The crazy people are often correct.
In some fields– business, investments, invention, the arts–, this is accepted as an obvious truth. “Crazy people” are likely often enough to become billionaires and have their faces appear on the cover of Forbes Magazine.
I think it needs to become a more widely-accepted truth in the world of politics, because it is as true there as in any other field of human endeavour. The “crazy people” are also just as likely to get a Nobel Peace Prize too.
“Crazy people”– extremists and activists– are a society’s early warning system. They are almost always identifying a legitimate problem that needs to be taken seriously. Often they get the solutions wrong– or the tactics– but I think that the political “fringe” is always telling us something important about what’s wrong with our world, and which needs to be addressed urgently.
The global warming people were right. The people I marched alongside in October 2002, protesting this idiotic Iraq war before it even started, were right. The activists fighting for the preservation of biodiversity and against habitat destruction are right. The people marching in Seattle in 1999 were right. The people who have been shouting about evil conspiracies lurking within the Bush Administration have been proven right. No, I don’t think Bush planned 9/11, but he has almost certainly done worse; Conyers hasn’t even scratched the surface yet of uncovering the criminal conduct of Bush, Rove, Cheney, and their cronies.
But I’m not just crowing. Even the activists I don’t agree with, I’d still advocate taking seriously. For example, I abhor fundamentalist religious fanatics– particularly the Christian fundamentalists here in the USA, as well as the Islamic fundamentalists in the Middle East. I consider them dangerous, and the Christian ones more immediately so. But they are identifying a very serious and legitimate problem: today’s corporate “globalized” consumer culture is morally and spiritually bankrupt, and ultimately unhealthy for humans. Their solution– theocracy– is nonsense; I will fight tooth and nail to avoid ever having to live in a theocracy. But I think they’ve been correct in identifying a legitimate problem: commerce is amoral, and something is seriously wrong with a society based entirely upon it.
Oh, and warmest congratulations to Al Gore.
