beatings and murders uniformly sanctioned by the courts, the people have become callous. We must draw a line that says at this point we lose the thing that makes us human. Here we must
take our stand. That point was reached when hospitals, the historic sanctuary of mercy, became cold-blooded instruments of unjust law. We are referring to the admissions by hospitals that they have deported undocumented workers who have come to them for medical aid.
Crisis is a moment of instability when the future is determined. This instability has spread slowly from the economic to the political arena and then to the cultural life of the country. It is now gaining a stranglehold on our morality.
The beginnings of the economic crisis were expressed as a growing gap between the gigantic productive power of robots and globalization and the deepening poverty of the peoples of the earth. This in turn illuminated the beginnings of a political crisis. Politics is the expression, the handmaiden, of the economy. Its task is to clear the way for the expansion of the economy. Clearing the way called for a new imperialism that would fi nish the destruction of indigenous peoples, place the ecology on the global market, throw each worker into competition with every worker — creating their collective poverty. Undreamed of profi t for the few shrank the purchasing power of the many until only the state-sponsored arms industry guaranteed profi t. It secures its market place by staggering toward an Armageddon of nuclear world war.
Such callous destruction of the human-ness of humanity could only be accomplished by persuading the wretched of the earth to stand as the Roman gladiator, shouting, “Hail Caesar! We who are about to die salute you!” Persuading the poor to fi ght one another in the interest of their common enemy demanded a cultural offensive. This offensive was more than the daily glorifi cation of war. It was the subtle teaching that the lives of the peoples of the earth are worthless
compared to that of an American. This offensive has made the class of economic royalists acceptable. It has sanctioned the domination of politics by interlocking dynasties. It has sanctioined a freedom of expression if you have a billion dollars, or freedom to run for offi ce if the corporate giants approve. This has produced a cultural crisis. How long can the slaughter of the innocent by napalm, cluster bombs and bayonet be glorifi ed without creating its opposition? Throughout history, a cultural crisis has become a crisis of morality, since culture inevitably poses the question: What is right and what is wrong?
Today, that crisis can no longer be ignored.
People have tended to overlook the terrible realities of American slavery, genocide, imperialism and annexationist wars because the slave owners signed a statement that they believed in freedom and equality while all other rulers believed in the slavery they practiced. This tiny moral high ground placed us apart from the nations of the earth. We are in danger of losing the ground. When a nation knowingly does the wrong thing and then attempts to morally justify it — that nation is doomed. We are at the verge of the “fi nal confl ict.” The fi rst skirmish is to secure the moral high ground that comes with doing what is right.
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