Evidence Of Things Unseen: The Rise of a New Movement

EDITOR'S NOTE: The following piece is adapted from a speech Tom Hayden gave at the Bioneers Conference on Saturday, Oct. 19, 2003.

The chairman of our Joint Chiefs of Staff, Richard Myers, has said that "Intelligence doesn't necessarily mean something is true. That's not what intelligence is."

Keep that in mind as I discuss what James Baldwin called the "evidence of things unseen."

A few weeks ago in Cancun, I watched at the barricades as a South Korean farmer appeared to shake his fist in militant anger at the dispossession of his people. I did not see that he was committing ritual suicide with a knife. As far as I know, neither did anyone else. Hours later, the WTO issued a press release stating its "regret" at what it called the "self-inflicted" wound that resulted in the farm leader's death. I began to wonder how many other deaths we see but do not see. Farmers in India poisoning themselves with pesticides. Farmers in America quietly committing suicide. A rise in suicides among American soldiers in Iraq.

These unseen deaths should be seen as signs of the times. They are birth pangs as well. For example, in the past three weeks some 80 Bolivians have given their lives -- hardly the first time in their 500-year-long struggle -- but these cocoleros, these sweatshop workers, these indios, have overthrown the government over globalization issues and sent their mine-owning, American-trained president packing.

The evidence of things unseen. There is rising a new movement in the world. It is bigger than the movement of the 1960s. Yet it is barely seen by the experts and analysts. They look only at the behavior of institutions and politicians, not the underlying forces that eventually burst into visibility.

The first strand of this new movement is the global opposition to the war in Iraq and to an American empire.

One year ago this month, when over 100,000 demonstrators hit the streets in Washington DC, the New York Times reported that surprisingly few attended the anti-war march, perhaps out of fear of the sniper. National Public Radio repeated the story. How could they not see the 100,000? Apparently because such protests were not supposed to happen anymore. Both the Times and NPR were forced to apologize a few days later and report the huge turnout. Then, in another correction, the Times announced in February that there was a "second superpower" in the world in addition to the White House, which was world public opinion. By then 10 million people were demonstrating globally; two million in Rome, one million in London, 200,000 in Montreal in 20-degrees-below weather -- even a brave few in McMurdo Station in Antarctica.

The second strand is the global justice movement, which began with the Zapatistas on the day NAFTA took effect, then surfaced in Seattle in 1999. Those were called isolated events. Then came Genoa, Quebec City, Quito, Cancun, the world social forums in Porto Allegre. Far from isolated events, these were the historic battlegrounds of a new history being born.

Together these movements mount a challenge to an entire worldview. We are experiencing an enlargement of dignity, an enlargement of what we consider sacred and therefore off the table, not negotiable. The purported Masters of the Universe are becoming as obsolete as those who once claimed the divine right of kings. The earth and its people are not for sale; the environment is not just a storehouse of materials for utilitarian exploitation; and cultural identities can't be replaced as if they were commodities, whether the treasures of Babylon or the rainforests of the Amazon. This movement is saying that diversity will not be looted.

Why is this happening? No one really knows. Movements arise in mystery at the margins, eventually change the mainstream, are repressed or co-opted, and return to the oblivion we call official history.