While the court poets and media glitterati quibble over the ‘professional’ Left and Right, the country sinks into a greater recession, a deeper depression, and widening disdain among the flourishing rich, glaring down below at the languishing middle and lower classes’ descent into feudal poverty.
The protracted war crises, the deconstruction of education, the expanding fall-out of worker abuse that is culminating in mass unemployment, the degradation of the Gulf of Mexico and world environment – all results of decades of mismanagement and lack of political vision and expedience. Millionaires, billionaires and political royalty crowd the 2010 electoral system, hoping to get a crack at the wheel, in hopes of adding yet another peacock feather to one’s cap full of ‘accomplishments.’
And by all measures citizens grow increasingly uneasy at their state of affairs. Even accountants are increasingly glum about the American future. Elections are coming fast on the horizon – but no one is excited. Why not?
Perhaps because they sense that long after the elections have passed, nothing will have substantively changed. Some new faces. Maybe. But new policies? Voters should know better, when they elect representatives that think government is about sales, marketing and corporate business, and hence, put corporate motives and profits ahead of people. It’s not – government is about social justice and legal fairness in the commonwealth of society.
So why don’t they vote anew? Embrace a worthy risk, engage a new line of flight toward a different American progress that is not the same as the worn decades long passed, but still we suffer? All we need is a couple of hundred thousand votes in the right direction, no? Left? Right? Green.
Hope. It means something different than pulling the straight ticket we’ve collectively heaved for the last decades in recent memory. That idea has gotten us to – well, where we are - and whether we meant to or not, the ritual flushing of hope down the toilet every election cycle. America in absentia.
Hope. Seek out the option, the alternative, wherever you are – but mostly, cultivate the courage of the conviction most of us share, which is that we wish to cultivate better times for more people. It should be fairly evident which candidates not only stand for that kind of progress, but whom will actually make that kind of change and progress once elected – there won’t be many of them, so it should be easy to decide.
Hope is a concept that will move society forward, but only if the arrow shaft of new political will and activism is tethered to the arrowhead of hopeful justice via the election of new candidates. Progressive political activism only works when there are progressive political candidates to activate and elect, and voters in turn, uphold their responsibility to activate, support and elect them.
Please support our campaign for U.S. Representative in Congress, and be sure to check out our new TV ad. If you would like a bumper sticker, please send us a note!:
http://intertheory.org/nriiiforcongress2010.html http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6O_RIId7Atw Thank you,
Nicholas Ruiz III
Green Party candidate for U.S. Representative
Political advertisement paid for and approved by
Nicholas Ruiz III, Green Party candidate for Congress
Nicholas Ruiz III, Ph.D NRIII for Congress 2010 http://intertheory.org/nriiiforcongress2010.html ____________________________________ Editor, Kritikos http://intertheory.org ____________________________________ Director, Florida Forum for Social Justice http://intertheory.org/ffsj.htm