Wisdom Quotes from
Grace Lee Boggs
I
think people are really looking for some way whereby we can grow our
souls rather than our economy. I think that at some level, people
recognize that growing our economy is destroying us. It's destroying us
as human beings, it's destroying our planet. I think there's a great
human desire for solutions, for profound solutions — and that nothing
simple will do it. It really requires some very great searching of our
souls.
The
main reason why Western civilization lacks Spirituality, or an
awareness of our interconnectedness with one another and the universe,
according to Gandhi, is that it has given priority to economic and
technological development over human and community development.
Real poverty is the belief that the purpose of life is acquiring wealth and owning things. Real wealth is not the possession of property but the recognition that our deepest need, as human beings, is to keep developing our natural and acquired powers to relate to other human beings.
Being
a victim of oppression in the United States is not enough to make you
revolutionary, just as dropping out of your mother's womb is not enough
to make you human. People who are full of hate and anger against their
oppressors or who only see Us versus Them can make a rebellion but not a
revolution. The oppressed internalize the values of the oppressor.
Therefore, any group that achieve power, no matter how oppressed, is not
going to act differently from their oppressors as long as they have not
confronted the values that they have internalized and consciously
adopted different values.
History is not the past. It is the stories we tell about the past. How we tell these stories — triumphantly or self-critically, metaphysically or dialectally — has a lot to do with whether we cut short or advance our evolution as human beings.
At the core of the problem is an obsolete factory model of schooling that sorts, tracks, tests, and rejects or certifies working-class children as if they were products on an assembly line. The purpose of education, I said, cannot be only to increase the earning power of the individual or to supply workers for the ever-changing slots of the corporate machine. Children need to be given a sense of the 'unique capacity of human beings to shape and create reality in accordance with conscious purposes and plans.
We
are beginning to understand that the world is always being made fresh
and never finished; that activism can be the journey rather than the
arrival; that's struggle doesn't always have to be confrontational but
can take the form of reaching out to find common ground with the many
others in our society who are also seeking ways out from alienation,
isolation, privatization, and dehumanization by corporate globalization.
With the end of empire, we are coming to an end of the epoch of rights. We have entered the epoch of responsibilities, which requires new, more socially-minded human beings and new, more participatory and place-based concepts of citizenship and democracy.
Civil and voting rights for blacks didn’t come from the White House or from masses demonstrating in front of the White House. They came after the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955–56, the Freedom Rides in 1961, the Children’s Crusade in Birmingham in 1963, the Mississippi Freedom Summer and Freedom Schools in 1964, and the Selma-to-Montgomery march in 1965. In other words, they came only after hundreds of thousands of black Americans and their white supporters had accepted the challenge and risks of ourselves making or becoming the changes we want to see in the world. Women’s leadership in the public sphere didn’t come from the White House or from CEOs. It came only after millions of women came together in small consciousness-raising groups to share stories of our “second sex” lives. Today’s good news is that Americans in all walks of life have begun to create another America from the ground up in many unforeseen ways. In our bones we sense that this is no ordinary time. It is a time of deep change, not just of social structure and economy but also of ourselves.
We urgently need to bring to our communities the limitless capacity to love, serve, and create for and with each other. We urgently need to bring the neighbor back into our hoods, not only in our inner cities but also in our suburbs, our gated communities, on Main Street and Wall Street, and on Ivy League campuses.
A revolution that is based on the people exercising their creativity in the midst of devastation is one of the great historical contributions of humankind.
I
am often asked what keeps me going after all these years. I think it is
the realization that there is no final struggle. Whether you win or
lose, each struggle brings forth new contradictions, new and more
challenging questions. As Alice Walker put it in one of my favorite
poems: I must love the questions themselves as Rilke said like locked
rooms full of treasures to which my blind and groping key does not yet
fit.
As Jimmy Boggs used to remind us, revolutions are made out of love for people and for place. He often talked about loving America enough to change it. 'I love this country,' he used to say, 'not only because my ancestors' blood is in the soil but because of what I believe it can become.' Love isn't just something you feel. It's something you do everyday when you go out and pick the paper and bottles scattered the night before on the corner, when you stop and talk to a neighbor, when you argue passionately for what you believe in with whoever will listen, when you call a friend to see how they're doing, when you write a letter to the newspaper, when you give a speech and give 'em hell, when you never stop believing that we can all be more than what we are. In other words, Love isn't about what we did yesterday; it's about what we do today and tomorrow and the day after.
— Grace Lee Boggs
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