I got the worst post election blues I had since Reagan beat Jimmy Carter by secretly holding up the release of hostages. It got so bad and I was so conflicted it turned physical. It got so bad because I voted Democratic ONLY because I didn't want to throw my vote to a far right conservative. I voted for a local Green, Kent Solberg, because he had a strong stance, intelligent planning, name recognition and popularity going for him in a local race, but he only got 8% of the vote. It's kind of sad when we have to vote against our principles to try to hang on to the little bit of better, the nano-bit of less-bought -and-sold, the Democrats have over the Republicans. But then listening to Thom Hartman and Bernie Sanders discuss post election strategies, I was almost persuaded, AND THEN… I asked myself,
Assume everything they say is not only predictive but prescient, assume even that the Democrats get everything they want in the house and Senate, could they EVER effectively address global warming? (Seems to me the most they've ever done is suggest a politically calculated static decrease in a non linear increase, seems to me the most scientists have ever done is feed the mainframe data and tell it to add with grade school math while the feedback loops, according to all the stats I’ve read, are multiplying each other by exponents IF we don’t need some new form of calculus to figure their natural curves.) And is there a more important issue on the table, IF it's even ON the table? For one instance, what good is the best healthcare system on a sick planet? That's like these 1950s government fantasies that you could build a bomb shelter and store food and water so you could survive a nuclear winter after a nuclear war. For another instance how do we pull the plug on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and the hunger of the Military Industrial Complex for war without getting off oil? And in the financial realm, so many of the big corporations have so much oil stock all they lack for being oil companies is a few drilling rigs and pump jacks (and don’t tell me they don’t have the money to buy them).
Or let me ask all these questions a different way, how do you stop a feedback loop? Say Harry Potter waved his wand and suddenly we're back to pre industrial 350 PPM or even lower carbon dioxide levels. The tundra and permafrost are still melted, the arctic ice is gone and the Albedo effect (reflectance) is gone and the open water is absorbing heat like it hadn’t heard one calculated concession the scientists and politicians were offering it, billions and billions of tiny organisms in the exposed biomass are still farting out methane and carbon dioxide, the oceans have absorbed so much CO they're acidic and the coral is still dying and all that absorption potential is gone, not to mention the rainforests not sucking up CO2 and pumping out Oxygen...anymore...so…HOW do you refreeze the arctic and start over? That's just one out of hundreds of feedback loops, but all I'm asking right now, is how on EARTH (we can’t live on Mars if we can’t survive in The Biosphere on Earth while cheating) do you unlock, much less reverse just that one knot of inertia? I've read about solutions and I have some ideas of my own, but none of these are feasible given the mass and inertia of demographic and POLITICAL feedback loops as we now know them.
So should we, and why not, address the Citizens United decision the way good martial artists would, by using the antagonist's energy against him---but how?
By recognizing that all borders change with the advent of new forms of communication and transportation, because we live in more and more times and places at once, because pollution and global warming recognize no borders, no property or even personal lines drawn in the sands of time, and so we only have to open our minds to the fact that we have common cause with Green parties in other countries. So if, in recognition of these truths which I hold to be self evident, we form a Green Party International, then according to Citizens United it would, just like Big Oil, Big Pharma, and Big Money in general, have the right to buy a piece of the American pie, warp our elections at warp speed, offer Democrats, Republicans, libertarians et al carrots and sticks of global opinion and money, assume its part and parcel of the myth of mass, so the political chess players could suddenly see their way to turning all righteous and principled.
One way we could obtain that outreach is, odd as it might seem, by going intensely local. That gets us to global because it's the same earth that we all grow food in, the same air and water we're all trying to save for the sake of our children...if we've given up on our own lives. And then use another martial arts principle and stay grounded and focused on how well (or not) we’re doing our art form, never lose our ROOT. And so in the course of inhuman events, connect to others in other countries on THAT common ground, speak truth to power on THOSE commons. Is it too much to ask? Too large a proposition to contemplate? An equation with too many variables? Maybe so, but one last question,
What's our other option?
