boy it’s going to be so annoying when we finally do get nuked. the nonstop mandatory 24 hour grievathons and patriotic punditry about how could anyone dare to think to vaporize a city
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City hall, school board elections – it’s an order of magnitude easier to get real change pushed through at this level. Being elected representatives gives these candidates experience to push up against higher boundaries. By proving strength at a small scale you can build your movement on concrete accomplishments. I mean, I can vote for my socialist city council candidate, and I did, and she was seated on a major city.
Pinning all the hopes on the Presidency is going from Wii Fit to Olympic decathlon; you can’t get upset when the institution is by design selecting for moderates due to the 50%+1 coalition required.
And yeah, joining the Democratic party is the only way to move politics at a federal level, but the party is so much further left than it was even 10 years ago that we can’t get upset that it’s not working because it’s working pretty well.
Things might not be changing fast enough to solve problems at the scale we have but I don’t think that’s historically unusual.
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My dad won a few school board elections back in the late 90s. He was president of the board for a while too! He managed to get a new middle school built even but it was nothing but an uphill battle. After that he didn’t really have the will to stay in for the long term because the surrounding culture was so incredibly hostile to any kind of forward progress. It wasn’t like he was all alone either. He had friends and allies, it’s just they were undercut at every turn and some even run out of town.
Now I know you’re probably thinking but Mr_Mechanical you’re in middle America of course people will call you communist if you try to get a bond issue passed to build a new school and people who acted like they were friends will swoop in once you’re not around to undue every program you fought for like helping keep pregnant teenagers in school so they can graduate and not be dropouts (seriously this program was terminated when the new president came in because everyone was all oh it’ll look so bad for the community having pregnant kids in school).
And my dad’s not even liberal! His foreign policy regarding Muslim countries is “nuke 'em all”. I don’t think he realizes how many Muslim people there actually are in the world but whatever right. He’s no Trump supporter thankfully but I have a feeling that’s because he gets his news mainly from cable television and not talk radio. Though after the rise of the Tea Party he swung more left, which is to say he basically just stopped where he was and said well I guess this is the new center okay.
But hey that politics for you! You just have to keep on fighting the good fight right. As this was all part of my formative early adolescent experiences it kind of soured me on the whole idea of trying to accomplish things politically because if people are just going to cheat and be snakes and break the rules whenever they can then why try to do what’s good or right? Simply because it’s good and right?
Anyway this is all going nowhere fast. I’m sorry I’m just in a shitty mood. It happens every election year because like clockwork everyone goes through the same motions of oh god if so-and-so is elected it’s the end of all life as we know it and every political discussion is some irrational, anger fueled hatefest-toilet that you can either try and tip toe around and not get any splashed on you or just dunk your self right into facefirst.
THE POINT I was making I guess to try and salvage some of this post is that sure meaningful change takes a long time. I don’t want anyone to think I’m denying that but at the same time if you don’t see any signs of any progress being made it’s like what are you doing?
This is what I’m trying to say about the state of the political process in the United States: If I go volunteer and feed the homeless and the needy every weekend I’m doing a great thing by helping the people who are homeless and needy but I’m actually not really doing jack shit to stop the root causes of homeless and neediness in the first place. I’m just putting a band-aid on the problem. In the way these days I feel like voting for the president is the American people’s way of putting the band-aid on the problems that we as a country are either unable or unwilling to face and deal with. Voting for new school board presidents is like, I don’t know, putting a bit of neosporin on the infection? Like, it’s better than a band-aid but if the problem persists you should really think about seeing a doctor or something.
Okay I’m sorry I’ll stop now. How about those latest outrageous things Donald Trump said? I say it’s about time Bernie finally endorsed Hillary.
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I don’t know; I read your story and I think, yeah, exactly, that’s how it’s supposed to work. “I helped get a school built” is a story of success even if it was hard and draining. Stuff gets done because we’ve got over 300 million people in this country and at least some of them are doing this hard work at any time.
Feeding the homeless: yeah, the problem might not be getting solved, structurally, but a more pressing problem of the hungry people in front of you is directly getting solved and that’s something good right there. And you can even have a structural view – food banks are a system that eases the problem of poverty, you can count it, you can measure participation, you can proscribe things like, “if we lose 10% of our volunteers we won’t be able to function” and then things will get worse. In the same way that politics can only generate incremental progress to solving or easing these issues so does treating the pain, but it’s still gotta be done.
Meaningful progress in politics is often just treading water because the bastards have even worse planned and you’re fighting as hard as you can to stop them from taking it. But if you didn’t fight–
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