Past the Tipping Point
By Steve Greenfield
As a person who dissents from voting within the two-party duopoly, I find the level of vitriol directed at me by “friends” to be breathtaking.
A typical example goes something like this one I saw recently: “You don’t get to claim ‘moral purity’” if Trump wins and “destroys the country.” Another similar version is “You don’t get to complain…blah blah etc.”
Allow me to point out just a few things about this:
You think that my goal in life is to proclaim my “moral purity”? You think that if Donald Trump becomes president, my main preoccupation will be with “complaining”? If DT becomes president, which seems highly unlikely, my focus, like yours, will be on opposing what he does and doing what I can to stop it. That’s not “complaining,” it’s fighting for survival.
Your denunciations of me have an eerie resonance to the thing you hate and fear most, Nazi Germany. Why don’t you just come out and say that if Donald Trump becomes president you’ll turn me over to the Brown Shirts?
How about if i turn the tables and say, “You don’t get to complain if HRC becomes president.” Oh, right. You don’t complain. You turn your back on all the destruction she and her kind are responsible for. You tell fairy tales about what and who she really is.
It doesn’t matter if the evidence right before your eyes tells a different story. That this very day the U.S. bombed 30+ civilians into oblivion. That HRC really, truly doesn’t give a damn about the DAPL.
I don’t doubt that life under a President Trump will be worse — much worse — for the people in this country, and maybe as bad or worse for people abroad. But to use a phrase spoken by a friend here — one of the few to engage my viewpoint with respect, even while disagreeing — the “tipping point” in this country isn’t now, and it isn’t Trump and his sham democracy.
We passed it a while ago.
It’s the same tipping point we are passing with global warming. It’s the tipping point of endless wars and mass surveillance. The question we should be asking ourselves is how do we begin to walk it back? As long as we keep voting in the same managers of our already sham democracy — a fully-owned subsidiary of the corporate-military oligarchy — we’re toast.
By now you’re probably itching to say, “Yes, but…Trump is so much WORSE!” And yes, he probably is.
But here’s the question: Does the fact that he would be worse make it right to vote for either “major” candidate, both of whom do not truly have the interests of black Americans (or all Americans) at heart? My answer is no. You may answer it differently, and I actually respect that position; it’s certainly one you’re entitled to. I would ask that you respect mine, even if you disagree.