Re: RAT "Politics antithetical to BCT" Readers please delete!

[Chris Jeffries <cjeffries@seanet.com>]

> << buying the fear manipulator's line that a vote
> for Nader is a vote for Bush, >>
> 
> Which, regardless of other mental ping-pong, is what it is exactly in the
> existent process - like it or not.
> 
Which, regardless of other mental ping-pong, is what was said exactly about
Jesse Ventura, who went ahead and won, largely due to widespread disgust
with the "existent process."  Like it or not.

In the 1850s a certain third party started winning a seat here and there,
but still, no one was prepared when dark horse Abe Lincoln took the White
House by a narrow margin.  People voted for him in spite of being told they
were throwing away their vote.  I'm not making this up.  Go ask his party --
the Republicans.

Whigs and Federalists ran America for years.  In time (and it took time)
they got voted off the map.  By people like you and me -- well, like me,
anyway, since I'm a white male whose grandfathers could vote so back then
I'd have been one of the lucky ones who actually voted... ring any bells?
Must we be reminded that it was third parties, whose names we mostly can't
remember, who pushed and pulled on the mainstream until, for instance, more
of us got suffrage?  And that pushing and pulling, y'know, was VOTES and the
threat of losing VOTES, nothing more.  Only nowadays they don't worry about
that since they see how shit-scared we all are of throwing our votes
away....

Sigh.  Lots of things were once thought impossible.  Time was, a vote for
candidates who were pro-Abolition or pro-women's-suffrage was a vote thrown
away.  Clearly someone was voting for those crackpots anyway.  Those ripples
turned to waves.  It has to start somewhere, and it always starts small.
Huge monolithic status quos slowly get turned around by people who are not
ashamed or impatient with small beginnings and slow returns.

Susan B. Anthony was told her whole life, every day, by nearly everyone she
knew, that her fight was hopeless, that she was pissing her life away, that
nothing would change.  She died wondering if that flood of voices was right.
SHE LIVED AND DIED A FAILURE.  And then years later, surprise, she wasn't
one after all....  Are we going to stand with all those people who were so
comfortable and so sure of themselves, or with Susan and her friends, who
were laughing stocks and who lost every campaign and who were right.  I say
vote with courage.