{news} GREENS ARE THE NEW MAINSTREAM?

[Green Party-CT]

UNDERNEWS
JUL 19, 2006
FROM THE PROGRESSIVE REVIEW
EDITED BY SAM SMITH
LATEST HEADLINES & INDEX: http://prorev.com
UNDERNEWS: http://www.prorev.com/indexa.htm


RAFTING DOWN AMERICA'S REAL MAINSTREAM

By Sam Smith
Permanent link: http://prorev.com/rafting.htm


I helped to start the national Green Party some
years back because I was looking for a political
organization in the American mainstream with
which I could feel comfortable. I wanted to get
out of the Democratic Party because I thought I
might become liable under the racketeering
statutes. I didn't want anything to do with
parties that went around invading countries and
killing people in the name of freedom. I
certainly didn't want to find myself called
before some war crime tribunal. And I wanted
nothing to do with an economics based on the
cruel notion that what was best for one's
campaign contributors was also best for the
country. Or people who treated nature like it was
Kleenex.

In short, I wanted a nice conservative American
political party. One that would conserve the
environment, the Constitution, individual
liberty, economic and social opportunity, and all
the other values that our country claimed - if
not always followed - during its first two
centuries. Values like independence, fairness,
cooperation, and the protection of those places -
including communities, open spaces or buildings -
that people called home.

Of course, I couldn't even mention to my fellow
Greens that I thought of them as mainstream. Some
of them would have been insulted, some would have
gone off to form a another party, and some would
have argued with me long past my bedtime.

But I was right. If you want to find the
prototypical American who not only values those
things most often associated with America at its
best, but acts on those values, you need search
no further than the Green Party.

There are others to be sure: libertarians, free
thinkers, devolutionists, unpolitical small
farmers, eccentric shopkeepers, independent
religionists and what Bill Kaufman in Look
Homeward America calls "reactionary radicals and
front porch anarchists." On his website you'll
find a tentative list that includes, besides this
writer, Ivan Illich, Wendell Berry, Karl Hess,
Bob Dylan, Zora Neal Hurston, Senator Burton
Wheeler, Jane Jacobs, Ken Kesey, Merle Haggard,
Kenneth Rexroth, Hiram Johnson, William Jennings
Bryan and Albert Jay Nock.

It is as inexplicable as it is flattering to be
in such company unless, that is, you accept a
currently unpopular notion that it is not policy
or ideology that really divides us but our
understanding of, and relationship to, the world,
America, and each other.

While I might not agree with all the company that
Kaufman would have me keep, I accept absolutely
his argument:

"There are two Americas: the televised America,
known and hated by the world, and the rest of us.
The former is a factitious creation whose strange
gods include HBO, accentless TV anchor people,
Dick Cheney, reruns of Friends, and the National
Endowment for Democracy. It is real enough -
cross it and you'll learn more than you want to
know about weapons of mass destruction - but it
has no heart, no soul, no connection to the
thousand and one real Americas that produced Zora
Neale Hurston and Jack Kerouac and Saint Dorothy
Day and the Mighty Casey who has struck out.

"I am of the other America, the unseen America,
the America undreamt of by the foreigners who
hate my country without knowing a single thing
about it. Ours is a land of volunteer fire
departments, of baseball played without payment
or sanction, of uncut maples and unpasteurized
cider.

"So no, I do not feel 'ashamed' of my country,
for America. . . is not George W. Bush or Hillary
Clinton but my friends, my neighbors, and yes,
the Grand Canyon, too. Even better, it is the
little canyon and the rude stream and Tom
Sawyer's cave and all those places whose names we
know, whose myths we have memorized, and whose
existence remains quite beyond the compass of
ABC-TV."

The Green Party is part of that unseen America.
The problem is that I seem to be among the few
who know it. The media treats the Green Party as
though it were a bag of nuts, liberals regard it
as a strain of avian flu, and the Greens, to a
sad degree, accept the illusion that they are an
oddity rather than prototypical of their country.

The danger in this is that the Green Party will
end up in hippie heaven, an ideological Balinas
full of old VW buses, people who think the right
thing and act the right way, but huddled together
in a refuge when they should be leading a
revolution. A revolution by mainstream Americans
to recover their land from the thieves, dunces,
megalomaniacs and pathological psychopaths who
are destroying it in one of the greatest acts of
political dishonesty, economic banditry and
cultural apostasy in human history.

This is not rhetoric. On issues including the
Iraq war, the environment, health care, campaign
financing, genetically modified foods, and
marijuana use, the Greens represent mainstream
America better than either of the two major
parties.

And there are other potential issues and
constituencies about which the Greens have paid
far too little attention but with nothing between
them except the will and an appreciation that
it's not abstract platforms of good intentions
that matter but the ability to witness one's
beliefs at ground zero every day and in every
way. For example, on immigration, a recent poll
finds Latinos blaming the Republicans and
distrusting the Democrats - providing an opening
for the Greens they have yet to discover. Or
consider the women's movement, so absorbed with
glass ceilings that it ignores the hard floors
daily faced by their sisters at Wal-Mart and
elsewhere. Or consider the lack of any movement
for young men with less than a college education,
whom conservatives send to fight their wars or
imprison for smoking pot, and whom liberals
assign to a rhetorical hegemony of dominant males
these men will never meet, let alone emulate. Or
consider issues like eminent domain reform and
small business that are just sitting there hungry
for a political voice but shunned by both major
parties. The issues are out there. And so are the
voters. If people went to the polls as they did
in 1960 there would be about 25 million more of
them.

Finally, there are two great issues the Democrats
have deserted: civil liberties and economic
decency. Once hallmarks of liberalism, these
causes have been forgotten by the liberals and
trashed by the Clintonistas. One hardly hears a
Democrat mention health care, pensions, or
minimum wages any more because too many of the
party's elite have drifted into a social class
buffered against such concerns and the party's
campaign contributors won't let them near such
issues anyway.

A Green Party that not only opposed the
misadventures of U.S. imperialism and continued
its fight for sane ecological policies and
electoral reform, but also became the loudest
voice for single payer healthcare, populist
economic reforms; a sane drug policy; tight
control on eminent domain; devolution of power,
better treatment of small business; and fair
immigration laws would pick up a large new
constituency as it became the movement of the
silenced majority, which is to say just about
everyone in America currently being screwed by
the Democrats and Republicans.

It wouldn't be easy because the Greens are an
anarchistic amalgam of pragmatists and purists;
utopians; spiritualists; ideological
fundamentalists and strategic agnostics; people
with a natural feel for politics and people who
would rather be practicing a religion; the
sanctimonious and the excessively humble; those
absorbed in a pointlessly fractious debate over
presidential politics and those deeply involved
at the local level; the gentle and the obnoxious.
In other words, a typical American assemblage.

But there's a big America out there without any
party that gives a damn about its concerns. Many
of these Americans have given up voting. The
Greens could be the party of this America if they
learned to lead on issues that currently don't
interest them; to respond to things actually
happening around them as well in their heads and
debates; to follow fellow spirits as well as to
lead them; to take pleasure in, and make friends
with, those who can only travel part their way;
and to explain and celebrate their close
connection to the best of mainstream traditions
and values of an America the other parties have
betrayed. The politics are all out there. All
that is missing is a party.






       
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  Paid for by Thornton For Governor ,Donna Byrne-McKee, treasurer-   www.VoteThornton.com
  email: info at votethornton.com
   
  Tim McKee NEW cell (860) 778-1304 or (860) 643-2282 Cliff Thornton for Governor- Campaign Manager-
  National Committee member of the Green Party- Connecticut



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