Radicals Untie

sarcastic satire by Myron Litwak
June 14, 2002
Last night I went to the  center to attend an event put on by a public policy group about our glbt radical movement. The panel discussion, by radical writers and others, focused on the historical precedents of the radical queer movement as well as the implications and visions for its future course considering the current political situation. I went filled with anticipation at being amongst gray haired intellectual street revolutionaries of the old days and hearing what they thought ought to be the course of the movement in the brave new world we now find ourselves in. Sad to say, the level of dedicated delusion was appalling. Each of the well-fed and dressed mostly white middle class radicals tried to out radicalize each other, direly declaring that the comfortable capitalist apathy of the middle class had to be challenged. Oh dear. The moderator, a distinguished looking elderly woman, was dressed in a suit and tie –a most distinct symbol of capitalist upper middle class identity and aspiration. They spoke of the need to find ways to include representatives of all oppressed peoples in the world in their vision of the future of the radical queer led and inspired movement. Some, who have comfortable incomes working within service provider organizations, spoke of the trap of ‘compromise’ that must be made with the establishment when one uses government funds to provide services for the poor under-served, uninsured and oppressed. It was suggested that their organizations might now escape that trap by moving away from providing such services and moving into ‘organizing’ the new movement which presumably would free the under-served, uninsured, and oppressed.

It is a well known fact that throughout history those radicals who have led the battle cry for change have always been rather well-off upper middle class educated intellectuals. The poor and oppressed, engaged in the daily struggle to survive, have never had time for such leisure activities. Whenever revolution has come, the genuine poor have always been the first to immediately suffer horribly, in fleeing the battle zones, from starvation and death in the violent crossfire between armed idealists and demagogues.

The idea that all oppressed peoples must be included in the revolution to come, I infer to mean those that our establishment calls terrorists (although that was never actually said). The implication, on the panel, was that the glbt radical movement was born out of the Stonewall Riot and other active non-passive elements of the past protest movements. And that therefore implies that there is an equivalence with current oppressed people’s uprisings with whom our intellectual panelists would have solidarity. The fact is that the Stonewall Riot and other such events were all totally non-violent acts of Civil Disobedience. There is absolutely no equivalence between those who burn a trash can or break a window and those who send their own children to blow up bombs to kill people in cafes, busses, airplanes, and tall buildings. If these idealists can’t see the difference then their delusions are as damned to horror as the corrupt totalitarian Soviet system was.

Poor oppressed people do not need deadly revolution; they need food, education, safe places to live, and the right to decent medical care services in an environment where they can attain skills and the means to a peaceful life. A great deal of progress towards those goals has been achieved by dedicated leftists who have now created huge organizations serving and educating the poor and oppressed with funds negotiated from established civilization. I fail to see the purpose to abandoning all that for the sake of idealized ideological struggle.

I fear that were these dedicated idealists ever to win their revolution nothing would change except that the roles of the oppressors and the oppressed would be reversed. Their friends would be freed and their enemies would be imprisoned.

My protest history began at the age of 13 in 1960 when I, as a little middle class white boy, marched with the NAACP. I was bloodied by rocks thrown at my head by racist adults who were enraged by my participation. I later worked for women’s rights, gay rights, AIDS funding, and now transgender rights, among others, in a lifetime of involvement in social causes and socialist idealism. I was so leftist that when I spoke, communists blushed. But, yesterday, I was essentially rejected as not worth talking to nor listening to since, after all, I am a worthless privileged white male. In their revolutionary thirst for inclusiveness their level of exclusion and rejection seems to have exceeded their lack of logic.