STRIKE

A writer friend has brought up a subject I haven't heard mentioned in a long time. I also haven't read Harper's in a long time, so maybe it's just my being out of touch. And to many people just the words general strike sound very Sixties French New Left. Anyway who has the time? Who hasn't bought into the the neofascist security state, if only by silent submission? Can they send all of us to Guantanamo?

If someone were to suggest, for example, that we begin a general strike on Election Day, November 6, 2007, for the sole purpose of removing this regime from power, how readily and with what well-practiced assurance would you find yourself producing the words “It won’t do any good”? (Garret Keizer, Harper's, October 2007)

Correct me if I'm wrong, history geeks, but my understanding is that groups of people go on strike when they are excluded from other means of influencing policy, either public or private. When workers have no leverage because their interests are not represented, when prisoners are silenced or otherwise treated as objects, or when students without rights are herded like livestock through the diploma mill. Everyone can draw their own conclusions about whether voters fall into that category.

An Election Day general strike would set our remembrance of those people free from the sarcophagi of rhetoric and rationalization. It would be the political equivalent of raising them from the dead. It would be a clear if sadly delayed message of solidarity to those voters in Ohio and Florida who were pretty much told they could drop dead. (Keizer)

Tell me to get over it, but is anyone really convinced that the electoral process was served in Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004? And remind me again how it helps the general public to accept unquestioningly the results of a rigged election. (Chorus offstage: It's a terrible system and far better than European multiparty chaos or any other current system. It isn't perfect, but it's stable, and changing the election process would be too disruptive. Elections and the illusion of majority rule have always been corrupted by money and influence, so how is this any different?)

But we don’t have to do it, you will say, because “we have a process.” Have or had, the verb remains tentative. In regard to verbs, Dick Cheney showed his superlative talent for le mot juste when in the halls of the U.S. Congress he told Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy to go fuck himself. He has since told congressional investigators to do the same thing. There’s your process. (Keizer)

Maybe what I should do it let other's make their case. Here are some other voices on this issue

My frustration shows whenever I speak about this maimed democracy, as it did the other night in an otherwise calm conversation about the ghost of stolen elections past. I think what is most damaging is the complicity of the losing parties - both the political party that loses the election and the voters who vote against their own interests, e.g. tax cuts for the wealthy - in this perversion of "free elections."

Grant me the energy to do what I can do, the serenity to sleep at night when it doesn't work, and the wisdom to wake up and smell the coffee. Or something like that.