SuperWeed

Having encouraged SuperWeed readers in swing states to vote, I feel the need to remind everybody that, in the words of the CrimethInc Don’t Just Vote project, “voting is the least effective strategy for having a say in society. You can vote once or twice a year, but it’s what you do every day that counts. Don’t abdicate your power to so-called representatives — take responsibility for the ways you can change the world yourself.”

It’s particularly important that the young people for whom this election represented an exciting first step into civic engagement join the collective struggle for more healthy communities and ecosystems rather than retreating back into private concerns for the next four years. That’s the question on my mind this morning: How to channel rather than dampen the enthusiasm of young voters who will be ecstatic about the outcome of this election (and sorely disappointed, eventually, if they now sit back and wait for the promised change to come)?

I remember visiting Brazil shortly after the election of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, whose election (as a landless worker from the impoverished North) was as historic there as Obama’s has been here. Even radicals who really ought to have known better were singing ecstatically “Lula, Lula, oh-lei-oh-lei-oh-la!” I wanted to feel it with them but I couldn’t help thinking, “these people are going to be so disappointed.” As a Brazilian friend said to me when I told her that story, “we were.” Lula did keep some of his promises and did, to a certain degree, ally with South American leaders like Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales, rather than with the United States. But he mostly turned out to be just another demonstrably corrupt politician, leaving the landless peasants who had invested their hopes in him feeling even more demoralized than before. Years later, there’s still hunger (his top promise) in Brazil. There’s still slavery in Brazil. The devastation of the Amazon continues apace.

Could Obama could turn out to be more like Morales — the first Indigenous leader of Bolivia, who really has tried to change the very shape of things? That seems unlikely to me given Obama’s deference to corporate capitalism and explicit support for unilateral attacks on Pakistan. And, of course, Morales has only been able to do so much, given the wealth and power of the established interests arrayed against him.

In short, as anybody who’s ever lived in a truly dangerous urban neighborhood knows, it kind of doesn’t matter who the Mayor might be. Only concerted, collective, block-by-block community cooperation can carve safe spaces out of dangerous environments. Anymore, the whole world is a dangerous neighborhood. We all need to take responsibility for creating the change we need.

Nobody who remembers the days when registering African Americans to vote might lead to a lynching could fail to be moved by the election of Barack Obama. Let’s take our authentic joy that Americans so resoundingly rejected the racist past and pour that emotion into effective direct action for the future.

November 5th, 2008 | Category: Politics | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL