April 23, 2012
Voting With Your Feet
Democracy in the Streets
Several months before the 2008 general
election, I stood with two other antiwar demonstrators outside of the
town hall of a small town in Massachusetts. One of the other two
demonstrators had demonstrated for peace there each Saturday at noon
since just prior to the inception of the war in Afghanistan. We were in
the habit of exchanging both small talk and substantive talk about
issues of war and peace during the hour-long vigil.
I was hardly ready for the response I received from the longtime
protester when I brought up my reservations about voting for Barack
Obama. His frontal attack came seemingly out of nowhere, but reflected
the long quadrennial tradition of substantial numbers of leftists
supporting the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee as the lesser of
two evils or the only alternative in a general election. “Keep your
thoughts to yourself about Obama and his commitment to continue the war
in Afghanistan! Look at the alternative! Do you want passersby to hear
you?” Of course, the result of the election of Obama was the expansion
of the war (and the defection of masses of so-called antiwar Democrats
from the peace movement); the complete disregard for the union movement:
jettisoning of millions of those who lost trillions of dollars of
equity in their homes in the housing debacle; the neglect of pressing
environmental issues; and finally, the expansion of the national
security state with its attendant erosion of civil liberties.
Just a few days ago I listened to a segment of The Thom Hartmann
Program on Free Speech TV. I paid special attention as Hartmann
explained that both the voices of protest on the streets of America and
traditional political activists had a home in the Democratic Party and
could work together to support the President for reelection. The
conclusion, I gathered, would result in Obama being given the
opportunity to bring his agenda for hope and change to fruition. The
latter, of course, was the same bill of goods that the electorate had
been sold four years earlier. Common wisdom and history tell a different
story for leftists to pay attention to. Whenever a politician does not
have demands placed on him or her, then activists can expect nothing in
return for their efforts. In other words, power concedes nothing without
a struggle as so many Occupy movement activists have painfully and
brutally learned on the militarized streets of America!
My own experiences as an antiwar activist and war resister during the
Vietnam War speak loudly and clearly about change and maintaining a
spirit of hopefulness. It was only through years of concerted effort on
the streets that forced the political establishment to realize that the
Vietnam War was too costly in political capital for the war to continue.
There definitely existed a measure of self-interest on the part of many
demonstrators during the Vietnam era, but the sacrifices of millions of
people on the streets added up to a force that the Democrat Lyndon
Johnson and the Republican Richard Nixon could not ignore.
When it’s suggested that organizations such as MoveOn (which allows
for no correspondence among its members and is a hierarchical, top-down
group) and the Occupy movement can together bring about the change
necessary to alter the course of US domestic and foreign policy, I have
to laugh. The only voice that power will listen and respond to in a
right of center political system, bankrolled by the wealth of
individuals and giant corporations, is the voice that comes from the
demands of those who put the soles of their shoes on the streets (like
the Occupy movement) of this nation and demand change in the oligarchic
elite that now controls the government.
And when it finally comes time to vote in November, Ralph Nader had
prescient words on what those disaffected by the two-party system of
high-finance capitalism can do with their votes: “…in order to tell him
(Obama) that they do have a place to go: they can stay home. And that’s
what hurt the Democrats in 2010. People can just stay home.” (Democracy Now, January 25, 2012)
In the movie Sunrise at Campobello (1960), Ralph Bellamy,
the actor who portrays Franklin D. Roosevelt observes, speaking of what
interests voters in the US identify with, that once in a great while
when social conditions are right, voters will temporarily turn away from
materialism and vote for democratic principles. But, I doubt if the act
of voting in a dog and pony show will change the oligarchy that governs
the US in any measurable or meaningful way, especially since the common
wisdom dictates that voter behavior can be heavily influenced by
political advertising, which has been unleashed to an exponential degree
by the Citizens United case (2010).
I don’t know if contemporary activists possess the wherewithal to
change the entrenched system of extreme wealth and militarism. The stark
brutality at the street level is breathtaking in its viciousness. Not
many can stand that kind of long-term abuse and stay the course of
activism, but what happens both on the streets and in the halls of
government over the next few years in the US will determine the fate of
this planet!
Meanwhile, The Los Angeles Times published photos of US
troops posing with dead Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan (“U.S. troops
posed with body parts of Afghan bombers,” April 18, 2012). These
gruesome photographs come on the heels of other pictured atrocities from
Afghanistan committed by U.S. troops. Not only a violation of both
international, U.S., and U.S. military law, the photos go to the heart
of the dehumanization that takes place during military training and war.
My memoir, Notes of a Military Resister: Looking Back From a Time of Endless War(2011)
depicts the dehumanization of the so-called enemy that took place in
basic training during the Vietnam War. Combined with the attack on
individualism that is part and parcel of military training, it is a
simple leap of the imagination to recognize how these two forces combine
to create the environment for the committing of atrocities in war. Even
the secretary of defense, Leon Panetta, was seen squirming in great
discomfort at the news conference held just after the publication of the
photographs as he offered his own tortured account of the incident
while attempting to explain away these latest in a long line of U.S.
atrocities.
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