left cheek: democracy

Showing posts with label democracy. Show all posts

Friday, January 13, 2012

Democracy Means No Idols

I don't view the Occupy movement as a sustainable political movement. Partly because the organizers never saw it as that either. It's more of a long-term, several-site teach-in/demonstration/experiment.

And a darned good one too. This isn't meant to belittle the Occupy's. They serve many functions and bring awareness and an energy to social justice issues sorely lacking in the US and throughout the world. And, equally important, they help to envision what true democracy can look like.

Which is very different from what we consider to be democracy.

We tend to view democracy as the process of voting. Which is a part of democracy, but not the essence of it. Democracy is rule by the people. Though we are taught what we are participating in is democracy in the United States, we must be honest: it's oligarchy - rule by the few, the elites, the powerful. That is how it's been set up since the beginning of our nation. That is a root cause for the American Civil War: the right of slave states to count their "property" (slaves) as representative votes without extending to the slaves the right of those votes (thus, the slave "owners" will have the power of voting for as many slaves as they have without allowing them to self-determine. Quite brilliant, really. But also eerily familiar to current political practices [cf, Florida]).

We citizens have very little say in how our nation is run, but rather we pull a lever for a person that we believe will rule to our benefit. Every once in a while, however, we are infused with a dynamo, a leader that we are led to believe will or has lead us to new heights, a true leader that represents our best interests at heart. A benign sovereign. A messiah.

John F Kennedy. Bobby Kennedy. Theodore Roosevelt. Abraham Lincoln. Franklin Roosevelt. Thomas Jefferson. Bill Clinton. Ronald Reagan. Barack Obama. Ron Paul.

President Roosevelt op kameel /American President Roosevelt on a camel in the desert

These presidents and presidential contenders have endeared themselves to legions upon legions* of devout followers. They inspire. They have an aura around them to make us believe that they can fix what ails us... given the opportunity and enough power.

And so we give them that power.

And they always disappoint. Always.

And so we turn our focus to our next leader, hoping for better things.

It's a game, really. Not to repeat the ridiculous charge that each politician is just like the other and that we might as well all vote for Animal from the Muppets (although that would make a great poster), but the focus of all of this is to siphon off and centralize our own power. That's the focus and scope of Republican and Democratic leadership since at least as long as they've been in power.

I believe we need to self-determine within the context of our communities and the surrounding context. And the route to that is not through more oligarchy. It is not through another Great Leader. It can not be through putting our eggs into such fragile baskets who always succumb to the ragged entrails of personal authority.

The problem isn't that we have the wrong people/person in authority. The problem is authoritarianism. The idea that we should and need to give all of our power into the hands of a person or group of people who can save us.

Rather, we must ~~put our eggs into~~ invest in each other. We must actively seek to empower ourselves to act in community, to listen to each other, to find out where and how we can collaborate and act together. It's in acting as neighborly, finding what we can all bring to the table, how we can help each other, how we can benefit and trade our goods and services in ways that are complementary to each other.

----------------------------------------------------
*Deliberate word choice, yes.

Monday, October 31, 2011

Local Sabor pt 2

The reasons for buying local are growing by the day - or maybe they've always been there and we just didn't know it. As I've been arguing on this site and at Facebook, the way society does business is going to have to fundamentally change. It is going to have to change from a multinational, centralized plutocracy - where most of the power and resources of the world are held in a few hands - to localized, people-centered democracies. Concentrating on buying locally is an important first step in this process. This is further expanded by the fact that buying local helps the local economy and keeps profits generating in the area. Multinationals centralize their profits - some for investing, some for saving, some for keepsies. But very little - besides some charitable work that disguises this grand theft - actively gos back to the local areas from which the profits were extracted.

As we noted earlier, buying from local independents recirculates money used by local producers for local business. An independent grocer is more likely to staff its store with local workers, to use local vendors, to advertise using local talent and on local-based media. This is currency that is self-generating. This is jobs.

For small businesses struggling to make ends meet - not because their products, vision, or service is inferior, but because they're unfairly crowded out - buying local gives them a chance they may otherwise not have. And it brings us a few steps closer between goods and their consumers and between clients, owners and workers. This in turn makes the company more likely to be ethical and follow ethical practices - not least of which because it is not a faceless, money-first multinational.

Now, the arguments made against buying local are legion. They are not without merit on the face, but they're deceptive and evil in practicality. The main reason to support the global economy, or so we've been told since the days of NAFTA, is that it supports and gives jobs and infrastructure to those who would not otherwise have money or access to resources.

But then we realize that those same people were better off before the multinationals came in and convinced them of their need for international commerce anyway. The emperors of the multinationals - with the aid of the mad men on Madison Ave - have convinced the world that having enough is no longer adequate. In doing so, they have traded in the economy of need and joy to that of excess and leisure. Yet since most of the world's citizens cannot possibly achieve that level of excess and leisure*, they are left hungry and overburdened. Even those of us who have the good luck to be in a part of the world and have access to jobs and resources that give us this E&L are finding ourselves fundamentally unsatisfied. (Picture the emptiness and sorrow that inspired this raving piece of antisocial anger of the Wall St leafletteer.

In the two-thirds world, the main resource, the main source of revenue, the main capital is human slavery. So although the PR firms and think-tanks can try to convince us that buying clothes from the Gap and Nike is supporting the Vietnamese and Laotians who make the clothes, those laborers are certainly not getting the wages appropriate for their work. To understate.

The systemic oppression of people within the third world - and largely though not at all exclusively non-white folks in the first world - is the price we pay for the nice stuff we get through globalism. Globalism, by the way, is just a nice-sounding way of saying that a few people have rigged the entire world into an intricate, overly-complex, centralized web in which those few people themselves profit immensely, a few more of us profit well enough to not rise against the system substantially (although thank heavens for the Spring and Occupy movements, largely organized by the richest third of the world - ones who can largely afford higher education and technological devices to spread word and message), but most of the world workers are in all actuality slaves. At a dollar per twelve hour day.

Buy and support local. It just tastes better.

---------------------------------------
*

Quote attributed to Gandhi. Picture stolen from Goodnighmoonlight.

pt 1 is here

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Confessions of a Political Junkie

"I believe we need to start a grassroots solidarity movement for true revolution that builds healthy systems in opposition to the current cystem we live under. If you believe that salvation lies through one man, then I would like you to remove yourself from my friends list so I can add revolutionaries. It's as simple as that. It's a class war and there's no time to collaborate with the Robber Class and Robber Class cystems, like federal elections."

I agree with Cindy Sheehan here (taken from her Facebook page this morning). And yes, I believe that "systems" was spelled that way intentionally; though I'm not in any hurry to remove people from my life.

I've been beating this drum that politics is just a frakkin' dirty game. It's ugly and it draws out the worst in people. Case in point from last night's Tea Party debate among GOP candidates, when presented with the scenario of leaving a young man who got sick, fell into a coma and did not have insurance (though he had the option earlier) to die:

Ron Paul: That is what freedom is all about and taking your own risks. This whole idea that you have to take care of everyone…

(Crowd cheers)

Moderator: But congressman, are you saying that society should just let him die?

(Crowd screams YES!)

The crowd goes wild!!!!

The same type of crowd that was cheering Texas Gov Rick Perry for the death of over 200 inmate prisoners.

At this rate, I worry about the propulsion of any true democracy. Are our people mutating into the extras from "Gladiator"?

Not that our dear Republic is working so well.

In response to some controversy about the so-called Safe Communities Act (which is working out to be anti-community, anti-family, and not-very-safe), a fair representative for his people's welfare, Massachusetts State Rep Ryan Fattman argued that undocumented victims of rape should have not flaunted their illegal bodies anyway, or something to that effect:

When asked whether or not he would be concerned about an undocumented woman, beaten and raped, the rep. said that he was not worried about those implications.

“My thought is that if someone is here illegally, they should be afraid to come forward,” Mr. Fattman said. “If you do it the right way, you don’t have to be concerned about these things,” he said referring to obtaining legal immigration status.

Which isn't to say that the Republicans or conservatives (whatever that title may mean these days) are the only ones that we should worry about. Despite constant soft threats made against big business, President Obama is clearly on their side when push comes to shove (notice even the dropping of Elizabeth Warren for the delegation that she is clearly gifted for). And then there's the constant drum-beat bat bat of war. And the fact that, with the notable exception of "enhanced interrogation", there is little differentiating the way that Obama's administration and Bush's administration handle the War on Terror - aka, War Plaguing Fear (TM).

So what is the point, then? As I started writing this piece, a friend asked me if I thought one could be a conservative and a Christian. Or, to put it another way, that since I believe my Christianity has led me to be a liberal, then shouldn't it fall that all other Christians should, if they're to be truly Christian, move to the same place I'm at. A slightly edited version of my response:

Growing up, I was very conservative. I thought it was the Christian thing to do. Anti-abortion. Business and choice help poor people. Welfare, not so much (I know from my own experience and my community. Didn't have a clue how to help people get off welfare in areas that have no jobs, let alone living wage jobs). I voted for George W Bush because he told me he was a compassionate conservative. With the onset of war, and little appreciable care for the victims of Katrina, I understood that to be a lie. I got really behind Obama because he promised to be a smart diplomat who would pull out of war and not sell our bodies to the corporatocracy. Obviously, neither of those have panned out so well. Now, I'm starting to pull away from political labels together (I'm kind of writing right now about that) because I don't see them to be honest.

What does it mean to be right, or left, or moderate? Seriously, what do those titles mean? Obviously, it's not some grading scale, though we keep pretending it is. How can one person honestly say to another that he is more liberal than she is. I've been thinking we need a different model for a long time.

But I believe that overall I'm influenced by my eschatology. The idea of the coming and present Kingdom of God. This Kingdom, I am convinced, is not one of power, or manipulation, or sermons. But one of healing, inclusion, spiritual wholeness. One of feeding the poor, sheltering the homeless, visiting the sick, freeing the captives... You know the things.

The political question for Christians, I can't see it as being "Are we a part of this or are we not a part of this", because we have no choice. It's in our scripture, it's commanded of Jesus." The question, how I see it, is "How?"

I'm exploring the "how" right now through localism. Others through variations of capitalism, or democratic socialism, or through incarnational living (including the CCDA approach), or through this candidate or that candidate.

But I can't see a Christianity that doesn't ask, "How do we get involved in Christ's Kingdom on Earth now in a way that all men and women can see and glorify God through our good works? (not through trying to enforce our standards of righteousness, which the bible would call 'being busy-bodies.')" Some of what we call Right Wing Christianity (I'm thinking particularly of the Fox News crowd) impresses me that they're NOT interested in that vision. And I guess those guys frustrate me more than I should let on.

I was explaining basic politics to a family friend last night as our kids played and our Cuban dinners were getting ready. And eventually, I answered, "I'm becoming more and more frustrated by it. It's all rigged to play like a game. It's not a democracy in any true sense of the word. It a game. Just a silly game."

And yet, I am addicted to this game!