This little note, despite the imperative tense in the title, isn’t about telling you what to do. It’s about realizing that the first steps towards a better world must necessarily be steps away from the corporatist, overinflated, top-down monopoloy money world we currently live in.
Votes formerly represented our freedom and autonomy- however the obvious reality is that the American people are not free and are not autonomous, so your vote can’t represent freedom and autonomy because those things are largely non-existent in this country. Otherwise it wouldn’t be necessary to gang up in groups of tens of thousands of people and march around impotently with signs in order to affect the decisions which will have a dramatic influence on our lives. The people who make those decisions are largely beholden to powerful moneyed interests, who care nothing for community, interpersonal reactions, or satisfying lives. They care about “growth,” because the international monetary/capital system requires perpetual exponential growth in order to continue to get returns out of an economy.
In the late 1950′s, one man working 40 hours a week could make enough to buy a home, feed a wife, two kids, and a dog, take vacations, and still have some money left to leave to the kids when all is said and done. Obviously I’m not saying that the 50′s were perfect or that everything that’s happened since then was bad. But consider now that a married couple, each working well over 40 hours a week, has to sink itself deep into debt in order to afford things that were once considered basic accommodations. Certainly many people are living beyond their means, but the fact remains that after 60 years of “growth” we are a poorer, less functional country, more like slaves and less like sovereign independent people deciding the courses of their own lives.
People mock me for saying that Americans aren’t free, and I can admit that we’re certainly lucky for our many physical comforts. So far. But consider that we’ve been growing into a soft fascism since the 80′s, and now we have cameras in all urban centers and, since the passage of the humoursly-named “Patriot Act” (quite Orwellian) the government has unfettered access to information once considered private, may tap your phones without a warrant, and may hold you indefinitely as an “enemy combatant” if it considers you to be one, and that there’s no judicial oversight over these decisions. Also consider that, if this depression continues for over another year (it will), the middle class will be well on its way to disappearing entirely.
So the American social strata will look like this: roughly 90% of Americans will be poor debt slaves working hard for subsistence with literally no hope of upward social mobility, and probably 3-7% of people (those working in the upper echelons of the few large corporations which survive the depression, plus their government and military enforcers) will be extremely wealthy. It’s not difficult to imagine how citizens will react to this, so police presence will be increased (for your own protection, of course) and any unrest will be put down with as much violence as is necessary. Does this dynamic look familiar?
What does all of this have to do with voting? Votes and democratic change are the opiates which allows people to continue to feel free, and continue to feel powerful. But, as, I discussed, the people of the USA are neither free nor powerful. And, even though for a while we were able to delude ourselves into feelings of material comforts using debt, the reality is that we are already an impoverished nation, and it will only get much, much worse from here. The best actions you can take right now, with so much uncertainty, is first, not do anything to perpetuate the current money-hungry power structure whose demands for exponential growth have destroyed the landscape, impoverished this nation, increased the incidence of cancer dramatically, polluted the environment, destroyed indigenous peoples and native species, and generally made the world worse while increasing “wealth” (as discussed, for most Americans this wealth was an illusion anyway).
That means, first of all, don’t vote. Don’t put your money in banks. Don’t buy from faceless, soulless corporations with no connection to your community, if you can avoid doing so. Don’t work as a paper-pusher or administrator or data-entry clerk for their corporate monarchies, if you can avoid doing so.
The second, longer phase of our economic cleansing will not be merely economic but also psychological, spiritual, and philosophical. Capitalism disclaims all value except monetary value… and the results speak for themselves. Look around you right now and think of all the ways the space near you could be better. Look out your window- can children play in the street near you? Would their parents feel safe about that? Is your neighborhood suitable for real human life? Or is it a mere habitation unit with plenty of roads and cars to take people from one gear in an economic growth machine to another? These are the important changes, the difficult ones, and it will require new values and perhaps even a new religion. But it’s what’s necessary, it’s possible, and it is the future. It’s up to you, and other individual people acting within their own local sphere, to make sure that there even is a future for us to create.
Have hope, embrace change, don’t vote.