Where in the World Are We? Elections, the Color Line, the Decline of Empire and Fireflies

My middle son, Malik, was five-years old when my life partner/his father Bill got his doctorate.All four of us waited outside during Bill's dissertation defense with balloons and flowers.When Bill came out, Malik raced over to him, jumped up into his arms and then said, "Poppy, you're a doctor, right?But you're not the kind of doctor who can help anyone."[1] That, of course, remains the dilemma for all graduates.You graduates are, we anticipate, the kind who can help.Where in the world are we?The graduating classes of Summer 2005 entered college or high school just at the turn of the millennium in the long-ago autumn of 2001, looking forward with the promise and privileges of stepping forth from the richest, most powerful, globally-dominant nation in human history.You have-as young adults today-almost no memory of the cold war, let alone a time of American isolationism or economic depression.You were awash in abundance relative to the rest of the world, even those of you who worked and sacrificed to graduate.You were raised in, soaked in, and shaped by an era of American triumphalism, empire, privilege, and apparent peace.Yet you have graduated, just four years later, with that myopic worldview in ashes.Just as you began your student years, the brutal, criminal attacks of September 11, 2001 tore open the illusions; the shredded economy and loss of jobs, the consequences of deregulation and devolution that bankrupted state and local governments, the relentless punishment and imprisoning of over two million of your fellow citizens in America, flagrant corporate plunder and criminality, rolling blackouts, the apparently permanent war on terrorism, the shock and awe occupation of Iraq, systematic and degrading detention without trial, torture, and extrajudicial assassinations, and the establishment of a crescent of new U.S. military bases across the Middle East and South Asia-all have transformed whatever blissful myths were harbored as you prepared to enter college or high school.Yet you graduates were not sound asleep.Many, during your past four years, have been struggling to come awake to a world in flames.Although your school years were characterized by the colossal new world ordering of war and occupation, you also came to connect with the ripples of insurgent resistance to power, the so-called "globalization from below"-manifest in the world social forums in Puerto Allegre and Mumbai, the international movement to abolish violence against women, the global effort for a safe environment, the surprisingly fierce partnerships for human rights, insurgent public health efforts to address the HIV-AIDs epidemic, the U.N. Durban Conference on Racism and Xenophobia, the campaign to abolish child soldiers, the popular peasant struggles against being charged for water in Bolivia, the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela, and the monumental global opposition to war on February 15, 2003.These are the incipient and activist communities with global reach who simultaneously represent the humanist alternative, the emancipatory.The inability to stop the war in Iraq flowed into popular efforts to defeat Bush's '04 re-election.This year, hundreds of thousands of young people had their first experiences with organizing, with talking politics to strangers, with knocking on doors in neighborhoods, with working a campaign in the buildup to the 2004Where in the World Are We? Elections, the Color Line, the Decline of Empire and Fireflies