as per usual...Mr. Howard Zinn articulates what so many sane people are feeling right about now...
Election Madness
By Howard Zinn
(The Progressive, March 2008) -- There's a man in Florida who has
been writing to me for years (ten pages, handwritten) though I've
never met him. He tells me the kinds of jobs he has held: security
guard, repairman, etc. He has worked all kinds of shifts, night and
day, to barely keep his family going.
His letters to me have always been angry, railing against our
capitalist system for its failure to assure "life, liberty, the
pursuit of happiness" for working people.
Just today, a letter came. To my relief, it was not handwritten
because he is now using e-mail:
"Well, I'm writing to you today because there is a wretched
situation in this country that I cannot abide and must say
something about. I am so enraged about this mortgage crisis.
That the majority of Americans must live their lives in perpetual
debt, and so many are sinking beneath the load, has me so
steamed. Damn, that makes me so mad, I can't tell you. ... I did
a security guard job today that involved watching over a house
that had been foreclosed on and was up for auction. They held
an open house, and I was there to watch over the place during
this event. There were three of the guards doing the same thing
in three other homes in this same community. I was sitting there during the quiet moments and wondering about who those people were who had been evicted and where they were now."
On the same day I received this letter, there was a front-page
story in the Boston Globe, with the headline "Thousands in Mass.
Foreclosed on in ‘07." The subhead[ing] was "7,563 homes were
seized, nearly 3 times the ‘06 rate."
A few nights before, CBS television reported that 750,000
people with disabilities have been waiting for years for their Social
Security benefits because the system is underfunded and there are
not enough personnel to handle all the requests, even desperate ones.
Stories like these may be reported in the media, but they are
gone in a flash. What's not gone -- 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. Is it possible to
get together with friends these days and avoid the subject of the
presidential elections?
The very people who should know better, having criticized the
hold that the media have on the national mind, find themselves
transfixed by the press, glued to the television set, as the
candidates preen and smile and bring forth a shower of clichés with
a solemnity appropriate for epic poetry.
Even in the so-called left periodicals, we must admit there is
an exorbitant amount of attention given to minutely examining the
major candidates. An occasional bone is thrown to the minor
candidates, though everyone knows our marvelous democratic
political system won't allow them in.
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 '30s,
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.
But before and after those two minutes, our time and energy
should be spent in educating, agitating, and organizing our fellow
citizens in the workplace, in the neighborhood, and 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.
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 similar 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 general strike in Minneapolis and
San Francisco, and 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.
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 healthcare 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, and 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 '30s and the '60s.
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.
So we need to free ourselves from the election madness
engulfing the entire society, including the left. So, yes, spend two
minutes focusing on the election. Before that, and after that, we
should be taking direct action against the obstacles to life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness.
For instance, the mortgage foreclosures that are driving
millions from their homes -- they should remind us of a similar
situation after the Revolutionary War, when small farmers, many
of them war veterans (like so many of our homeless today), could
not afford to pay their taxes and were threatened with the loss of
the land, their homes.
They gathered by the thousands around courthouses and
refused to allow the auctions to take place.
The evictions today of people who cannot pay their rents
should remind us of what people did in the '30s when they
organized and put the belongings of the evicted families back in
their apartments, in defiance of the authorities.
Historically, government -- whether in the hands of
Republicans or Democrats, conservatives or liberals -- has failed
its responsibilities, until forced to by direct action: sit-ins and
Freedom Rides for the rights of black people, strikes and
boycotts for the rights of workers, mutinies and desertions of
soldiers in order to stop a war.
Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute
for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens.
------------------
Howard Zinn is the author of "A People's History of the United
States," (with Anthony Arnove) of "Voices of a People's History",
and most recently, "A Power Governments Cannot Suppress."
