Blog PostsMatters Of Life and Death
By John Krumm at Feb 22, 2008 |
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Howard Zinn's recent article from the Progressive got me thinking, because it held at least a little hint of a possible contradiction. He wrote about the election, and the quantity of coverage the candidates are recieving in even left periodicals, and he wrote eloquently about how we need to make a movement right now that can truly influence whoever wins the Whitehouse when the time comes. But he included this line that got me thinking the most:
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.
Noam Chomsky has also talked of the small differences between candidates potentially leading to large outcome differences on the ground. Not radical differences on the ground, but small differences for large amounts of people. This makes sense to me. We have a mostly top down oriented government in the U.S., and the President is the top of the top, with huge power in matters of life and death for the whole world, from how many bullets are fired to how much pollution is created to how many schools are built.
A large movement to change the world can also make huge differences. But in this country a movement can be rapidly deflated by a determined president, and George Bush showed that when he ignored the largest global protests in history and invaded Iraq. My guess is that such a movement would have swayed a less hard-right president to not invade Iraq (maybe he'd have satisfied his blood-lust and fear of being labeled a coward with a short and brutal bombing campaign, something like that).
So if this election might be a matter of life and death, and if a movement could be vastly more effective with a slightly more sympathetic president in office, then wouldn't it make sense for at least some people on the left, even the far left, to fully engage with the campaign? Even if they do nothing to build a movement in the process, if it's really a matter of life and death, if all they do is knock on doors and help with voter registration and distribute yard signs, isn't that a good thing? Shouldn't we applaud them for it, and maybe even join them?
Re: Matters Of Life and Death
By Krumm, John at Feb 26, 2008 15:59 PM
Hi Chris,
Yeah, it\'s really somewhat unpredictable what someone like Obama will do once in office, though I doubt if he\'d stray too far from the Clinton path. McCain seems a little more predictable, in a scary way. I think that instead of a tweedle dee vs. tweedle dum contest, we have tweedle dum vs. tweedle dumber.
Of course, under Clinton we had a serious anti-corporate globalization movement in this country. Bush took the gas out of that with this war. I suspect a Democrat or even a less right wing Republican might not have invaded Iraq, but whether a Democrat will pull us out (influenced by anti-war popular opinion) remains to be seen.
Sorry to hear about your mom. I just went through something similar, with my mom moving in with us for her last two years of a kidney disease. There\'s nothing like a little first hand experince with prescriptions, bills, hospitals and everything else in our health care system to make you want to scream.
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By Green, Chris at Feb 25, 2008 18:36 PM
Well I agree that elections do have some importance, I was just fulminating a bit in my last post. I think elections have the capacity to be useful tools for educating but too often they don\'t do that, they lull people\'s senses away from the importance of direct action.
I think of the issue of health care, which has been all too terribly on my mind lately while living at home with a mother in the latter stages of cancer. It may ease the burden on my family and me a little bit if Obama gets in there and puts in more government regulation of managed care. Perhaps an Obama health care plan would lower costs A LITTLE or force insurers to cover A LITTLE more than they would under the current system. Or perhaps his health care policies wouldn\'t change anything. Certainly such plans of the Democrats have the profitability of the big insurers in mind and if patients see improvements than it is only incidentily. But of course, the chance of improvement is nill under McCain but reasonable under Obama. It might ease my burden a little if Barack Obama is president. It would be easier to pressure an Obama white house and Democratic congress for improvements though there has to be widespread education from grassroots organizations before that can happen. That\'s one thing that nettled me about Moore\'s \'Sicko\' was that it really didn\'t viewers the tools to understand health care policies and he even implied that Clinton\'s 93-94\' health care plans were genuinely progressive and "universal" but, he said, Hillary Clinton retreated from the thing when she became senator and started recieving health care industry money, etc.
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