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7/9/2025, 10:24:55 PM
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I will share some of the information I read from Chomsky as a counter to your arguments OP
>Well, the Thirties were an exciting time-it was deep economic depression, everybody was out of a job, but the funny thing about it was, it was
hopeful. It's very different today. When you go into the slums today, it's nothing like what it was: it's desolate, there is no hope. Anybody who's my
age or more will remember, there was a sense of hopefulness back then: maybe there was no food, but there were possibilities, there were things that
could be done. You take a walk through East Harlem today, there was nothing like that at the depths of the Depression-this sense that there's
nothing you can do, it's hopeless, your grandmother has to stay up at night
to keep you from being eaten by a rat. That kind of thing didn't exist at the depths of the Depression; There's really something qualitatively different about contemporarypoverty, I think. Some of you must share these experiences. I mean, I was a kid back then, so maybe my perspective was different. But I remember
when I would go into the apartment of my cousins-you know, broken family, no job, twenty people living in a tiny apartment-somehow it was
hopeful. It was intellectually alive, it was exciting, it was just very different from today somehow.
>WOMAN: Do you attribute that to the raised political consciousness of that era as compared to now?
>It's possible: there was a lot of union organizing back then, and the struggles were very brutal. I remember it well. Like, one of my earliest childhood memories is of taking a trolley car with my mother and seeing the police wade into a strike of women pickets outside a Philadelphia textile mill, and beating them up-that's a searing memory. And the poverty was extreme: I remember rag-pickers coming to the door begging for money, lots of things like that. So it was not pretty by any means. But it was also not hopeless. Somehow that's a tremendous difference: the slums are now hopeless, there's nothing to do except prey on one another.
Thus according to Chomsky, politics used to be more hopeful
I will share some of the information I read from Chomsky as a counter to your arguments OP
>Well, the Thirties were an exciting time-it was deep economic depression, everybody was out of a job, but the funny thing about it was, it was
hopeful. It's very different today. When you go into the slums today, it's nothing like what it was: it's desolate, there is no hope. Anybody who's my
age or more will remember, there was a sense of hopefulness back then: maybe there was no food, but there were possibilities, there were things that
could be done. You take a walk through East Harlem today, there was nothing like that at the depths of the Depression-this sense that there's
nothing you can do, it's hopeless, your grandmother has to stay up at night
to keep you from being eaten by a rat. That kind of thing didn't exist at the depths of the Depression; There's really something qualitatively different about contemporarypoverty, I think. Some of you must share these experiences. I mean, I was a kid back then, so maybe my perspective was different. But I remember
when I would go into the apartment of my cousins-you know, broken family, no job, twenty people living in a tiny apartment-somehow it was
hopeful. It was intellectually alive, it was exciting, it was just very different from today somehow.
>WOMAN: Do you attribute that to the raised political consciousness of that era as compared to now?
>It's possible: there was a lot of union organizing back then, and the struggles were very brutal. I remember it well. Like, one of my earliest childhood memories is of taking a trolley car with my mother and seeing the police wade into a strike of women pickets outside a Philadelphia textile mill, and beating them up-that's a searing memory. And the poverty was extreme: I remember rag-pickers coming to the door begging for money, lots of things like that. So it was not pretty by any means. But it was also not hopeless. Somehow that's a tremendous difference: the slums are now hopeless, there's nothing to do except prey on one another.
Thus according to Chomsky, politics used to be more hopeful
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