The Meaning of Honesty in Academe

I’ll begin with a comment that may or may not resonate:  the United States is going to hell. 

Is this comment an observable fact or is it merely a perception?  If observable, then based on what metrics?  If perception, then what are the conditions that might lend it credence? 

Here are some observable facts:  the USA’s industrial base is gone, replaced by a technocratic economy which aggregates wealth among the elite at a faster rate than any society in human history; health outcomes are poor; housing is a serious problem; wages can’t keep up with inflation; everywhere are signs of ecological crisis; most people are indentured to debtors; police can abuse and kill with impunity; poor communities exist as corporate dumping grounds; the U.S. political system is completely beholden to wealthy donors; both major parties enthusiastically support genocide. 

Here are some perceptions:  if you’re not a wealthy donor, or a potential source of wealth in general, then politicians despise you and govern accordingly; new variations of Nazism feel like they’re now ubiquitous; anger and alienation dominate the zeitgeist; imperialism shows no signs of abating; reactionaries keep winning the culture wars; the idea of social welfare is anathema to U.S. cultural sensibilities; there is a general sense of doom in the atmosphere; and electoralism promises no meaningful solution to any of these problems. 

There are other ways of thinking about the United States going to hell, let’s say as a moral proposition.  It is going to hell because of the evil it performs in this world.  It is going to hell as a cosmic punishment.  It is going to hell as an ontological conundrum.  It is going to hell because it never charted any other destiny. 

Maybe I’m talking nonsense, maybe I’m ranting my way into something of value.  It’s hard to say because I have a difficult time distinguishing absurdity from utility these days.  I’m in something of an uncertain state wherein I still care deeply about the spaces I inhabit and the world surrounding them but see little reason to expect a corrective to the problems amassing faster than my capacity to understand.  My condition isn’t malaise or nihilism.  Nor is it indifference or cynicism.  Not exactly.  Or not directly, anyway.  All of these phenomena are perhaps evident in the condition, but all told it’s something different, emerging from and thereby suited to this moment. 

I cared about the recent election, for example, but I also didn’t give a damn.  A lot of factors can influence a person’s voting decisions, but in the end a brutal reality governs the democratic economy in the United States:  voters had no option for compassion, for vitality, for the cessation of genocide. 

And I care about how people speak to the genocide in Gaza, but I find the commentary to be largely unbearable.  It’s not that the commentary is always insipid or opportunistic, although it often is, and it’s not that it doesn’t always feel meaningful, per se—every now and again it does—but that it doesn’t seem consequential.  People aren’t talking into a void, necessarily, but altogether the commentary is a looping chorus recited to the pleasure of a diminished audience.  We can make our feelings known, demand adherence to this or that ideological purview, and influence a great many people.  Opinion polls, in fact, heavily favor an end to Israel’s violence, and evidence has emerged that the Democratic Party’s participation in the Zionist genocide cost it dearly last November.  None of this stuff changed a goddamn thing in Gaza. 

I’m not saying that agitation on the street or in the public sphere is useless or that we should always measure our efforts by their effect on centers of power.  Rather, I’m pointing to the inherent limitations of dissent under regimes of capitalism.  The remaining myths of American “democracy” that many people still held on to died for good these past several months, or at least they should have.  What the people want is of no concern to the ruling class and its quislings.  This recognition is the basis of the condition I describe.  It is a particular type of ethos, neither binary nor fatalistic, that strives for relief against reactionary forces that increasingly feel insuperable.  Pardon my presumptuousness, but I daresay I’m not alone.  I recognize it all the time in others.  I recognize it on some of the faces at which I gaze right now. 

I suppose in the end it’s because I’m feeling politics more than thinking them and that’s why I don’t want to talk about them, or can’t do it very well when I try.  Because once I realized that our supposed freedom to speak is meaningless without guns or dollars, because without a dictate attached to whatever analysis I proffer, however germane or dazzling, I simultaneously realized that speaking won’t stop a single Palestinian or Haitian or Sudanese or Yemeni or Congolese from getting murdered.  So what’s left?  What’s always left:  the same desire for the language of joy and discontent to matter. 

I just want to identify a legitimate basis for possibility, where children are loved and well-fed, where workers can afford leisure, where good health doesn’t require bankruptcy, where our taps produce unpoisoned water, where ecosystems survive industrialization, where roofs cover bedrooms and blankets cover beds, where genocide is always a red line, where the unloved, the destitute, the surplus, finally enjoy refuge—or, better, succor—because this kind of world isn’t getting theorized into existence without a material power to accompany our words and it’s not coming about through our magnanimous thoughts and well-reasoned opinions, those noble activities that too often function as commodities for social climbing and podcast subscriptions, but, still, it has to happen, this kind of world, which, corny though it sounds, is the current state of my politics, in other words how I am feeling, a burning ambition without basis in the environs I inhabit that it must happen, somewhere, anywhere, inshallah everywhere. 

*****

Here is a consequent observation:  if the United States is going to hell, then academe is also going to hell.  Maybe it’s already there and this gathering is just a manifestation of our collective damnation.  I like to think of it as an exception or a respite, but there’s no way to be sure. 

I’ve been chewing on the relationship between academe and politics, academe and self-fulfillment, academe and notions of the public good.  Certainly I’m not alone in doing so.  Academics and observers have been exploring these intersections for decades or centuries in some cases.  Still, it strikes me as important to conduct a reassessment in light of today’s problems, the Gaza genocide in particular. 

My experience as a professor has been tumultuous.  I was almost fired, outright fired, and de facto fired all within the space of a few years.  Then I couldn’t get a job anywhere so I moved on to other pursuits (mostly unemployment).  Five years later, I was hired into an untenured faculty position at the American University in Cairo.  It’s one of the few universities in the world where I’m employable and I arrived in Egypt through an incredible confluence of luck and opportunity. 

When my academic career first went to hell, my son was a toddler and I usually considered the implications in terms of his future.  I wrote a lot about my obligations as a father in relation to the ethics I wanted to uphold as a professional.  I hated that the two concerns—professional security and ethical praxis—seemed to be in fundamental conflict.  I wanted them to be coterminous.  But that’s not how the capitalist regime of the United States is organized.  Serving the interests of the dispossessed necessarily subjects one to dispossession.  There’s no getting around it.  It’s one way, among many, that the ruling class so effectively coerces obedience. 

About ten years ago, I used to sit in my parents’ garage late at night in Manassas, Virginia, where we moved after I was unceremoniously fired from a tenured position at the University of Illinois, having no means to pay rent.  They live in a standard suburban townhouse with a garage halfway below ground level.  I would chain smoke amid the bins and boxes holding our possessions and try to write out a deep sense of loneliness and frustration.  Usually it was cold and so I kept the garage door open about a foot, which wasn’t enough to properly air out the space.  I sat on the futon I used to keep in my campus office, amid stale yellow vapor mixed with the dank smell of soggy cardboard and dried grass clippings.  It was a decent place to write. 

I had plenty to say, but I couldn’t make sense of anything back then.  My real education, eleven years after having completed a PhD, was just beginning. 

As is usually the case with people who have been harmed but haven’t yet discovered a language to process the aftermath, I was bitter and angry.  It wasn’t just that I had been publicly expunged from a faculty position.  I knew that the good people out there who could help me back on my feet lacked the influence to return me to the classroom.  I knew as well that Zionist defamation, which is uniquely intense and mean-spirited, would become a lifelong reality. 

I spent a lot of time especially thinking about how I, disgraced and unemployed, would provide for and protect my child.  And I kept returning to the same rupture:  my ability to protect my child required a kind of obsequiousness to the status quo, which would thus make me complicit in the insecurity of other people’s children.  I’ve contended with this rupture every single day since, whether I went to sleep in bliss or misery. 

I had one motivation throughout that chaotic period:  I wanted my child to grow up to be proud of me.  Whatever else happened, I was determined to bequeath to him the comfort of filial probity.  I think it should be an aspiration for all parents. 

A few months ago, I was chatting with my son, then twelve, about the usual tween stuff.  He goes to an American school in Cairo and, as one might expect of this type of school, it’s filled with very spoiled children. 

He knows about my employment fiascos of the past and the notoriety that followed because I told him last summer.  I always dreaded having to do it, but he and his cousins had long since learned to scour the internet and I figured it was time he heard the story from me and asked whatever questions were on his mind.  At the time, he offered no judgment.  He was mostly curious about how lawsuits work.  It also became clear to him why we likely wouldn’t go back to the United States:  no university there would hire me.  It was an important recognition because he sometimes agitated about returning to Virginia.  All four of his grandparents are there.  Aunts, uncles, cousins.  It’s tough being an only child separated from extended family. 

Anyway, he was telling me all about the fancy stuff many of his classmates own, shoes mostly.  Air Jordans and such.  Seventh-graders are really into shoes and I find it amusing that today’s seventh-graders are into the exact shoes we were into when I was in seventh grade.  Another commonality is that my old man never bought me Air Jordans and I haven’t bought my son any, either. 

He was sad about it, for the usual reasons.  We were all in middle school once.  We know what it’s like.  As professionals, we still know what it’s like because so many of our workplace problems are guided by the same pubescent sensibilities we’re supposed to help our children navigate. 

He interrupted one of my discourses about the dangers of material possessions to say, “I don’t think you should have done it.” 

“Done what?” I asked. 

“You know, that whole Palestine thing.  Where you lost your job.  I understand why you did it, but I wish you didn’t.” 

I heard him out, gave him a hug and told him that he’ll soon be a man with his own tough decisions to make, then went on with the evening.  There was a lot to unpack.  I’m pleased that my son feels comfortable expressing his opinions and anxieties.  It’s important that children of all age groups can find a sympathetic audience, if only so they don’t develop the habit of appending guilt to self-expression. 

There’s also a benefit to adults who serve as that audience.  We get the opportunity to reflect through points of view untainted by subjective material calculations.  Whether at age five or ten or fifteen, children are fantastic theorists if we take a moment to understand the assumptions guiding their logic.  On the surface, my son was expressing angst typical of his age group.  Beneath that angst, though, he was raising difficult questions that academics and other professionals have been trying to answer for a long time. 

To wit:  how do we maintain decency in an environment that rewards subservience to power and punishes loyalty to the dispossessed? 

(A quick aside:  if you’re wondering how it is that universities demand conformity to the status quo while lionizing debate and critical inquiry, the answer is straightforward:  they don’t have to be explicit about the demand because it’s built into the same culture of intellectual freedom that they promote.  In other words, these notions of intellectual freedom aren’t anathema to conformity because reproduction of the status quo is imperative to the social life of the institution.  An elaborate system of inducements, financial and psychological, exists to maintain a sort of political decorum that cossets stakeholders in imperialism—among them the university itself.  The loud culture war between liberals and conservatives doesn’t demonstrate ideological diversity; it is self-branding in a frivolous contest to collect the scraps of Empire.  The real schism is between anti-capitalists and everyone else, something the culture wars occlude to great effect.) 

As to the question:  I don’t think people can maintain decency in academe without a serious disruption to their upward mobility.  It all depends on how we define “decency.”  If we conceptualize it as loyalty to the dispossessed, as I did a few seconds ago, then putting the sentiment into practice is a reliable way to invite recrimination.  If you work or study on campus, then being forced into difficult choices is inevitable.  Too many of our colleagues choose expedience and self-preservation over their apparent devotion to the wretched of the earth. 

We’re supposed to be critical thinkers, though, which should lead us to understand that what might be perceived as expedient only produces collective harm in the long run.  Self-preservation, too, is something of a misnomer because sucking up to management is no guarantee of individual gratification.  You’re just as likely to be disposed of as you are to ascend into a more dominant social class. 

That we’re forced into this conflict isn’t some peculiar lapse of diligence.  It is a diligently calibrated system of coercion and punishment in which Zionism plays a critical role.  It is quite effective in this role, too. 

When students and faculty revolted over the past two years, setting up encampments and in some cases occupying administrative buildings, they forced universities into a more honest posture.  Those universities could no longer rely on the myths of mobility and merit to generate obedience.  So they dropped the act altogether and turned into mini police states.  The level of repression and persecution has been extraordinary.  Students assaulted and expelled.  Diplomas rescinded.  Visas revoked.  Faculty suspended and fired.  Criminalization of speech opposing genocide.  Raids and imprisonment.  Cancellation of classes having anything to do with Palestine.  On and on.  It’s been a long time since we’ve seen anything like it. 

This persecution is in service of Zionism, sure, but it is also an expression of the university’s deepest sensibility.  Zionism offers a pretextual basis for institutional authority.  In the metropole, Zionism and institutional authority are mutually constitutive and one functions optimally in relation to the other. 

I used to say, semi-jokingly, that they can’t fire all of us, but it turns out that they can—or at least they’ll try, which has a panoptical effect on our activities.  There’s no safety in numbers, not really.  We need a countervailing power to the ruling class.  Developing such power requires us to do things that have a reasonable chance of leading to trouble. 

My son understands this already, not through my stories of tumult but by his own experience in the world.  He sees rich people and poor people in Cairo.  He knows who among them matter to educators, to news agencies, to politicians.  He thinks I shouldn’t have disrupted a steady career by defending Palestinians because the prospect of indigence is terribly discomfiting to a child.  That’s the thing about finding a radical principle and standing on it, though:  if one isn’t risking indigence, then in the end that person is merely reciting an exotic narrative to the same old audience. 

Maybe my son will understand one day, maybe he won’t.  Like I told him, he’ll unfortunately have multiple opportunities to decide for himself. 

*****

So, how do we balance the security of employment with the practice of a meaningful politics? 

There’s no singular answer—no answer, really, that I’m comfortable putting forward as definitive.  It seems more useful to examine the nature of the question and make sense of the situation in which it exists. 

When I have the opportunity to give a talk, interlocutors often ask, “what can I do?,” which I consider a variation of the same question I raised a second ago.  It’s an important question, “what can I do?,” and with a few exceptions should be treated with care and respect.  Why is the question so prevalent and what does its prevalence tell us about the relationship between citizen and society? 

To begin with, it illuminates one of four things about the questioner:  1) they’re being disingenuous; 2) they’re seeking validation for a preexisting opinion; 3) they’re overwhelmed or confused by the gravity of the moment; or 4) they’re motivated and want to act on some issue of justice.  I reckon that numbers three and four are the most common. 

All kinds of interesting assumptions underlie the question.  For example, it suggests a lack of belief in the system.  We’re already supposed to know what to do, right?  Vote!  Give money to charity!  Join the PTA!  Vote some more!  So anybody asking what can or should be done already knows on some level that the “democratic process” is bullshit.  It also suggests that selling our labor or paying tuition to corrupt institutions in a society with deteriorating quality of life feels exactly like the prospect of indigence to a child. 

I’m probably being too severe, but I think that people who care enough to want to do something to improve the world in lasting and meaningful ways know deep-down exactly what needs to be done.  They’re looking for ways for that action to be somehow compatible with job security, with personal freedom, or with notions of civic responsibility.  The first thing to be done, then, is rid yourself of the idea that the U.S. polity is redeemable.  It’s not.  Unchecked, it will only lead the world into catastrophe to the benefit of a few thousand technocratic psychopaths.  Overthrowing the system and replacing it with something at least minimally humane is what needs to be done.  Does that sound glib?  It might.  Unserious?  Sure.  Impossible?  Almost certainly.  But if the goal is equality and justice—or merely preventing ecocide—then we’d better get to doing it.  Thus the ambiguity.  There are no easy answers because the easiest answer is also the most onerous and least likely to be put forward.  Nearly all the so-called radicalism in academe is a longwinded paean to conciliation. 

The second thing that needs to be done is giving up the idea of safety.  It doesn’t currently exist for opponents of U.S. imperialism (to say nothing of its victims).  And it won’t exist until U.S. imperialism is defeated.  If you agitate against militarism, police brutality, corporate extraction, and Zionism, then you might well end up with a satisfying career, but there’s an equal chance that you’ll be forced onto the periphery even among the major leftist formations in North America.  On campus, these commitments only work as a branding device.  Put into action, they become cause for mobbing, hostility, ostracism, and recrimination.  I’ve lived this reality more than once.  They’re some of the unhappiest times of my life.  But I’ve come to recognize that a lasting satisfaction arises from never having ceded a solitary centimeter to the oppressor. 

This is our first confrontation with the meaning of honesty in academe, the apocryphal and self-serving notion that you can desire revolutionary change while still maintaining the esteem of corporate media editors, NGOs, celebrity podcasters, donors, senior scholars, and the managerial class.  If we’re being honest about the nature of the corporate university, and if you’re being honest about the depth of your commitment, then the honesty demands a realistic assessment of the dim outcome that results from actual loyalty to the dispossessed rather than implicit service to power. 

*****

Let’s stick with the topic.  I’ve written a lot about the notion of honesty.  My book, An Honest Living, is what led to my invitation to speak at UMass.  I’ve normally thought of honesty as a moral question:  how does one maintain humanity in an environment that likes to reward mendacity?  In An Honest Living, the answer is pretty straightforward:  I removed myself from academe altogether and tried to find meaning at the wheel of a school bus.  (And it worked.)  I’m aware that a confluence of factors led to that outcome and so there’s really no universal counsel to derive from it.  But I’d say that the underlying principle is relevant, whatever your situation:  a refusal to internalize or reproduce the toxicity of institutional ambition.  I’ve maintained this impetus to refuse in Cairo by doggedly focusing on my students’ well-being and having a nonexistent public profile, just slow and irregular writing without marketing for whoever cares to read it.  I work in academe, but I’m not in academe. 

Now, your refusal can and probably should take a different course.  As long as it prioritizes the disempowered then it can lead to all kinds of interesting places in the world. 

Lately I’ve been thinking about honesty as a methodology.  Who represents the sensibilities of people whose political visions don’t align with common wisdom in academe?  In our bubbles, common wisdom always lands on something counterrevolutionary.  There’s nothing organic about that outcome.  It’s the upshot of an intellectual culture engineered by upper-class tastemakers and reproduced through the consent of supplicants chasing the petty rewards of compliance.  Those supplicants are adept at dressing counterrevolutionary thought in radical adornments, but in moments of crisis they revert to a default state of acquiescence. 

Take the past eighteen months of unmitigated abuse of students protesting a genocide.  Many honorable faculty joined those students or spoke in their defense, but they’re an exception.  A greater number of their colleagues who have built reputations (and thus material comfort) on big talk about Fighting The Power were absent from the frontlines.  This is a longstanding habit, by the way.  Ask your local Marxist professor if he happened to take management’s side during a graduate student unionization drive, for example. 

What about all the people, inside and beyond the United States, for whom the term “democracy” is an empty signifier?  Who among us represents their point of view?  Forget representation.  Who among us actually agrees with them?  After all, we just witnessed nearly every leader of the so-called Democratic West underwrite a genocide despite the adamant disapproval of their populations. 

How about the Palestinian resistance?  It has significant support among people in the Global South, and among no small number of Black people, Natives, Muslims, Chicanos, and other underrepresented communities in North America.  You won’t find their points of view taken seriously by the professional decolonialists writing for liberal audiences in old-money periodicals (Lewis Gordon, Adam Shatz, Pankaj Mishra, and so on).  Instead, they offer highhanded reverie about the native’s pathological violence.  The scholars who do take resistance seriously get fired or suspended. 

Fact is, there’s an entire world of opinion, some inspiring and some dubious, completely omitted from what cultured folks like to call dialogue.  A lot of people think that U.S. democracy is a sham, that soldiers shouldn’t be glorified, that voting is a waste of time, that violence is sometimes necessary, that Israel has no right to exist.  We can’t be honest about it without risking trouble.  So we revert to bourgeois common sense, instead. 

Do you know who has excellent powers of perception when it comes to distinguishing artfulness from substance?  Administrators.  They have a finely-tuned ear for nuance and subtext.  They can read an article filled with references to Marx, Fanon, and Gramsci and immediately decide, “This motherfucker doesn’t have a radical bone in his body.  The radicalism is concentrated in his tongue.”  They never make exceptions in their judgments and so we needn’t make excuses in ours. 

Finally, we can consider the meaning of honesty in terms of achieving justice for the downtrodden.  If we’re being honest about this possibility—let’s say for Haitians, Congolese, Sudanese, Lakota, Kashmiris, and other oppressed national communities—then we have to engage the logic of the street, the shanty, the reservation, the refugee camp.  This kind of approach will necessarily be distasteful to scholars writing for the foreign policy establishment.  But there’s an honesty inherent to it that good taste cannot apprehend:  if the idea is to explore notions of freedom and democracy, then any honest assessment of the concepts in action will recognize that they’re a whole lot of flimflam deployed without scrutiny to simultaneously justify imperialism and pacify insurgency.  In the real world, there is more power and less power.  And aligning yourself with less power is an abdication of freedom and democracy. 

*****

Earlier this evening, I mentioned a “legitimate basis for possibility.”  In closing, I’d like to elaborate on this phrase.  

When I say “possibility,” of course I mean the possibility of a livable future, especially for those who are given no place in this world.  We all have different ideas of possibility, which can certainly create tension but also adds richness to our social and interior lives. 

Wherever each of us exists on the ideological spectrum, it’s important to remember that possibility exists precisely where the university occludes it.  You cannot expect institutions hosting ever-distended strata of upper managers to offer themselves as sites of revolution, no matter what overheated reactionaries like to claim about leftism run amok on campus.  Those upper managers are deeply invested in maintaining order.  Same goes for many current students and alumni.  Try to elevate the downtrodden through access to campus resources and a certain crowd will immediately run to the statehouse to cry about the degradation of their credentials.  You cannot expect people to become class traitors, in other words. 

This is why the language of civil liberties and human rights is so insidious—same with the hyper-focus on diversity and personal agency and representation.  It elides analysis of hostile class relations and dissuades alliances that might disrupt the upward flow of capital.  Thus capital folds the language of uplift and belonging into feelgood theatrics governed by an unacknowledged class antagonism.  In this environment, speech is less a universal right than a limited commodity.  There could be no James Baldwin today.  He had exceptional talent, no doubt, but that’s not what I mean.  Through decades of refinement, the system is much more effective at coopting or suppressing radicalism at its inception.  Any line of thinking with potential to subvert corporate dominion, as with any insurgent mobilization, gets coopted back into the same bourgeois machinery of voting, of tolerance and inclusion, of donating to ostensibly socialist politicians who revert to Party dogma when it matters.  Where cooptation fails, brute force steps in, as we’ve seen on campuses throughout the USA, the UK, Canada, Australia, and Germany.  The anointed successor to Baldwin, Ta-Nehisi Coates, was a darling of the liberal establishment until he implicated the Zionist state in apartheid, at which point the same liberals unleashed a once-latent racism on him that made them sound every bit the Trumpers they deplore.  The same has happened to every Black leader and intellectual since the 1960s.  Baldwin, it’s worth pointing out, opposed Zionism, but that opposition is largely absent from his historic profile, as is the case with other icons like Nelson Mandela and Muhammad Ali. 

You have to remember that discourse is fungible among centers of power.  Rhetoricians of imperialism can append a humanistic lexicon to any violent ideology.  There’s not always a good reason to die.  But there’s always a good reason to kill. 

People have been making some variation of this argument for a long time, going all the way back to Aristotle and Jesus.  But with the Gaza genocide, we’ve just seen the process happen in real time, in big blinking lights.  An American client state and fellow settler colony committed a genocide on camera.  The entire corporate media apparatus joined with the political classes in justifying and in many cases celebrating the genocide.  Institutions of higher education did the same.  When the usual means of consent failed, liberals and conservatives set aside all pretense of civic responsibility and brutalized opponents of the genocide.  There isn’t a solitary excuse to humor all the usual banalities about free speech and human rights. 

So let’s draw on our creativity, resourcefulness, resilience, and honesty to pursue ideas of liberation that transcend the empty signifiers imparted by thought-leaders, politicians, intellectuals, podcasters, and the like.  Remember:  search for possibility at the point of occlusion.  That’s always the point at which it promises to be disruptive.  What’s practical and realistic according to the ruling class depends entirely on our immiseration.  Possibility and impossibility are actually synonymous. 

I don’t know.  As I said, I’m having a tough time these days finding cause to be optimistic.  No need to rehearse all the reasons.  I’m sure I’ve depressed you quite enough already.  Then I think about the people in Palestine; the people in Sudan; the people in Yemen; the people in the Congo; the people in Haiti; the people in Hawaii; the people all over the world who suffer penury so that coteries of insatiable scoundrels can accumulate wealth.  At this point I realize that for people of my station cynicism is a luxury; for the downtrodden, optimism is a necessity, a survival mechanism.  Human beings endure incredible abuse only to maintain their dignity and pass it along to ensuing generations.  Therein lies my theoretical methodology. 

These human beings endure because they want to live and grow, they want to work and play, they want to see other lands and oceans.  Nobody should expect anything more of them than survival.  But their endurance isn’t confined to a local milieu.  They endure for the good of all humanity.  A liberated Palestine is better for the world than a world indulging the Zionist entity.  A society with food and housing security is better for the world than a world enraptured by the obscenities of wealth.  A landbase under Indigenous stewardship is better for the world than a world owned by corporations.  A sovereign Africa is better for the world than a world organized through Western exploitation.  We endure for others so that others can endure for us.  This is honesty in its most powerful incarnation. 

The challenges facing us appear indomitable.  I sometimes limit my exposure to the news because it scares me.  I’m okay admitting it.  We’re all scared, right?  Those of us who aren’t dead inside or beneficiaries of injustice, anyway.  But fear isn’t a stand-in for cowardice; it is a prelude to courage.  So let’s join arms and march into hell, confident that we can transform it into something more heavenly than this rotten world.