bradicalmang:

titusandtheraindrops:azspot:

Chris Hedges “Death of the Liberal Class” at The Sanctuary for Independent Media 10-17-10

Every once in a while, if you’re lucky and are open to it, you’ll run across something that will change your life. This video changed my life. Please reblog this. Make sure everyone you know has an opportunity to see this.

Chris gives articulation to my rage. He provides me with a framework so that I can keep whatever is left of my sanity. He gives me purpose, even if that purpose is overwhelmingly sad.

I realize now that I have been mourning. I’ve been grieving but I didn’t know how to put my loss to words. 

What is lost is liberal society, the last breakwater against the corporate machine. I thought this was my birthright as an American, but that birthright has been sold.

I feel this loss more acutely because I’m old enough to remember when things were different, when being liberal had meaning and purpose, when it was something tangible that you could nurture and protect. I watched a generation change practical politics during the 1960s and 1970s, I watched the civil rights and the anti-war movements succeed. I knew people who had taken part in the labor movements a generation or two before me. I’m sorry that young people today have been denied even this agonizing sense of entitlement and loss.

But the part at the end where he talks about resistance, that part really floored me. I think he’s absolutely correct when he says that it is not our job to take power, it is our job to be torch bearers for our system of values; when he says that hope is not about achieving change within our lifetimes, it is about ensuring that our values survive us.

So, like the Christians during the Roman persecutions, we liberals will meet in secret. We will scribble our sacraments on the walls of the crypts where we bury our martyrs. We will hone our message and teach it to our children. And we will wait.

In the meantime, pass the message.

Posting to watch later.