Chris Hedges: A Time for Sublime Madness!

The planet we have assaulted will convulse with fury. The senseless greed of limitless capitalist expansion will implode the global economy. The decimation of civil liberties, carried out in the name of fighting terror, will shackle us to an interconnected security and surveillance state, that stretches from Moscow to Istanbul to New York. To endure what lies ahead, we will have to harness the human imagination. It was the human imagination that permitted African Americans during slavery and the Jim Crow era to transcend their physical condition. It was the human imagination that sustained Sitting Bull and Black Elk, as their land was seized, and their cultures were broken, and it was the human imagination that allowed the survivors in the Nazi death camps to retain the power of the sacred. It is the imagination that makes possible transcendence. Chants, work songs, spirituals, the blues, poetry, dance and art converged under slavery to nourish and sustain this imagination. These were the forces that, as Ralph Ellison wrote, "we had in place of freedom." The oppressed would be the first, for they know their fate, to admit that on a rational level, such a notion is absurd, but they also know that it is only through the imagination that they survive. Jewish inmates in Auschwitz reportedly put God on trial for the Holocaust, and then condemned God to death. A rabbi stood after the verdict to lead the evening prayers. African Americans and Native Americans, for centuries, had little control over their destinies. Forces of bigotry and violence kept them subjugated by whites. Suffering, for the oppressed, was tangible. Death was a constant companion, and it was only the imagination, as William Faulkner noted at the end of "The Sound and the Fury," that permitted them, unlike the novel's white Compson family, to "endure." The theologian James H Cone captures this in his masterpiece "The Cross and the Lynching Tree." Cone says that for oppressed blacks the cross was a "paradoxical religious symbol, because it inverts the wold's value system with the news that hope comes by way of defeat, that suffering and death do not have the last word, that the last shall be first and the first last."