Beyond Ideology

Whole Earth,  Summer, 2000  by Julius Lester

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One day in the mid-sixties--about 1965, I think--I was in New York's Forty-second Street Library and ran into a friend whose first words were an excited, "Have you read this yet?" He thrust into my hands a book called The Wretched of the Earth [Grove Press, 1986]. The author was someone named Frantz Fanon.

The Wretched of the Earth was a sophisticated reiteration of much that Malcolm had said, and reading it made our second thoughts become new convictions. Fanon gave us words through which to know ourselves anew. In his writings we found the term "Third World," and no longer would we identify ourselves as American. He told us that we were a colonized people, and that we had a political identity that aligned us with all the people of the twentieth century who had struggled against colonialism. Most important, Fanon told us that violence was redemptive, that it was the only means by which the colonized could cleanse themselves of the violence of the colonizers.

We did not have to wonder about the violence of the colonizers because every night on the news we watched the films of US soldiers carrying out a war in a country we had never heard of, a country that none of us thought threatened America's security. The nation was at war and something happened that was perhaps unprecedented in American history: A significant number of young Americans sided openly with the enemy. Young men fled to Canada and Sweden rather than be drafted to fight an unjust war. Draft cards and American flags were burned at antiwar rallies and Phil Ochs sang "I Ain't A-Marching Anymore."

At the same historical moment, the predominantly black Civil Rights Movement and the predominantly white anti-Vietnam War Movement became anti-American. Suddenly, America was the enemy. If ever there was a moment in history for second thoughts, that was one. Common sense should have told us that it is impossible to transform a nation if you hate it.

But that is one of the dangers of idealism. When it is let loose in the public arena, it is like an animal in heat and in desperate need of a sexual joining. All too quickly, unrequited idealism can become surly and aggressive. All too quickly, it becomes rage, bares the teeth that have been lurking behind the smile as pretty as a morning glory, and, enraged, bites itself and never feels the pain, never knows that the blood staining its teeth is its own.

But the signs had been there almost from the beginning. I remember being at a civil rights rally in the early sixties and hearing the chant, "Freedom Now! Freedom Now!" I muttered "Freedom any ol' time" because I was afraid of what would happen if we didn't get "Freedom Now." Later in the sixties, Jim Morrison of The Doors shouted, "We want the world and we want it now!" We should have been frightened, and we weren't.

Freedom did not come now. We may have wanted the world, but we didn't get it, at least not warm from the oven, as light and flaky as a croissant. Because freedom did not come now, because we did not get the world, we turned against the nation we had wanted to love, a nation that did not want our love. Or so it seemed. And we turned against each other.