Unbought and unbossed

"Unbought and unbossed" were the wise words of pioneering American politician Shirley Chisholm around the time she ran in 1972 as a candidate for presidential nominee for the Democrats. The earthshaking newness of her act - a black woman seeking the highest office in American politics - remains a powerful historical event, though it has been robustly and certainly forgotten outside a few university courses and a couple documentary retrospectives. Strange that both as a woman and black person, a doubly marginal person in American society if ever there was one, Ms. Chisholm's ballsy move has faded into obscurity. Given how excited our twittering, facebooking, blogging culture is about social innovation, it's strange that such an iconic event has been forgotten and ignored, its potency as a radical act of political and social expression withered and gone. But a few decades have passed since then, and it would seem that our technologically teeming, instantly engaged era, we need the same old, same old - that is men - to tell us what's what, and to push the boundaries of social insidership a little farther out, where they might rope in a few more deformed, less than paradigmatic individuals into the white man's domain of normalcy.

I only discovered Chisholm's story myself by accident. I was astounded to watch as this tiny African American woman expressed values as ennobling and enlightened as any which come out of Barack Obama's eloquent speeches. And while in a way I'm grateful that such calls for tolerance, compassion and curiosity to understand differences are being uttered at all, it is dismaying (just a little) whenever I relearn that it's all been said before, again and again and again. Why the inertia? So the truth of virtues - tolerance, compassion, curiosity - depends more on the branding, how they're packaged and pitched than on the truth of the content itself? As I ranted in an earlier post, we seem quicker than ever to celebrate whatever comes to mind as an historic event. Everything is of historic importance until a few seconds pass and new historic events and entities need to be identified and praised. And so it goes.

Our short attention spans, and the natural but erroneous feeling we all have that the times we happen to live in are of monumental importance, act as a leaven on our ideas. It lightens, weakens and loosens our grasp of truths that were as true for our grandparents as they are for us. History is not linear, an incalculable though simple matter of chaining events to events. I would also not make the claim that it is cyclical, that what goes around comes around, though I do think there's something deeply true about repeating mistakes once known but later forgotten. We need to look at Shirley Chisholm's story and ask ourselves, "Why is change taking so long?" Just as we need to remember our elementary school years when our teachers encouraged us to turn of lights and taps, and told us of the insidious perils of the greenhouse effect. The truths of our society's ongoing inequality, over consumption and indifference in the face of short-sighted ecological destruction have been known for a few generations at least. What's taking us so long to change?