Living Activism
I make a lot of posts about current events that turn opinionated toward the bottom, where I usually rant that the solution is for us to be more active, engaged citizens. I want to take a minute to expand on that.
Every problem within our broken system has its own set of solutions, but one facet to every solution is more people taking a more active role in the decision process. This means first educating yourself enough to have a strong opinion and then taking the time to back it up with action --- on Election Day, using your vote, or on every other day, using the 1st Amendment. When a lot of people do it over one problem, pressure for a solution follows. This is called “progress”.
People often look to leaders for this, but I think that’s a mistake. The only thing a leader can do is direct a bunch of followers to behave a certain way, and only in the short term and only over one issue at a time. It’s like the old analogy --- give a man a fish and he’ll eat tonight, but teach a man to fish and he’ll never go hungry. I think activism is the same way. Better to learn the trade and reuse it over and over again, applying it to a wide variety of situations, instead of pinning your hope on a leader who may or may not do what you want later on.
It’s a question of trust versus initiative. Some people think that if they vote, their job as a citizen is done. They think since they put the best person they could think of there, they can just sit back and trust them to act on their behalf. Then you hear them complain when the person they voted for does a poor job. Then I roll my eyes. Because voting is a tiny part of being a citizen. Despite the races being in our faces all the time, courtesy of a superficial media, elections don’t happen very often. Most days are not elections. Most days your only power resides in the 1st Amendment. And the 1st Amendment is about initiative.
The 1st Amendment gives us a lot of nice things, but in my opinion, the rights to freedom of speech and assembly are the keys to a healthy democracy -- use them well and the government will feel you. The problem is that each of these rights are useless to most people. And here is where this essay gets raaaadical.
The reason they’re useless has to do with 2 things: time and money. I mentioned earlier that to use your rights effectively, the prereq is that you take the time to understand what you’re talking about and agitating for. Well most people don’t have the time. Why?
The answer is money. Because people need to put in 8+ hours a day to make enough, and the rest goes to rest. They’re addicted. And it overshadows all other priorities, because money gets you what you want. Let's face it: money is far more valuable than something as abstract and seemingly dead-endish as educating oneself about a political issue. So there the time goes. And it happens
on a mass scale, and it's self-perpetuating. People brainwash each other into thinking they need to buy certain things, that something is necessary to live, or worse, to be cool, or worse, for your life to have value. Better to own an HDTV than a brain that understands the healthcare debacle. And it's not even just "buying certain things"; it's that people trying to make the sales tell the other people to live a certain way (example: cosmetics driving bulimia). What’s right? Far be it for me to tell you how to live your life -- that'd be committing the same sin as the man on the commercial, albeit not for profit -- but I’ve sure as hell made up my own mind, whether anybody else feels the same way or not.
Anyway, I don’t see things getting any better. I believe America as Jefferson and Paine idealized it is collapsing before our very eyes --- undying loyalty to capitalism and only shallow lip service to democracy. President George W. Bush, elected and reelected by a bunch of people who were (and are)
clearly not very informed OR interested in individual freedom, let alone taking an active, everyday role in government decisionmaking, is not an anomaly. He’s the new rule. Get used to Iraqs, Katrinas, Gitmos and 9/11s.
America is a nation of people asleep at the wheel driving off a cliff in a really nice car.
Either we jolt ourselves out of this, wake ourselves the fuck up, become much, much better citizens, or we get used to having total morons putting total morons in positions of power. Either we use the 1st Amendment like HELL or we watch it continue to die a slow death by economic strangulation. It’s about retaking time by redefining priorities until we have
a formula that doesn’t lead to President Bushes.
…
It’d be easier to get hit by a bus or something. Until then, I'll keep talking, especially the things no one wants to hear.
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