I’m often told that I cannot talk politics and I cannot organize with students at my college because they don’t have time. They have to work. They have better things to do like school projects. They would rather party and cut loose since these are some of the best years of our lives.
I happen to think all of that can be done while talking about a radically different future for America and while organizing to take on the powers that be.
We cannot limit ourselves to couch potato political action. We cannot click a key on the keyboard, send our opinion off, and then roll over to watch a rerun of Judge Judy or a Discovery Channel special on raging nature.
If anything good comes out of Obama’s campaign, it will be that the youth were mobilized. If anything good comes out of Nader’s campaign, it will be that the youth, the New Nader’s Raiders, believed in something more than what this country has to offer socially and politically.
There is no easy way out of this. The times require stamina, fortitude, the drive to learn, and the urge to create a better world for a better future.
We will not vote our way out of this. Even in a perfect world where Nader was elected (or McKinney or Ron Paul or Dennis Kucinich), it wouldn’t matter who was helming the ship. The ship would surely sail into the rocks and become stuck because the people currently are not acting and wielding the power our Founders believed the people must wield on a regular basis.
Just today, Al Gore is calling on young people to engage in civil disobedience:
"If you're a young person looking at the future of this planet and looking at what is being done right now, and not done, I believe we have reached the stage where it is time for civil disobedience to prevent the construction of new coal plants that do not have carbon capture and sequestration," Gore told the Clinton Global Initiative gathering to loud applause.
The antiwar movement and in fact, all modes of grassroots political action is in disarray. We disagree on tactics monumentally and come off as circus freaks when we appear on television. We also lack the ability to turn perceived public rejection into perceived public approval.
For all the moral arguments we make, we haven’t the apparatus to do anything, and we turn to the politicians who led us to mobilize in the first place for help. That’s kind of like this bailout plan: Wall Street led us to be upset and now, we are being asked to help out Wall Street if we hope to restore our economy and cure our outrage.
United for Peace and Justice, for example, has degenerated into this conglomeration that asks people to vote every four years. In between elections, they harshly criticize politicians for not supporting peace and justice. Such degeneration divides the grassroots political activist groups between the courageous and morally righteous and then the weak and pragmatic.
But, if we suggest that neither is right but because neither can reconcile and advance an agenda which achieves goals, well, then we see there is quite a problem for American people especially when they are asked to support citizen action groups? Who wants to donate dollars to bullshit organizing---organizing which results in nothing?
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