Grace Lee Boggs' direction for activists

Interviewed the day after Martin Luther King Jr. day, Grace Lee Boggs, the 92-year-old activist from Detroit, describes these difficult times as "an opportunity to look at ourselves and reorder our priorities."

"There's a planetary emergency. There's a calamity of our war, of the occupation of Iraq. There's the tanking of the economy. And all these things are coming together at a time when King's call for a radical revolution of values against not only racism, but materialism and militarism, has a resonance that it hasn't had in previous years."

Boggs is trying to "encourage the capacities, the energy, the creativity, the imagination, that exists in people at the grassroots to redefine and rebuild our society. If we want to live in freedom from terror, we have to begin looking at ourselves, redefining who we are, redefining who this country is and reassessing what it is within our capacity to do."

Listen carefully. Perhaps listen several times to her call for local leaders to build and participate in transformative change within their spheres of influence.

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• Democracy
• Now
• activism
• Martin
• Luther
• King
• global
• warming
• Iraq
• war
• recession
• racism
• materialism
• militarism
• priorities

[LuisLomeliMD]

We do "have to lead by example." To effect health care reform, we must challenge the system through law and public leadership. There is no political solution to our health care mess. Grace Lee Boggs is a truly amazing American and she has such intellectual clarity at 92.