polarization and schism to a degree America has not seen for decades, if ever . . . and the people who care are writing on the Internet. Now, whether or not this is a crisis of epic proportions, whether or not America has never seen polarization like this before (hint: 1860), there is something decidedly disconcerting about the way people are reacting to what are undeniably serious issues.

I don't mean to demean the "blogosphere". What am I doing, after all? And the Internet is--and this is hyperbole I willingly indulge in--the greatest instrument for anti-system organization ever constructed. But amongst all that talk, all that reporting and linking and discussing and raging, nobody is doing anything. The cliche, of course: talk is cheap, actions speak louder than words, whatever.

Of course, part of the problem is the locus of support behind Barack Obama. Obama has managed to delude a large portion of the American "left" into thinking he's a fucking messiah or at least the lesser of two evils. The truth, of course, is the same as the truth always is: he's a man, a politician, he is running to become President, not to change the world or America, and one man will not save anything. Obama has generated a Movement of sorts, but that Movement will do nothing except (perhaps) carry him into the Oval Office. Obama has made himself into a golden calf. It seems unlikely the worshippers will realize that there prayers aren't being answered until he's gotten what he wants.

But there are many who understand that Obama is what he is. There are many who recognize that the Democratic Party no longer has absolutely anything to do with any real American Left or liberals or progressives or whatever the current label is. They are writing and commenting and raging and reporting and linking and doing absolutely nothing. The protests against the Iraq War--which is not even an fringe cause but something the majority of Americans are against--have been tiny and insignificant. There hasn't even been any other protests worthy of note. (Some may blame the media, saying they haven't given enough coverage, and the media is a fucked-up institution, but I think it's asinine to call it the root cause.)

So my question is, why aren't we doing anything? Why don't we care anymore? My first response is that we're so disillusioned that we don't believe it's possible to fix this country anymore, that it's best to just give up and run while we can--and that's basically been my answer; I plan to move to Canada as soon as I monetarily feasibly can after graduating--but that's the lazy answer. So I ask again, why aren't we motivated enough to create a real Movement? We look at the world and see it falling apart. (Hyperbole.) Why aren't we moved to do something about it?

The most recently large-scale (in)famous Movement in the United States was the protest against the Vietnam War. It was driven by a minority of more radical groups protesting not just Vietnam but US policy and government in general. It developed to the point where we had many advocating domestic terrorism and civil war, the epitome of which may have been the Weathermen, the "urban guerrillas" who carried out a bombing campaign across the US between 1970 and 1975, after which, following the end of the Vietnam War, the organization collapsed. Today many former known Weathermen are active members of society. Several are university professors.

I'm fascinated by the Weathermen because they went so far. They were so disillusioned by America that they divorced themselves entirely from the nation, going underground, assuming false identities, and living as a fifth column with no standing army behind them, and decided that the only means of fixing the problems they saw in America was through violent revolution. At the time, of course, this wasn't unusual--similar groups were operating across Europe--but their existence remains a skewering of the often seemingly unimpeachable American optimism and exceptionalism, the same kind of skewering that 9/11 brought on to another generation. As a pacifist I'm of course against their methods--although the Weathermen's bombing campaign took no lives except for three of their own in an accident--but I can't help but wonder, in an America that seems to approaching an even more extreme state of disillusionment, where are our Weathermen?

It seems to me that a useful measure of a people is to look at their extremists. As with fiction, when characters are easier to read when pushed to the edge, extremists give you an idea of the nature of a peole. In America today, there are no Weathermen. The most extreme of us simply say really mean things to each other. I don't support violent action, of course, but I can't help but wonder: in a world where Americans are slaughtering a nation for purposes no one seems to understand, where our own government is openly contemptuous of its people, where the media is consumed by vapid rumors, where everything is openly going to hell and lots of people are saying it . . . where are the people willing to do anything to stop it? Where are our Weathermen?