The Making of a Radical<\/em>. He was 89 years old at the time. References to his youth and to the early part of the century offer his perspective from the early 1900s.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
\u201cThe perfect parrot was the perfect pupil \u2026. As students in grammar school or in high school we seldom question the truth of any statement. Instead, our concern was to get each phrase exactly as the teacher or textbook stated it \u2026. Imagine the effect of years of such training on the developing mind. The habit of mental conformity becomes almost ineradicable. I was merely one of generations of victims. How many teachers suggested to us that the established order was not all that it might be? Even the possibility of change was hinted at only vaguely. We were not rebels. We were not pioneers. We were not even enthusiastic or devout copyists. We were mere discs on which the language of our generation was cut. At certain intervals, called examination periods, we were expected to reproduce this language, word by word and paragraph by paragraph.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u201cThe American Way was not based on \u2018life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,\u2019 but upon the determination of business men to hold down wages and push up profits. The American Way was designed to make the rich richer while it kept the poor in their places.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u201cI live in the United States only because my post of duty is there \u2026. I am ashamed of any connection with the oligarchy which presently misgoverns, exploits, plunders, and corrupts the United States and the world.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u201cAs an individual, I continue to do what I can. I go about, talk, and write in the face of ignorance, inertia, escapism. I believe there is a growing awareness of the crisis and the gravity of the menace hanging over humanity. \u2026 My personal contribution is increasingly a form of foreign aid \u2014 a contribution to fellow citizens whom I seem not to know. They are a people without history, misled, deluded, inexperienced, baffled. They are people who are turning more and more away from reason and foresight to instinct, emotion, and pathetically desperate efforts to escape a fate that is closing in around them as a fog envelops a ship at sea.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u201cWith increasing awareness of the real situation there has grown up in me a conviction that I should do something about it. I have tried talking, writing, speaking, lecturing, and have been bypassed and ignored by my fellow Americans. I continue to do what I can, at every opportunity. I have spoken my lines as I have thought them out and learned them. I continue to offer my help to my fellow Americans as one would offer help to a drowning man who every moment is being carried farther away by an irresistible current. I offer this aid gladly, hopefully, anxiously. Like the Ancient Mariner, I am saying to preoccupied passersby: you have chosen and are following a path that leads to your destruction and probably to the destruction of hundreds of millions of your fellows. I have advised, opposed, warned, decried, denounced. You continue on your way to perdition. You rush on, unheeding. I continue to warn. You do not look and do not listen. You do not see the infinitely rich possibilities of life, lying unused at your feet. You go your own way \u2014 the way that millions of humans have gone before you, lured and corrupted by the glass beads and printed calicos which civilized societies offers to its devotees.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u201cI have turned my back on the American Oligarchy, the American Way of Life, and American Century, the American Empire, western civilization. The entire chain of civilizations have brought a little light, learning, joy, and hope to a very few human beings while multitudes lived and died in darkness, ignorance, misery, despair. I have turned my back on this short-sighted, opportunistic acceptance of that which is, because I am convinced that we could reach out, create, touch, and grasp a better life and make it ours, if only we would put forth the effort.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u201cI have burned the last bridge which connected me with the American Way of Life because I am convinced that the ideas, devices, techniques, and institutions of civilization have been tried time after time and found wanting. They are superfluous and obsolete because better ways are already in being, available to any who will turn their backs on the past and face the future hopefully, confidently, creatively, and conscious of the need for concerted, radical action.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u201cThe affluent, drugged, debauched, corrupted, polluted, deluded nation is a country I never envisioned in my youth. It is an alien and hostile land. When I return to it I cannot say happily, \u2018I am going home.\u2019 Instead, I must gird myself and prepare to return to a foreign and none too pleasant habitat.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u201cTeaching is my job. Teaching, in its largest sense means searching out the truth, telling it to all who are willing to learn, and building it into the life of the community. Truth is often unpleasant, annoying, and unpalatable to those who hold a disproportionate amount of worldly goods, who are power hungry, and who are pushing a cause to the detriment of the many. So they try to avoid truth, to cover it up, to forget it. It is the job of the teaching profession, of which I have been a lifetime member, to keep on uncovering the truth, reminding the rich and powerful of its character and its significance, bringing it to public attention, and arguing that it be made the cornerstone of local, regional, national and planet-wide public life.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
More than a century later, I am afflicted with a form of radicalism similar to that which plagued Mencken and Nearing. I am ignored or disparaged when I point out the actions taken to prop up an empire in decline, the obvious signs of human-population overshoot, and the likely near-term results, as well as the root causes of overshoot.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
How radical are you? Do you love life, including the continuation of your own?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
AVID Audio Course Description (Conservation Biology) Latest Peer-Reviewed Journal Article: McPherson, Guy R., Beril Sirmack, and Ricardo Vinuesa. March 2022. Environmental thresholds for mass-extinction events. Results in Engineering (2022), doi: https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1016\/j.rineng.2022.100342. Draft script: You probably recognize the symbol, though you might have forgotten its name:\u00a0\u221a When I would write the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"__cvm_playback_settings":[],"__cvm_video_id":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"post_series":[],"class_list":["post-31686","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry","no-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/guymcpherson.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31686","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/guymcpherson.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/guymcpherson.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/guymcpherson.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/guymcpherson.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31686"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/guymcpherson.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31686\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31709,"href":"https:\/\/guymcpherson.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31686\/revisions\/31709"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/guymcpherson.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/guymcpherson.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/guymcpherson.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31686"},{"taxonomy":"post_series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/guymcpherson.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post_series?post=31686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}