MIDWIFING A LIVING DEMOCRACY

By Grace Lee Boggs

Michigan Citizen, Aug. 5-11, 2007

Excerpts from my speech opening the SDS Convention in Detroit, July 27.

Forty years ago this month Detroit youth rose up in a rebellion on such a huge scale that it forced the power structure to accept black political power in Detroit.

One of the roots of that uprising was the concern of young people that they were being made expendable by Hi-Tech and the exodus of plants from Detroit.

Since then, Detroit's de-industrialization has escalated to the point that our city, once the national and international symbol of the industrial age, has become a wasteland.

But Detroit's history has not come to an end. The industrial epoch only began a few centuries ago, and although it produced technological miracles and a material abundance that were once unimaginable, it has also polluted the Land, Waters and Air on which our lives and those of future generations depend. In the process it has also turned us into individualists and materialists, consumers rather than citizens, seeking to compensate for the emptiness of our lives by the endless pursuit of more things.

Thus Detroit's deindustrialization challenges us to create a new post-industrial 21st century city and new kinds of citizens who, having rid themselves of the myth that there is something sacred about producing for the national and international market, are accepting the challenge to create a local economy. Producing food, goods and services for local needs instead of importing these from distant places, we will not only provide Work (as distinguished from Labor) for Detroiters of all ages and capabilities. We will also be combating the climate crisis and transforming ourselves from selfish individualists into responsible members of our city and communities.

I hope that some of you will consider joining this movement in Detroit or other de-industrializing cities.

As students, you can help build this movement. For example, the educational system which was developed a hundred years ago to serve the industrial economy is now obsolete. Yet our schools and universities are still stuck in the processes and practices used to industrialize the Earth in the 19th and 20th centuries.

What we urgently need at all levels are educators with the imagination and courage to introduce innovative curriculums and structures that create a much more intimate connection between intellectual development and practical activity, root students and faculty in their communities and natural habitats, and engage them in the kind of real problem-solving in their localities that nurtures a love of place and provides practice in creating the sustainable economies, equality and community that are the responsibilities of citizenship.

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Unlike past revolutions, the coming American revolution will be one in which, instead of demanding more things, we will be giving up many of the things that we have acquired at the expense of other peoples of the world and of Nature. In so doing we will be creating a new concept of American, global and planetary citizenship.

When you discuss what SDS should do NOW about Iraq and the Bush administration, I hope you will consider joining the movement to impeach President Bush and Vice President Cheney for placing themselves above the law.

Because the first American revolution was made to oppose and resist the imperial power of George the Third, the founders designed the method of Impeachment as a way to inquire into the conduct of the executive branch and if necessary to remove a President swollen with power and grown tyrannical.

Over 50% of American voters now favor impeachment.

In the lives of individuals and nations the opportunities to participate in a new birth of freedom come rarely, if at all.

"The process of impeaching this president and vice-president," as Shea Howell wrote recently, " is the single most important step we could take as a nation to begin to restore a sense of living democracy to our country."

Cindy Sheehan called it "our opportunity to challenge the status quo because the status quo is no good. We need to be plugged into our government once again as active participants,

In other words, impeachment provides everyone with the opportunity to create the participatory democracy which was the goal of yesterday's Students for a Democratic Society.

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