Memories of Chile in the Midst of an American Presidential Campaign

[CAcyclist]

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1027-28.htm
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I would read the news each morning in my home in North Carolina and each morning I would feel the same sudden stab of vertigo. Was history repeating itself yet one more tired time? Could it really be that simple to corrupt American democracy? Could the citizens of the United States be so easily twisted and manipulated by their fear?

The answer was, in fact, no, not that easily.

Over the last year, everywhere I have turned in the United States, I have seen signs of an amazing spirit of resistance, another sort of better America mobilizing, citizens not moved by dread but by hope, a vast and plural and creative wave of activism that I had not witnessed since... well, since the year 1970 when my country elected Salvador Allende as our President, when gentle armies of my fellow countrymen and countrywomen took their destiny into their own hands and proclaimed to the winds of history that it was possible to build socialism using democratic means, that we did not have to terrorize or persecute our adversaries in order to free ourselves from oppression.

If the present American campaign for the presidency reminds me of that revolutionary moment in Chilean history more than three decades ago, it is not because John Kerry is at all like Salvador Allende or George W. Bush is a clone of Augusto Pinochet. But there is in the American air today the trembling prefiguration of the same sort of enthusiasm, the same conviction that each of us can make a difference, that history belongs to those who dare to imagine an alternative future. The world does not have to be the way we found it, the way we have been told it must remain: a message once sent to everybody by a multitude of hungry peasants in Chile marching to demand ownership of the land they had tilled for centuries for the benefit of others; a message transmitted again today by millions of angry internet subscribers to Moveon.org in the United States and defiantly announced by a widespread coalition of progressive American activists who are much more mature than the protestors of the Vietnam era and, I would wager, far outnumber them as well.

In Chile back then, as in the United States now, you could feel the same certainty that the last word has not yet been said.

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