00:00I have to deal all the time with how to be more alive. More alive. Because living is a pleasure. It is. So how do I stay more alive? It becomes center.
00:21And I personally, as a being, cannot be more alive. And the opposite is happening to me. The only way I can stay more alive is through you. Is through that young person. It's through other people. Without that, I'm just going to be a bag of ashes.
00:43I call my life the freedom train. What do I mean by that? The freedom train has no final stop. It's forever. The search for additional human freedom is forever.
00:58But being a train, it has places where it's hard to get up because it runs into a big mountain. Occasionally it gets derailed. But more or less, but certainly, eventually, that train moves forward.
01:14And I view myself as being on the freedom train. And there's all kinds of passengers on the freedom train. There are passengers when the train runs into difficulty, they get out and they take a taxi. Politically speaking.
01:28There are other passengers. There are other passengers who will get out. They want to lighten the load so the train can make it. So they'll take the load out by getting off the train and walking. But there's some of us on that fucking train who'll get out and push that fucking train.
01:43Until he gets up to the top of the hill and then get back in and continue with the ride. That's the real activist. And what makes such a person? I'll say it in a few words.
01:53Activism is not a sacrifice. Activism is not a sacrifice. If it becomes a sacrifice, get out of it.
02:04To me, being a radical humanist is to be a person who's concerned with the world in which he lives, recognizes a great deal of the inhumanity in this world,
02:17and is decided to do something about it, but it's not enough to go about it, what I would call,
02:28by little increments. They're important. They're not unimportant, certainly not unimportant,
02:34but really believe that some fundamental revision of society would be necessary
02:38to deal with peace as opposed to war, human cooperation as opposed to exploitation.
02:51Abe Osheroff, with characteristic honesty, wonders aloud if the fight can ever be won.
02:58We fought the good fight, he says, and we lost. And yet, and yet, I received a letter from Abe less than a month ago
03:11saying, I'm still in the good fight, even in a wheelchair. I have also heard him say that we do not fight the good fight
03:20because we know the fight will be won. We fight the good fight because it is the right thing to do,
03:26because our lives will be immeasurably richer for it. We are driven to create a record of human suffering
03:32and resistance to suffering without the luxury of measuring our impact on the world,
03:38which cannot be weighed, measured, or otherwise quantified. We do not write such poems because we
03:45necessarily believe that our side will win and the conditions will change. We write them because
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