On Wed, 12 Nov 1997, William S. Lear wrote:
> >But the question is does spending your main energies protesting the
> >Contras help the Nicaraguan people more than concentrating on the needs of
> >Detroit workers who are needed as an integral part of any decent,
> >progressive foreign policy?
>
> Suppose someone down the street from you were being raped. Next door,
> a friend of yours is fired. Do you rush to the aid of the person
> being raped, or do you rush next door? Aiding people
> who are actively being slaughtered (this was a full-scale war,
> remember), however, is far more urgent.
Except for a small handful of Americans who physically went down to
Nicaragua and put their bodies in between the Contras and the peasants,
your analogy doesn't hold. What most folks were doing in the solidarity
movement was trying to influence US foreign policy, i.e. its political
makeup and decision-making.
THe question is how do you change the political makeup of a government?
Many people would say (and I think this is Michael Moore's point) is that
you mobilize the broadest number of people into opposition to the
government promoting the policies you oppose. Now, if you focus on issues
that many people don't understand or identify with, you will fail in that
endeavor and while you may feel good about talking a lot about the "most
urgent" issues, you actually will have materially accomplished little for
the Nicaraguans.
If, on the other hand, you spend time working with those fired workers in
Flint and build a strong progressive coalition to take political power,
helping the Nicaraguans, ending the death penalty and a host of other
issues will flow from addressing "less urgent" issues at the forefront.
That doesn't mean that you don't spend some time on key "urgent" issues,
from Nicaragua to defending immigrant fights to defending affirmative
action (all of which I have been immersed in mysefl) but that if you fail
to keep majoritarian appeals to broad economic issues, you will inevitably
fail on most of those "urgent" issues.
--Nathan Newman
