Today I really am feeling more hopeful--maybe it was just the knowledge that probably about a half million people showed up for the first day of RNC protests in NYC. Ok right that's a drop in the bucket of the votes we need, but I think there may be more of us out there than the polls are getting. And maybe it's because I'm going to the Kerry speech/rally in Ohio tonight at midnight and I'll be shouting "four more months" with the rest of them. Everyday my daughter goes out and canvases for Kerry votes in this swingy state.
And maybe it's also that I recently re-read this quotation that I pulled from Tony Kushner's speech at Vassar College two years ago (it might be available on The Nation magazine's website, in the archives if you are interested:
" . . . hope isn't a choice, it's a moral obligation, a human obligation, an obligation to the cells in your body. Hope is a function of those cells, it's a bodily function the same as breathing and eating and sleeping. Hope is not naïve, hope grapples endlessly with despair. Real, vivid, powerful, thunderclap hope, like the soul, is at home in darkness, is divided; but lose your hope and you lose your soul, and you don't want to do that, trust me, even if you haven't got a soul, and who knows, you shouldn't be careless about it. Will the world end if you act? Who can say? Will you lose your soul, your democratic-citizen soul, if you don't act, if you don't organize? I guarantee it. And you will feel really embarrassed at your ten-year class reunion. People will point, I promise you; people always know when a person has lost his soul. And no one likes a zombie, even if, from time to time, people will date them. "
~~Tony Kushner, "A Word to the Graduates: Organize," May 26, 2002, Vassar College
[I'm sorry I can't just let this drop: Believe it or not, Nader's polling data shows that he pulls equally from Dems and Republicans (many of whom are NOT happy with the WBush administration--out of control debt, radical interventionism, his radical religious rhetoric, or issues around immigration--but can't quite vote democrat), so I genuinely think he's a non-issue. The enemy is Bush Bush and Bush. And the enemy should also be the basic slothfulness of the democratic party which has gotten too fat on corporate dollars to be as forceful on populist issues as it once was: In Florida in 2000, about 97000 people voted for Nader, yes. But about 300,000 registered Democrats voted for Bush--of course, whether that's what a few of them in Dade county intended is open to question. The Democrats, in my opinion, should be more focused on getting those voters back and making sure that their votes count! I'm ashamed that they did nothing in 2000 about the massive disenfranchisement of especially African American voters. Nader is, in my opinion, a very distracting, very red herring for the Democrats.
Finally, look at his whole career before you call him unpatriotic--he's been taking on corporate greed, fighting for and gaining real, tangible consumer protection of real people, since before you were born. If you haven't been killed in a car wreck, you owe your continued existence in part to his work. My point: He's still heroic to many liberal voters, even some who disagree with his decision to run. I think the Republicans are making a tactical error in their shabby treatment of John McCain that will later come back to haunt them, and I see a similar kind of miscalculation on the Democrats' part if they let villify Nader and let his campaign distract them into focusing their energies on him and not on the real enemies.) |
