William Lee Miller

As the primaries have gone on and the passions of the Clinton and Obama campaigns have gone on, I read an article in the March issue of the Progressive that I thought made a good point. The article caught my eye because it was written by Howard Zinn. As I've been on a big Zinn reading kick these past few months, I thought I had to read it. In it Zinn warns Progressives not to expect the election of either Obama or Clinton to unleash any great reform cycle, unless their elections are accompanied by the hard work of Progressives to move the nation to be receptive to reform. In his article, Zinn wrote:

"I'm talking about a sense of proportion that gets lost in the election madness. Would I support one candidate against another? Yes, for two minutes- the amount of time it takes to pull the lever down in the voting booth.

But before and after those two minutes, our time, our energy, should be spent in educating, agitating, organizing our fellow citizens in the workplace, in the neighborhoods, in the schools. Our objective should be to build, painstakingly, patiently but energetically, a movement that, when it reaches a certain critical mass, would shake whoever is in the White House, in Congress, into changing national policy on maters of war and social justice.

 With the birthday's of Washington and Lincoln and the coming of President's Day, I wrote this post:

Right now I'm reading Howard Zinn's book A People's History of the United States and it's a wonderful book of the contributions and struggles that women, African Americans, Native Americans, workers' groups and various other marginalized people have made to build up America.  It's a history that needs to be told, as these stories talk of the struggles of marginalized people to be included in America's democratic experiment, and Zinn sees a struggle based on an oppressive economic system.  One of the few things where I disagree with Zinn is in his take on the Founding Fathers and their relationship with slavery.  Slavery was a subject that the Founding Fathers struggled with mightily, and their inability to resolve the issue was something that they themselves realized was one of their greatest failures.