PopDev Director Betsy Hartmann speaks to activists

At the Bonfire of the Vanities, Follow the Sparks

Plenary address to Building the Movement for Reproductive Freedom conference
at Hampshire College on April 10, 2010.
Betsy Hartmann  ♦  Professor of Development Studies

I’d like to focus my remarks today on the end of the American Empire.  Drawing on the words of novelist Tom Wolfe, you might liken it to a bonfire of the vanities.  It’s scary and absurd, and as the winds blow ever more heavily from the Right, it threatens to rage out of control and become a wildfire destroying everyone and everything in its path. 

I had hoped that the president we elected last year might have tended the dying American empire better, let the fire die down slowly and gracefully so from its ashes could rise a vision for a more just society, a greener planet, a more peaceful world.  Instead, we have the escalation of the war in Afghanistan, a drill baby drill, radioactive energy policy, a seriously compromised health care plan, and business-as-usual bail-outs for the big boys.

 Of course it’s not all Obama’s fault.  Rupert Murdoch and his Fox News Know-Nothings, and Sarah Palin and her Tea Party popu-nuts are all pouring the ugly oil of rancor, racism, nativism and homophobia onto the flames.  So it’s drill, baby, drill, deeper and deeper and deeper, and burn, baby, burn, higher and higher and higher. And Annie, you better get your gun.

The heat is on, in other words.  Not just the political heat, but the heat of a planet heating up because so far the American Empire has done nothing serious to address its massive responsibility for climate change.

So what do we do?  Haul buckets of water to dampen the flames?  I don’t know about you, but my arms already ache from the effort and my heart aches too because I’m so tired and demoralized from trying to put out their fires. 

What do we do? How do we turn this dire situation into a moment of opportunity?  Every bonfire – even this atrocious bonfire of the vanities -- throws off sparks, bursts of illumination that puncture and punctuate the night.  When you get tired of watching the fire, follow the sparks and see where they fly.

In these last years of the dying American Empire, the challenge before us is to follow those sparks and create the new values, politics and institutions that can remake and reshape this country and its relationship to the planet.  All of you here are already doing that in a multitude of ways.  And in the plenaries, workshops and strategy sessions at this conference we can learn from each other’s experiences and movements.  But a central question remains before us:  how can we build better bridges between us, span the distances, create not just a solidarity economy but a solidarity ecology, a solidarity politics? 

Why, for example, does the peace movement still remain so isolated?  How can it be that some health care advocates were willing to sell reproductive rights and immigrant rights, not to mention a public option, down the river?  Why do so many environmentalists still blame the planet’s problems on overpopulation and refuse to acknowledge the role of corporate resource guzzling and militarism in degrading the environment and causing climate change?  What are the barriers of gender, race, class, age, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality we need to break down?  How do we have and expand these conversations in order to build a broad progressive movement that is ready to show the way when the bonfire finally dies out?

All politics is local, as they say. The wisdom in that observation has not been lost to the Radical Right, and should not be lost to us. It may be that now, more than ever, we need to build alliances from the bottom up, to engage in community bridging wherever we happen to live and work and study and play. It is through grassroots organizing that we may achieve the small but important victories that sustain us and find the new ideas that guide our way.  

And never underestimate the capacity of the local to spread far beyond municipal borders. This fall, for example, the town meeting of Amherst, Massachusetts made national news when it voted to accept detainees released from Guantanamo, challenging a Congressional ban on their settlement in the U.S.  And communities all over the country are telling their local police not to cooperate in repressive crackdowns on immigrants.

This is what democracy can look like. If there’s an impasse in Congress, try town government. Try the meeting rooms. Try the streets. Make art. Make music. Make change.  Collectively, our voices are loud, clear and true, beautiful and powerful sparks in this darkest of times.

So take the heat and turn the country around. Wherever you are, make history – right now.

Thank you.