RADICAL HISTORIAN HOWARD ZINN:
Changing Minds, One at a Time

From the Progressive:

That question leads me to a larger one, which I suspect most of us have pondered: What does it take to bring a turnaround in social consciousness--from being a racist to being in favor of racial equality, from being in favor of Bush's tax program to being against it, from being in favor of the war in Iraq to being against it? We desperately want an answer, because we know that the future of the human race depends on a radical change in social consciousness.

It seems to me that we need not engage in some fancy psychological experiment to learn the answer, but rather to look at ourselves and to talk to our friends. We then see, though it is unsettling, that we were not born critical of existing society. There was a moment in our lives (or a month, or a year) when certain facts appeared before us, startled us, and then caused us to question beliefs that were strongly fixed in our consciousness--embedded there by years of family prejudices, orthodox schooling, imbibing of newspapers, radio, and television.

This would seem to lead to a simple conclusion: that we all have an enormous responsibility to bring to the attention of others information they do not have, which has the potential of causing them to rethink long-held ideas. It is so simple a thought that it is easily overlooked as we search, desperate in the face of war and apparently immovable power in ruthless hands, for some magical formula, some secret strategy to bring peace and justice to the land and to the world.

And

But there is still a large pool of Americans, beyond the hard-core minority who will not be dissuaded by any facts (and it would be a waste of energy to make them the object of our attention), who are open to change. For them, it would be important to measure Bush's grandiose inaugural talk about the "spread of liberty" against the historical record of American expansion.

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That's really one of the major missions for Real Art. When I first started blogging, I posted a couple of essays here and there that were trying to take apart conservative arguments, as articulated by conservative writers--in the back of my mind, these posts were aimed at any conservative readers who might wander into my little corner of cyberspace. That got boring fast, however, because posts like this always had to be argued in the terms set up by the conservative writer. In other words, I felt really constrained by the fact that I was essentially arguing on their turf. I couldn't really go anywhere, I felt, with these kind of posts, and I really didn't think I was going to be changing any minds with this approach. So, I've decided to aim, for the most part, at liberals and moderates, who are probably much more willing to listen to what I have to say. I don't know that I've actually managed to write anything that's caused anybody to rethink his point of view, but the hope of doing that is one of the things that keeps me hitting the keyboard day after day.

At the very least, it's ego-affirming.

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