`Moving On,' From the Old Politics
by Wesley Irwin, LaRouche Youth Movement
In the weeks leading into the Nov. 7, 2006 Democratic Congressional landslide victory, and later, in an even more focussed intervention the following month in a special election held in San Antonio, Texas, the LaRouche Youth Movement (LYM) physically demonstrated, that the political process in the United States for the coming revolutionary period will be determined by the quality of creativity embodied by the LYM. We have now reached a moment in history when a justifiably enraged American population is reacting against the policy assumptions of the last several decades, and the LYM is reaching out to them with a unique quality of beautiful ideas, rooted in the best conceptions that mankind has ever produced.
In the scientific and philosophical tradition of our Republic's founder, Ben Franklin, the LYM is using ideas of Kepler, Bach, and Plato, to name a few, to uplift the population of the United States to the level that they are able to use their minds to passionately reason; reason through the lies told by the Cheney-Bush Administration about our foreign policy disaster(s), as well as those told by the "Wall Street Urinal" high priests, like Alan "Greenspin," who preside over the ever-shrinking, in fact actually "Invisible," physical economy of today's world, and discover the solutions, for themselves, to the onrushing existential crisis facing mankind.
Thus on Jan. 6, just hours before 75 youth were to descend on Washington, D.C. for a revolutionary "Week of Action," about 15 members of the LYM took their singing voices and high spirits to the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) headquarters, known to D.C.'s well-informed as the "Temple of Doom," where Sen. John "Manchurian Candidate" McCain (R-Ariz.), and Joe "Howdy-Doody" Lieberman (I-Conn.), were giving speeches in favor of the President's fantasy "surge" policy.
Beauty Trumps Rage
Arriving early, we greeted citizens with carols and canons, blasting Cheney and Bush musically, calling for their impeachment, and distributing literature to anyone walking on the blocks surrounding the AEI building. Then, about an hour into the event, we began noticing older people amassing on the corner of the street we were on, carrying yellow signs, "Out of Iraq!" and "No to the Surge." We quickly were told that this was a MoveOn.org protest event, and soon, the 15 LYM organizers, singing beautifully, were surrounded on both sides by about 100 protestors—all but four of whom were over the age of 45—who repeatedly echoed slogans they heard from a small, seemingly very enraged man on a bullhorn. The line of screamers continued, "John McCain, John McCain, 'Surge' policy is insane!" over and over and over, at the top of their lungs. The LYM, keeping the idea of the beauty of the choral piece in mind, continued singing in harmony, which caused some of the Baby-Boomer protestors to ask us to join their circle of uniform noise. We declined the offer, as it was clear to all the LYM singers that the type of emotional-reactionary protesting which they were practicing, was derived from a method without beauty, and therefore, also void of any reasonable solution to the world crisis we face today.
As we continued to sing polyphonic songs about Joe Lieberman's ties to William F. Buckley's purse strings, and so on, the little "MoveOn" man on the bullhorn turned his rage on the crowd of older protestors and the LYM, yelling at the marchers, "C'mon, the LaRouche people are louder than you! This isn't the civil rights movement! (We were singing spirituals) Let's hear it! John McCain ... !" This "peacenik" turned the bullhorn on our singers, who were singing the beautiful Bach motet "Jesu, meine Freude," holding the horn within a few feet of us at high volume. The more he yelled the same slogans over and over at the overwhelmed, and increasingly tired marchers, the more it became clear that many of the MoveOn people were slowing down to hear our singing, and soon many of them were smiling at us as they walked by, and were taking the LaRouche PAC literature we were handing out as they passed.
One 60-year-old, who had previously asked us to join the protest, asked the fellow on the bullhorn to stop shouting so the marchers could hear the music. He refused, but it was clear that the protestors were slowly being won over to the method of our "New Politics," which we had used on the campuses to turn out the youth vote, before the Nov. 7 election. Our songs cut through their dry, passionless chants like a knife through butter.
The Chorus Grows
At a certain point, when we began to sing the Negro Spiritual, "Oh Freedom," everyone stopped chanting to listen, and many people, who learned the music long ago, began to sing with us. Slowly, individuals left their places in the roaming herd of sign-holders and joined our chorus. First one, then two, then more; they kept breaking ranks until we had recruited eight protestors to our, now much larger, chorus of beauty!
The LYM's calm, potent method, and seeming easiness of our recruitment of the MoveOn marchers, was too much for some of the lead organizers of their group. These frustrated, enraged people launched their own "Surge" campaign against the LYM, sending one woman over, who posed as a reporter, to try to interview our fearless conductor Matthew Ogden, while he was conducting the chorus, attempting to pull him away. When that didn't work, we were physically threatened by another lead MoveOn organizer, who told us that if we didn't give up our singing spot at the doorway to the AEI building (where we had been standing for an hour before he had arrived), that someone "might get hurt," and he "didn't want that." However, this angry, rather rotund liberal "for peace" couldn't stop the power of our truthful ideas as they pierced the noise and confusion, appealing to the potential within everyone in range of our voices, to give up their fear and anger, and use ironical humor and beauty, to transform the failed policies of our nation.
Eventually, the MoveOn protest, which began after the AEI event, ended, and the exhausted protestors went home, before McCain and Lieberman left the event; while the singing, literature, and ironic signs of the LYM, continued to shape the social geometry of the event until the last AEI member left the building. The LYM organizing and singing recruited many MoveOn protestors to our "New Politics," and sent neo-con former UN Ambassador John Bolton scampering out the door of the AEI building to his car.
We organized many institutional contacts, including international political figures, around LaRouche's idea of a new Treaty of Westphalia for Southwest Asia, as well as youth contacts around our Kepler/music work, and the ideas of Plato, Cusa, and LaRouche. In short, on Jan. 6, in D.C., the LYM continued to prove that the politics of revolution is, in fact, the politics of scientific creativity and beauty.
