Elections: The Day After

[Better Believe It]

Elections: The Day After
by Robert Jensen
October 31, 2010

On mid-term Election Day, voters will choose between candidates with different positions on health-care insurance, withdrawal from Afghanistan, and CO2 levels that drive global warming. The politicians we send to the legislatures and executive offices will make -- or avoid making -- important decisions. Our votes matter.

But Election Day is far from the most important moment in our political lives. The radical changes necessary to produce a just and sustainable society are not on the table for politicians in the Republican or Democratic parties, which means we citizens have to commit to ongoing radical political activity after the election.

I use the term "radical" -- which to some may sound extreme or even un-American -- to mark the importance of talking bluntly about the problems we face. In a political arena in which Tea Partiers claim to defend freedom and centrist Democrats are called socialists, important concepts degenerate into slogans and slurs that confuse rather than clarify. By "radical," I mean a politics that goes to the root to critique the systems of power that create the injustice in the world and an agenda that offers policy proposals that can change those systems.

Because these crucial questions are not on the agenda for the two dominant parties battling on November 2, we have to commit to a radical citizens' agenda on November 3. The first step is building and fortifying -- both the local grassroots institutions that can work independently of the powerful, and the networks of empathy and caring that will be needed if we are to survive the fraying of the systems in which we live.

Read the full article at:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/10/31

[MineralMan]

1. It's an on-going process. Always has been.

One election is just the beginning of working on the next one. But, the current one is still important. We'll talk, starting Wednesday. Until then, there's an election on Tuesday. We can still have an effect in this election.