As I was studying for the English AP test scheduled for this Wednesday, this old Pete Seeger song started playing while my iPod was on Shuffle Mode. Written in 1949, it champions progressive causes at a time when they were under siege--at the height of the Second Red Scare.
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(Above) Famous folk musician and activist Pete Seeger.
We're in just such a time. A time when unions are targeted by conservative hacks installed by their corporate masters last fall. A time when the wealthiest and the most powerful are strangling the middle class and the working poor. A time when women's rights are under assault throughout the land. A time when people are struggling, soldiers are continuing to be maimed and killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, the education system and the national infrastructure are crumbling, and the environment is suffering from huge amounts of man-made pollution.
Sixty years ago, Seeger said he'd "hammer out danger, hammer out a warning, hammer out love between my brothers and sisters all over this land." Today, I'd hammer out the injustice, greed, hatred, and ignorance that increasingly pervades American society. Unfortunately, gone is the activist sentiment that characterized Seeger and his generation, whether it was Hubert Humphrey's impassioned call for civil rights, or Edward Murrow's challenge to Joseph McCarthy's red-baiting, or Betty Friedan's expression of the hopes and fears of the nation's women.
We need such leaders again if we are to shake up the status quo and make change. More than that, the American people need a new mindset, We take too many things lying down, accept the promises and assurances of our politicians too easily, acquiesce to unfairness too quickly, and succumb to apathy too readily. We need an activist culture, we need a new New Deal, we need a New America. However, these things will only come to pass when we prove ourselves worthy of them.
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