By Jean Rhoe
The night before making her commencement speech at the New School graduation ceremony, senior Jean Rhoe had to confront the fact that Senator John McCain was to share the stage with her and use it as a platform to push an immoral agenda of more war and yes more torture. The next day she grabbed headlines for speaking out and gained the support of millions of people overnight. Rhoe has continued to speak out against Bush’s disastrous course and has recently contributed an article here for worldcantwait.org.
This weekend I called nearly 100 progressive voters in a congressional swing district in Pennsylvania to urge them to vote. It was difficult and at times demoralizing-lots of answering machines, out-of-service numbers, and hasty hang-ups-but I had the amazing opportunity to speak with a number of voters who feel the way I do. I conversed with many of them about their concerns and their hopes for the future of this country. Some of them were worried about the environment, others about their health care, quite a few wanted us out of Iraq. But one voter summed up all of our sentiments succinctly, I think. “What is the single most important issue for you in voting for Congress this year?” I asked him, following the script given to me by the political action group on whose behalf I was calling. He thought for a moment. After awhile he said, “I just want Bush out of office ASAP.”
Now, it’s true that getting Bush out of power is not going to change everything bad about the world today. Certainly the United States has taken a sharp turn to the right over the past six years, entrenching Christian fundamentalism, zenophobia, cowboy foreign policy, and a host of other destructive tendencies deeply into the rhetoric that we encounter, unquestioningly, every day. The Bush administration has acted swiftly and effectively to instill fears in us and to encourage black-and-white logic as a means to deal with them. Terrorism, genocide, and civil wars, not to mention hunger, AIDS, and lack of sustainable employment threaten the lives of people everywhere every day. It will take a lot more than the removal of one man to counteract the effects of six years of damage. But getting Bush out of office now would be a start.
I don’t want to make a long list here of all the reasons why we, as people living in the US under the Bush administration, have a special responsibility to see to the end of his leadership and his policies. But let us be reminded that we have all witnessed the devastation that Bush’s term-and-a-half in office has brought us. We have seen how the administration’s policies have taken away social services and cut taxes for the wealthy. We”ve seen our troops and Iraqi civilians die by the tens of thousands for a lie. We”ve seen families rejected by their own government after Hurricane Katrina. We”ve seen Bush condemn Iran’s uranium enrichment program and allude to military action to stop it out of one side of his mouth, while negotiating a nuclear weapons deal with India out of the other. And if you don’t see a problem with this, then I’m not talking to you. I think that the battle against these dark days will be joined by those people, like the man I spoke with this weekend, who already sense all the reasons why we as a globe are headed for ruin with the conservatives at the helm here in the US, people who find themselves feeling angry or sad or powerless because of the changes they see around them, but don’t know what they can do to stop them, and don’t know that there are others out there who share their frustrations.
I believe that with the right information and a clear plan of resistance to this path of destruction, the people of this world, if not the people of the United States, will not allow the Bush agenda to go any further. I have great optimism about the future because there are people who believe in true freedom, in true justice, and who won’t be sucked in by the conservatives” doublespeak. These people, if they all choose to work together, and to see themselves not as just independent, disaffected individuals, but as members of a group with power to exact real change, will have so much influence over the course of history. This may sound overly romanticized and even naïve, but the past has shown that the public is strong enough to topple dictators, end wars, and to regain self-determination.
But resistance to a powerful government will take a lot of work and dedication. We cannot sit still. I feel the seeds of change germinating all around me, but they may not lose momentum or else we are all lost. What can you do to keep that momentum going? How can you educate yourself and others? What actions can you take? What kinds of creative responses can you find? There are so many things we can do to prevent our nation’s hijacking from going any further. We can talk to our neighbors, friends, and family about how we feel and what we can do about it. We can encourage debate in our schools and workplaces. We can lead by our own peaceful and diplomatic examples within our own small social circles. We can choose to be informed. We can choose to be a part of projects in our own communities, to engage ourselves in the social fabric of our neighborhoods. We can learn from the examples of those abroad who have resisted their own unjust governments. We can choose to be strong and joyful in the face of horror. And we can act collectively through events like The World Can’t Wait’s October 5th walkout, to tell the world’s citizens that we stand with them.
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