Not The End Of Responsibility But The Beginning
A few thoughts on the election. How original.
Regardless of who gets to sit at the head of this country in which everything important is eroding and breaking down, regardless of whether you voted or didn’t vote or tried to do a secret third thing (vote for Kamala Harris anyway but hold your nose while you did it), today is not the end of responsibility. It is the beginning.
I think you have a responsibility to organize your workplace, or join the union and participate in it if you’re lucky enough to already have one available. This is especially true if you care about ending the United States’ war machine, which in my experience is the main rationale for people choosing doors two and three. As Peter Camejo told us in 1970, an organized, militant labor movement is the only real tool the people have for putting an end to the heinous crimes of American imperialism:
You see, if you walk into a store that’s selling refrigerators, there’s nobody in that store to stop you from wheeling out a refrigerator. How many guards do they have at the door? Probably zero. They have some salesman who walks up to you. It wouldn’t take much to get him out of the way. You could wheel out four or five of them.
Now, the reason you don’t go wheeling refrigerators out of stores every day of the week is because there’s a certain power ensuring that that refrigerator stays inside the store unless they get money for it.
There are things like the police, the courts, and jails behind it. But this power isn’t apparent when you look at the refrigerator and at the little salesman saying, “You’d better not take that.” In a similar way, when a union bureaucrat gets up at a rally and says, “You’d better stop the war,” it isn’t some helpless little guy on the street talking. There’s a lot of power behind that plea.
…The ruling class can deal with any one individual or any small group; it’s only masses that can stand in their way. So the potential power of the working class to stop the war is a big threat.
Not sure how to organize your workplace? Get help here! (You can also volunteer and donate at that link, if you work alone or work remote or otherwise can’t organize.)
I think you have a responsibility, too—again, regardless of what choices you made on this hallowed Tuesday—to materially support the people who are being annihilated by your government and your tax dollars, in your name, in collusion with a fascist foreign government that you can’t vote out or influence (or even legally criticize in some places).
Gaza eSims: donate to help keep Palestine connected to the outside world
It is these people I find myself chiefly concerned with and inspired by. To continue fighting to your last breath against an invading army; to round up and feed your bombed-out city’s cats amidst the shelling; to throw, as a child, stones at tanks, for want of any better weaponry; to break out of your concentration camp knowing that the Western world will denounce you as a terrorist for it: these acts are radical, so radical that it makes me feel ashamed for ever having used the word to describe myself.
I certainly won’t ascribe that word to the act of voting, which in this country often means giving consent to cosmic evil being done elsewhere in our name so that we might prevent the worst of it from coming home to roost. And I believe in the deepest core of my being that if we’re going to participate in that act it is our responsibility to sit with the contradictions and the awfulness of that choice, and so be driven to action, real action, by what it reveals. Accepting that we must be shorn of our illusions seems to me to be an important part of being human.
I say all this because losing these illusions—that just one more most important election of our lifetime will be what finally seals the deal on abortion rights or trans rights or labor rights or the Supreme Court, for example—has not been demotivating to me. On the contrary I think it has given me the chance to put my time and energy into political projects that I actually believe in, projects that involve moving everyday people into collective struggle. Hope—real hope—has to be grounded in something more than a basic refusal to engage with reality. And nothing makes me more hopeful than those moments when I get to help put my shoulder to the wheel alongside a bunch of people, some of whom I know well and some of whom I’ve just met, to take collective action and stand up for ourselves, for our students, for Palestine, or whatever else.
When you see politics as something other than showing up to vote every few years, it becomes much less difficult to confuse “feeling good” with “doing good.” And this is what bothers me more than anything about the recent discourse, wherein people try to make themselves feel better about being presented with a fundamentally awful choice. I worry that all this election day talk of “Voting Like a Radical” is ultimately just a way for people to give themselves permission to stop showing up. To not seek out other avenues of involvement, to not risk the possibility that their whole life might have to change when it is given over to something bigger and more difficult and more hopeful than what they could previously imagine.
I guess that’s all I’m asking. Let your whole life be changed. Pretty easy, right?
Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next time.
-Chuck
Thanks, Chuck! Excellent column! And so we fight another day...💪🏼🦋☮️