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ideas about voting

The 2000 election was the first election in which I was able to vote and the experience was one of mixed emotions. On one hand, it was exciting to have one more tool at my disposal, however weak, however miniscule to make my voice heard. On the other hand, it was a sad and frustrating experience to see the White House inhabited by a president who seems to have no concern or compassion whatsoever for humanity and whose words and policies reflect values that are polar opposites of my own. Despite some gains that were made, it is impossible to ignore that at least in one enormously significant way, the 2000 election was a huge failure.

In the 2000 election, I voted for a third party candidate whose policy plans and personal beliefs seemed closest to mine. “Vote your heart, not your fears,” said the slogans and this made sense to me. Even if you’re jaded at the reality of American democracy, the idea of it seems okay, and if, I thought, that all the textbooks were right when they called this a representative democrarcy, I was sure as hell going to vote for the person that seemed most like me. Obviously, things didn’t work out as I would have hoped. My pick for the president didn’t have a chance of getting elected, ever. I guess that I just hoped that in acting sincerely, that in “voting my heart” something good would come of it. The reality of the outcome was much more confusing and frustrating. I’d like to think that my vote helped to shift the platform of more viable “liberal” candidates further to the left. Listening to the speeches of the Democratic hopefuls this year, it seems that this may have happened in some small part. Still, I was also confronted with the possibility that I was complicit in making sure a real a-hole bullied his way into the white house. Despite the many arguments that I had about this subject. I’m still unsure of what really happened. I suspect both. I am both a dynamic force driving the policies of the left in a more reasonable direction and also an accomplice to a monster. But really, I don’t think it matters. The most profound feeling I had in the wake of the election was one of frustration. I was frustrated because those who voted as I did spent all their time defending their decision and didn’t take any time to consider whether we actually achieved what we wanted. And, I was frustrated by the more moderate liberals, the traditional Democrats, who were spending all their time pointing their fingers, blaming people for ruining the election, and refusing to throw up their hands, admit that “shit is fucked” and figuring out what to do next. And strangely, it seems that many of us forgot about what a shit fest the last election was and ignored the whole thought of elections until just this moment, when maybe things are too late*.

A few months after the election, I started noticing stickers around town that read “voting doesn’t work, it only encourages them.” For the most part I thought that statement made a lot of sense. Voting, at least in the traditional sense, sure didn’t work for me in 2000 and I didn’t have much faith that I would ever see a candidate who shared any of my beliefs get elected in a national election. But, looking at the upcoming election, I don’t think I agree with those stickers. In fact, I think that they’re really wrong. Of course voting doesn’t work the way it should and I suspect it never will, but I think we no longer have the luxury of pretending that elections no longer exist.

Elections might not work in terms of electing someone reasonable, but they are important. For all the power that the ruling elite wield, they seem rather concern with keeping people from voting. History and even our recent history is filled with accounts of groups of people trying to keep other groups of people from participating in elections. So even if it feels like we’ve been completely disenfranchised, “he establishment” isn’t completely confident in their oppression and there must be some power in that. Furthermore, it seems like elections are the one time when the media pays attention to certain issues and elections are one of the only times when there is at least the pretense of the common person being able to influence policies and have some determination in the way they are governed. So, elections might not work, but in the space surrounding them, at least, there is the opportunity for something to work.

I’ll put this bluntly. I’m going to vote for the presidential candidate who is not George W. Bush and who seems to have the greatest chance of winning. It doesn’t matter who it is. I am under no illusion that this candidate will have policies that are better than the current administration and for all I know, things could be even worse. But, I think that “not George Bush” offers some unique advantages over the status quo.

1. A regime change, any regime change, will send a message to people elsewhere in the world that we, as a highly privileged nation, who all, in some ways, are connected to some devastating atrocities, are making some effort to step back and make things right. A change of president might not make much difference in terms of the reality of the USA’s role in the world, but given the manner in which the media operates, a change in the leadership of the US is something that is highly visible and goes a long way in terms of perception and making the world feel like we’re doing something to deter our path of destruction.

2. The fact that some candidates at least give lip service to more progressive policies provides a tiny bit of leverage for progress. At least the ideas are in the public consciousness and through other means of political action, it might be possible to achieve some small gains.

3. Even if the alternative is a jerk like Joe Lieberman whose ideas are virtually identical to that of the current administration, the logistical hassles of a change in power at least offer a temporary reprieve from the carnage.

I’ve had a lot of arguments with members of the punk/radical community about this point of view. The most frequent criticism of the “anyone but Bush” tactic is that voting for a seemingly liberal candidate will serve as a tacit affirmation of their fucked up policies and that if the liberal candidate is elected, members of the progressive community will fell like their work is done and the momentum that has been built in the anti-war and anti-bush movements will be lost.

It doesn’t have to be this way! If I’ve learned one thing from identifying with punk culture it’s that things don’t have to be the way they’ve always been and actions don’t have to mean what they’ve always meant. We don’t have to live in a world of strictly defined and limited options. Voting can be a tactic just like a black block or a banner drop. We can contextualize a vote however we want to. We know that voting doesn’t work, and we can tell people why and why, even knowing this, we’re still voting. Participation doesn’t have to equal universal approval!

Think about it. We have to contextualize our decisions anyway. If we’re going to vote for a 3rd party candidate, or for Mickey Mouse, or not vote and not come off to the average person as a hopeless ideologue, we have to add a context for these actions and that takes a lot of visible, complicated, communication. Since it seems that we have to contextual our actions whatever they may be, we might as well vote tactically and use direct action, our words, independent media and other resources to make it very clear that voting for a candidate doesn’t mean that one supports these policies and that social change can and must start in places other than our system of government.

I know that historically, during quasi-liberal administrations, progressive and radical movements have lost momentum. People will often cite the Clinton administration as an example of this. I guess I just feel like I don’t have much control over the actions of government working through traditional channels. Whatever I can do with my small vote is pretty much the extent of what I can do. But what I do have is a lot of faith in is the ability of the radical community to mobilize under any administration and to continue to push for change. It’s something we can do and something we have to do. It’s the only option.

This November, I’m going to vote and I’m going to try to get all my friends to vote and I’m going to try to plan actions that show people that there are things that no election can fix but that there are ways we can work together to change policies, to challenge the staus quo, to live our lives more reasonably. And when there is a throng of punks lining up at the polls I think it will be an amazing thing. It will make those in power concerned and confused because in our participation we won’t be written off as a bunch of wingnuts but in our action and voice our participation cannot be confused with support of destructive policies and values.

* Not that I blame people entirely because a lot has happened since then that has taken a lot of time and energy to process let alone respond to.

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song lyrics from wil

tanks tanks tanks
bombs bombs bombs
nuclear heat seeking battleships
shake yr hips
raise yr fist
tell em they can kiss your ass if they come knockin for us kids

you needed a dependable work force
so you created a drug war and got one in orange.
now, on the backs of the poor, youre taking over the world by force.
whatever for?

mr rumsfield, a question from me to you: “if saddams such a jerk, then why,in 1982 did you give him a pair of gold spurs?”
if you ask me how i feel, my friend, id say “actions speak louder than words.”
if you ask me how i feel mr military man, id say “actions have spoken louder than your words.”

woo hoo
woo hoo

woo hoo
woo hoo

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daniel handler = lemon snicket?!?

this is what chad says. he called last night and said that the internet told him so. apparently daniel handler has authored a few novels for adults which are readily available.

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this is not a travel narrative part 2

The bus rolled into the mall parking lot. I was horrified with the fact that the parking lot was filled with cars the day after Christmas. My horror was not at the defiling of the true meaning of Christmas, but more at the endurance of the mall goers. Lately, I’ve found Christmas to be exhausting with the re-learning of how to be part of a family now that I’ve moved away and the stress of trying to buy meaningful gifts. I’ve even grown uncomfortable receiving gifts and though I’m usually one of the first to jump into the car for a trip to the mall, I was glad to avoid them altogether this holiday season. These people seemed crazy. The night before, when my mom got sentimental and called all her siblings to wish them a merry Christmas, I talked to my cousin and she said she and her mom were making the two hour drive from their rural North Carolina home to the nearest mall in Norfolk, Virginia. “Err, that sounds fun,” I told my cousin wondering what the hell she and my aunt were thinking. As the bus carefully crawled through the parking lot, I tried to imagine that the mall was the one from the zombie classic “Dawn of the Dead” and that inside the shoppers were meeting an onslaught of flesh eating undead. It wasn’t so farfetched. After all, the mall where they shot that movie was in western Pennsylvania. I thought how funny it would be to see a stream of people burst from the mall doors, pounding on the bus windows seeking sanctuary. “How am I going to return this sweater now?” a woman would shriek, “there’s brains all over it!”

I liked the idea of the town’s bus stop being at the mall though. The bus stop in Carlisle had been at the mall when I was young. It was at the more abysmal of the two malls, where only the most delinquent of teenagers would even bother to hang out, and I always wondered what a town the size of Carlisle needed with two malls. It was right next to one of the only independent book shops in town. The rear entrance, facing the sidewalk and the bus stop, opened into the back of the store which was the children’s section and I recall that it always seemed to be alive and vibrant in a hyper-real explosion of frogs and other cartoon animals. But it was nice to browse through the books and oftentimes my mom would buy me a skateboard magazine, or a bmx magazine or whatever my interest happened to be that week.

The bookstore was the first to go. Then the bus stop moved. Years later, while I was in college, the mall was demolished and replaced by a Wal-Mart. The bus stop in Carlisle now resides in a truck stop on the outskirts of town near the turnpike. I find that minutiae like this – the location of a bus stop, the demise of a bookstore, the phoenix-like emergence of a Wal-Mart from the ashes of a dying mall – serve as a better metric of time than years. It scares me though, because I think that time feels like it’s moving faster and the changes to my old hometown seem more and more crazy. The places that mark events in my life are familiar, but they are no longer nostalgic and there is no comfort in their familiarity.

My mom and I walked past my old high school one afternoon while I was home. I broke off a clod of snow from the piles that had built up from where the parking lot had been plowed and kicked it in front of me. I kicked it hard and repeated this when I caught up to where my snow clod had come to rest. I finally goaded my mom into playing this game and we alternated kicks. As we walked past the school it felt like there was an invisible barrier around it and that if I crossed it, if I came too close to the school, if I thought too much about my time there, I would suddenly be acutely aware of how distant, how irrelevant that all seemed, of how much I had aged and how the place around which my entire life had once revolved now held nothing.

I had that feeling when I went to the school in Bloomington to learn how not to get HIV or hepatitis when a kid gets his hand cut off in school so that I could start substitute teaching in January. There’s something about a school that makes the people who work around a school that seems to leave a permanent mark. As I inquired with the secretary, I couldn’t help but feel like she was addressing me as some clueless high school freshman and when I spoke to another administrator she treated me with that pleasant maternity that is the mark of those who manage to find some shred of pleasure and dignity amidst what seems to me a pretty frustrating and shitty place. I had the same feeling of being uncomfortably reminded of the past, and my distance from it, when I was recognized by my 9th grade honors English teacher (who, though we were never close, was one of my favorite teachers). She patted me on the shoulder as she walked past my pew and I realized that it had been 9 years since I sat as a student in her classroom.

I’m not sure what is the worst part of being reminded of the passage of time. Is it the increasing awareness, with each passing year, with each fragmented reminder of the past, of ones disconnection from that past? Or, is it the realization that the reality of your life, the hours passed, the dedication, the frustration and the triumph of your current days will soon so pass?