The Freezing of Love into Small Spaces

[babylonsister]

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/11/18/5304/

The Freezing of Love into Small Spaces
by Steve Duin

snip//

Wayne Morse wasn’t the only one speaking to our better angels when Solomon was dropping out of high school and enlisting in social activism. A year before he was assassinated, Martin Luther King Jr. realized that “I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government.”

“What hasn’t changed” over all these years, Solomon says, “is the bedrock resiliency of the warfare state.” The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center “only reinforced our belief in the ethicacy of violence,” and the need to spend $2 billion each day on our military.

What has changed, he argues, is the sense of urgency and alarm over this nation’s zest for combat. While he was still in his teens, Solomon was picketing segregated apartment complexes, attending SDS conventions, and (at the age of 14) generating an FBI file.

“There was more wariness early on at the grass-roots level about the rationale for launching yet another war,” said Solomon, who moved to Portland in 1970 and lived in the Northwest for the next 15 years.

“That’s been diffused. The culture has diluted people’s resolve, their outrage. The mass-market culture has left us numb. And lack of feeling translates into lack of action.”

Solomon calls this “the freezing of love into small spaces.” There is no end to our love for our children or claustrophobic circle of friends. “We say, ‘Don’t mess with my loved ones, but screw the people across the street or around the world.’ Unfortunately, we define our loved ones rather narrowly.”

So it is, as King preached, that “scientific power outruns moral power (and) we end up with guided missiles and misguided men.” So it is that Thomas Friedman lobbies the Clinton administration to “give war a chance” in Yugoslavia and The New York Times pulls out the pompoms when George W. looses the dogs in Iraq.

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[omega minimo]

1. aka "demographics"

:thumbsdown:



“That’s been diffused. The culture has diluted people’s resolve, their outrage. The mass-market culture has left us numb. And lack of feeling translates into lack of action.”

Solomon calls this “the freezing of love into small spaces.”



K/R :kick: