True Talk

Having a math degree, I had to suffer through Noam Chomsky and his work on context grammars as applied to programming, but his political activism is what I have found interesting. Came across this on Tobia's blog.

Only American audiences ask me, “What should I do?” I’m never asked this in third world. When you go to Turkey or Colombia or Brazil, they don’t ask you, “What should I do?” They tell you what they’re doing… These are poor, oppressed people, living under horrendous condition, and they would never dream of asking you what they should do. It’s only in high privileged cultures like ours that people ask this question… We can do anything. But people here are trained to believe that there are easy answers, and it doesn’t work that way. If you want to do something, you have to be dedicated and committed to it day after day. Educational programs, organizing, activism. That’s the way things change. You want a magic key, so you can go back to watching television tomorrow? It doesn’t exist. —Noam Chomsky, Imperial Ambitions, p. 39-40