Join the Dialog on the Bill Moyers Blog

By Grace Lee Boggs

Michigan Citizen, June 24-30, 2007

Last weekend, on PBS, I discussed with Bill Moyers some of the issues I have been writing about in this column. www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/06152007/profile2.html/ The program included many shots of Jimmy.

I hope Michigan Citizen readers will join the dialog on the Bill Moyers blog. It begins with this statement by me: I was privileged to participate in the great humanizing movements of the last century, but I can’t recall a time when the issues were so basic, so interconnected.

How are we going to make our livings in a society becoming increasingly jobless because of hi-tech and outsourcing? Where will we get the imagination to recognize that for most of human history the concept of Jobs didn’t even exist. Work, as distinguished from Labor, was done to produce needed goods and services, develop skills and artistry, nurture cooperation.

How do we rebuild cities like Detroit that were once the arsenal of democracy into models of 21st century self-reliance and sustainability?

How do we redefine education so that 30-50 percent of inner-city children do not drop out of school, thus ensuring that millions will end up in prison?

What will move us to care for our biosphere instead of using our technological mastery to increase the speed at which we are making it uninhabitable?

Can we build an America in which people of all races and ethnicities live together in harmony, and Euro-Americans, in particular, celebrate their role as one among many minorities constituting the multiethnic majority?

And, especially since 9/11, how do we achieve reconciliation with the two-thirds of the world that increasingly resents our economic, military, and cultural domination?

These are the times to grow our souls. Each of us is called upon to embrace the conviction that despite the powers and principalities bent on commodifying all our human relationships, we have the power within us to create the world anew.

We can begin by doing small things at the local level, like planting community gardens or looking out for our neighbors. That is how change takes place in living systems, not from above but from within, from many local actions occurring simultaneously.

Actions like these seem insignificant because we judge progress in terms of quantity. But, as the decline of GM suggests, the time has come to rethink the way we think. In the words of organizational consultant Margaret Wheatley (Leadership and Modern Science):

“From a Newtonian perspective, our efforts often seem too small, and we doubt that our actions will contribute incrementally to large-scale change. But a quantum view explains the success of small efforts quite differently.

“Acting locally allows us to be inside the movement and flow of the system, Changes in small places affect the global system, not through incrementalism, but because every small system participates in an unbroken wholeness. We never know how our small activities will affect others through the invisible fabric of our connectedness. In this exquisitely connected world, it’s never a question of ‘critical mass.’ It’s always about critical connections.”

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In a superb article on Detroit in the July 2007 Harpers Magazine, Rebecca Solnit includes this passage from a 1988 speech by Jimmy: “We have to get rid of the myth that there is something sacred about producing for the national and international market and begin thinking of creating small enterprises which produce food, goods and services for the local market, that is, for our communities and our cities.” Solnit follows it up with this prescient observation: "It is unfair, or at least deeply ironic, that black people in Detroit are being forced to undertake an experiment in utopian post-urbanism that appears to be uncomfortably similar to the sharecropping their parents and grandparents sought to escape. There is no moral reason why they should do and be better than the rest of us, but there is a practical reason. They have to. Detroit is where change is the most urgent and therefore the most viable. The rest of us will get there later when necessity drives us too. By that time Detroit may be the shining example we can look to, the post-industrial green city that was once the steel grey capital of Fordist manufacturing."

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