The People Speak
The People Speak is a film inspired by Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, which is a critical view of American history and one of the best-selling history books in the United States. The book and the film look at the history of America from a different perspective, not from that of Government and the powers that be, but rather from those ordinary people who resisted, protested, and dissented in order to fight for the principles on which our government is based. “The film features the actual words (in letters, songs, poems, speeches, and manifestos) of rebels, dissenters, and visionaries from our past – and present – including Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Bob Dylan, Langston Hughes, Chief Joseph, Muhammad Ali, and unknown veterans, union workers, abolitionists and many others never featured in high school textbooks.” As Matt Damon suggested in Good Will Hunting: [It] will f*cking knock you on your ass.
As has happened again and again in a nation’s history the government is only moved to reform by the actions of organized citizens.
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The people up on top , the people who have the power, their power depends on the obedience of people below them and when people withdraw that obedience – when workers go out on strike or when consumers boycott or when soldiers refuse – then the makers of war, the profiteers, the purveyors of greed, then they are helpless. You can see the possibility that small acts multiplied by the millions can merge into great movements of social change; well that impels us to act. And we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future, if we live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that’s bad around us, that in itself is a marvelous victory.
