Thursday, January 28, 2010

Howard Zinn, 1922-2010

Before we humans got too damn smart for our own good, someone like Howard Zinn would have been rightfully called a “saint."

I was fortunate enough to know Howard a little. He wrote a blurb for my first book, Saving Private Power, in 2000...not only calling me “iconoclastic and bold,” but lending me instant credibility with one paragraph. Also, when I later asked him to write an introduction for another of my books, A Gigantic Mistake, he replied with a short comment about not liking introductions. He preferred to dig right into a book, he said. I promptly asked if I could use that comment as my book’s “anti-introduction,” and he loved the idea.

Howard Zinn sez: “The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”

He also sez: “As dogma disintegrates, hope appears. Because it seems that human beings, whatever their backgrounds, are more open than we think, that their behavior cannot be confidently predicted from their past, that we are all creatures vulnerable to new thoughts, new attitudes. And while such vulnerability creates all sorts of possibilities, both good and bad, its very existence is exciting. It means that no human being should be written off, no change in thinking deemed impossible.”


Howard Zinn changed...from soldier to sage

Losing him brought to mind this quote from I.F. Stone: “If you expect to see the final results of your work, you simply have not asked a big enough question.”

+++

Poem: “Our game plan was far from clever"


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Posted on 01/28 at 05:26 AM
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