Only a few weeks after the elections, I've become overwhelmed with all the depressed reactions around me. At a bar friends would cry into their drinks in disbelief that supposedly Christian zealots from the Mid West had taken the country over. While many had set the election up as a battle against the devil himself, I personally didn't find myself sweating the fact that Bush won. While I voted by absentee ballot and drove a friend to the polls at the last minute, I had very little invested in the election. Except for a few bets that Bush would somehow win. I had seen dedicated community activists who were working to get out the vote, wondering what all their work had gone towards. Post election, they suddenly were struggling to find relevancy. It was is an identity crisis of progressives - If we can't present the alternative that people will choose come election day, why are we here? One commentator tried to console his audience like a preacher to his congregation. He said that after the tears stop, to overcome your feelings of despair and grief and attempt to gain important insights from this event. After reading this it made me realize what the greatest tragedy of the election was. The real shame was that those on the left, who profess themselves as trying to create an alternative to today's despair, "Anybody But Bush"? meaning vote for John Kerry, was the best that could be offered. Around the world I do see a good number of alternatives. In Argentina I see people from the neighborhoods, the unemployed, coming together to cook food and help each other with their basic needs in spite of a collapsing government. In Italy, when they protested the war, a million people launched a strike across the country and filled the streets. Even better is Brazil, where despite the election of left wing President Lula de Silva, landless workers have expanded their take overs of land to meet their needs. Puts the increase American voter turn out in some perspective. Two weeks after the election, I look around at the faces in my neighborhood, my family and the folks I work with and I don't really see a change. All the same problems exist, but I don't think anything they heard in the election really spoke to what's going on in their daily lives. Here in America, no matter who the President is, my mom won't get her job back, sky rocketing costs of community college won't go down for me, the shootings in my neighborhood won't stop and my cousins will still be deployed in Iraq. Rather than sobbing over not being able to drum up enough votes to defeat one millionaire, Yale educated, white man with another, we should instead be taking a cue from our comrades around the globe on how to build a movement. We should instead be thinking of real alternatives that can touch people's hearts, their minds and help them put food on the table. Perhaps then those talking about making change in this country could have an impact far greater than who wins the next presidential campaign. |
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