COLUMN LEFT/ DAVE DELLINGER : Hungering for the Real U.S. Issues : Along with communism, our system too has failed, depriving millions of basic human rights.

Now that the Soviet Union has collapsed, what are we going to do about the United States? Will we accept the propaganda that “our system is triumphant” and should be established all over the world, with the United States as superpower? Or will we admit that our system too has failed, depriving millions of their basic human rights, from food, housing, health care and jobs to a safe and healthy environment and realistic participation in the decisions that affect their lives?

During the period in which the Soviet Union was falling apart, the United States had a doubling of billionaires and of the homeless. Shall we pretend that the children of billionaires and the children of the homeless are “born equal” and that this is a democracy? More American children die every year for reasons related to poverty than the total number of U.S. combat deaths in the entire Vietnam War. And in the United States, the rate of black incarceration is six times that of whites. Do blacks have a proclivity for criminality in their genes? Or is the economy, culture and system of “justice” criminally racist?

At one level of their consciousness, most people know these realities--and more. Public discontent is far greater than in the ‘60s. But because it embraces more issues than when civil rights and opposition to the Vietnam War dominated public demonstrations, not everyone goes to the same city on the same day to shout the same slogans. This makes it easier for the media to claim that the days of social revolt are over. Nonetheless, the volcano that the military/corporate elite is so fearfully sitting on is bound to erupt, one way or another, just as the Soviet volcano erupted.

One of our purposes in fasting is to encourage the development of a nonviolent movement that will have the power of a volcano without its mindless destructiveness. I am rededicating myself to principles that Martin Luther King Jr. articulated in the last few months of his life. “For years I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions--a little change here, a little change there,” King said. “Now I feel quite differently. I think you’ve got to have a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values.

“We can’t have a system where some people live in superfluous, inordinate wealth, while others live in abject, deadening poverty. From now on, our movement must take on basic class issues between the privileged and the underprivileged.

“The evils of capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and evils of racism.”

King called for imaginative experiments in new forms of human-relatedness based on respect for the dignity and ultimate sanctity of every human being, regardless of race, age, sex, sexual orientation, abilities, skills and whatever mistakes or crimes that anyone may have committed. Even crimes? Some of society’s victims do terrible things that are deplorable even though they harm far fewer people than the crimes of our current society and its rulers. But as Judge David L. Bazelon has written: “Society should be as alarmed by the silent misery of those who accept their plight as it is by the violence of those who do not.”

The New Yorker magazine wrote of the riots in Los Angeles: “But what, as a nation, did we really expect? The residents of our inner cities have for many years now been unable to lay claim to our sense of common humanity and simple decency. On what basis can we expected to suddenly lay claim to theirs?”

Martin Luther King once said to me: “We don’t have to like everyone, but we won’t solve our problems if we don’t love them.” While fasting, my colleagues and I will attempt to spell out some of the concrete steps through which we think that these principles--and that love--can be implemented. But the task will require the combined trial-and-error efforts of many hearts, minds and lives, with many experiments in our own live and communities and in the overall society.

As I once heard a wise person say, “If you tell me that what I propose will take a thousand years to accomplish, that’s all the more reason for starting this afternoon.”