While the people of the Middle East and northern Africa are staging wonderful revolutions based on the people’s will, we in the States are fighting hard to serve the needs of the many, and I tell you what, it is a discouraging time. I don’t have the energy to argue with people anymore about why cutting Title X funding is immoral or how disbanding unions will only hurt the economy, not fix state budgets. Things seem to be getting worse and worse, with fewer and fewer victories to brighten the mood.

When I first read the selection from Max Havelaar in The Indonesian Reader, I just got even more depressed. Here’s a piece published in 1860 by a Dutch administrator in colonial Java, written anonymously because it was so damning about the colonial government, and it spells out many of the same problems of inequality, passing the buck, and exploitation that plague the modern world. The excerpt describes a system that exploited the native people of Java and surrounding islands (not united into the country of Indonesia until 1949) as a labor force for Dutch business interests. This same system employed civil servants, regional administrators, and others who were too worried about keeping their jobs to report horrific abuses and deaths, lest those reports draw unfavorable attention to their regions. Rather than look to the needs of the people they were charged with protecting, they looked only to the bottom line and worked people harder to turn a bigger profit and get more acclaim from those back in the Netherlands.

I’m not saying that the union workers in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Ohio are in the same situation as the Javanese workers in the 19th century. But the same impulse to human greed and domination runs through both stories, and the government happens to play the role of villain in both. That same story is played out over and over again throughout history, and that’s what struck me as I read this piece for the ACAM project. George Santayana’s famous “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” has been trotted out far too many times for it to hold much meaning anymore, but it’s still true, and that’s what scares me. Are we just going to repeat the same stories of oppression and futile resistance over and over, in various horrible forms the world over? And if so, of course the question then becomes, what’s the point in fighting?

I think the answer lies in how we view history. The popular view, certainly the American view, is the linear one; we’re moving in a straight line from barbarism to civilization, and it’s just one grand march of progress and improvement. The other view sees history as a big circle, with highs and lows coming and going as the natural course of things, an inevitable turning of fortune’s wheel. The strictly linear view is clearly false; we can see people reverting to customs and laws from the bad old days all the time, so we can’t always be moving forward. The circle view is too depressing; the human experience becomes an exercise in literally spinning our wheels.

How about a Hegelian compromise? I wish I had artistic skills, because I would draw you this picture I see in my head: a series of circles, moving along a line. Those circles are various wheels of progress, regression, enlightenment, and repression, and we move through those circles as ideas are introduced, developed, and tested. We jump to new circles once those ideas have been accepted into the common understanding, and those wheels keep us spinning slowly forward through history.

It’s the development of ideas that really gets us moving into new wheels of progress and improvement. For example, right now Walker and other politicians are doing their damnedest to do away with collective bargaining in their states and eventually the country as a whole, and they very well may succeed for a period of time. But the idea of collective bargaining, which at one point in history wasn’t even a possibility, has settled firmly in the national consciousness, and what’s more, the practice of that idea has shown how easily it can be done. That’s going to make it harder to kill the idea completely, and if an idea is still alive, a movement can still survive. What’s more (and here I’m trying real hard to be positive about the current national situation), when the idea of collective bargaining survives, it should survive as a stronger idea. Right now, we see collective bargaining as a luxury afforded to certain professions, rather than a basic right of workers worldwide. As we spin about in this wheel of government bullying and corporate greed, those who fight for workers’ rights may be able to convince the general public of this difference between luxury and human right, and at that moment, we will jump into the next wheel. That will have its own ups and downs, as spinning wheels do, but it will be within this broadened national consciousness, and the discussion will grow ever more equitable.

Just as slavery was once a fact of life and is now a banned and abhorred practice, though we still fight to free trafficked persons; just as women were once the property of their husbands and now hold national office, though we still fight for their bodily autonomy; just as sodomy was once a crime and now gays and lesbians live openly, though we still fight for their right to marry and raise families — in these ways, will we continue to make strides for human rights in a world of greed and corruption.

I still feel my blood pressure rise every time I read a newspaper, and I still cry when election results are announced, but throwing up my hands in despair and deeming it all too big a problem to fix just puts me at the mercy of that spinning wheel; if I stick with it and join with others for our collective good, I can help push us over to the next one, the one with a better starting point than the one I was born into.

As Multatuli says in Max Havelaar:

After all, who would maintain that he had seen a country where no wrong was ever done? But Havelaar held that this was no reason for allowing abuses to continue where one found them, especially when one was explicitly called upon to resist them.

And we are all called. Decency calls us, history calls us, the future calls us.