Amid all the escalating warfare between Obama and Clinton, which has been reflected and intensified on the web with accusations that the "Obama-bots" or the "Clintonistas" have been rigging the election, I came upon a dose of sanity. This from Howard Zinn's article in Progressive Magazine: Election Madness
No, I’m not taking some ultra-left position that elections are totally insignificant, and that we should refuse to vote to preserve our moral purity. Yes, there are candidates who are somewhat better than others, and at certain times of national crisis (the Thirties, for instance, or right now) where even a slight difference between the two parties may be a matter of life and death.
I’m talking about a sense of proportion that gets lost in the election madness. Would I support one candidate against another? Yes, for two minutes—the amount of time it takes to pull the lever down in the voting booth.
All the vicious infighting is destroying all sense of perspective. I hear people all the time swearing they will vote for a 3rd party, or not vote, or vote McCain rather if the "other" candidate wins the primary. This is simply a symptom the prevailing "election madness."
Zinn's article continues to point out how utterly far we have to go:
But before and after those two minutes, our time, our energy, should be spent in educating, agitating, organizing our fellow citizens in the workplace, in the neighborhood, in the schools. Our objective should be to build, painstakingly, patiently but energetically, a movement that, when it reaches a certain critical mass, would shake whoever is in the White House, in Congress, into changing national policy on matters of war and social justice.
Today, we have two candidates who will produce marginal differences if elected. The real difference will be how strongly we as a people organize to defend ourselves against the resurgence of the "Guilded Age", the hideous rule of concentrated wealth and power that is utterly indifferent to what the rest of need, or even what it will take for the human race to survive. Yet, this perspective is sorely lacking in the heat of the campaign:
What occupies the press day after day, impossible to ignore, is the election frenzy.
This seizes the country every four years because we have all been brought up to believe that voting is crucial in determining our destiny, that the most important act a citizen can engage in is to go to the polls and choose one of the two mediocrities who have already been chosen for us. It is a multiple choice test so narrow, so specious, that no self-respecting teacher would give it to students.
And sad to say, the Presidential contest has mesmerized liberals and radicals alike. We are all vulnerable.
Whether our candidate won or lost, we should gladly support the "lesser of two evils" in the fall, not because we believe (wrongly) that whether Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama winning the election will make a significant difference in our lives, because to believe that is to believe in a "savior" President who will solve our problems FOR us, rather than our taking united action together to force solutions on our government.
During the election our only task is to stop the right-wing from making things infinitely worse than they already are: by electing McCain who will proceed to continue the process of global destruction; ignoring global warming for instance, spending whatever is left of our money on 100 more years of war.
So, prior to the election, organize and vote for your candidates, but stop attacking each other! And the day AFTER the election, go back to your community, your churches, your schools, your workplace. And try to join together with the rest of us to build a better society.
We know, or should know that NO fundamental change will result from this election. At best we have an opportunity to continue to organize to put pressure on a new administration to move toward greater social justice, peace and humanity at home and abroad.
Don't pretend for a second that this will be easy or quick, no matter who is in the White House:
Today, we can be sure that the Democratic Party, unless it faces a popular upsurge, will not move off center. The two leading Presidential candidates have made it clear that if elected, they will not bring an immediate end to the Iraq War, or institute a system of free health care for all.
They offer no radical change from the status quo.
They do not propose what the present desperation of people cries out for: a government guarantee of jobs to everyone who needs one, a minimum income for every household, housing relief to everyone who faces eviction or foreclosure.
They do not suggest the deep cuts in the military budget or the radical changes in the tax system that would free billions, even trillions, for social programs to transform the way we live.
None of this should surprise us. The Democratic Party has broken with its historic conservatism, its pandering to the rich, its predilection for war, only when it has encountered rebellion from below, as in the Thirties and the Sixties. We should not expect that a victory at the ballot box in November will even begin to budge the nation from its twin fundamental illnesses: capitalist greed and militarism.
Zinn provides an historical perspective that the President, Roosevelt, who brought the greatest amount of social change, only acted because there was such tremendous pressure from below, that people were taking unilateral action on their own behalf, regardless of government.
Let’s remember that even when there is a "better" candidate (yes, better Roosevelt than Hoover, better anyone than George Bush), that difference will not mean anything unless the power of the people asserts itself in ways that the occupant of the White House will find it dangerous to ignore.
The unprecedented policies of the New Deal—Social Security, unemployment insurance, job creation, minimum wage, subsidized housing—were not simply the result of FDR’s progressivism. The Roosevelt Administration, coming into office, faced a nation in turmoil. The last year of the Hoover Administration had experienced the rebellion of the Bonus Army—thousands of veterans of the First World War descending on Washington to demand help from Congress as their families were going hungry. There were disturbances of the unemployed in Detroit, Chicago, Boston, New York, Seattle.
In 1934, early in the Roosevelt Presidency, strikes broke out all over the country, including a general strike in Minneapolis, a general strike in San Francisco, hundreds of thousands on strike in the textile mills of the South. Unemployed councils formed all over the country. Desperate people were taking action on their own, defying the police to put back the furniture of evicted tenants, and creating self-help organizations with hundreds of thousands of members.
Without a national crisis—economic destitution and rebellion—it is not likely the Roosevelt Administration would have instituted the bold reforms that it did.
. . . .
So we need to free ourselves from the election madness engulfing the entire society, including the left.
Yes, two minutes. Before that, and after that, we should be taking direct action against the obstacles to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
A simple step would be to de-escalate the rhetoric and stop the insane infighting.
We expect this from the two candidates. They are competing for power in a zero-sum game. One will win, one will lose everything. They will do whatever it takes to win.
But, we don't have to pretend that THEIR stakes are OUR stakes. We don't have to play their game and risk defeat for the sake of our emotional investment in the "election madness."