Creeping Toward Violent Revolution
The hugely unpopular shutdown of most Federal Government operations by the Republican Party shows that the leadership of that minority conspiracy against majority rule is again defying the will of the people over "Obamacare", the well-intentioned, if clumsy, attempt by our Democratic President to bestow nearly universal healthcare upon the American people.
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Make no mistake: this is not a revolt by overburdened Americans across the Nation, but mainly a regional rebellion, a new North-South Civil War waged by disloyal neo-Confederate scum against the rest of us. The Tea Party militants who brought about this shutdown represent only 18% of the public, according to NBC News today.
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It must be humiliating to be an intelligent, loyal, decent person in the South, surrounded by knuckle-dragging retards who would gladly cut off their own nose to spite Obama's face, and gladly DIE, or be completely ruined financially, if they have a medical emergency that they cannot easily pay for, rather than have medical insurance brought to them at reasonable cost by a black man!
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The Radical Right has persuaded the victims of their viciousness that the terrible things they are doing TO them are instead FOR them.

Yes, we have your best interests at heart. After all, it is GOOD for you that you are poor, and that we are doing everything in our considerable power to KEEP you poor. So when we refuse to pass measures to rescue the economy and drastically lower unemployment, it's for YOU. It's GOOD that we are exporting YOUR jobs, so the rich can become ever more obscenely rich by paying foreigners a fraction of what they'd have to pay you. It's GOOD that you don't have health insurance. Look at all the money you save when you're healthy. (Do not, however, under any circumstances, inquire into how much it will cost you if you get sick, or are seriously injured in an accident or crime.) It's GOOD that your schools are terrible. Good schools would cost a lot of money, that YOU would have to pay in higher taxes. Who needs an education? There are no jobs for you whether you are educated or uneducated, so why struggle to learn anything when your job prospects as a dropout or graduate of a lousy high school are pretty much identical to your job prospects if you have a bachelor's degree — and a bachelor's degree would cost you thousands and THOUSANDS of dollars of debt that would haunt you for decades! So why bother? Just save yourself a lot of pain and bother by dropping out of school or doing the very least necessary to get a worthless high school diploma, because it doesn't make the slitest bit of difference whether you get a good education or not. You will always be poor, no matter what you do. That's the natural order. A few are rich; the many are poor; and if you are MEANT to be rich, you will win the lottery, or be drafted into a pro-sports franchise, make a platinum-selling record, come up with a brilliant invention, or otherwise luck out — which isn't really luck at all, but the Will of God. You believe in God, don't you, Bubba? If God wants you to be rich, He will make you rich, just as He made those other people rich. They deserve to be rich, because that is God's Will, and it is not for YOU to question God's Will. God will show you the way, or plant the idea that will make you rich. But if He does NOT want you to be rich, you will never be rich, because that, too, is God's Will. You accept God's Will, don't you, Billy Bob? So when we oppose that Black Man in the White House, we're doing it for YOU. He pretends to want to do good things for you, but you know better, don't you, Bobbi Jo? No black man wants to do anything good for YOU! Oh, he might want to do something TO you, Ellie Mae. We'll protect you, and defend your boyfriend's (white) manhood. When we reject everything that Black Man wants to do, we're doing it for YOU and yours, Sarah and Jebediah!

As of today, Congress in general has a public-approval rating of 10%, because of the behavior of Republicans. Alas, too many members of the public blame both parties for what is SOLELY a Republican conspiracy to thwart the general will. How can the House defy the plain will of the people year after year without end? How do these evil losers keep getting re-elected?
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Turnout.
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In that one word lies the open secret of the anti-democratic nature of the American political system as it has degenerated over time. In 1900, turnout in Federal elections was 73.2%. Now, it's 57.5%. That's not democracy. Turnout in non-Presidential years is even lower,
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Worse, where turnout makes the biggest difference, in primaries, it is commonplace for tiny minorities of 7% or less to select the name that goes on the general-election ballot. Yet we call this system "democracy". That would be funny if it weren't so sad, and maddening.
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There is a simple, quick fix to the problems produced solely by low turnout: mandatory voting. Australia and some 30 other democracies around the world have compulsory voting, and their turnout is hugely higher than ours. In Australia, the typical Federal-election turnout is 93%; in Belgium, 95%. What would our Congress look like today if 93% or 95% of our people voted? It surely would not remotely resemble the hellish mess we have now.
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Would the people now in office enact mandatory voting? Oh, we could argue to them that if they really believe they speak for their constituents, they would be thrilled to have mandatory voting, because that would prove they are representative of the people they are elected to, well, represent. But they know full well that they are NOT representative of the constituency they are elected to represent, so they would FITE mandatory voting, asserting a "right", set out nowhere in our basic documents, NOT to vote. Where, exactly, in what document, is such a right proclaimed? It's certainly not in the original Constitution, nor its Bill of Rights or other amendments added in the 224 years since that Constitution went into effect. Is it, perhaps, in the Declaration of Independence, which preceded the Constitution? No. The basic issue in the Declaration and the Revolution it justified was the right TO vote for the people who make the laws. Is the right not to vote in the Emancipation Proclamation? Nope. Gettysburg Address? Nope. FDR's "Four Freedoms" address? Nope. Where, then, IS this mysterious "right" not to vote?
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Mind you, for much of our history, we had a military draft, which asserted a Governmental right of slavery. That involuntary servitude was supposed to be temporary, but for people who died in the military, their slavery was permanent. We do not presently have a military draft, but there has been no constitutional amendment barring the return of the draft, so that is still an arrow in the Government's quiver of powers against the individual.
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How can anyone argue that a Government that has the right to sweep citizens off the streets and force them into military service for years — or jury service for days or weeks — does not equally have the right to compel citizens to vote one or two days every couple of years?
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And how can the Radical Right, so indignant about foreign nationals invading our territory without permission, assert that the one right reserved exclusively to citizens, the right to vote, is actually a right NOT to vote? One might as reasonably argue that noncitizens' "right" NOT to vote is actually a right TO vote.
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If Congress were to enact mandatory registration and voting, the Nation would be transformed, drastically for the good, within a single voting cycle, as people whose cynicism and defeatism has prevented them from voting for decades, suddenly do vote. We can reasonably expect that dozens, if not hundreds, of unrepresentative 'Representatives', most particularly in the South, would be ousted, and new people, with new voices for new ideas and new hopes, would start to address very old hopes that we might finally live up to our fine words and stop being the world's supreme hypocrites.
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But what if Congress refuses to enact mandatory registration and voting, because people who know they would be ousted if everyone voted, block universal voting? How, then, might we force Congress to do what we really want them to do, and stop doing what we DON'T want them to do?
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Mass demonstrations in the streets of every major city and town? How much energy, money, and organizing time would such demonstrations require? We had spontaneous demonstrations in a few cities in the Occupy Wall Street movement, but that movement vanished as quickly as it sprang up, in part because of a lack of a unified vision or program, but worse, from bad weather! Yes, a movement for socioeconomic justice in the United States was cut short by winter! And it did not, like daffodils or tulips, re-emerge in the spring.
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Such demonstrations would ideally have to be staged in places where the imposition upon ordinary citizens would be minimal. Shutting down the business center would alienate the public. But demonstrations considerately located in parks or public plazas where they would be minimally disruptive could be easily ignored by the powers that be.
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How about an immense March on Washington for Universal Voting? That too would take enormous amounts of organizing effort and money. And, sadly, Congress could simply absént itself from the city that day, completely vitiating such a march.
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How, then, can widespread public disgust and rage effect change? A general strike? The unions are too enfeebled, after decades of anti-union legislation at the state level, to do anything on a national level.
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Mass demonstrations designed to disrupt business and society over and over? Such tactics would cost support as likely as grow support for anything such disruptions are intended to effect.
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Voting drives? It is to laff. Every election, but especially every Presidential election, we are subjected to get-out-the-vote drives that try to get unregistered people to register, and get those newly registered people to the polls. Every election, such drives fail miserably to boost turnout enuf to make the slitest difference.
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The argument is made that voting is a "civic duty", but no one takes that seriously. After all, "duty" means something you have to do: "1. An act or a course of action that is required of one by position, social custom, law, or religion. 2.a. Moral obligation." Obligation: "A social, legal, or moral requirement, such as a duty, contract, or promise that compels one to follow or avoid a particular course of action." (American Heritage Dictionary, Third Edition; italics added)
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Contrast voting with testifying in a court of law. It is your duty, your obligation, to tell "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth". It's not optional.
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You can't defeat defeatism thru reason. You can't make cynical people hopeful by talking at them. Only results matter. And the only way cynical, defeatist people will see that their votes do matter is by actually COMPELLING them to vote.
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But if hopeless, defeatist, cynical people don't vote, and thus do not see any change, they will continue to believe that voting doesn't work. What, then, WOULD work to make this now-hideous travesty of the United States do socioeconomic justice? We aspired to be the City on the Hill, a secular lite unto the world: an inspiration to mankind. But we are today a ruin on the hill, a bonfire among fallen hopes. The pillars of our fine words still stand, silhouetted from within by the fire that has gutted society. The U.S. Capitol might as well be the Parthenon, a hollow shell of a building, representing a hollow shell of a society.
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If we cannot vote our way out of this nitemare, and cannot demonstrate or march our way out of it, how are we going to fundamentally change the thoroly corrupt, disgusting monstrosity that "America" has become? How about violence?
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Violence is as American as apple pie or baseball. We are the most violent First World country on Earth. Large swaths of our inner cities are war zones filled with gunfire every nite. Periodically, mass shootings "take out" a dozen or more people.
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What if instead of a dozen ordinary people — workers in a Navy yard, theatergoers in a cineplex, small children in an elementary school — each mass shooter killed a dozen Republican Congressmen or Radical Right state legislators and their reactionary governor? Wouldn't that produce very quick change? Would the replacement Congressmen, state legislators, and governor be as regressive as, or even worse than, those put to death by an indignant citizen? If so, wouldn't a second-round mass assassination make plain that going even more Rightwing is not the fix?
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Unlike guerrilla warfare, which is very hard to wage, and very costly in money and lives lost among the revolutionaries, a campaign of assassination is relatively easy, and has a very low cost in lives to the revolutionists. Assassins could be recruited from, for instance, people who are terminally ill because they couldn't afford to go to the doctor in time for early detection to permit effective, early intervention; or from elderly people who expect to die soon, whose "golden years" have been ruined by Social Security's having broken its promise to keep pace with inflation, and by cuts to things like Food Stamps by vicious politicians, so they are reduced to penury and fury at being crushed by The System. There are hundreds of thousands of people in this country who feel smashed to the wall by an unjust System that they feel powerless to do a thing to stop. Put a gun in their hand, and all of a sudden they are powerful against their enemies. Make sure they understand who The Enemy is. Help them hunt down their oppressors, with names and addresses, and you have mass revolution on the cheap.
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One of the appalling statistics that emerged in the debate that preceded passage of Obamacare is that 45,000 Americans a YEAR die because they don't have health insurance. 45,000, year after year. Yet the implementation of Obamacare was delayed by almost four years, during which 180,000 Americans were allowed to die!
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How many Republican and Blue Dog Democratic Members of Congress would have to die to change the politics of the Nation fundamentally and fast? Well, there are 233 Republicans and 14 Blue Dogs in the House of "Representatives"; 45 Republicans in the Senate. Were we to execute them all, that would be a total of 278 "people" who would need to be "taken out" of Congress.
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If you can save 45,000 decent people each and every year by killing 278 evil "people" (but actually subhuman, antihuman scum) in one year, it seems to me that that would be a terrific bargain — esp. if you can harvest organs and tissues from most of those evil "people" to benefit decent people on waiting lists for transplants.
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Alas, violence has its problems, and all too many violent revolutionists have turned upon each other and destroyed their own revolution thru fratricidal exterminations. In the United States, we could expect some Radical Rightists and Radical Libertarians to wage their own campaigns of assassination of people not Far Right enuf for their tastes. Leftist assassins would try to snuff out Rightwing assassins, the element of surprise would almost vanish, and layer upon layer of defenses would be thrown up around the "people" in high office who "need killing" (to borrow an expression used to justify murder in the South).
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Any campaign of assassination would have a very small window of opportunity to achieve massive change. And if the low levels of turnout that put enemies of the people into Congress to begin with, continue in place, people of similar vicious contempt for the people would likely be returned to office, this time pledging to "get tuf" on crime and "save our democracy from lawlessness". So violence would likely at once beget violence and even produce a few "Representatives" and Senators who are even worse than those "taken out". Still, the number of people willing to die to serve the rich is small, so many Radical Rightwingers would swear off political office, and at least a significant portion of the replacements for assassinated Radical Rightists would indeed be more moderate — if only because they are "scared to death" of public fury, which would be a very good thing.
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Republicans need to be made aware that if they do not let out the pressures of popular rage that are building and building, they could see an explosion that might KILL them. Few of these "people" are personally courageous. They serve the rich with impunity because the poor are gutless and defeatist. But if they actually do come to believe that the poor are at the edge of violent revolution, they might decide that it's better to be a live representative of the many than a dead servant of the rich.
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Thus we must not, as a society, suppress talk of violence as the fix for the terrible things that have happened to this country. Quite the contrary, we should be talking-up violent solutions to our social stalemate and the unending gridlock in Congress. "Public servants" must be scared s*tless of the people. The very many can without doubt exterminate the few, whenever the many become hopeless and livid. So shut the Government down, boys. Make life even harder for people you have kept unemployed for YEARS, and see what happens.
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The British responded to the Boston Tea Party with arrogance and a small force in a large land. For that, they got Minutemen at Lexington and the ironically named "Concord". Occupy Wall Street might be our time's Boston Tea Party, which accomplished nothing. What will be our Lexington and Concord?
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:57 PM