Pseudo-Culture

Pseudo-culture is one of 8 common methods of psycho-economic exploitation [2].

Pseudo-culture exploitation occurs when a particular group which is motivated by socio-sentiment to exploit others, tries to destroy the local cultural expressions of other groups.  The group forcibly imposes its language, dress and ideas on other groups, and thus paves the way for exploitation by paralysing those people psychologically [1].  

If some people, by virtue of their wealth, impose vulgar cinemas and dramas on others, this will break the latters’ spines and they will become paralyzed.  As a result those paralyzed, spineless people will thenceforth never be able to stand unitedly against cultural or any other kind of exploitation [1].  

Pseudo-culture is exemplified by pornographic literature which debases people’s mind and particularly undermines the vitality of the youth [2].  

“Pseudo” means to some extent like the original but not exactly like the original [4].  Culture is the collective form of all the expressions of life and those activities expressing the subtler and sweeter aspects of life are generally called “culture”.  But with pseudo-culture the lower sentiments and expressions are utilized in order to paralyze and exploit a group of people, and it is propagated in an attractive and sophisticated way.

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1. “Cultural Exploitation through Pseudo-Culture

Now, there is another aspect:  culture.  As you know, the subtler and sweeter expressions of human life are generally termed “culture.” Suppose someone offers you food:  you may eat without washing your hands and feet, or you may eat after washing thoroughly.  The refined manner of eating in a hygienic way is called the “culture of eating”, while those activities expressing the subtler and sweeter aspects of life are called “culture” in a general sense.  

Human culture is one, though there are some local variations in its expression.  But a particular group which is motivated by socio-sentiment to exploit others, tries to destroy the local cultural expressions of other groups.  It forcibly imposes its language, dress and ideas on other groups, and thus paves the way for exploitation by paralysing those people psychologically.  This is how people guided by socio-sentiment perpetuate exploitation in cultural life.

This is occurring throughout the world.  Is it not your noble duty to save these simple and persecuted people from exploitation?  Certainly it is.  Those of you who did not understand this before, now do understand it clearly; or you will come to understand it later from others.  Human beings must be saved.  Why should innocent people be forced to live like sacrificial lambs?  This must not be tolerated.  

Suppose a particular group has a high standard of arts (theatre, cinema, etc.), but the number of rich people in that group is comparatively few.  The culture of another group, on the other hand, is very undeveloped, but among them there is a greater number of wealthy people.  Now, the latter group wants to maintain its exploitation over the group that has a more developed cultural heritage, because one way that psycho-economic exploitation can paralyse people in the psychic sphere is cultural exploitation – to impose vulgar cinemas and dramas upon those good people.  

As you know, the mind has a natural tendency to degrade itself; it flows more easily downwards than upwards.  So if some people, by virtue of their wealth, impose vulgar cinemas and dramas on others, this will break the latters’ spines and they will become paralysed.  And those paralysed, spineless people will thenceforth never be able to stand unitedly against cultural or any other kind of exploitation.  They will never be able to do so, because mentally they will be completely dead – their capacity to raise their heads in protest will have been crushed forever.  How can they raise their heads again?   

This exploitation in the cultural sphere is accomplished by the propagation of pseudo-culture.  Every honest, virtuous, rational person must fight against this pseudo-culture, and inspire others to do the same.  If this is not done, the future of humanity will be sealed.  It is proper for human beings to struggle for political freedom, for social emancipation; but if their cultural backbone is broken, then all their struggles will end in nothing – like offering ghee into a fire that has died out.  

If one’s spine is shattered, it is impossible to hold one’s head erect.  Can those whose necks and backs are crushed under the weight of pseudo-culture, be expected to hold their heads high in any sphere of life?  Hence it is the bounden duty of every rational person to save innocent people from pseudo-culture.” – PR Sarkar, 21 March 1982, Calcutta, Prout in a Nutshell Part 8, Exploitation and Pseudo-Culture (Discourse 7), Cultural Exploitation through Pseudo-Culture  

2. “Psycho-economic exploitation is the latest form of dangerous and all-devouring capitalist exploitation.  It is a special type of exploitation which first weakens and paralyses people psychologically in various ways, and then exploits them economically.  Some of the methods of psycho-economic exploitation include, first, the suppression of the indigenous language and culture of local people; secondly, the extensive propagation of pseudo-culture, exemplified by pornographic literature which debases people’s mind and particularly undermines the vitality of the youth; thirdly, the imposition of numerous restrictions on women, forcing them to be economically dependent on men; fourthly, an unpsychological education system with frequent political interference by vested interests; fifthly, the negation of dharma in the name of secularism; sixthly, the balkanization of society into numerous castes and groups; seventhly, the damaging of society by the use of unnatural and harmful methods of birth control; and eighthly, placing the control of different mass media, such as newspapers, radio and television, in the hands of capitalists.   Both intellectual exploitation and psycho-economic exploitation are great dangers to the human race today.  

To counteract this threat, powerful popular sentiments will have to be generated immediately for the liberation of intellect.  For this, the first requisite factor is that intellectuals must keep their intellects pure and unblemished.  Casting aside all their inertia and prejudices, intellectuals will have to mix with the common people and engage themselves in their welfare.  They will have to assist the common people in their development and extend their support to all anti-exploitation movements.  This approach will help to root out exploitation, stabilize the structure of society and expand the intellectual standard of the common people.  Human society will move forward to a brilliant future with rapid steps.” – PR Sarkar, 1981, Calcutta, Prout in a Nutshell Part 13, Capitalism in Three Spheres, Intellectual Capitalism  

3. “Imperialism is anti-human.  It runs counter to the spirit of Neo- humanism and the ethics of human life.  It is detrimental to pramá saḿvrddhi, pramá rddhi and pramá siddhi in human society.  In a word, it thwarts human progress and creates global wars and all sorts of divisive and destructive forces in society.  

Imperialism is a negative force, a destructive phenomenon, which generates exploitative and unjust conditions in individual and collective life.  Such a poisonous radiation of black force attracts negative forces like negative microvita.  Those negative microvita intensify and escalate the demonic activities of imperialism in all aspects of human society – art, literature, education, trade, commerce, industry, agriculture, morality and social relations.  They cultivate a psychology based on slavery, inferiority complex, pseudo-culture and psycho-economic exploitation, and in certain cases are the cause of nihilism and cynicism.” – PR Sarkar, 26 March 1987, Calcutta, Prout in a Nutshell Part 9, 

4. ” “Pseudo” is a Latin word of German origin.  It does not mean “false”.  It means “to some extent like the original but not exactly like the original”.  – PR Sarkar, 14 July 1988, Calcutta, Prout in a Nutshell Part 15, Defects of Communism – Section C

Explore this and other articles covering alternative economics, ethical leadership, economic democracy, and a society without the weal and woe of social and economic vicissitudes HERE

GOP Leadership Contest: The Likeability Factor

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Pundits seem to love to profess multitudes of differing explanations for the see-sawing GOP leadership contest that has seen, respectively, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain and now Newt Gingrich surge to the front of the pack in challenging Mitt Romney. These alternative explanations range from the simple to the complex, the realistic to the ridiculous. 

At the risk of simply indulging in this same game of choosing my favorite factor that is determining the outcome of this contest, I think the dominant factor is quite simply the likeability and personality of the candidates as expressed chiefly through the numerous debates as well as through the morning talk shows and other media appearances. Most of the factors the pundits identify seem to me to only be the type of thing that is persuasive to those who are quite knowledgeable about the minutiae of the political scene (ie the pundits themselves) while the simple question of whether the candidate presents themselves in a broadly likeable way dominates any more policy-centric focus. 

Take, for instance, the much heralded comments by Perry, timed near an inflection point in his demise, where he defended in-state tuition to illegal immigrants suggesting that one would be "heartless" not to support this (a wording he later apologized for). Conventional wisdom was that such a position with anathema to Republicans and hence precipitated his downfall. In some sense, we have a fairly clear counterexample since Newt Gingrich gave an even more extreme version also arguing for compassion towards illegal families who have been in the US a long time which struck a lot of amnesty-esque overtones. Yet Gingrich is still pushing strong in the polls as the sole remaining first tier candidate to take on Romney (as an aside, the reason he so prominently emphasized this is because of considering the general election and trying to appeal to moderate and Hispanic voters). However, I don't think we even need the counterexample to realize that such a narrow policy focused issue is quite unlikely to be a major factor in such a precipitous demise or even that this issue is necessarily something the casual conservative leaning person has even deeply thought about or cares all that much about. 

Let us follow the evolution of the race for the respective candidates from this perspective of focusing on likeability as illustrated principally in the debates. Here is the Dec 3rd aggregate from Real Clear Politics which shows the rise (and falls) of Bachmann, Perry, Cain and finally the rise of Gingrich against relatively flat projections for the frontrunner Romney and the third tier candidates, Santorum, Hunstman and Paul. 

Michele Bachmann:
Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry both came into the race with momentum. Bachmann has been a leader in some sense of the Tea Party caucus in Congress. Since one of the dominant divides in the Republican party has been between the establishment Republicans (of which Mitt Romney is a member) and the upstart Tea Party, Michele Bachmann entered with some momentum behind her that she may have been the Tea Party's de facto standard bearer in the nomination process. However, her debate performances were simply muted. They didn't contain much of the more extreme positions one might conventionally associate with her that would let her stand out form the field and simply came across as one of the pact. As in, her basic personality in the debates wasn't enough to established her as the clear Tea Party frontrunner and so she fell off in the polls - and so left the first Romney challenger. 

Rick Perry:
Rick Perry arrives next on the scene late but with enormous momentum, overnight jumping in the polls much higher than Bachmann ever had to front runner status given the excitement that he was the only one in the field with the establishment clout (as two term Governor of Texas, ala Bush) to challenge Romney. There are essentially three commonly established explanations for his fall. Firstly, the immigration comments mentioned above. Secondly, a series of gaffes made in the debates such as the infamous "oops" moment when he couldn't remember his talking point of the third department he was going to cut. I am very hesitant to think such minor gaffes have much relevancy. With so many debates, most people don't see any individual gaffe and I think people are usually pretty forgiving of a gaffe if they like a guy and only make a big deal of it when it is used to attack an enemy. 

The third explanation (which, to be fair, has been widely trumpeted) is simply that he has had terrible debate performances. This is certainly true. He simply has not come across as a likeable guy. Perhaps the best descriptor of his debate performances is 'feckless'. Maybe this isn't the sole factor, but it is to my mind a very large chunk of the explanation for his downfall and is sufficient to have caused it almost irrespective of anything else. 

Herman Cain:

Cain's rise is, I think, the best example of my thesis. He is clearly a likeable guy and came off very well in the debates. He was smiling, friendly, and cracking jokes that got more laughter than any other candidate. He spoke simply, concisely, and without the usual parlance and mannerisms of the politician. This isn't the only prescription to come off as likeable but it is a sufficient one. The timing was right and he picked up Perry's votes despite no one really thinking he ever stood much of a shot. 

A lot of his approach and attitude, however, only works in a zero scrutiny environment when others are not digging and attacking him. Thus, when the spotlight turned to him it wasn't so much that he failed to answer certain policy questions or the like, it is that he started coming off as defensive, guarded and shifty. As in, he stopped being likeable.

From a policy standpoint, Cain is quite interesting. One the one hand, he heavily promoted his 9 9 9 plan which is, if nothing else, an actual policy that, through concision and repetition, is easily understandable. So Cain might be considered very policy oriented in that supporting him is a little bit equivalent to supporting 9 9 9. On the other hand, outside of this he has been probably the least policy oriented of the candidates and rarely offers much of a substantive policy decision, often hedging his bets by saying things like that he would consult his Generals or his economic advisers without offering an actual policy. That a candidate like him rose so quickly without much substantive policy outside of 9 9 9 indicates one again how a policy focus can be largely irrelevant. 

As it turned out, he then got hit by a string of sex allegations which our society can't help but think is the biggest deal in the world. The latest involving and alleged long term affair right up to the present with phone records and money transfers would appeal to have locked in his demise as he has now "suspended" his campaign. I am of the opinion his downfall was close to inevitable anyways (and am a bit annoyed the sex allegations mean I won't be able to let time prove it for me). 

Newt Gingrich:
The current (and perhaps the last) runner up to Romney is Newt Gingrich. His rise is clearly very dependent on the timing, but again fundamentally stems from the fact that he came off as very likeable in the debates. This was a guy whose entire campaign staff had quit a couple months earlier and was in the low single digits poll wise. But he stepped into the debates and really shown as clearly the best or second best debater after Romney on the stage. It isn't just that he appears to be intelligent, intellectual even, or other such traits, it is predominantly that he appears to be genuinely likeable. Gingrich is sometimes characterized as acerbic, in a pejorative sense, but I think this attitude comes off more as that beloved no bullshit attitude that says it how it is which is often admired.

Partly because the Republican party as a whole has shifted considerably to the right since Gingrich was Speaker during the 90's (he was far right at the time), and partly because of his personal policy eccentricities, from a policy perspective Gingrich stands out considerably and flies against standard GOP orthodoxy of the day. However, it doesn't seem to matter if the polls are to be believed, which really underscores my view that personality, not policy, is the defining characteristic here.

Cain and Gingrich can both credit their rises to this likeability factor even though the reason why the two candidates are likeable are quite different. The important difference is that while Cain's likeability seems to vanish in conflict, Gingrich's is the type that remains and perhaps becomes even more prominent in the face of conflict. It is for this reason that I don't expect him to experience the kind of precipitous fall that the other experienced.

Ultimately, I would wish that it was indeed policy, not personalities, that dominated election contests. However, it would appear that the driver of polls is precisely the opposite. 

Too Big to Fail: The Movement -- And Everybody Needs One, Every Day

A Movement Too Big To Fail 

Chris Hedges, TruthDig 
October 17, 2011


There is no danger that the protesters who have occupied squares, parks and plazas across the nation in defiance of the corporate state will be co-opted by the Democratic Party or groups like MoveOn.  The faux liberal reformers, whose abject failure to stand up for the rights of the poor and the working class, have signed on to this movement because they fear becoming irrelevant.  Union leaders, who pull down salaries five times that of the rank and file as they bargain away rights and benefits, know the foundations are shaking.  So do Democratic politicians from Barack Obama to Nancy Pelosi.  So do the array of “liberal” groups and institutions, including the press, that have worked to funnel discontented voters back into the swamp of electoral politics and mocked those who called for profound structural reform.

Resistance, real resistance, to the corporate state was displayed when a couple of thousand protesters, clutching mops and brooms, early Friday morning forced the owners of Zuccotti Park and the New York City police to back down from a proposed attempt to expel them in order to “clean” the premises.  These protesters in that one glorious moment did what the traditional “liberal” establishment has steadily refused to do-fight back.  And it was deeply moving to watch the corporate rats scamper back to their holes on Wall Street.  It lent a whole new meaning to the phrase “too big to fail.”

Tinkering with the corporate state will not work.  We will either be plunged into neo-feudalism and environmental catastrophe or we will wrest power from corporate hands.   This radical message, one that demands a reversal of the corporate coup, is one the power elite, including the liberal class, is desperately trying to thwart.  But the liberal class has no credibility left.  It collaborated with corporate lobbyists to neglect the rights of tens of millions of Americans, as well as the innocents in our imperial wars.  The best that liberals can do is sheepishly pretend this is what they wanted all along.  Groups such as MoveOn and organized labor will find themselves without a constituency unless they at least pay lip service to the protests.  The Teamsters’ arrival Friday morning to help defend the park signaled an infusion of this new radicalism into moribund unions rather than a co-opting of the protest movement by the traditional liberal establishment.  The union bosses, in short, had no choice.

The Occupy Wall Street movement, like all radical movements, has obliterated the narrow political parameters.  It proposes something new.  It will not make concessions with corrupt systems of corporate power.  It holds fast to moral imperatives regardless of the cost.  It confronts authority out of a sense of responsibility.  It is not interested in formal positions of power.  It is not seeking office.  It is not trying to get people to vote.  It has no resources.  It can’t carry suitcases of money to congressional offices or run millions of dollars of advertisements.  All it can do is ask us to use our bodies and voices, often at personal risk, to fight back.  It has no other way of defying the corporate state.  This rebellion creates a real community instead of a managed or virtual one.  It affirms our dignity.  It permits us to become free and independent human beings.

Martin Luther King was repeatedly betrayed by liberal supporters, especially when he began to challenge economic forms of discrimination, which demanded that liberals, rather than simply white Southern racists, begin to make sacrifices.  King too was a radical.  He would not compromise on nonviolence, racism or justice.  He understood that movements-such as the Liberty Party, which fought slavery, the suffragists, who fought for women’s rights, the labor movement and the civil rights movement-have always been the true correctives in American democracy.  None of those movements achieved formal political power.  But by holding fast to moral imperatives they made the powerful fear them.  King knew that racial equality was impossible without economic justice and an end to militarism.  And he had no intention of ceding to the demands of the liberal establishment that called on him to be calm and patience.  “For years, I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions in the South, a little change here, a little change there,” King said shortly before he was assassinated.  “Now I feel quite differently.  I think you’ve got to have a reconstruction of the entire system, a revolution of values.”

King was killed in 1968 when he was in Memphis to support a strike by sanitation workers.  By then he had begun to say that his dream, the one that the corporate state has frozen into a few safe clichés from his 1963 speech in Washington, had turned into a nightmare.  King called at the end of his life for massive federal funds to rebuild inner cities, what he called “a radical redistribution of economic and political power,” a complete restructuring of “the architecture of American society.”  He grasped that the inequities of capitalism had become the instrument by which the poor would always remain poor.  “Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism,” King said, “but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all of God’s children.”  On the eve of King’s murder he was preparing to organize a poor people’s march on Washington, D.C., designed to cause “major, massive dislocations,” a nonviolent demand by the poor, including the white underclass, for a system of economic equality.  It would be 43 years before his vision was realized by an eclectic group of protesters who gathered before the gates of Wall Street.

The truth of America is understood only when you listen to voices in our impoverished rural enclaves, prisons and the urban slums, when you hear the words of our unemployed, those who have lost their homes or cannot pay their medical bills, our elderly and our children, especially the quarter of the nation’s children who depend on food stamps to eat, and all who are marginalized.  There is more reality expressed about the American experience by the debt-burdened young men and women protesting in the parks than by all the chatter of the well-paid pundits and experts that pollutes the airwaves.

What kind of nation is it that spends far more to kill enemy combatants and Afghan and Iraqi civilians than it does to help its own citizens who live below the poverty line?  What kind of nation is it that permits corporations to hold sick children hostage while their parents frantically bankrupt themselves to save their sons and daughters?  What kind of nation is it that tosses its mentally ill onto urban heating grates?  What kind of nation is it that abandons its unemployed while it loots its treasury on behalf of speculators?  What kind of nation is it that ignores due process to torture and assassinate its own citizens?  What kind of nation is it that refuses to halt the destruction of the ecosystem by the fossil fuel industry, dooming our children and our children’s children?

“America,” Langston Hughes wrote, “never was America to me.”

“The black vote mean [nothing],” the rapper Nas intones.  “Who you gunna elect/ Satan or Satan? In the hood nothing is changing,/ We aint got no choices.”

Or listen to hip-hop artist Talib Kweli:  “Back in the ’60s, there was a big push for black … politicians, and now we have more than we ever had before, but our communities are so much worse.  A lot of people died for us to vote, I’m aware of that history, but these politicians are not in touch with people at all.  Politics is not the truth to me, it’s an illusion.”

The liberal class functions in a traditional, capitalist democracy as a safety valve.  It lets off enough steam to keep the system intact.  It makes piecemeal and incremental reform possible.  This is what happened during the Great Depression and the New Deal.  Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s greatest achievement was that he saved capitalism.  Liberals in a functioning capitalist democracy are at the same time tasked with discrediting radicals, whether it is King, especially after he denounced the war in Vietnam, or later Noam Chomsky or Ralph Nader.

The stupidity of the corporate state is that it thought it could dispense with the liberal class.  It thought it could shut off that safety valve in order to loot and pillage with no impediments.  Corporate power forgot that the liberal class, when it functions, gives legitimacy to the power elite.  And the reduction of the liberal class to silly courtiers, who have nothing to offer but empty rhetoric, meant that the growing discontent found other mechanisms and outlets.  Liberals were reduced to stick figures, part of an elaborate pantomime, as they acted in preordained roles to give legitimacy to meaningless and useless political theater.  But that game is over.

Human history has amply demonstrated that once those in positions of power become redundant and impotent, yet retain the trappings and privileges of power, they are brutally discarded.  The liberal class, which insists on clinging to its positions of privilege while at the same time refusing to play its traditional role within the democratic state, has become a useless and despised appendage of corporate power.  And as the engines of corporate power pollute and poison the ecosystem and propel us into a world where there will be only masters and serfs, the liberal class, which serves no purpose in the new configuration, is being abandoned and discarded by both the corporate state and radical dissidents.  The best it can do is attach itself meekly to the new political configuration rising up to replace it.

An ineffectual liberal class means there is no hope of a correction or a reversal through the formal mechanisms of power.  It ensures that the frustration and anger among the working and the middle class will find expression now in these protests that lie outside the confines of democratic institutions and the civilities of a liberal democracy.  By emasculating the liberal class, which once ensured that restive citizens could institute moderate reforms, the corporate state has created a closed system defined by polarization, gridlock and political charades.  It has removed the veneer of virtue and goodness that the liberal class offered to the power elite.

Liberal institutions, including the church, the press, the university, the Democratic Party, the arts and labor unions, set the parameters for limited self-criticism in a functioning democracy as well as small, incremental reforms.  The liberal class is permitted to decry the worst excesses of power and champion basic human rights while at the same time endowing systems of power with a morality and virtue it does not possess.  Liberals posit themselves as the conscience of the nation.  They permit us, through their appeal to public virtues and the public good, to see ourselves and our state as fundamentally good.

But the liberal class, by having refused to question the utopian promises of unfettered capitalism and globalization and by condemning those who did, severed itself from the roots of creative and bold thought, the only forces that could have prevented the liberal class from merging completely with the power elite.  The liberal class, which at once was betrayed and betrayed itself, has no role left to play in the battle between us and corporate dominance.  All hope lies now with those in the street.

Liberals lack the vision and fortitude to challenge dominant free market ideologies.  They have no ideological alternatives even as the Democratic Party openly betrays every principle the liberal class claims to espouse, from universal health care to an end to our permanent war economy to a demand for quality and affordable public education to a return of civil liberties to a demand for jobs and welfare of the working class.  The corporate state forced the liberal class to join in the nation’s death march that began with the presidency of Ronald Reagan.  Liberals such as Bill Clinton, for corporate money, accelerated the dismantling of our manufacturing base, the gutting of our regulatory agencies, the destruction of our social service programs and the empowerment of speculators who have trashed our economy.  The liberal class, stripped of power, could only retreat into its atrophied institutions, where it busied itself with the boutique activism of political correctness and embraced positions it had previously condemned.

Russell Jacoby writes:  “The left once dismissed the market as exploitative; it now honors the market as rational and humane.  The left once disdained mass culture as exploitative; now it celebrates it as rebellious.  The left once honored independent intellectuals as courageous; now it sneers at them as elitist.  The left once rejected pluralism as superficial; now it worships it as profound.  We are witnessing not simply a defeat of the left, but its conversion and perhaps inversion.”

Hope in this age of bankrupt capitalism comes with the return of the language of class conflict and rebellion, language that has been purged from the lexicon of the liberal class, language that defines this new movement.  This does not mean we have to agree with Karl Marx, who advocated violence and whose worship of the state as a utopian mechanism led to another form of enslavement of the working class, but we have to learn again to speak in the vocabulary Marx employed.  We have to grasp, as Marx and Adam Smith did, that corporations are not concerned with the common good.  They exploit, pollute, impoverish, repress, kill and lie to make money.  They throw poor families out of homes, let the uninsured die, wage useless wars to make profits, poison and pollute the ecosystem, slash social assistance programs, gut public education, trash the global economy, plunder the U.S. Treasury and crush all popular movements that seek justice for working men and women.  They worship money and power.  And, as Marx knew, unfettered capitalism is a revolutionary force that consumes greater and greater numbers of human lives until it finally consumes itself.  The dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico is the perfect metaphor for the corporate state.  It is part of the same nightmare experienced in postindustrial mill towns of New England and the abandoned steel mills of Ohio.  It is a nightmare that Iraqis, Pakistanis and Afghans, living in terror and mourning their dead, endure daily.

What took place early Friday morning in Zuccotti Park was the first salvo in a long struggle for justice.  It signaled a step backward by the corporate state in the face of popular pressure.  And it was carried out by ordinary men and women who sleep at night on concrete, get soaked in rainstorms, eat donated food and have nothing as weapons but their dignity, resilience and courage.  It is they, and they alone, who hold out the possibility of salvation.  And if we join them we might have a chance.