Earlier today I surveyed with mixed feelings the aftermath of our Thanksgiving feast: the postprandial wreckage of roasted yams; peas; giblet dressing [and Fafnir cries "Noooooooo!"]; pan gravy; cranberry-orange relish; crudités; rosemary focaccia; pumpkin bread; pumpkin pie; sparkling lingonberry-apple juice; and lest we forget, a 17-lb. turkey that, unlike MN Observer’s, actually was a caged-raised, genetically modified, monoculture bird bought from some megafoods in Eden Prairie.]
It was a lot of food. A lot of food. An almost obscene abundance, even tho we actually cut back this year and I didn’t make anywhere near the amount and assortment of stuff we’ve had at Thanksgivings past. Still, what we ate today was more than enough, so much more than enough for the eight people at the table, even taking into account that two of the people were teenage boys, who capacity-wise should each be counted as 3 people. We have pounds of turkey left, not to mention copious amounts of yams, and peas, and cranberry sauce, and bread. We could feed 20 people easily on the leftovers. A lot of food.
Yesterday on MPR I heard a speech given by Frances Moore Lappé, author of Diet For a Small Planet. Lappé spoke in Minneapolis last week at a fundraiser for the Land Stewardship Project. Her subject was food democracy — how we can work to change the situation we find ourselves in, living in a world where a billion people go hungry each day. It was a great speech, and sent me hustling off to the library to check out some of her books:
Hope’s Edge: The New Diet For a Small Planet
Feeding the Future: From Fat To Famine
You Have the Power: Choosing Courage in a Culture of Fear
and most recently
Democracy’s Edge: Choosing to Save Our Country by Bringing Democracy to Life
From Chapter 1:
Contemporary social critics see America divided—left versus right, conservative versus liberal, religious versus secular. I disagree and even find these framings destructive. They deflect us from the most critical and perhaps the only division we have to worry about.
It is that between those who believe in democracy—honest dialogue, basic fairness, mutual respect, inclusivity, and reciprocal responsibilities—and those who do not. In the latter category are those willing to put ends over means, violating these core principles in pursuit of an ultimate goal.
Antidemocrats here or abroad include those willing to demonize opponents and even to kill innocent people in pursuit of political power, an idealized future, or a superior afterlife.
At home they include members of our own government who allow illegal detention and torture of captives, arm known tyrants, meet secretly with private interests to hash out the public’s business, bar congressional colleagues from hearing rooms, interfere with voting by citizens likely to disagree with them, remove vital information from government Web sites, disguise government propaganda as real news, and employ Orwellian labels to mislead us.2
All are justified by perpetrators as necessary tactics to move us to their idealized future.
In the past two centuries, we human beings have proved to ourselves something vital to our survival: that we have the capacity to make democracy work. Within democracy’s framework of values, we are able to address even our biggest problems by working creatively with – and even gaining from – differences of opinion and culture.
Thus the only real threat we face now is that to democracy itself.
Democracy—negotiating interests by relying on fair play, honesty, and mutual respect—is powerful, I will argue; yet it is also fragile. Democracy can “be easily lost, but is never fully won,†Judge William Hastie once observed.
Social creatures, we humans are easily molded by those around us. Once the bullying begins, once dishonesty appears to succeed, it can quickly avalanche toward fascism, the term I use for a society ruled by the power of wealth and fear.
Glancing back over the twentieth century and now the early twenty-first, we see just how startlingly malleable we humans are. The Holocaust. Pol Pot. Bosnia. Rwanda. Abu Ghraib. Darfur. We see decent people commit unthinkable acts. We see decent people silent in the face of unthinkable acts.
Once acknowledging the potential for brutality in each of us, we become incapable of locating evil in “the otherâ€â€”in everyone else but not in ourselves. It is, yes, a terrifying thought, but also liberating, for this admission helps us appreciate the power of the culture we ourselves create to bring forth either the best or the worst in human beings.
And from there the survival task for humanity is clear: it is to envision and create institutions, from our schools to our media to our businesses, that foster our democratic selves—people able to feel and express empathy and to see through the walls of race, culture, and religion that divide us, people who know how to exert power while maintaining relationship.
Nutritious. Filling. Food for thought indeed.
Posted: November 24th, 2005 under General.
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