One Pissed Off Leftist: Protest Further!

Article by OPOL
One Pissed Off Leftist




There is some march or other practically every weekend in DC and it has become old hat for the park police. Limiting access, choking off rebellion, smiting trouble-makers and controlling press coverage is now routine. Aided by a complicit corporate-owned media elite, ignoring and minimizing our protests has become a simple matter. While we once struck fear in their hearts, we barely raise an eyebrow now.

So is the answer to abandon street democracy? It might be ... if there were other realistic avenues. But there aren't many IMO. The electoral system is so corrupt that even those who still believe in it will admit that we have to win in overwhelming numbers to be assured our victory will be acknowledged. And even when we 'win' we don't get what we were promised. That was the entire rationale for the One Nation 'march'.

Republican-owned corporations electronically count our votes and our traitorous SCOTUS has opened the floodgates to unlimited corporate money flowing into the system. So our electoral democracy is every bit as compromised as our street democracy.

So what then is the answer?

I still support One Nation Working Together because we need a peoples coalition, and this seems a promising beginning. I am hopeful but not blindly optimistic. It's a fine thing to form a mighty peoples coalition, but I think we are going to have to go well beyond that. I think we are going to have to act up to get anywhere. Acting up is what the civil rights marchers did. Acting up is what the Vietnam protesters did. I see no way around it - this is what we are going to have to do too.

Teresa Heinz Kerry once told me that if we really wanted to get the government's attention, we should mass on the five bridges leading into DC and shut the city down. I think this is the sort of thing we're going to have to do if we want to have any real impact. Of course they'll freak if we do it and people will be beaten and arrested no doubt. But if we can't face that threat, take that risk and make that sacrifice then we are going to continue to lose. The deck is too thoroughly stacked against us. The only meaningful options left to us, it seems to me, are direct action and wide scale civil disobedience. Without it I fear that we are toast.

OPOL is dead on! We need not be violent, but we do need to be disobedient to get our message through the corporate blockade.

-Dead Press- Journalism that's not sold-out!