There is something to say about the growing difference between the 20th Century Man and 21st Century Human. The crisis in the 21st Century is a byproduct of the 20th Century and the self-seeking consumption of the later 20th Century greed. If we have learned anything from the first ten years of the 21st Century, it is that even if one wants to deny history or accept history, one will not avoid the primary drive for human dignity. We must leave the affluent Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama mind frame, a clear conditioned identity of the previous century, out of the next eighty-eight years. If we are to survive, we will have to demand more of ourselves than what our previous generations have nurtured us to accept.
Upon entering the 20th Century, human rights were limited to the few. Exiting the 20th Century, the world was ready for and demanded more. But we have leadership still trapped in 20th Century mentality.
In the remaining years of the 21st Century, we will need to exceed man’s mainstream understanding of power, politics, and wealth. It will not be easy and it will unfortunately be a violent struggle. We will have to exceed our understanding of history and of the idea of nationalism. Whether we want to fight the changes, accept it, or ignore it; the next decade will push us to face reality inevitably. As 2011 draws to a close, it has proven to be a year of igniting dynamite.
Some individuals engulfed into the American belief system, who whole-heartedly accept certain scenarios, may believe that as an individual if he or she does not personally exploit others, is rich through the means of hard work, and focus primarily on self-initiatives, that they will succeed. When educated individuals say that you cannot blame the rich, you cannot blame Capitalism as a system, or that you cannot blame Corporations, these individuals have a point of view. We cannot blame them for the limits of perception we have been indoctrinated into. There are some strongly positive views that are associated with self-reliance and hard work.
When debating and discussing the issues with others, many individuals take a stance of repressive tolerance, claiming that throughout history man has been violent, repressive, sexist, racist, and manipulative. These givens allow people to accept that it will always happen, and if it doesn’t happen in their own neighborhood or their own nation, then others will have to face the repression from their own governments or corporations. However, larger and wider historical fact has shown that we tend to ignore that our way of life has openly accepted our government as a corporate interest that represses other nations and other governments, who repress their own people just the same.
In his memoir Mute Soliloquy, Pram Toer, an Indonesian novelist imprisoned in his own country throughout the Suharto regime, a military dictatorship the CIA helped in its grasping of power; Pram Toer states: People seem to think that ‘freedom’ is in the interest of the downtrodden and the oppressed and forget that freedom is also in the interest of those who purloin and repress. But what are the interests of those people ‘across the sea’ who control the world’s capital? He notes that many times people who do not get involved in discussing politics are often unaware that it is not that they aren’t political, they are, but they are so accepting of the system that they flaunt aloofness to their repressive tolerance of a politics they grudgingly own.
As I keep coming back time and time again, Amilcar Cabral, the Guinea- Bissau freedom fighter toted, before the Portuguese hunted him down in a similar fashion as the FBI hunted down the Black Panther activists in the late-sixties, “Do not confuse the reality you live in with the ideas you have in your head.”
One of Cabral’s main theoretical approaches that he activated into his revolutionary movement was the idea of Unity and Struggle. This included a development of a people’s culture, a political moral awareness, and an internal alarm to when we are supporting an indirect domination. He notes that our “leaders and responsible workers have to have courage to struggle constantly against all the temptation for opportunism. The path of struggle is never an easy path, but there are many among us who have a tendency to seek the easy way out”.
As Barbara Ehrenreich discusses in her book Bright-Sided, the ostracizing of negative criticism of society is continually avoided in America; for far too long the one-sided positive thinking approach pushed through Reagan economics and Clinton economics has undermined America so that we claim to blame the youngest generations for laziness, lack of initiative, and having life too easy, but the parents of their generation were just as indoctrinated into a bright-sided blindness. “It is not enough to cull the negative people from one’s contacts,” and if information about factual reality beyond opinions is carefully censored, “Why retreat into anxious introspection when there is a vast world outside to explore” and much to be done to make necessary change? (Ehrenreich).
“What you see is what you get!” This is not good enough for the 21st Century. Our vested interest into Output should not be about quantity and profit, but a drive to go beyond the illusion of national security. Intellectuals like Cornel West and Paulo Freire uphold the importance of an individual’s ability to continually question. One does not have to be an intellectual to have critical thinking skills. Being a devil’s advocate in a debate or a discussion, when that individual cannot go beyond the games of self-amusement will not do. Have a passion, uphold your passions, question your passions so that you can understand them better, and then create the means to make others aware of this zombie-like behavior. Repressive tolerance is not an acceptable answer, work for change.
