Journalist, author and activist Chris Hedges took time during his September 13, 2014 appearance at Fighting Bob Fest in Baraboo, Wisconsin, to talk about the human race’s sustainability or potential collapse in the age of unstoppable climate change, corporate domination, and perpetual war.
In this 8-minute interview, Hedges is not optimistic and suggests that we will need to start living in a different way. "Frankly", says Hedges, “we don’t have any time left.”
His first words address our relationship with the ecosystem and profligate consumption.
“Not only of fossil fuels, but just of things”, states Hedges” then adds, “it may mean materially we are more impoverished but it does not mean spiritually we are more impoverished.”
Chris says, progressives and liberals need to get over the idea that electing more Democrats will reverse the tide in favor of the “forces of death”—or even slow it.
“The Democratic Party transformed itself into the Republican Party which forced the Republican Party to become insane,” Hedges says. “I don’t see how you can look at those 16 years (of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama’s presidencies) and say the Democratic Party has been anything but a corporate puppet; maybe a sane corporate puppet….but still a puppet.”
Instead, we should “forget about elective politics on all but the local level,” Hedges says, and focus our energies on creating, promoting and sustaining grassroots movements that draw attention to the dire consequences of corporate domination. Citing women’s suffrage, the labor movement and the anti-slavery liberty party, Hedges says taking power has never been a matter of holding office.
“All of the political openings in the United States came through mass movements that never achieved formal positions of power,” he says.
Instead, Hedges says, we must build movements to serve as a check on power and commit to doing all of the hard work that movement building entails: “If we are not willing to sacrifice, stand up and mobilize for the forces of life then we won’t have any life.”
