Posts from — February 2008

Let me be up front here: I voted for Ralph Nader in 2000. So go ahead and blame me. In truth I’ve come to admire Al Gore and if the Gore of 2008 were running in 2000, well, I’d have had a more difficult choice. But at that time, Nader was the progressive voice - the only option - to choose from. It wasn’t even a hard decision.

In the years since I’ve watched Nader vilified - not from the Right but from the so-called “Left”. And this criticism is - it seems to me - short-sighted, narrow minded and ultimately reactionary. It does great damage to any progressive movement. And it plainly shows why need multi-parties and instant runoff elections.

Anyway, here we are in 2008, and Ralph is at again. And I won’t vote for him this time around. We’ve seen what an out-of-control right-wing party can do; it’s only the Bush Administration’s bungling and ineptitude that limited their damage, and they’ve done plenty of damage regardless. So I’ll vote for a Democrat because right now, the stakes are that high. But still, I’m damn glad Ralph’s running.

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Like any other politically passionate, web-trolling denizen I post to blogs all the time. But since starting ChangeAny1Thing, I’ve made a personal pledge to avoid flaming anyone on line. If we’re to have the progressive changes we so desperately need - and for which this site exists to help spur on - flaming supposed “enemies” is not the way. So I’m committed to conducting myself online as I would in person.

Tell me then what I should do when I come across a line like this during a “friendly chat” over at In These Times:

I mean how does one respond to such nonsense? In my case it was with about 500 clever, sharp, biting words. I wrote so fast my fingers were falling off.

But I didn’t send it. I saved it to my desktop and then the next day I deleted the thing. It’s like that rule about nasty emails to your friends or co-workers when you’re angry: You write them out, save them as a draft, but the next day they go in the trash. Keeps your friendship - or your job - alive.

And if we hope to see the Web as an instrument for progressive change I’m suggesting that we all take this same pledge. Tossing flames across political blogs is like screaming at the car that cuts you off; the distance makes you brave. But bump into someone at a store and right away you’re friendly, polite and apologetic. It’s the difference between building community versus social disorder.

So here we are in the cold and physically distant blogosphere, tossing snarky barbs from the safety of our PCs at the “idiot winger” online. Honestly, where’s that get us? It’s a progressive-change dead-end. I think it’s killing the Web as a place to share and learn about grass-roots, up the front the bottom, progressive ideas. It’s really got to stop.

I’m not suggesting some kind of “fair and balanced” rule here. Those are reactionary code words designed to stand in the way of change. I’m talking about something much more subtle. It’s finding a way to move beyond our own internal, knee-jerk ideology towards a more open-minded strategy, because God knows we need new ideas.

So when I post at other sites - and I do this all day, it’s like an addiction - I’m trying to chuck the easy arrogance that comes from anonymity. I don’t think I’m going to change someone’s opinion with clever insults and nasty names anyway. And how do I know my position is “right”? I used to think “everyone else is asleep, I know History, I know what’s real”. But I don’t agree even with half the things I myself once thought. Who’s to say everyone else is wrong, all the time?

The concept of being stuck to an ideological position - Marxist vs. Capitalist, Stalinist vs. Trotskyist, Democrat vs. Republican — it’s all about being stuck in a place. And the result is that nothing ever changes. You can still be open to new ideas without leaving your core beliefs behind. I still have core beliefs, my basic values and I’m sticking to them. When it comes to how we’ll get a world based on those values (fairness, compassion, respect, community, democracy, in my case) - I’m open. I think we all ought to be.

It’s a new century, after all. You can see a progressive awakening all over. You can see it in the natural food sections cropping up in the supermarket, in the new environmentalism, in the sustainability movement, even some elements of the evangelical crowd are acting like they’ve rediscovered The Beatitudes, the original progressive’s platform. I see it even in myself, when I realized hours after leaving the primary voting booth that I’d just voted for my first black presidential candidate, and race hadn’t even entered – in any form – into my decision. This is cool stuff; we’ve come pretty far.

But we’re not there yet, not by a long shot. Now more than ever we need passionate communicators to bring progressive ideas into the world to move the greater community beyond worn out, dug-in, ideological positions holding back true social change. “lib” vs. “repug”, “us” vs. “them” – these belong in the past. An open mind is the path of true social change.

Listen: I just found out that my “FOX-is-Right,” Limbaugh-listening, hate-all-liberals co-worker is thinking seriously of voting for Obama in November. So maybe anything’s possible, after all.

If I could change any one thing, I would…

Demand socialized medicine. That’s what it is, that’s what we should call it, and that is what we need.

OK, I’m being a bit dramatic with that headline. What I really should have written is “demand a single payer health care system”. But I had a “mad as hell” moment this weekend and while it hasn’t put me over the edge with our health care system - that happened a long time ago - it was enough to get me thinking about our need for real health care change.

It came from the Flu, which I thought might be pneumonia, and which inconveniently hit on a Saturday afternoon. This gave me two options: The emergency room’s day-long ordeal or the walk-in service at a local physician’s group. I could have tried making an appointment with a doctor on a Saturday afternoon, but there’s no chance in Hell I’d get one.

It’s just not cost-effective to have office hours at that time.

So I walked into the nicely decorated drop-in facility; waterfall in the corner, stone walls, very comforting although I was ready for death’s door. I was told to be ready for a wait - a long one. Did I really need to see the doctor?

Yes, I really did. So I settled in and waited. It felt like half a lifetime. Why such a long wait? Because there was one doctor on call.

Having one doctor on call during Flu season is nuts. But it is cost-effective.

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If I could change any one thing, I would…

Keep McDonald’s and their poisonous pitches away from my kids.

It’s bad enough that kids are blasted with TV advertising every day (the average child watches more than 40,000 television commercials per year; warms the cockles of your heart, doesn’t it?) Add in the highway signs, the checkout counter, the doctor’s office, the buses passing by…our kids being consumed.

Thing is, children don’t have the brain-processing skills to understand advertising, which they see as “truthful, accurate and unbiased.” It’s like giving solid food to an infant; they’ve yet to develop teeth to take it in.

This is explicitly understood by the advertisers themselves, who are dumping $15 billion per year on advertising to children. What’s the result? The most over-weight, over-materialistic, over-manipulated generation ever imagined. Ever wondered how 70% of Americans got duped into thinking Iraq was responsible for 911?

Maybe because they saw it on TV.

The good news is that parents are catching on, and fighting back. Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood - along with nearly 2000 parent complaints - just got McDonald’s to end their advertising campaign on report cards (yes, freaking report cards). They had been promising “a free Happy Meal to students with good grades, behavior, or attendance”. You’ve got to see this thing to believe it.

When I was a kid we had Dick and Jane. But there’s nothing like that smilin’ face of Ronald McDonald to make you think “learn kids!”

Way to go to the families of Seminole County, Florida…