Stay in the Streets: How Revolutionary

( This is the second part of a two-part feature )

WE can only learn through experience. We only really know what we have seen and heard and felt. I am not black, and therefore I cannot explain what it is like to feel the spiked heel of racism grinding into your stomach.

Imagination is, however, a kind of ersatz experience. When you see a starving child, you share his suffering through empathetic identification, through imagination. If someone who has seen a starving child is able to relay the sensory image of his perception, he can stimulate your imagination, to a lesser degree, to understand the child's suffering. If your learning is confined to reading non-empathetic accounts of the effects of starvation on, say, a million people, you are little better off than when you started. To understand, you have to translate the "facts" into examples from your former experience.

When the matter is starvation, we can all imagine the feeling to some extent, for all of us have gone without a day's meals at one time. To go without food for a week or a month is certainly different, but we can imagine. We can also imagine the feeling of burning napalm glued to your body, because we have all burned our fingers on a stove. The more able your imagination, the more able you are to extrapolate from a modest experience to an intensive one, the more suffering you can understand.

But when you have no experience to relate to someone else's, you are unable to understand it. Again, I am not black. I have not the words, but more than that, I have not the experience to explain what it is like to walk down the street in a white city, with a black face. I have no idea what it would be like to know that my grandfather was a slave. I do not know what it is like to have learned that I am here by the grace of a white God, because I am of a race of savages.

I have a sense that it would be unpleasant, but that is all that I have. I have not lived in a ghetto, so I do not even have the sensory basis for understanding. I have not talked to enough black people who have felt the enforced burden of inferiority.

ALL THAT I can relate to is a kind of oppression that could happen to me. I can imagine what it is like for a white man to starve. Even then I am unable to comprehend the overwhelming extent to which black people are forced into the worst jobs, the extent to which they are beaten and murdered by the police, the extent to which they have the creativity stomp-out of them. I can read the Black Panther every week, but all I can grasp each week is another eviction, or another Panther office destroyed. I could multiply the number of times each of those incidents takes place in this country each week, by ten or a hundred or a thousand. But multilying does not intensify.

The Panthers explain that black people in this country are oppressed as a colonial nation-in Frantz Fanon's sense. That oppression is both economic and psychological, and the case is obvious. But white Americans cannot feel what it is like to live in a colony, either in Vietnam or Harlem, because they have never experienced it.

I would like to stop talking about racism and call out for everyone to pick up a gun and march into the New Haven jail, into the New York jail, and into every jail where a black man is held to have violated laws that he never consented to, and help to free them to organize and lead their own lives. But I cannot call out, because there are not yet enough of us.

Instead, we will march from Post Office Square today at 3 p.m. to the Berkeley Police Station. We will march because we understand that the state will not free Bobby Scale, that it will continue to bind and gag and starve black people in this country until enough people decide that they are willing to do anything to stop it. But we will also march because we understand that, in a real sense, we do not yet know about racism, and that only by fighting it can we learn what it is that we are fighting.

I sat on the grass with 5000 other people two summers ago at the Peace and Freedom Southern California convention in a Los Angeles park. I watched Eldridge walk to the small platform escorted by half a dozen uniformed Panthers. As he began to speak, I looked around and saw about twenty other Panthers spread through the crowd, facing the seated audience, and another six with walkie-talkies on the small hillside next to the grass. Malcolm X was gone and they weren't going to lose Eldridge.

I was scared. I was afraid that one uniform was as bad as another and that black people would begin to kill white people. As I listened to Eldridge, I had to wrestle with what I meant by "civil rights." At the end of that long afternoon, I marked "Cleaver" on my ballot and handed it in. I had begun to understand that black people have a much better judgement about how to organize other black people than I did. If black people thought that they needed to defend themselves with guns, then I would have to respect that. I realized that I had liked Dick Gregory because he made me feel comfortable. I had like his tactic of boycotting record and cigarette companies until the war ended. But I liked it because it was respectable, not because I thought that it would work. I knew that I would have to overcome that.

So the movement does not claim to know everything about racism and does not want simply to get enough people together to change it. We can begin to understand our own racism only by pushing ourselves until we see the effect of our own racism on our lives. Banks burned down, ROTC buildings exploded and court houses were destroyed because five white radicals were sent to jail for five years. But when Bobby Scale was sentenced to four years for contempt, no one did a thing. Why?

Because the movement is still fighting its own racism. Because we can listen to Eldridge talk about a race war and then go home and go to sleep.

We learn through experience. I am not a woman, and therefore I can only imagine what women feel in America. I can only imagine what it must be like to walk down a never-ending street lined on both sides with men who judge how well I would fulfill their sexual desires. I do not know what it is like for a working class woman who graduates from high school and is forced to sell herself to a man, sell herself into slavery in order to have any kind of existence-social or economic.

But the same system that forces women to be slaves forces men to be masters. To love another person you must understand that he or she is different from yourself, that he or she is another complete person who lives another complete life.

When a woman is forced to change diapers and wash dishes and pluck her eyebrows, she is forced to become less than a person, she is forced to lead less than a life. If love is a relationship between people, then no love is possible in a society that requires half of the society to be servants and whores to the other half. No love is possible in a society that makes every man feel that a woman's idea is a challenge to his masculinity.

This much we have all felt. This society not only forces people to compete with each other as objects in the labor market, but it also forces people to compete with each other as people. What we find in most other people is a way of supporting our own egos. We cannot stop manipulating and objectifying. Other people, both men and women, are either a challenge or a way of getting what we want.

This society provides no way to live happily with another person. If the man works and the woman does not, the woman becomes a slave. If both work, they can probably have no kids, because there are no day care centers. Besides, the system makes sure that most women never get a creative job-there are so few left in this country anyway.

The only place where men and women can work together as equals is in the movement. Men and women can overcome what divides them only by fighting together against it. Most radical organizations have yet to allow women an equal voice. Most have yet to understand what it means to follow the leadership of women. But the only place in this society where people face the problem is where they are fighting against it.

I find that the only way that I can relate to women without having to tear out my hair over the anxieties I feel from the feelings and ideas about male supremacy that I am unable to purge, is to work together with them as equals in a struggle that we both agree is necessary.

The Vietnamese have shown the way. They learned about equality of men and women through experience. Here is their program on women's liberation, from the expanded fourteen-point program adopted in August 1967. Remember that it is the U.S. that claims to be liberating the Vietnamese.

"9. To carry out equality between man and woman and to protect mothers and children.

To pay the utmost attention to raising the political, cultural and vocational standard of women, in view of their merits in the struggle against U.S. aggression, for national salvation. To develop the Vietnamese women's traditions of heroism, dauntlessness, fidelity and ability to shoulder responsibilities.

Women are equal to men in the political, economic, cultural, and social fields.

Women workers and civil servants enjoy two months' maternity leave with full pay, before and after childbirth.

Women who do the same job receive the same salary and allowances and enjoy the same rights as men.

To apply a policy of actively favouring, fostering and training women cadres.

To promulgate progressive marriage and family regulations.

To protect the rights of mothers and children. To develop the network of maternity homes, creches and infant classes.

To eliminate all social evils brought about by the U.S. imperialists and their lackeys, which are harmful to women's health and dignity."

AS we sit in classes, we learn from the examples of our teachers that all we need do is talk about the war, because those people who do, who act, who run the country, will defer to our greater knowledge one day.

Needless to say, they are bad examples. If philosophical inquiry has shown anything in the last hundred years, it has shown that there exists a unity of theory and practice-that you only believe what you are doing. You do not believe that the genocide in Vietnam should be ended unless you are working for that end. If you are teaching Renaissance poetry instead, then you may still believe, in some abstract and useless sense, that the war should end. In any case, you believe that teaching Renaissance poetry is more important than ending the war.

Many continue to teach Renaissance poetry because they say that it is helping to end the war. The argument is that Western poetry inculcates a certain kind of humanism and concern with life that is necessary for a "good" revolutionary. But the peculiar kind of humanism we have inherited in the West has remained healthy while Africans were taken to Europe and then to America as slaves, and while the great humanist nations proceeded to subjugate and exploit the rest of the world. That humanism remained intact while the world suffered. Most of Western poetry does not just extoll abstract values, but pretends that they are incarnated in their respective societies. That poetry does not help to end the war.

Others continue to teach Renaissance poetry because they say that they are unsure about what to do. That is a common belief for people who have been acting only upon assurance (from someone who they respect more than themselves) that the proposed action is "right." If someone has an idea, we will discuss it and probably try it. If it works, fine. If not, then we have learned one more thing that does not work.

We learn through experience. No one knows how to end the war. The only way to learn is to continue to try until you succeed. If you say that you do not wish to try because you are not certain of the way, then you are the prisoner of the system. You have lost any desire for your own freedom and creativity. You are dead and buried. You can no longer hold out a hand to another man, for you are dead and buried in your private casket.

I intercepted Jean-Paul Sartre as he was leaving a mass meeting in Paris three years ago. The meeting had been called to protest Bolivia's jailing of Regis Debray, a French journalist and a friend of Fidel Castro.

I asked some simple question about what he had been thinking or doing or about what I should be thinking and doing. He shot glances all around the room and then answered suddenly.

"I don't think that anyone believes in existentialism anymore. I don't think that I have much effect on the French youth anymore. And unless you're helping little kids who are starving in India, or helping little kids who are dying of dysentery in South America, or helping little kidswho are being bombed in Vietnam, I don't think you're doing anything."

" This said, he form'd thee, Adam,

thee O Man

Dust of the ground, and in thy nostrils

breath'd

The breath of Life; in his own Image

hee

Created thee, in the Image of God

Express, and thou becam'st a living

Soul. "

WHAT we are living is less than life. As with Adam, when he lay fully formed yet lifeless, we need the breath of life. The breath of life, that inspiration, can only come from people who are truly living.

To express the qualitative difference between our lives and the life of a revolutionary, Che Guevara had to use a biological metaphor, "This type of fight gives us the opportunity of becoming revolutionaries, the highest level of the human species...."

A revolutionary is the highest level of the human species. Castro said that Che considered himself a soldier of the revolution without ever considering if he would survive it. That is a lesson for us. The meaning is not in the end but in the doing. Should you ask, "Will the revolution win? Do we even have a prayer for success?" I'm certain that Che would have shrugged his shoulders. The Third World revolution will probably win, with us or without us. That is not the point. Just as much of your body and your genes were selected for you before you were born, so was your time and place. As Sartre says, we live on situation. The only response is to make of it what we can. That is why you must understand what is happening in the world before you can find out what to do with your life. There are no abstract decisions.

After the revolution, I want to band ducks in Canada and follow them south ?? the Tetons. I would work for the People's Ministry of Wildlife Conservation. But that simply is not a choice today. Our time, our situation, requires that we be revolutionaries. That does not mean that it will be easy. It will not. We will need all of the inspiration we can get. There simply exists no alternative for creativity, in fact, for life, than to try to create a new society.

A few years ago, Che as talking to some American radicals, explaining to them the campaign in the Sierra Macstra. Apparently, the Americans were beginning to picture themselves in fatigues, with rifles over their shoulders and a month's growth of beard. Che stopped for a second and said, "But I really envy you. Yours is the toughest job, for you live in the heart of the beast."

From Guevara and all of the men who fought in Cuba, we can take a new breath of life. Che wanted us to take up his gun as he fell. It is hard to imagine a soul more committed, more alive than Che. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a higher level of human being.

THE WAR probably will not end until there are 20,000 people in every city in the country ready to burn down banks and draft broads, ready to do anything, to end the war. Sadly, we are not yet that strong. Maybe no matter what we do we will not be able to scare Nixon into ending the war. But we can show him that the movement will grow larger and more destructive every day that the war continues.

Tomorrow, we will march back to Cambridge after the Moratorium on the Common. We will protest in front of Ithiel Poole's Simulmatics Corporation and in front of the Cambridge Corporation. Simulmaties was one of the architects of the pacification program in Vietnam. The Cambridge Corporation is one of the architects of Washington's research community in Cambridge. Both are symbols of the distorted priorities in America.

We no longer have a choice. If we want the war to end, we must say so continually and powerfully. If you want the war to end, you will march back to Cambridge tomorrow.