Recently I looked up the three-syllable word "progressive" in my dictionary, and the results are in my little diary The Pilgrim's Progressive.
Today I had to look up a two-syllable word, "prevent," just to be sure that I hadn't mistaken its meaning. I hadn't. My dictionary says that "prevent" means "to keep from happening."
What prompted me to question my understanding of simple English was an article What YOU Can Do to Prevent Another Stolen Election, published on opednews by Mark Crispin Miller and headlined by the editors. Notice that the title of the article is not what you can do to document another stolen election, or what you can do to litigate another stolen election, but what you can do to "prevent" another stolen election. So I read the article carefully several times, but I could not find a single word in it about preventing another stolen election or what anyone could do to achieve that goal.
Normally I wouldn't doubt my comprehension of basic English, but not only do I have a lot of respect for Mark Crispin Miller, but he also happens to be a professor of Culture and Communications at New York University. So I thought that perhaps he hadn't mistitled his article and that I had misunderstood what the meaning of "prevent" is.
No such luck.
I also got an email from somebody else I greatly admire and respect, opednews election integrity editor, Joan Brunwasser, touting Miller's article and urging people to read it. So I had to go to the dictionary because I couldn't just assume that a highly competent editor and a distinguished professor of communications wouldn't know the meaning of "prevent."
But the dictionary had the same definition I've always used.
Miller's article suggests that people donate money to an organization that intends to litigate election fraud. Litigation of that sort can cost a lot of money and it can also take many years. Ultimately, since it involves a number of very highly-placed government officials and the issue of federal elections, it is likely, if it should succeed at lower levels, to end up before the United States Supreme Court. Remember them? The people who stole the 2000 election? Does anyone seriously think they might be likely to rule that stealing elections is illegal?
When they see that the title Miller chose for his article refers to "another stolen election," people are apt to think of the upcoming November presidential election, which happens to be very much in the news these days. Yet his article does not have any advice about or even any references to ways to prevent the November 2008 election from being stolen in the same ways (or newly invented ways) that the 2000 and 2004 elections were stolen. Anyone looking to his article to find advice on what they could do to prevent the 2008 election from being stolen, will be sorely disappointed.
My interest in this is personal because I have for quite some time been advocating the only way that I know of to actually PREVENT the November election from being stolen: an election boycott. If you don't cast a vote, your vote cannot be stolen and discarded or flipped to another candidate.
The problem is that once a presidential election is stolen, there is nothing that We the People can do about it for the next four years except whine and cry to Congress to impeach the fraudulently installed president, something they have shown no inclination whatsoever to do. And the consequences of unintended presidencies can be dire, such as torture, crimes against humanity, wars of aggression, the destruction of the environment, the destabilization of our economy, and the erosion of civil rights. Given that Congress is currently spending more than a million dollars every two minutes on wars that most American disapprove of, even a few hours of an unintended presidency can be extremely costly at a time when our country is already deeply in debt.
Many of us have already spent years expressing our outrage at the stolen elections of 2000 and 2004, and their consequences to us and to our posterity, and we would very much like to prevent another stolen election. That may be why Miller chose such a deceptive title for his article. We have learned that unless we prevent stolen elections, there is little or nothing we can do to mitigate the damage afterwards. What sort of person would be encouraging people to allow yet another election to be stolen so that they can write about it and their friends can raise money to file law suits about it? What sort of person would mischaracterize allowing another election to be stolen as preventing another stolen election?
There is a way to prevent the November election from being stolen. You can read about it in my essay Consensual Political Intercourse. If you explore that site you will also find other essays on why an election boycott is necessary and how it can work. It is the only nonviolent method of discrediting a government that has ever been proven to be effective, when it delegitimized the Apartheid regime of South Africa and led to the ANC being decriminalized, Nelson Mandela being released from prison, and blacks being allowed to vote. As long as we are willing to keep voting in rigged elections, we cannot stand up for our right to honest elections.
I am issuing a public challenge to Prof. Miller to explain how anything in his essay would enable anyone to prevent the November election from being stolen. I'm going to post a link to this diary as a comment under his article, and also send him a personal message with the link. Of course since he is such an eminent author and academician, his secretaries may not think my challenge worth passing along to him, and/or he may not deem it worthy of a response. But when a professor of communications doesn't seem to know the meaning of a simple word like "prevent," it is difficult to take him seriously or to avoid the suspicion that he just might have a political agenda contrary to the interests of our country.
