Institution Building

I want an organizational vehicle for the dissemination of the ideas we believe in: democracy, protect and expand civil liberties, participation in the political process, ending economic exploitation, make love not war, universal literacy and education, protect the environment, honoring diversity, ending racism, a woman’s right to choose, learning from people who are different rather than fearing them, equal economic educational and political opportunity, separation of church and state, decentralized media is necessary to a republic, reinvest in our voting and elections infrastructure, etc. I’m looking for a model of an organization where different kinds of people can channel their desire to make the world a better place into coordinated action. I want a place where people educate themselves and each other politically, socially, and culturally. Ideally I’d want a social venue where different kinds of people would mix and provide each other with mental cross pollination. I’m thinking of a family friendly place where people can bring their children to learn values, ideals, and critical thinking. I would love more than I can say to be able to provide a place where people can be a part of a movement without having to give up their capacity for critical thought.

The idea I have is to first build a thriving example of the kind of organization we agree on, and then help other people build their own versions of it. A decentralized structure of people drawn together through a communications network, and shared ideals and goals.

We need to be part of however it is that mass numbers of citizens get educated, active, and organized. If I had my choice the forces to make these changes in American society would be decentralized because otherwise it would be itself dangerous to our goals.

This kind of organization could serve as liberal secularist assemblies that serve much the same function as churches do for the Right. Institutions that help us spread and just as importantly solidify our ideas and way of life. They could be of any size from a handful of people to thousands. They could wind up being part of a network of organizations that grow into one or more new political parties. Members could serve as part time or full time coordinator/educator/advocates. Sharing research and information would be a key aspect of their activities. Political theater, cultural events, lectures, charity, volunteerism, activism of various kinds would be other key activities.

Repression and Oppression

One of the most overlooked contributing causes of political oppression is sexual repression. This is not my idea. Wilhelm Reich, a student of Sigmund Freud wrote whole books about this. Reich was vilified by the Right and Left in Germany during the 1920s and 30s because of his ideas. I am no scholar of Wilhelm Reich, but if what I have read about his ideas are true, his earlier researches brought him to one or two conclusions that I have come to more intuitively.

The basic idea as I understand it is that all human beings have a certain amount of energy in our minds and bodies. This energy is presently unmeasurable. It has been called various things by different cultures. Freud called it libido. The Chinese called it Chi. Our culture calls it life force. We get to use this energy for our emotions, thoughts, and bodily processes. One of the main ways that we express this energy is through sex and orgasmic release. Another main way that we express this energy is through aggression and violent acts. Taboo ridden misinformation and shameful silence about sexuality represses and deforms natural sexual expression. When natural sexual expression is deformed and repressed, that energy goes somewhere else. It becomes physical and mental illness and, most useful to oppressive governments, rage and violence. This is one of the main reasons the Stalins and Hitlers find the people who are willing to staff their wars, purges, and death camps.

There really isn’t anything mysterious about this. The necessity of managing one’s sexual life is commonly acknowledged as being essential to staying a happy and healthy human being. I haven’t seen any studies, but my guess is that happy and healthy human beings are less likely to commit acts of destruction and violence. Speaking for myself, I’ve never been angry at anybody when I’m a postorgasmic glow. And the periods during which I’ve not managed my sexual life to my emotional and physical satisfaction, I am unhappy and irritable and resentful of other people’s happiness.

The 60s slogan "Make love not war" really is make love or war.

The Us/Them Response

If you are a person who believes they are better than many groups of people, you can stop reading here because what follows just won't make sense to you.

Its one of the universals of how human beings are constituted: we all feel that we are part of a group that is better than any other group. The boundaries of your group can be determined by lots of different things. Family is determined by good old genetics, as is race and ethnicity. Nationality is another simple way to identify who you are and are not based on geography. Then there's religion, which allows you to know who you are based on the dogmas and symbols you share with others. There's profession, which allows you to identify with others based on economic activity. There's class which measures who you are mostly by the results of your--and your ancestors'--economic efforts. There's activities such as sports, games, art that afford opportunity to define your group based on what you do during your leisure time.

When you are a member of the group, you will feel instinctively that this group is better than any other. This belief of yours is utterly flimsy and transparently self serving almost every moment you feel it during the entire course of your life. It is based on the need of primates to propagate their genes and it has almost nothing to do with the reasons we tell ourselves our group is better. It is based on the same kind of perspective that we use to persuade ourselves that we are better than the individuals we meet, even members of our own group.

The Us/Them response works beautifully as long as you are just a band of monkeys squabbling over fruit and grubs in a tropical forest. As soon as your band is threatened by an outside foe, you close ranks and act in unison until that enemy is overcome. You know exactly who your enemies are and who your friends are without having to think about it at all. As primates we have extensive emotional, mental and even physical infrastructure that causes us to adopt the Us/Them perspective to a degree that usually matches how threatened we feel. For example at a sporting event where actual threat level is low, we will respond to our opponents with usually good natured teasing. Even then, the Us/Them response often becomes more extreme than the actual threat level. Witness all the incidences of fans rioting. During war, when we come to feel that our actual survival and the survival of our children are at stake, any level of atrocity can easily either be accepted outright or rationalized or denied.

When we do it it is a necessary evil. When they do it it is an atrocity. When we kill them it is a necessity of war. We are good. They are evil. We are human beings. They are monsters. When they kill us it is foul murder. Their leaders are tyrants who are leading a bloodlustng population to slaughter us for criminal and insane reasons. Our leaders are just, wise, and above all able to defend us; equal to the task and we are the aggreived parties in the war, even if it was we who started it. Havn't you all heard the same from individual people about their conflicts with other individuals?

There is no place for this in the repertoire of anybody who is seeking to be more of a human being and less than a monkey. There is no religion, nation, passion, grievance, or mandate that allows for the Us/Them response anymore.

Us/Them is obsolete. We have made it obsolete. The day the first atomic detonation took place it became a deadly atavism because that was the day we started being able to make ourselves extinct if we use it.

If you want to know how someone actually values you, pay very close attention to their Us/Them response. If they clearly believe that they belong to one or more group(s) that are better than one or more groups, they almost certainly believe they are better than you and everybody else they encounter.

Almost every human being I've ever met is completely at the mercy of their Us/Them response. This results in you and I being very easily manipulated by any authority figure who needs to bolster their power.

If you think that you have rooted this out of yourself with less than constant vigilance and analysis of your emotional reactions for many years you are fooling yourself. I'm not sure that people can entirely stop their instinctive Us/Them reactions, but I'm sure we can be aware of them and not let them make our decisions for us.

Small Encounters

Small Encounters

What if it isn’t enough?

I was talking to my Aunt, a lady who I respect and who has paid her dues for sure, about the loss of civil rights we are suffering along with the other things I think I’ve been all to clear about recently.

She got it. She was nodding, if wearily told me, in her turn, that what I was saying was very close to what she was seeing. Then she said to me “I don’t have time for any of this. I’m a parent. I’ve got to raise my kid.”

I thought about this and when I saw her the next day I said: “OK. You’re a parent so you’re busier than I am that’s for sure, so I don’t have anything to say to you. But I have to just ask you something in response to that. And that is: What if it’s not enough? What if, in addition to all that work you’re doing now to see to the immediate needs, concerns, and aspirations of your child you also have to pay attention to the world at large that that child lives in? What if you have to do that and it isn’t fair and you don’t wanna and you have to do it anyway or you are seriously blowing it for your kid. Except that its not so easy to see as if you had, say, not provided them with shoes. But there it is anyway. So: What if it is not enough?

A Simple Phone Call

A friend called me one night in April of 2003 and spoke to me for 40 minutes about the political social and economic crisis this country is in. I’d known this man for 12 years and he’d not called me in the last 5. When we’d discussed politics in the past, his eyes would glaze over and he’d politely wait for me to discuss something interesting.

He called me. He was impassioned, furious, frightened. The Presidential election(sic) of 2000 is how it started for him too.

So when we got off the phone, I sat for a minute or two. I was filled with wonder. “If people like Kevin are getting angry there’s something going on here.” I started talking to other people myself. I started looking online for news and found myself becoming more and more concerned.

That’s why we may very well be able to call the grassroots liberals the organization that was started by a phone call.

Talking To My Friend

I was talking to my friend, the artist from New York City who called me in April of 2003 and got me started on this rampage of do-gooder activism and educating myself and other people and heaven only knows what else. This was the first Sunday after the election and he told me he’d gone out for drinks with a co worker who was a Republican who’d voted (a moment of silence to brace ourselves for the spoken words) for Bush. He wondered at it; as if he’d invited Jack the Ripper; or a fallen angel; or perhaps some mythic beast that no matter how vilified could not be dismissed: child eating monster or not this creature was surely numbered among the powerful since it was its chosen whose steady finger was on the Button.

He recounted to me, honestly surprised and pleased, that they could talk together about the election(?) and even joke about it and even found common ground of various kinds.

Oh, oh it gets us. No matter how educated and sensitive and sophisticated you think you are, that human need to be part of a group that is better than any other is difficult to escape because as a strategy of propagating your genes it certainly doesn’t hurt to passionately believe that the people who bear them are better than others.

My friend is no yahoo. He’s educated, an artist, usually prepared to be open minded, curious about people different than he. And he fell into this Us/Them, Blue/Red, Good/Evil stuff. We all do. I’ve yet to meet anyone who didn’t at least slip into it from time to time.

Sun Tzu For Activists

I think that it's important to have a theoretical framework with which to make your strategic and tactical decisions. I am no expert on strategy, but ever since first reading Sun Tzu's Art of War I've been fascinated by the rational and relentlessly effective methods of organizing your efforts that he lays out in thirteen tiny chapters.

The translation I love the most is by R. L. Wing who translated the title as The Art of Strategy. I particularly like this emphasis because Sun Tzu did believe that actual warfare is the last resort.

What would people think of starting a study group of Sun Tzu's strategic principils with activism and creating change in mind? I have found it valuable to organize and prioritize my own efforts using this stuff. It might be fun as well as useful for us collectively to make this one of the things we use to make our decisions about our collective efforts.

Studying this stuff is mental martial arts. Would people want to use R. L. Wing's system of splitting the book into 52 short parts, one for each week of the year? Or if somebody has another idea for the scheduling, let everybody know.

What Can I Do?

One of the things that led to me wanting to start this group was that I was having conversations with people both before and after the election. About the erosion of our civil liberties, the war, a president who was chosen by Supreme Court Justices, rampant voter fraud, the concentration of more and more media in fewer hands. And the people I was talking to kept saying at some point: But what can you do?
Well, I thought, maybe they need a list.

Here is as good a list as any I've seen:

Be a drop in a bucket. One of many. No single drop is a flood. The difference you make may be far more than you'll ever know or measure. Find a cause and put your efforts into it. Something that makes you passionate.

Educate yourself. Fifteen minutes to a half hour a day. At least five days a week. For a long time. How long? How long do you want to live in a republic? The rest of your life? A necessary part of educating yourself is learning how the media manipulates all of us, and developing your critical thinking skills. Another part of educating yourself is to then expend the energy to watch listen to or read any media critically. It takes a lot more effort and is a lot more fun than sitting there.

Put your monty where your mouth is. Vote with your dollars. Buy from companies that support the policies, candidates, and values you say you value. Maybe even pay a tiny bit more or walk half a block farther once in a while.

Donate. Give money to organizations who are working towards causes you believe in. The value of even a few dollars is far beyond what you might think it is if you donate to nonprofit organizaions. This is because they can go to institutional funders with your relatively "small" donation and have evidence of community support. Just a thought.

Educate others. Talk to the people you know. This is a very important part of how you make change happen. Educate them and let them educate you. A major part of why you are reading this at all is a phone call from a friend alerting me to some problems he saw our country was not dealing with.

Volunteer. Do it. Get out of your routine. Parents: bring the kids along. Set an example. Choose what you do carefully. You'll be amazed when you find yourself having fun along with the hard work. Beats the heck out of any time I ever spent watching television.

Vote. You don't just have to vote for Democrats and Republicans. You can vote for a third party candidate, you can use the write in vote. You can use jury nullification. You can also vote with emails and letters to representatives, companies, media. You can sign petitions. (To give youserlf that extra incentive to vote click on votergasm.org.)

From their Own Lips: Spreading The Word Face to Face

Face to face education is essential because the act of people talking in person is part of what we want to encourage in of itself. Any communication with other another human being that helps us break down walls of misunderstanding and anger is a victory. Consider each face to face encounter as a work of performance art; an exercise in Socratic dialogue; a chance for you to learn from someone; a game of mental chess.

Not everybody is a good at engaging face to face. The following qualities are necessary to be a good face to face educator.

The ability to listen. The goal is to be able to listen at least 51% of the time. Not saying anything while you are waiting and thinking about what you’LOL say when it’s your next chance to talk does NOT count towards listening. Listening means you are giving the person you are engaging with your full attention. You will have to listen in order to be able to have any chance of understanding them. If we don't give people a say in the conversations they have with us, why should they believe we will help them gain a voice with their government? Do you interrupt your television set? If you can't listen to another human being at least as well as you can listen to your television set or radio, maybe you should not be a face to face educator.

Honesty. Belief is powerful. And it’s catching.Telling the entire truth about your beliefs is the single most powerful thing you can do to support them when talking to people. Human beings really do almost always at least subconsciously know when each other are lying. You not only damage or ruin your credibility with other people when you lie, you damage your credibility to yourself. It doesn’t matter how harmless the lie or how well intentioned. That’s just how human psychology is constituted. If you met another person who lied you would not trust them. The same is true for how you gauge yourself. It sucks because lying seems so darned convenient sometimes. Oh well.

Enthusiasm. If you're not having fun making the world a better place, why should anybody want to go with you and do the hard work necessary? Ideally we're looking to motivate people using the positive emotions: laughter, the feeling of a job well done, the desire to learn new things, the appreciation of freedom, the joy in working hard towards goals you believe in with people you like and respect, the excitement of being a part of a movement and getting to keep your ability to think for yourself.

A sense of humor. Especially about yourself and what you believe in. If you can¹t poke fun at yourself and your beliefs, chances are you've lost your sense of proportion and are behaving outrageously self importantly. Worse, you may have turned into a fanatic. Laughter is the closest thing we have to a litmus test for fanaticism. Laughter and smiling and twinkles in the eye are tools for defusing hostility and turning people who think they are our opponents into friends.

The ability to say "I don't know." There are a lot of things you don't know about. Live with it. If you have to be the expert all the time, you will only make yourself look like an idiot and you'll make everybody you are associated look like idiots too and believe me we don't need any help from you to look like idiots. Admitting you don't know is the sign of an adult human being; of somebody who is looking for the truth rather than looking to look superior.

The ability to keep your cool. In a confrontational situation if you can¹t keep calm and collected you lose credibility. Instantly and usually forever. If you are raising your voice you will look like a bully and a fool and you will turn people off. If you have a dramatic flair, you might be able to display anger very sparingly during a conversation for impact. Losing your temper is not the same thing as displaying anger for dramatic effect.

Actual knowledge of what you're talking about. If you haven't done your homework and all you¹ve really got is opinions, well that just leaves you at the same level as most of the rest of us. But when talking to people be careful to admit that this is what you have. Anybody with half a brain will know if you are trying to pass opinions off as facts that you have researched and are reasonably certain of. If your opinions are like those of almost every human being ever born, they will be of limited interest or use to anyone else but your closest friends some family members. Remember this when talking to people.

Desire to learn from the person you are talking to. If you don’t want to learn anything form the people you talk to, why should they take the time to learn anything from you? Some people will respond to your taking the teacher role, but you’d better wait and see if they show you that in the course of interacting with them. Meanwhile remember that the inability to learn from a person you are interacting with is yours and not theirs.

Patience. Sometimes, despite your brilliance, good looks, smug sense of moral superiority, impeccable performance in the conversational arts bolstered with both obviously superior logic as well as the actual factual near infallibility of the philosophy you espouse—sometimes—these people these poor addled fools will hold to their own perspective they’ve had all their life that disagrees with yours even though you yourself have had a whole conversation with them. I don’t get it either.

Republicans Trying to Wreck the Federal Government?

As everyone knows, the Democratic Leadership Council is the steward of modern, centrist liberalism, spending the bulk of its time urging Democrats to follow in Bill Clinton's hawkish, third way, values-loving footsteps. Love 'em or hate 'em, the DLC is the voice of the moderate wing of the Democratic party.

Here's what Ed Kilgore, the DLC's policy director, had to say about the election yesterday:

I came to believe strongly that the real agenda of the people closest to Bush--including his political advisors and much of the Republican congressional leadership--was not only dishonest, but deeply cynical and irresponsible: a drive to simultaneously wreck the federal government and to perpetuate their control over the wreckage as long as possible through the exercise of the rawest sort of institutional power and corruption.

Kilgore is part of a remarkable phenomenon: the radicalizing of the center left. He's part of a crowd that includes people like Paul Krugman, Al Franken, Howard Dean, Atrios, and, um, me: liberals who are basically fairly moderate in policy terms but who have been appalled to discover that what seems unthinkable actually appears to be true. The modern Republican party really does seem to want to wreck the federal government.

Email ends here.

Above is an email that Bruce Conklin sent me. This idea to me comes completely out of the blue. Since the Republicans and the Democrats and the transnational corporations run the Federal Government anyway, why would any of them destroy it?

But I started thinking about it. When would I destroy an institution? If I thought it was fundamentally tainted and that it could not be reformed I could do it. If there were elements within the Republican leadership whose ideology it was to reduce government then why not. Add to this the fantastic profits some of them would make by doing so then it becomes less unthinkable every minute. I'm not sure that I believe they would actually do something as potentially dangerous to themselves as this. However it is an interesting gauge of my state of mind that based on my current information about how the Republicrats are behaving that I'm actually willing to sit and think about it.

I sent Bruce Conklin an email in response asking him what the motivation of these people would be to wreck the Federal Government. His reply is below:

To completely dismantle anything from the New Deal. To privatize everything and anything because their ideology is capitalism is better than anything all the time. To make the deficit as big as possible to strangle all descretionary spending. Their guru is Grover Norquist. Google his name.
Bruce

If This Is A War Then Who is the Enemy?

If this is a war then who is the enemy?

1. The kind of people who write lists like this.
2. People who declare whole groups as being evil.
3. People who believe that their own group is better than any other.
4. People who need an enemy.
5. People who believe that what they believe in is the whole complete and utter Truth.
6. People who rewrite history.
7. Leaders addicted to power.
8. People who always have to be right.
9. People who can’t deal with uncertainty.
10. People who don’t believe in an America where everyone has equal rights.
11. People who threaten the separation of church and state.
12. People whose traditions are more important to them than my freedom.
13. Anyone who knows they can’t possibly be one of the above types of people.
14. People who will only fight for the rights of other people like them.
15. People who believe only what their television sets tell them.
16. People who sit back and let others do the work of freedom.
17. People who believe we can trade a little freedom for a little safety.
18. People who believe in this list uncritically.
19. People who always trust their leaders.
20. People who believe we cannot question our leaders in time of war.
21. People who need other people to lose in order for them to win.
22. People who can’t laugh at themselves.
23. People who can’t laugh at what they believe

Liberals in a Smoke Filled Room: The December Meeting

Agenda items for December 9 Meeting of no longer shell shocked Liberals

Present were Terry, Robin, Madalaine and Vincent

Nobody present thought that proposing a third party was something we wanted to undertake. Basically, if we wanted to or not, we don't think that its a struggle we can win.
Terry wants to do research projects, such as checking the veracity of claims of the Bush administration versus actual facts and figures, finding more out about blogs.
Everybody present thought the feed some Moslem children project so as to send the message that we are not all enemies was an intersting idea.
We agreed that we were so far in agreement about what our message was. The concern was how to present it so that people on the Right as well as the Left would be able to just listen and consider.
We all thought the mission statement worked OK with a minor change or two but could not decide on a vision statement.
Robin and Vincent agreed that they'd postpone the Sun Tzu analysis until the vision and mission statements were prepared. We need to know what the goals are.
It was a mostly informal meeting. Terry and Vincent had cigars again. Madalaine made a delicious dinner which was the only thing that brought the political conversationing to a halt all night.

Research/Educate ourselves
Possible topics
Jury nullification

Fairness Doctrine—Brenda
Write in Vote—Vincent
Third Party & reform movements
Fred Tuttle
The day of 9/11
Presidential Election 2000: voter fraud
Erosion of civil rights with emphasis on post 9/11
Media reform & consolidation
Voter reform & infrastructure improvements—Vincent & Robin (openvotingconsortium.org)

Vision Statement and Mission Statement

Vision Statement:

An America where everybody has an education, a voice, means to live, freedom: equal opportunity.
???

Mission Statement:

Educate and involve people of every political persuasion in order to
Reverse erosion of and eventually expand our exercise of our civil liberties.
We will do this through the following means:
Media reform: Education, reverse consolidation, fairness doctrine
Voting reform: Education, election infrastructure, transparent elections, write in vote, jury nullification.
Institution building: helping voters educate and organize themselves.
???

Partisan Issues

Articulate Progressive values—what are progressive values? Should say in our vision statement?
Sustainable Energy Tech
Environmental protection
Universal healthcare
End war in Iraq
Expose shenanigans of both Reps and Dems
???

Propose Third Party--Parliamentary model of multiple parties

Is this a part of our message?

Current Projects

Stephanie overseeing building database for research etc, also making central clearinghouse web site
Vincent creating narrative of what we are doing and publishing through blog.
Vincent & Robin conducting Art of Strategy analysis of our goals (to begin once we are agreed on what these are)

Proposed Projects

Research child aid agencies and find kids in Moslem world who need help send message that not all Americans think they are enemies. For us all to contribute monthly to this project.

Moveon.org national teleconference meeting at 304 North St

Sunday Nov 21, 2004

Moveon.org national teleconference for the purposes of determining the future of Moveon. They wanted the input from progressives across the country as to the issues we thought they needed to tackle during the next four years. Each party host had to have a computer or telephone to connect to the teleconference. The idea was for people to assemble, have discussions using the agenda that moveon.org had distributed, and vote on the issues and strategies they discussed.

The shell shocked liberals held two of these house parties. One on Burlington and one in East Calais. In Burlington we had six people. Three of them I’d never met before. Present were Vincent, Madalaine, Terry, Derek, Elizabeth, and Erica.

We successfully linked up to the teleconference at about 7:20 and listened to the presentations made by the moveon.org staff before breaking off to our own discussion.

I have to say that it was very interesting to see the map on my computer screen of where meetings were happening all over the country. Each party was represented by a dot on the map. The most of them were in the Blue states, but with a healthy scattering in the Red states. The only states almost devoid of meetings were in the upper Midwest and lower Midwest. The dots were sized according to the size of the party. You could move the cursor over a party and see how many people were registered for it. You could also as the voting happened, put your cursor over the dot for a party and see how the people there voted. The agenda was excellent. The way they had it laid out you really could run the meeting just by following the script they gave you. We ate cookies and pie people brought, drank coffee and gave it our best in the time we had.

Everybody was in agreement with the point in the moveon.org agenda for the meeting that they intended to work on voter reform no matter what other issues they were working on in the next four years. Also agreed on was that the concentration of power in media has to be ended. We discussed our concerns about Roe v Wade, environmental issues, economic security and education. I really enjoyed how to the point everybody was. There was that underlying feeling of a group that was very determined to do what they had assembled to do. Everybody wanted to hear what everybody else had to say. The needle on my bullshit meter didn’t even tremble once during the whole thing.

I mentioned my write in vote idea. That if in fact the American public could be sold on using this fundamental right, they in could in fact, even in the face of the special interests, reshape the political and economic landscape of this country. It’s really quite remarkable when the light does go off in people’s eyes. It’s like their attention is drawn to something they see all the time but had long since stopped noticing.

We followed the votes, entered on the computers linking them, as to the most important issue to work on during the next 4 years. I remember the most votes from the most parties was to articulate clear progressive values to the country. We had voted for that one too.

The three step strategy that we decided on was:

1. Articulate clear Progressive values to America

2. Media reform

3. Mid term elections: getting control of Congress out of Republican hands. This also being important because it will help prevent some of Bush’s more right wing Supreme Court appointees.

After the teleconference ended we talked a bit. I told the three people who we’d not met before about the shell shocked liberals and they seemed interested enough. As we said goodbye I sensed people feeling good, like we’d spent our time well and we’d accomplished something. And I’d learned a few things.

I think we should be looking closely into how to use this kind of technology.

I think we should seriously consider making moveon.org one of the key organizations we aid with fundraising, volunteers, etc.

Emails between Vincent Downing and Bruce Conklin 11/30/04-12/01/04

On Tuesday, November 30, 2004, at 03:52 PM, Vincent Downing wrote:

I just read a first person account of the years leading up to the
holocaust. The thing that fascinates me is that he was on a committee which was sending Jewish children out of Germany. The situation was that desperate and he never left. He never even mentioned that he and his wife even discussed leaving. Most who stayed died. He was very fortunate.
This is something that I and my friends who at least *say* we think a fascist takeover are doing as well. Even my friends with two small daughters are not leaving, not even discussing leaving. Well, it hasn't got to that point yet. I suppose we are just voicing our fears about what we think the future might hold. When you have kids it is much more difficult to pull up roots. What is up with this Bruce? I don't think that "there's no where to run" explains it by a long chalk. Of course there are places to run. Its the same idea as locking your car even though you are parking it in New York City.
They'll probably go for the easier target.......

Bruce Responded:

This is one of the few aspects of what we are going through personally that I don't come close to understanding. Well one has two choices, stay and fight or go somewhere else. The guy in Germany was in a position to do something good. But he also knew that by staying he would not be able to fight the Nazis, he would be crushed. Here today we can stay and fight because there is still a good chance of changing things. But even if we did that we would still have a high cost of living and no universal healthcare. The other choice, go somewhere else, in Germany most of those who could get out did, and it saved their lives. But that was a much worse situation. Here today, contributing to a Canadian society that is much saner and treats you better and isn't threatening everyone around the world is a very attractive option. Not unlike a citizenship divorce. Or liquidating your assets and retiring to a warm, relatively stable third world country where you could do some kind of helpful volunteer work is hardly running away.

To which Vincent Responded:

You are raising good points that need to be brought to the table. Especially 1. How is the nature of this totalitarian takeover different than the one that happened in Germany. 2. That leaving to contribute to another society is not running away. I'm going to post this to the blog.

My Political Prostitution

Confessions of a Born Again Political Prostitute

I voted for anybody but Bush. Anybody but Bush? There’s a group of people who will take anybody. They’re called prostitutes.

And then they lost anyway. I let these people pimp me out and they lost anyway.

Not again. If they can’t come up with someone who is worth my vote, I’ll vote my conscience. I’ll find a Nader or a David Cobb or a Michael Badnarik to support. Mind you, I’m a tad cynical after watching the national leadership of the Democratic Party walk meekly away from Florida in 2000 and fall in line with the systematic degradation of our Civil Rights after 9/11/01 and and and…

I think that if Kerry had won, tens of thousands of people on the Left would have sighed in relief and gone back home. And it would have continued. Business as usual (Nice car you got there sugar. What you looking for? A little Greek? Some French? Iraqi? What’s that? You want me to dress like a soldier? Oh sure sure. I got what you want baby.)

Now I’m off the streeet and in people’s homes, meeting with friends, coworkers, neighbors. I’m helping people who have never been politically active in their adult lives get educated and organized. When someone says to me “Yeah, but what can we do….” I have actual suggestions. Someone said to me recently “I was just sitting there in despair until you started talking about organizing.” I still smile (but don’t blush, we ex prostitutes don’t do that) when I think of such an honor. Far better than keeping company with people who only say to me, “How much?”