RE: praxeology of world change

David and friends,

 

on the subject of pessimistic worldviews versus worldviews of hope, I found something interesting in a book by a woman theologian of the "liberation theology" school. She has a chapter, entitled "Against the luxury of hopelessness". The general drift of the chapter is that "hopelessness" is a luxury cultivated by the (or, some of the) rich (she does not say "capitalists"). She tells all kinds of observations and stories from her work in Latin America. "My observation tells me that people were the more without hope the more they were intelligent, educated and knowledgeable. ... I found hope among those working at the base who had less of on overview, more simplistic analysis, less possibility for action...." After a lecture she gave in Lima, Peru, a theologian from the audience gave her a poem which summed up her own views [Leninists of wsn, just overlook the first word:]

 

God in the Garbage

 

I have been asked

what is the source of your hope.

I realize

it is not my hope

but the hope of the poor.

 

I go on

because of the faith

of these shit peasants

the cockroaches of this city

the rats in the street

 

who insist to survive

against every attempt

to crush them

to take their lives

which they love in their way

 

just as I cannot give up the hope

that we will not perish

 

[end of poem][the original was presumably in Spanish]

 

REFERENCE: Dorothee Soelle, Gott im Muell. Munich, Germany: dtv, 1992, p. 164; my translation]

 

Au revoir dans l'espace cyber

 

Gert Kohler

Oakville, Canada

 

snip..

I like this input.  I think Liberation Theologist-activists (and Greens) would be friends of a World Party, just as they were of Marxist "revolutionaries."  Consider the brilliance of Archbishop Romero's enclosed comments on "structural sin" that is, the immorality of the capitalist system, including the repressive comprador regimes supported by the US and the Pope, that assassinated him and thousands of others.

 

"And, like every. one who has the smallest degree of foresight, the slightest capacity for analysis, the church has also to denounce what has rightly been called 'structural sin:' those social, economic, cultural, and political structures that effectively drive the majority of our people onto the margins of society. When the church hears the cry of the oppressed it cannot but denounce the social structures that give rise to and perpetuate the misery from which the cry arises" (Archbishop Romero, Aug. 6, 1977).