To eliminate all social evils brought about by the U.S. imperialists and their lackeys, which are harmful to women's health and dignity."
AS we sit in classes, we learn from the examples of our teachers that all we need do is talk about the war, because those people who do, who act, who run the country, will defer to our greater knowledge one day.
Needless to say, they are bad examples. If philosophical inquiry has shown anything in the last hundred years, it has shown that there exists a unity of theory and practice-that you only believe what you are doing. You do not believe that the genocide in Vietnam should be ended unless you are working for that end. If you are teaching Renaissance poetry instead, then you may still believe, in some abstract and useless sense, that the war should end. In any case, you believe that teaching Renaissance poetry is more important than ending the war.
Many continue to teach Renaissance poetry because they say that it is helping to end the war. The argument is that Western poetry inculcates a certain kind of humanism and concern with life that is necessary for a "good" revolutionary. But the peculiar kind of humanism we have inherited in the West has remained healthy while Africans were taken to Europe and then to America as slaves, and while the great humanist nations proceeded to subjugate and exploit the rest of the world. That humanism remained intact while the world suffered. Most of Western poetry does not just extoll abstract values, but pretends that they are incarnated in their respective societies. That poetry does not help to end the war.
Others continue to teach Renaissance poetry because they say that they are unsure about what to do. That is a common belief for people who have been acting only upon assurance (from someone who they respect more than themselves) that the proposed action is "right." If someone has an idea, we will discuss it and probably try it. If it works, fine. If not, then we have learned one more thing that does not work.
We learn through experience. No one knows how to end the war. The only way to learn is to continue to try until you succeed. If you say that you do not wish to try because you are not certain of the way, then you are the prisoner of the system. You have lost any desire for your own freedom and creativity. You are dead and buried. You can no longer hold out a hand to another man, for you are dead and buried in your private casket.
I intercepted Jean-Paul Sartre as he was leaving a mass meeting in Paris three years ago. The meeting had been called to protest Bolivia's jailing of Regis Debray, a French journalist and a friend of Fidel Castro.
I asked some simple question about what he had been thinking or doing or about what I should be thinking and doing. He shot glances all around the room and then answered suddenly.
"I don't think that anyone believes in existentialism anymore. I don't think that I have much effect on the French youth anymore. And unless you're helping little kids who are starving in India, or helping little kids who are dying of dysentery in South America, or helping little kidswho are being bombed in Vietnam, I don't think you're doing anything."
" This said, he form'd thee, Adam,
thee O Man
Dust of the ground, and in thy nostrils
breath'd
The breath of Life; in his own Image
hee
Created thee, in the Image of God
Express, and thou becam'st a living
Soul. "
WHAT we are living is less than life. As with Adam, when he lay fully formed yet lifeless, we need the breath of life. The breath of life, that inspiration, can only come from people who are truly living.
To express the qualitative difference between our lives and the life of a revolutionary, Che Guevara had to use a biological metaphor, "This type of fight gives us the opportunity of becoming revolutionaries, the highest level of the human species...."
A revolutionary is the highest level of the human species. Castro said that Che considered himself a soldier of the revolution without ever considering if he would survive it. That is a lesson for us. The meaning is not in the end but in the doing. Should you ask, "Will the revolution win? Do we even have a prayer for success?" I'm certain that Che would have shrugged his shoulders. The Third World revolution will probably win, with us or without us. That is not the point. Just as much of your body and your genes were selected for you before you were born, so was your time and place. As Sartre says, we live on situation. The only response is to make of it what we can. That is why you must understand what is happening in the world before you can find out what to do with your life. There are no abstract decisions.
After the revolution, I want to band ducks in Canada and follow them south ?? the Tetons. I would work for the People's Ministry of Wildlife Conservation. But that simply is not a choice today. Our time, our situation, requires that we be revolutionaries. That does not mean that it will be easy. It will not. We will need all of the inspiration we can get. There simply exists no alternative for creativity, in fact, for life, than to try to create a new society.
A few years ago, Che as talking to some American radicals, explaining to them the campaign in the Sierra Macstra. Apparently, the Americans were beginning to picture themselves in fatigues, with rifles over their shoulders and a month's growth of beard. Che stopped for a second and said, "But I really envy you. Yours is the toughest job, for you live in the heart of the beast."
From Guevara and all of the men who fought in Cuba, we can take a new breath of life. Che wanted us to take up his gun as he fell. It is hard to imagine a soul more committed, more alive than Che. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a higher level of human being.
THE WAR probably will not end until there are 20,000 people in every city in the country ready to burn down banks and draft broads, ready to do anything, to end the war. Sadly, we are not yet that strong. Maybe no matter what we do we will not be able to scare Nixon into ending the war. But we can show him that the movement will grow larger and more destructive every day that the war continues.
Tomorrow, we will march back to Cambridge after the Moratorium on the Common. We will protest in front of Ithiel Poole's Simulmatics Corporation and in front of the Cambridge Corporation. Simulmaties was one of the architects of the pacification program in Vietnam. The Cambridge Corporation is one of the architects of Washington's research community in Cambridge. Both are symbols of the distorted priorities in America.
We no longer have a choice. If we want the war to end, we must say so continually and powerfully. If you want the war to end, you will march back to Cambridge tomorrow.