I guess FOX news missed an opportunity with that headline, eh? Of course it is not news much like the rest of their program. I went to the Peace Festival knowing I would see a lot of people I know to let them know I was running for Governor again and to meet and hear Cindy Sheehan speak. Cindy is a mother who lost her son in Iraq, a high price to pay for the awareness of what our military industrial complex government is really like. She bemoaned the fact that she was again talking to the choir and told the small crowd of the usual suspects gathered there that protests on the weekends weren't going to change things, "while they(the MIC) take the weekends off to enjoy themselves." She said "we all have to take to the streets", and was clearly reaching the conclusion that change was going to require a full time effort by many people, probably many more than those who would now call themselves members of the Peace Movement. Challenging the military industrial complex and its puppet government of two parties in the streets, however, can get you hurt if you aren't careful. The closer one gets to interrupting business as usual the more brutal the state response.
Cindy told everyone she did not vote for Obama but for the Green Party candidate, Cynthia McKinney, but pointed out how challenges at the ballot box have not gone well either. She said "they tell us that change comes at the ballot box but that is not so." We are given few avenues to change the system because the system doesn't want to change despite all the evidence and signals that they are headed way the wrong direction. The Green Party can lead in the right direction if people will stop voting for the system and they will have to stop allowing the system to convince them its going to change, just in order to get their vote of course.
The Green Party is running in this race in a effort to win a ballot line, it only takes 50,000 votes. currently the major political parties represent corporate interests over that of the people who live int heir districts. These corporate interests fund the political process in this country which allows them undue control over it. Stopping this is difficult but the Gulf disaster is an example of the world we can expect if we don't. I think there is a collective intelligence that needs to be awakened. Our European relations use 43% of the energy we consume. You can't walk into a convenience store and see a whole wall of refrigeration for different colors of the same sugar water in any other country in the world. We are not suggesting austerity, we are only asking for an end to the gluttony.
It doesn't matter what religious or non-religious beliefs we have as long as we have good relations. It is a huge project to rebuild our economy from the ground up, from the community level up. It will require everyone in each community to join in such a project because the time may be coming when they will have no other good option. The Green Party can provide the kind of leadership we need but as was recently demonstrated it is not the leaders who are important for a movement, it is the followers who are most important. Once enough followers are doing what the leader does the leader disappears into the throng. This is how it should be.
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