Voting Ain't Enough

(AP Photo / Matt Rourke)

As the world crumbles a lot of people might think, “What’s the point of doing anything, we’re already fucked?” That sentiment is depressing, but it’s not crazy. I think the answer lies in the idea that if you think things are fucked, you have to try to unfuck them. They won’t fix themselves. The powers that be won’t fix them without a serious struggle to force their hand. We can't count on just elections and voting. Congress newcomers like AOC are moving the conversation (mostly women of color, hmmm?) towards more substantive action but pinning your hopes solely to congress is a fool’s errand. There are too many old entrenched shitheads in congress that only care about clinging to the status quo to put much faith in them turning course. They ain’t gonna change shit without crushingly massive amounts of pressure from who they're supposed to 'represent'.

I want to live in a world where everything isn’t fucked. And that means we have to break free from capitalism and the police state's death grip. Almost every problem in our society traces back to putting the interests of wealth and power over the interests of the people. The groups that accumulate these vast swaths of wealth and power do not care, nor will they ever care, about anything besides furthering their own interests. They won’t willingly change the structures that work so well for themselves. We have to wrest that control from them. One course of action is to build a movement of people that is impossible to ignore (the other is to burn it all down). That means we have to start small and grow. We have to bring in diverse working class communities. We have to collaborate and develop trust with like-minded organizations. We can’t get bogged down in minutiae. We have to continually push forward and outward so the work and movement can spread to the overlooked, the marginalized, the vulnerable. That is where real power lies hidden. Capitalism divides people. Pits them against each other. Plays the blame game. And they use the police and mainstream media to quell any meaningful dissent. We need to get past that. We need to direct this collective fury in the right direction. It’s the people at the top that need to be brought low. So we need to take away their privilege. Stop letting obscenely wealthy corporations skate on taxes and call their shots on regulatory oversight. Demand the defunding of police departments in conjunction with public oversight on how they conduct themselves.

The CEO’s. The Landlords. The Politicians. The Merchants of Wealth and Power. They are the problem. The sooner we can bring that understanding to the people the sooner we can unfuck what capitalism has created. We don’t have a choice. Voting and electing moderate Democrats only reshuffles the deck chairs on the Titanic. It’s incrementalism that can and will be reversed. They aren’t interested in changing a system that they benefit from. Do you think Schumer and Pelosi and Dem Party leadership are going to do a damn thing to help change underlying causes of inequality and injustice in this country? No, they won’t. They can’t even guarantee people the right to vote, let alone enact change. We need fundamental change, not a bipartisan marketplace of ideas. We need Medicare For All, not 'access' to 'affordable' healthcare. You have to fight fire with fire, not with some half hearted optimism about checks and balances and blue waves. That shit is all window dressing that obfuscates what really needs to be done to unfuck our society. Putting power in the hands of the people, and getting rid of moneyed politicians controlled by wealthy jackals and enforced by their badged goons.