Thursday, January 20, 2011

The importance of being a radical. . .

The editor at truthout has recently reminded me of this outstanding and apt passage from Zinn:

"From that moment on, I was no longer a liberal, a believer in the self-correcting character of American democracy. I was a radical, believing that something fundamental was wrong in this country - not just the existence of poverty amidst great wealth, not just the horrible treatment of black people, but something rotten at the root. The situation required not just a new president or new laws, but an uprooting of the old order, the introduction of a new kind of society - cooperative, peaceful, egalitarian."

-Howard Zinn, from his 1994 memoir, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train