Over the past few months I have been doing a lot of text-banking for the Working Families Party, an organization that has the goal of electing candidates who actually care about the working class. Responses range from enthusiastic to vulgarly opposed. I don’t let the infantile rubbish from the MAGA jerks bother me – it’s their problem, not mine.
A few respondents have answered that voting won’t save us, only revolution will. I say, let’s give the polls one last chance, because ballots are better than bullets. Revolution is not nearly as easy as one may think. So, revolutionaries, how are you going to revolt? Throw bricks and Molotov cocktails? You’ll need to be a lot better organized than a wild mob. And if you have images of Minutemen kicking redcoat butt in your mind, remember that the American colonies succeeded only because they got help from the French and the Spanish.
Before you even contemplate starting a revolution, you need to think about what you will do if you succeed. Revolutions and marriages fail for the same reason: What the participants regard as “That’s all she wrote” is, in reality, just the last paragraph of the prolog. The American Revolution succeeded because the Founding Fathers had a plan to create a new kind of country, a new kind of democracy.
The United States they created was deeply flawed – racist, sexist and elitist. We needed a bloody Civil War to end the evil of slavery, and decades more tumult and protest to end legal discrimination against people of color. Women had to wait till the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920 so they could vote, and even after 50 years of marching and hell-raising the ERA still has not been added to the Bill of Rights, though as I write this it may be on the cusp of ratification. Racism, sexism, homophobia and other ills are still rampant; though they are technically illegal, society and culture keep them alive.
I do believe we are at a crossroads, and we have three choices. We can vote out all or at least most of the extremist Republicans who are up for re-election, and turn this country’s course back towards moral and ethical progress. Or we can degenerate further into fascism and oligarchy. Or we can have a revolution.
Revolutions, though, don’t have to be violent. Gandhi used nonviolent means to unite the peoples of India and gain that country’s independence. The former satellites of the Soviet Union, with the notable exception of Romania, threw off the chains of Communism peacefully. Problems still abound as different ethnicities bicker and even fight over who has the right to what land, but at least they initially took the path of irenic change. A successful revolution can involve minimal bloodshed, or none at all.
This is why we need to get out the progressive vote this election. Make sure you are registered to vote, get your progressive kith and kin registered, offer to help people get to polling places, and cast an informed ballot. Do your homework on the candidates, and remember the down-ballot races, because those are where extremists begin their takeover.
The alternatives to using legal, peaceful means to turn our country around are unthinkable.
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