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Speech Acts
Tonight, P.O.V. airs the documentary Wrestling With Angels about activist and playwright Tony Kushner, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play Angels in America.
Kushner and Wrestling With Angels director Freida Lee Mock spoke with NPR's Talk of the Nation yesterday about why Kushner hates to write and why Mock divided the documentary about Kushner's life into three parts. (The full audio clip is here.)
The P.O.V. site about the documentary includes video of his 2002 commencement speech at Vassar College, where he exhorts the graduates to take action.
I am here to organize. I am here to be political. I am here to be a citizen in a pluralist democracy. I am here to be effective, to have agency, to make a claim on power, to spread it around, to rearrange it, to democratize it, to legislate it into justice. Why you? Because the world will end if you don't act. You are the citizen of a flawed but actual democracy. Citizens are not actually capable of not acting. It is not given to a citizen that she doesn't act; this is the price you pay for being a citizen of a democracy. Your life is married to the political beyond the possibility of divorcement...
Will the world end if you act? Who can say? Will you lose your soul, your democratic-citizen soul, if you don't act, if you don't organize? I guarantee it. And you will feel really embarrassed at your ten-year class reunion. People will point, I promise you; people always know when a person has lost his soul. And no one likes a zombie, even if, from time to time, people will date them.
Similarly, blog readers are not capable of not commenting. What are your thoughts on your democratic-citizen soul?
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Calling All Souls
I think too many people in this country have lost their democratic-citizen souls. If they had their souls they would be marching in the streets of Washington in throngs to end this terrible war and to protest against the many other wrongs this administration has inflicted upon us. Instead, they are marching in the aisles of Walmart buying cheap goods made by children laboring long hours in Asian sweatshops. Anyone with a soul would not do this. When will America wake up and stop being so selfish. Where are their souls????
Calling all souls...we need to take action!!!!
Not voting is a political act
I love Kushner's comment "Citizens are not actually capable of not acting...Your life is married to the political beyond the possibility of divorcement..." I wish that more people understood that not voting is a political act.
I canvassed during the '04 election to register people to vote and get out the vote, and I heard over and over again that people didn't vote because they didn't want to get jury duty (in NH, where I was, the two are linked). In one fell swoop, they were dismissing two of their most powerful and important opportunities as citizens in a democracy.
The other reason people said they didn't vote was their cynicism about politics in general and their feeling that politicians didn't really represent them. I'm curious whether those feelings will change in this election. Personally, I feel that the YouTube debates and sites like 10questions.com and askyourlawmaker.com are offering more opportunities than ever for citizens to voice their concerns and have those concerns addressed by the candidates. Hopefully, these innovations will rejuvenate people's desire to exercise their rights and responsibilities.