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LIVING FOR CHANGE A New Kind of Citizen By Grace Lee Boggs Michigan Citizen, Dec. 16-22, 2007

A few weeks ago I spoke for the 30+ time to students in Professor James Chaffers’ class on Urban Design and Social Change in the University of Michigan Department of Architecture.

Jimmy and I started visiting this class in the early 70s. After he died, I continued on my own because they give me an annual take on how some UofM students are grappling with our changing reality.

This year I began the discussion by recalling two presentations by Jimmy that are especially meaningful in this period as we confront the interconnected crises of global warming, the imperial presidency, and our criminal invasion and occupation of Iraq.

In 1991 he startled the students by saying, “I don’t believe nobody can run this country better than me.” When they responded with nervous laughter, he continued, “I’m saying that you better think that way. You need to stop thinking of yourself as a minority because when you think like a minority you’re thinking like an underling. Everyone is capable of going beyond where you are.”

In 1976, following the presidential election in which Jimmy Carter defeated Gerald Ford, Jimmy opened the discussion with a speech which has been reprinted in the little pamphlet Towards A New Concept Of Citizenship.

The election campaign, he said, “exposed the limitations of our present concept of citizenship because neither candidate confronted the American people with the reality that we have been turned into masses who believe that consumption and possession are what life is all about. Because we believe that technology and rapid economic growth are the solution to every problem, we are intervening with Nature itself with the result that we live in constant danger of the whole planet being destroyed.”

It was this faith in technology and in rapid economic development to solve all problems, he said, which “enabled the people of the United States to go their own way for so many years pursuing economic development and material needs even when we knew that this was taking place at the expense of blacks and other people of color .”

“It was this philosophy which made it possible for us to go into Asia and into Latin America, supporting dictatorial regimes, regardless of how these regimes were trampling on the dignity of their peoples, as long as they gave us ready access to their raw materials and were ready to join in our cold war with communism.”

“It is this philosophy which enables our oil consortiums to make deals with so many Arab rulers even though the people in these countries are like feudal subjects, without any role in making decisions as to what is going to happen to their national resources.”

Jimmy said all this in 1976, twenty-five years before 911. But he also pointed out that “we are coming to the end of this joy ride because the Third World is standing up and because the world’s natural resources are limited.” (As Malcolm put it, after JFK’s assassination in 1963, the chickens have come home to roost).

Therefore “We are at a transition point in the whole world and in our own country…when we have to stop blaming our problems on the politicians or the system - and begin to do what we find hardest to do – confront our own individualism and our own going along with the system. When we are ready to do this, we will be ready to begin the struggle for the new theory and practice of citizenship which is so urgently needed In the United States today.”

This nation, he reminded the class, was “founded by a great revolution which inaugurated an age of revolutions all over the world because it gave men and women a new concept of themselves as self-governing human beings, as citizens rather than subjects, not as masses but as people who could and should think for themselves and accept responsibility for making social, economic and political decisions.”

From this year’s discussion my sense is that the students in this class are feeling the need to become engaged but don’t know where or how to begin.

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