> I'm fighting for a world that is better than this
> "lesser-of-two-evils" bullshit that comes along every four years. It
> was a pathetic choice when I worked on the Mondale/Ferraro campaign in
> 1984 and it still sucks 20 years later. I'm not one of those religious
> leftists who believes that they will get to go to revolutionary heaven
> when they die. Dammit, I want radical change now!
I really think that a lot of this argument is over individual temperaments.
I admire your passion. A lot of anarchists have this "Revolution now!" attitude. But I think it's just self-evidently unreal. (Obviously that doesn't bother you.)
I don't expect any revolutionary change in the U.S. system in my life-time (I'm in my early 60s, but hope to have a few good decades, anyway). That doesn't bother me at all (or not much), because I think patience is the prime revolutionary virtue.
OTOH, if one or more of the more apocalyptic scenarios which have surfaced on this list, like peak oil (there was a NY Times article the other day pointing out that the end of Saudi oil is in sight) or dramatic climate shifts, take place, some sort of wrenching social/political/economic change will probably take place within my lifetime, and not just in the U.S. But it won't be due to the calculated strategies and tactics of lefties -- they will be responding to overwhelming changes in physical/environmental circumstances, like everyone else. But aside from that kind of catastrophe, it seems clear to me that any political changes that take place in the U.S. in the next generation will be only gradual, no matter how passionate members of this list get.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A sympathetic Scot summed it all up very neatly in the remark, 'You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk-dancing.' -- Sir Arnold Bax