As our bus plowed southward from Jerusalem, the scenery was of secondary importance. What held my interest were the anecdotes of our two ex-soldier tour guides, who shared priceless insights into a military occupation that I had only heard about from the Palestinian side. The former soldiers were interesting specimens, one resembling a Brooklyn hipster, the other a dreadlocked hippie.

Before I go any further, I should mention that the military is one of Israel’s most revered institutions. If you are an Israeli citizen, military service is compulsory: three years for a man, two for a woman. Refuseniks are pretty rare in Israel. I knew an Israeli girl back in college that boasted that not one of her dozen or so cousins had less than a fantastic, life-changing time in the army. It’s easy to imagine why: the camaraderie forged in the classless ranks, the heft of a weapon at the ready, the sense of importance reinforced by friends and family (“Don’t worry about it soldier, it’s on me.”), and most of all, the very little actual danger that they face. The Israeli Defense Forces, wielding such disproportionate power in relation to the Palestinians, is rarely on defense. Thus they can have their cake and eat it too, basking in the glory of the armed service without enduring the grueling hell of actual war.¹ Thus, it is no surprise when Hippie says over the bus intercom that to most Israelis, serving in the army seems “like some computer game.”

In addition to a general sense of adulation for the army among the Israeli public, there was the chest-pounding assuredness and the pep rallies within the army itself that made the soldiers feel not only better, but unflinchingly right, even when protecting illegal Israeli settlements or torturing Palestinian prisoners. Hippie recalled his commander saying that “There is no better feeling that killing a terrorist,” then subsequently passing out photos of “terrorists” taken right after they had been killed by the IDF. “We were taught that all Palestinians were our enemies,” he said.

Brooklyn pointed out a small Israeli military outpost as we climbed a hilltop. As we passed, he mentioned that this outpost – “Hilltop 840” – only requires six soldiers to adequately man it. Yet when he served there, he did so with seventy-nine other men. Way overstaffed and consequently, bored out of their minds, they “practiced” on the locals by tying up, holding, and barging in on people who were unfortunate enough to be Palestinians living in Hebron. Even more unfortunate were the Palestinians that happened to live near Israeli settlements. No matter what the circumstances, “we have this mindset that wherever Jews are, we should protect them,” Brooklyn said.

Hippie then reclaimed the mic and told a story about his division’s hunt for a man wanted for the murder for three Israeli settlers. They knew where the man lived, but every time they arrived at the house, he was nowhere to be found and his family said they didn’t know where he was. While on patrol one night, Hippie saw that the wanted man’s house was abuzz with activity. The fugitive’s family – amidst a cluster of Israeli soldiers – was moving all of their belongings outside. He found that his fellow soldiers had decided to “punish” the family for their lack of cooperation by forcing them to clear out their house entirely, then put all their belongings back in, just as misbehaving soldiers had been forced to do with their foot lockers in boot camp.

Another little-known cruelty of the Occupation is the restriction of Palestinian movement. Hippie had no shortage of examples here:

* Palestinians were stopped on the road and questioned at length; sometimes their licenses were confiscated to be “examined” and “returned later.” The newly unlicensed Palestinian is back on the road when he is stopped by another IDF soldier asking for a license. The Palestinian describes in detail the soldier who confiscated his license, but to no avail – he is fined, or…

* …the IDF soldier reaches under the hood and takes the spark plug out of the car so that its Palestinian owner cannot start it. Later, when the Israeli army is feeling generous, the Palestinian is presented with a large bag filled with scores of electric fuses. “Here, you can have it back,” the soldier says. The Palestinian does not even know which one is for his car.

* A Palestinian farmer is stopped by an Israeli patrol. It seems that he has already been warned about driving on this road (since he must get to his crops, however, he has no choice). The IDF soldier orders him to turn the car off and takes the keys. The car is then left on the side of the road, perhaps to be used later as an improvised blockade.

When talking about Israel and Palestine to the uninitiated, or the “other side,” it’s common for Palestinian supporters to brandish their critiques garnered from leftist academics, to play them as their aces. Yet no matter the soundness of the scholarship of fellows like Finkelstein and Chomsky, they are not over there in the thick of things; they are easily dismissed as ideological, dogmatic academics disconnected from the events on the ground, just as the left dismisses fellows like Alan Dershowitz. Yet when armed with testimonies from Israeli soldiers—people who have been there, on the other side—the argument to end the Occupation becomes infinitely stronger. With this said, I feel that Breaking the Silence is one of the most important assets that the pro-Palestinian movement can utilize to work towards an end to the Occupation. I highly recommend a visit to their website, and taking a look at soldiers’ testimonies. If you’re actually over in Israel or Palestine, try and wriggle your way into one of their tours. (Even if you’re told that the tour is full, as my friends and I were, show up anyway, as there are bound to be no-shows.)

1. An exception to the general rule of Israel’s military dominance: the country’s ground incursion into Lebanon in the summer of 2006. Israeli soldiers suffered relatively heavy losses against an intelligent and wily Hezbollah resistance.

Jeff Gore: Seeing as you’re coming to Athens to speak at the Human Rights Festival, do you see any big human rights issues now that are as pressing as the ones that you and many others were involved with over forty years ago?

Bill Ayers: I do. First of all, I think the human rights framework continues to be vital and enlivening in a thousand different ways. I think if you go back and read the [United Nations’] Universal Declaration on Human Rights, it still – I actually carry it around in my back pocket, I have for years, I’m just reaching for it – literally you open it up and there are things like Article 1: “All human beings are born free and equal with dignity and rights.” That still has very important implications. Or, here’s one: “Everyone has the right to a nationality. No one should be arbitrarily deprived of nationality.”

Here’s another one: “Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.” That’s part of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That’s not some, you know, crazy radical idea that a bunch of gay people have imposed on us; it’s right there from 1948. So one of the overarching human rights issues of right now for us here in the United States is the full recognition and full civil rights of GLBTQ people…that’s a huge issue.

Another human rights issue is the issue of torture…incidentally, torture not only [by] the US abroad, but torture, for example, in Chicago, where – you may not know this – the suspension of the death penalty in Chicago several years ago was based on torture cases. That is, innocent men were tortured into confessions that put them on death row.

So we’ve slipped in a terrible, terrible way in this country…you have the Attorney General of the Justice Department writing memos just a couple years ago explaining why waterboarding is not torture, even though [after WWII,] Japanese officials were tried for war crimes, one of [which] was waterboarding. But here you have the Department of Justice issuing an opinion that waterboarding is not torture, because as soon as you remove the gag from the person’s mouth, his mental suffering ends – well that’s just insane.

Then of course, another human rights issue that’s overarching and quite relevant is the issue of war and peace. People have a right to a peaceful existence, and war destroys all human rights, yet we are a nation that is pretty much in a perpetual state of war; we’re fighting at least two wars now – some would argue three or four…

JG: Speaking of war, it seems like Obama put the antiwar movement in an awkward position. He’s going to supposedly end the war in Iraq and pursue the “good war” in Afghanistan. What do you see the antiwar movement doing, or what do you hope that it could do during an Obama presidency?

BA: Well I don’t think anyone should be deluded, I think that we have lots and lots of historical examples, for example Lyndon Johnson, the most effective politician of this generation and the man who passed, and really was responsible in many ways for, the most far-reaching civil rights legislation in the history of the country.

But there’s two things to remember about that. One is that Lyndon Johnson was never a member of the Black Freedom movement; that the civil rights movement brought the agenda to Johnson – it wasn’t the other way around. Or another way of saying that is: the civil rights movement provided the force and the energy and the moral framework for Johnson to do the right thing. So Johnson didn’t save the civil rights movement – the civil rights movement, in many ways, saved Johnson.

There’s a lesson there for us today, which is, all the hope that Barack Obama will somehow do the right thing for us is misguided. With any luck, the peace movement, the justice movement can save his presidency, but it doesn’t work the other way around – we don’t have kings to save us, that’s not how it works. So to me the injunction is to get busy and build a movement.

But secondly, Johnson burned up his presidency in war. All the effective things he might have done were destroyed in the furnace of Vietnam. That was his responsibility and that then, is his legacy. So none of us who are anti-war in temperament or activism should be resting easy at this moment. All of us should be naming this moment as a moment of rising expectations and real possibilities, but also a moment of danger and dread. And we should get busy and rebuild the antiwar movement – which we can, and we must.

JG: In a Democracy Now! interview, you suggested that our educational system should try to “educate for initiative and courage,” as well as “imagination and hope and possibility.” Could you put that in more concrete terms – or for example, could you propose something that President Obama could do right now to improve our public education system?

BA: Absolutely. The one thing he could do immediately is to work against No Child Left Behind. No Child Left Behind should be left behind. That’s something that the Obama administration should do.

Another thing it should do is it should spend that stimulus money to rebuild the educational infrastructure in places like Chicago and places like rural Georgia. Why is that? Well because we have in this democracy, where we assume that all people are equal, and we build social policy around that assumption. We have – for example, in Chicago – school systems that educate kids at the rate 30-40 thousand dollars per kid per year, and schools standing just a few miles down the road that spend less than five thousand dollars per kid per year. That’s a savage inequality in a country that thinks of itself as a democracy. So that’s a second thing that he could do right away.

A third thing that he could do is to stop spending any money at all on test prep. In other words, he should dry up that beast…test preparation is not an education, and the kids who need access to the arts, sports, to clubs and games and after-school – those kids have had those things stripped away from them in the last eight years, and those should be restored.

OK, and I’m going on until you stop me – you should get the military out of the schools. Education is a civilian, and not a military undertaking. And the idea that Chicago, the most militarized school system in the country, has whole schools designated “military schools” – public high schools that are called “military schools” are an outrage in a democratic society. The fact that JROTC is proliferating like mad, and not to make any mistake about it: the Department of Defense has JROTC and military high schools in its recruitment budget. So when they say “Well, it’s not really about recruitment,” they’re lying. It’s completely about recruitment.

…Notice where these military schools are. They’re in poor communities. No one would dare put a military school in Winnetka – the rich Chicago suburb – there’s no way. But in the Chicago public schools, who’s going to resist?

And parents are bought into because they’re led to believe there is no alternative, or the argument is made again and again that kids will learn to be disciplined and learn to be orderly. But what could teach you more discipline than playing in an orchestra? Or being in a theater group? These require enormous discipline. But of course the only discipline that counts, in the mentality of the military, is military discipline. In other words: obedience, conformity, uniformity – and these are not the qualities we need in a democracy. You know, I could go on for hours, I’d better stop right there.

JG: As you know, Students for a Democratic Society reformed in 2006. Have you been able to talk to the students involved with this, and perhaps gauge if they’re headed in the right direction?

BA: Yes, I know the SDS kids in the Chicago area…I know a lot of the SDS chapters and I’ve spoken at their campuses. I’m a huge supporter of multi-issue radical political organizing. In other words, organizing that connects the war with [global] warming, for example, or that connects civil rights with GLBTQ issues, or that connects GLBTQ issues with the right to universal health care. And on and on. So I like multi-issue organizing, SDS does a lot of that.

But the other thing that I feel very strongly about is that none of us should be so dogmatic or so certain that we know this is good organizing and this isn’t; we should have an attitude of experimentalness, and we should have an attitude of generosity. So I look at the formation of SDS as a hopeful sign.

…The one thing I would say is that the movement we need today is a movement of organizers, not just a movement of people who feel that they take the right position. People who go out and talk to strangers, knock on doors, find ways to get into the public square in unique and new ways, not in old, tired ways….engage the public in a conversation about the direction of the country. This is the moment of real opportunity, because the rising expectations people are experiencing everywhere are coming into deep collision with the realities of the environmental crisis, the economic crisis, and more, so I think that this is a moment when organizing is what we must do.

JG: Back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, SDS and the Weathermen described America as being tainted by white and male privilege. Almost forty years later, many on the left still consider that sentiment a pretty good description of the society we live in today. Would you agree with them?

BA: Well look, I think the election of Obama was a significant blow to white supremacy – and an important blow to white supremacy. I don’t think it was a fatal blow. And if you think white supremacy has kind of gone [by the wayside], I think you have to look again. You have to look at the poverty rates, for example. Children born into poverty: overwhelmingly children of color. Or people arrested, and people who are involved in the criminal justice system: overwhelmingly people of color.

So yeah, I think white supremacy still exists. I think a lot of indicators still show that it exists, and the system of white supremacy is what has to be done away with, not this particular individual with a biased attitude, but it’s the system that privileges people because of their race, their background, their gender, and this does still go on, absolutely. Not uniformly, not universally – it never did. But I think that white supremacy is one of the founding principles of this country and it is not dead yet.

JG: What about male supremacy?

BA: Similarly, women still make significantly less than men for the same jobs, and that’s astonishing forty years after the modern feminist movement got underway. So that’s one way to measure male supremacy: access, recognition, and so on.

But there are other measures as well. One of the things that all of these identity movements have to come to terms with – and the women’s movement is such a classic example of this – is the question of access versus transformation. Is the goal of the women’s movement, for example, historically, is it to have access so they can be as fully equal in the society that has injustice built right into it? Is the goal, that if we had a woman president or a woman CEO of General Motors, would that be proof that women had made it?

Or is hope of the women’s movement [to] create a society based on certain feminist principles like cooperation, mutual recognition?

Same with the question of the gay movement. Is the idea that gays should be equal to everyone else in terms of rights? Well that’s part of it. But some people would argue – and I think convincingly, persuasively – that the real promise of the gay movement isn’t that you get to fight in the U.S. Army and go kill people, or that you get to enter into this moribund institution called marriage, but rather that we create a society in which being queer is not something considered horrible or an anathema, but as something that we build a society where the recognition of people in their wild range of diversity is acceptable, and that we don’t have problems with it. That’s a different vision.

JG: I don’t know if I heard you correctly, did you call marriage a morbid or a moribund institution?

BA: Moribund. M-o-r-i-b-u-n-d. A dead institution. An institution that ought to be killed off…think about it, if you’re married, you get 1500 rights that if you’re not married, you don’t get. One of my favorites, for example, is in Montana – you can pass your hunting license onto your spouse, so if you’re not married you don’t have that right. I know that’s silly, isn’t it?

But what’s the point of that? Why don’t we say instead: “We want universal health care, we want every human being to have the right to name who their heirs are. We need every human being to have a right to name the people they want at their bedside if they’re in a serious crisis or in a life-threatening situation…”

The point is: why are these things tied to marriage? What’s marriage got to do with it? Now if you want to get married and you belong to a temple or a church or an ashram or neighborhood or community of friends, go for it. Knock yourself out.

…At this point, since we do have civil marriages, everyone oughta have a right to marry anyone they want. But if we did away with civil marriage altogether, did away with marriage – then you could get married in your religion or your cult or your neighborhood and nobody’d give a shit. A group of friends could come together and toss you up and down on a trampoline and throw rose petals at you, and God bless you all…

…I mean, people can make all kind of decisions. Why marriage should be privileged above all others just strikes me as inhuman.

JG: But you’re married, aren’t you?

BA: Absolutely. All those rights, all those privileges that you get for married…and I don’t know if you know the circumstance of my getting married. Do you know?

JG: I don’t.

BA: …I had three kids, my wife [fellow Weather Underground member Bernadine Dohrn] was called before a grand jury to testify, she refused, she was put in prison. And at that moment, we had three kids and we’d been together for years and years and years….but at that point, we were vulnerable and fragile in front of the law. So we got her a furlough for two days to get married – so that we could provide some protection for her and me if she were to go off to prison.

But why should we have to do that? Why shouldn’t I have the right to visit her and so on and so on without the nonsense of marriage?

JG: Even beyond marriage, I recall that the Weathermen had a slogan of “Smash Monogamy…”

BA: It’s a great slogan.

JG: [Laughs] But you’ve been with the same woman for what, thirty years now?

BA: Forty.

JG: Forty! So would that be proof that you’ve…gotten over that slogan?

BA: No, I’ve never gotten over it. I think that…[laughs] You know, I mean it was a silly, outrageous, theater of the absurd kind of political theater kind of slogan. It had no literal meaning. But the metaphoric meaning is right.

And that is, the idea that — well first of all, smash marriage — but even the idea of this institutionalized deadening kind of relationship where you become a habit rather than a choice. Rather than saying we’re together for forty years and every morning I get up and say “Gee, I wonder if we should be together today? Yes, I think we should.” That’s a choice. The other way of doing it is a habit: “Ah shit, gotta be here, because: what the hell.” You know? So the metaphor is a good one and the metaphor is a challenge to the idea that human relationships naturally fall into these boundaries of exclusivity.

JG: Why, in the Weather Underground documentary, were you carrying a baseball bat on the streets of Chicago when you were retelling the story of the Days of Rage?

BA: Because the filmmaker handed it to me. He brought it and handed to me, and I hadn’t taken my meds that morning…nah I’m just kidding, I don’t take meds – he handed it to me, he thought it would be cute…I wasn’t thinking about it much. He said “Would you mind walking around with this baseball bat?” and I said “Nah, I don’t mind.” So I think he thought it was cute, and what do I care?

JG: Well here’s this event that was out of control– you know, rioting – and here you are as an adult, talking about learning from your mistakes…and yet you’ve got a baseball bat in your hand walking down the same street you smashed up forty years ago. I just found that funny.

BA: Yeah, it was ironic and I think that’s how the [filmmakers] meant it.

But you know, the truth is that that was a militant demonstration at a certain moment in time. Nobody should be controlled [by] or living in the nostalgia of the 60s – for good or bad. We’re in a new era; the 60s is mostly myth and symbol, it didn’t happen the way the kind of perceived wisdom tells us it happened. It was both more complicated, more layered, more contradictory than any single narrative can tell you.

So I think that it’s kind of one of the great problems for young activists: living in the shadow of this mythological 60s. When mythologically, we had the best music, the best demonstrations, the best sex…it’s not true. It’s so flatly not true that it still astonishes me that people take that narrative seriously.

Or the other side of the narrative is: “Oh, they were out of control, they were domestic terrorists, they were crazy, they were horrible.” That’s also not true. So I think that people have to get over the 60s and move on to some sense that we have to reinvent – right here, right now – a movement for social change and social justice and peace that doesn’t rely on the mythology of the 60s…we have to make the movement right now.

And just one example is that, you know, the peace movement – we became a majority movement over time. But the majority of Americans today want peace also, and are against the wars that we’re waging. So it’s not so different than it was back then. There is difference in terms of street mobilization, but let’s not romanticize that either – because remember, we didn’t end the war. That’s very important to remember: that we did not have the power to stop it. And the war dragged on for seven years after the majority of the American people opposed it. And it dragged on in a vicious way – six thousand people a week being murdered – so the idea that the anti-war movement then was remarkably successful whereas the anti-war movement today is not is just a myth. It’s just untrue.

Now, we have to find a new rhetoric of resistance; we have to find new ways to mobilize…that’s all true. But it’s not true that we should measure it against what happened forty or fifty years ago.

But isn’t that part of the problem? Selling this idea that you don’t have to do anything. Anytime you sell people the idea that sit back and you’ll get 10 to 20 percent on your money, don’t you always know that that’s going to be a lie? When are we going to realize in this country that our wealth is work. That we’re workers and by selling this idea that of “Hey man, I’ll teach you how to be rich.” How is that any different than an infomercial?

At that moment, I hoped that the studio audience would give Stewart a standing ovation for a statement so refreshing in its common sense that it seemed almost revolutionary. Yet not a peep could be heard. True, it must be considered that the crowd was probably in a state of rapt attention at not only at the overdue humbling of one TV personality, but also at the rare serious form of another. And so it was understandable that they did not want to risk breaking the taut string of interrogation that was keeping Cramer squirming on the hook.

But I still can’t shake this thought: if the truth of Stewart’s statement was the equivalent a bucket of cold water in Cramer’s face, it must have been a tidal wave onto the audience. That is, I can safely bet that many of the people in that crowd – us – had bought into that same infomercial, the idea of getting something for nothing. And we’re now feeling pretty stupid about it.

It was easy to be fooled into thinking that our financial system was a legitimate enterprise with “solid foundations.” After all, the system seemed to work well for our parents. When it was our turn to invest, we were dazzled (and confused) by complicated terms typed on elaborate contracts printed on expensive letterhead, which were pushed across a rich mahogany table by men in crisp, clean suits with large salaries and offices in glassy skyscrapers. If that wasn’t legitimate, what was? And as a famous man once said, most people usually cannot conceive that those in power “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”

Yet there is more to it than that; this was – and continues to be – much more complex than a run-of-the-mill scam. How could a country built with such brave, valiant effort be seduced into such a lazy, irrational mode of thinking? Not the idea that we could make money without working, but the idea that we could do it legitimately, legally, and morally? There are plenty of possible reasons, but I’d like to discuss something that is easy to overlook: the power of words.

As the public relations industry matured throughout the last half of the twentieth century, powerful institutions with a lot to lose became increasingly adept at manipulating the semantics of our popular discourse. Take our government, for example. Violent, bloody interventions into other countries came to be known as “defense,” anyone who opposed our foreign policy could be labeled a “terrorist,” and whenever “democracy” was mentioned, it was sure to be paired with “capitalism” – to list a just a few examples.

Perhaps a few people noticed at first, scoffed, rolled their eyes. But it wasn’t enough. Before long, we had unconsciously digested these terms more palatable to the powers-that-be and started using them with a straight face, just as their creators intended – nowadays, you’d probably be laughed out of the room of you called the Department of Defense by its more archaic, politically incorrect name: the War Department.¹ The victors not only have the power to write history, but construct the language that tells that history.

It is little secret that many of those in government move back and forth between Washington and Wall Street. So it is not much of a surprise to find out that our business moguls also understand the huge potential of words. Just as our government had ensnared hundreds of formerly useful words and turned them into their zombified foot soldiers, so too did Wall Street invent their own Newspeak (which, in Orwell’s words, “was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought.”) and co-opt the English language to meet their ends.

With plenty of money to spend on PR, the titans of Wall Street transformed what seemed like brash, risky bets into “aggressive portfolios.” The winnings of these bets are now regarded as “returns.” And of course, the term “gambling,” so loaded with the baggage of addiction and broad public scorn, is rarely ever broached.

As Wall Street became more criminal, the words that they used to describe what they were doing became more complex. This more recent era of looting saw the birth of “credit default swaps,” “collateralized debt obligations,” “structured investment vehicles,” and “mortgage backed securities,” all very professional-sounding but utterly incomprehensible terms (even to the bankers themselves!) that served to hide an underbelly of shady trading that grew shadier by the day. The more often we heard these phrases, the more that they were uttered by knowing, professional faces, the fewer questions we raised.

There are many tasks ahead of us if we wish to return to a sane, sustainable mode of living. One of those tasks is to make a concerted effort to mean what we say. We must reinvigorate the words that we have left prey to PR spinsters and politicians to be used to manipulate our thinking. And sometimes, we must capture the words that the oligarchs themselves invented. How can we do that? By following Wall Street’s example: using them over and over and over again in our conversation and writing – in the context that suggests the meaning that we’d want for them to convey.

Let’s take the term “invest,” for example. In the 2009 edition of the Random House Dictionary, the first three definitions of the word are as follows:

   1. to put (money) to use, by purchase or expenditure, in something offering potential profitable returns, as interest, income, or appreciation in value.

   2. to use (money), as in accumulating something: to invest large sums in books.

   3. to use, give, or devote (time, talent, etc.), as for a purpose or to achieve something: He invested a lot of time in helping retarded children.

Dictionaries list several definitions of one entry in a numerical order based on their perceived order of importance. Because most dictionaries these days tend to be descriptive (reflecting how the language is actually used, “ain’t” included) rather than prescriptive (prescribing how the language should be used, “ain’t” excluded), the definition’s placement usually correlates to its how often it is used, which creates a numerical scale ranging from the everyday to the archaic.

In the spirit of the sobering bucket of cold water that is the global recession, I believe we should begin the process of pushing the #3 definition up to the #1 spot, through the means of verbal and literary labor. Why? To put it simply, the first two are narrow definitions which imply self-serving motives, while the third is more open and entails any possible range of motives, from the most selfish to the most altruistic. In today’s world, the #1 definition of “invest” exists mostly in the realm of the abstract, in a Matrix-like sea of digitized numbers; what is “invested” in has no face, no heart, and nothing for you to hold. Like a gambler and his dice, the average investor has no emotional connection to his investments outside of their capacity to make him money. Speaking of investments strictly in dollar terms is just one symptom of the diseased mentality that got us into this mess in the first place.

The third definition of “invest”, on the other hand, is very capable of referring to the real, the tangible, and the concrete. That “something” referred to could be to amass a personal fortune, but it could also be a host of other things – educating your child, taking charge of your health, bettering the relationship with your parents (Acknowledging the cynics in the audience: yes, it could also be world domination). While definition #1 only has fearful hope to keep the investor and his investments together in hard times, definition #3 has room to consider a sense of honor, personal obligation, or love (qualities which are especially useful in hard economic times). While definition #1 entails only risks, definition #3 entails risks and responsibilities.

When we as individuals accept more responsibility for our actions, the nation as a whole will benefit. How can we act more responsibly? Using words that meant to communicate, not to conceal, would be an excellent start. When we can speak more directly and frankly with each other, when the carefully constructed facades are torn away by clear logic, we’ll be able to see that our economy does not need an investment of more money, but common sense. We would accept, as Mr. Stewart said, that our wealth is work, and that we certainly can’t get something for nothing.

1. The Department of War was renamed the Department of Defense in 1949, only one year after the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) was founded.