Free Minds/Free People OCCUPY! After Port Huron
A note on the 50th Anniversary of the Port Huron Statement, the founding document of Students for a Democratic Society:
As the American-made catastrophe in Viet Nam was reaching full ignition in the mid 60’s, I was arrested with thirty-seven other students and one marvelous professor for occupying the Ann Arbor draft board in a militant, non-violent sit-in. Earlier I’d returned to school from the Merchant Marines and attended the first-ever teach-in against the war; I’d Paul Potter, then president of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), end a talk on the necessity of agitation by issuing a challenge that echoes in my head to this day: “Don’t let your life make a mockery of your values.” I was twenty years old, and I signed up on the spot.
I still have my battered membership card emblazoned with the lovely opening line from the Port Huron Statement: We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit. That, too, still seems entirely relevant to me.
Fifty years on, Port Huron can be read in a thousand ways, but for me its vitality lies in its self-description—“an agenda for a generation”—taking “generation” at its broadest and most generous: production and reproduction,
Classroom Ethics
It’s important to make a distinction between personal virtue—be honest, do your work, show up on time—and social or community ethics. Personal virtue is an undisputed good in almost every society, but we would be hard-pressed to say a slave owner who paid his bills and was kind to his wife was an ethical person. We need to think about how we behave collectively, how our society behaves, how the contexts of politics and economics, for example, interact with what we hold to be good. Most of us, after all, most of the time follow the conventions of our cultures—most Spartans act like Spartans, most Athenians like Athenians, most Americans like Americans. To be a person of moral character in an unjust social order requires us to work to change society, to resist.
A young soldier is taken to a VA facility missing both of his legs and his face. Shall I make a reservation for dinner and a show? Two more prisoners commit suicide at Guantanamo. Shall I get that new phone and camera I’d been wanting? Four million people are refugees or internally displaced because of the U.S. war in Iraq. Shall I send a contribution to one of the rascals revving up their political ambitions?
From In These Times, May 2012
A young soldier is taken to a VA facility missing both of his legs and his face. Shall I make a reservation for dinner and a show? Two more prisoners commit suicide at Guantanamo. Shall I get that new phone and camera I’d been wanting? Four million people are refugees or internally displaced because of the U.S. war in Iraq. Shall I send a contribution to one of the rascals revving up their political ambitions?
From In These Times, May 2012
My battered SDS membership card is emblazoned with the lovely opening line from the Port Huron Statement:We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort…looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.
Fifty years on, Port Huron can be read in a thousand ways, but its vitality lies in its self-description—“an agenda for a generation”—taking “generation” at its most generous: production and reproduction, development and genesis. More call-to-arms than manifesto, more a provocation than a program, more opening than point of arrival, Port Huron is an invitation to create.
“The 60’s,” thoroughly commodified now and sold back to us as myth and symbol, has been till recently an annoying brake on activism. It was neither as brilliant and ecstatic as some would have it, nor the devil’s own workshop as others insist. Whatever it was, it remains prelude to the necessary changes and fundamental upheavals just ahead. The self-appointed Board Members of “The Sixties Incorporated,” looking nostalgically at a ship that’s already left the shore, are mostly missing the point. We’re still living, still of this generation.
Enter Occupy!
Once again more labor than delivery, Occupy is a movement-in-the-making, shifting the frame and connecting
Fifty years on, Port Huron can be read in a thousand ways, but its vitality lies in its self-description—“an agenda for a generation”—taking “generation” at its most generous: production and reproduction, development and genesis. More call-to-arms than manifesto, more a provocation than a program, more opening than point of arrival, Port Huron is an invitation to create.
“The 60’s,” thoroughly commodified now and sold back to us as myth and symbol, has been till recently an annoying brake on activism. It was neither as brilliant and ecstatic as some would have it, nor the devil’s own workshop as others insist. Whatever it was, it remains prelude to the necessary changes and fundamental upheavals just ahead. The self-appointed Board Members of “The Sixties Incorporated,” looking nostalgically at a ship that’s already left the shore, are mostly missing the point. We’re still living, still of this generation.
Enter Occupy!
Once again more labor than delivery, Occupy is a movement-in-the-making, shifting the frame and connecting
