Broadcast 6/23/2010 at 6:59 PM EDT (83 Listens, 82 Downloads, 1040 Itunes)
The Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Show Podcast
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Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center. His latest book, All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice, was published in 2009 by Soft Skull Press. He also is the author of Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007); The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege (City Lights, 2005); Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (City Lights, 2004); and Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream (Peter Lang, 2002). Jensen's articles can be found online at http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/index.html.
We live amidst multiple crises -- economic and political, cultural and ecological -- that pose a significant threat to human life as we understand it.There is no way to be awake to the depth of these crises without an emotional reaction. There is no way to be aware of the pain caused by these systemic failures without some experience of dread, depression, distress.
To be fully alive today is to live with anguish, not for one's own condition in the world but for the condition of the world, for a world that is in collapse.
Though I have felt this for some time I hesitated to talk about it in public, out of fear of being accused of being too negative or dismissed as apocalyptic. But more of us are breaking through that fear, and more than ever it's essential that we face this aspect of our political lives. To talk openly about this anguish should strengthen, not undermine, our commitment to political engagement -- any sensible political program to which we can commit for the long haul has to start with an honest assessment of reality.
click here for the rest of the article.
There is no way to be awake to the depth of these crises without an emotional reaction. There is no way to be aware of the pain caused by these systemic failures without some experience of dread, depression, distress.
To be fully alive today is to live with anguish, not for one's own condition in the world but for the condition of the world, for a world that is in collapse.
Though I have felt this for some time I hesitated to talk about it in public, out of fear of being accused of being too negative or dismissed as apocalyptic. But more of us are breaking through that fear, and more than ever it's essential that we face this aspect of our political lives. To talk openly about this anguish should strengthen, not undermine, our commitment to political engagement -- any sensible political program to which we can commit for the long haul has to start with an honest assessment of reality.
click here for the rest of the article.
Size: 23,698,286 -- 1 hrs, 5 min, 39 sec
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