Unpopular Dissent

If Barack Obama does not win the presidential election tomorrow, I won’t be surprised. Don’t expect to see me wallowing in misery or to hear me crying out resounding lamentations in the halls of academia.

No, if Barack Obama is defeated in the US Presidential Election, I will sit in silence, partially stunned, and partially due to complete and utter indifference.

Why? I’d say it myself, but someone I respect has already said it much better:

From Jason Netherton’s Demockery.org:

October 30, 2008. 10:00 PM:

Election Time/State of the Dis-Union/Forging Ahead
Ahh…less than a week…winding down now on the elections, and as mentioned, of course a Democrat is always favorable to another Republican and the Bush-era bullshit, but we all know the liberal “left” (embodied in the mainstream by Obama/Democrats) here is a joke, and while they mean well, they are ultimately just bourgeois puppets that talk a lot about helping the poor, but still end up chained to the systemic gridlock that defines DC politics. Here, they reinforce the status quo and serve the wealthy just the same -and that is what so-called “democratic” politics apparently represents- more of the same class divisions…so in essence, it might be a “friendlier” Clinton-type situation, especially for the world, but nothing will change about our class system, where 37.3 million people wallow in poverty in America, mostly out of the view of the public eye, in the most prosperous country in the world.

But, hey, I am not cynical! And when looking at reality, I just think of the possibilities, and what we can do (and have accomplished) in the last 200 years in this country (it’s just the timeline is so damn long). Why hopeful about possibilities? I guess I met some great people who were very inspiring, and I guess its just about fueling and feeding our curiosity and imagination. These are two attributes that fundamentally make us human and they need to be actively fed from a young age, getting out into the world and “living,” as we are supposed to (not just in the school-work-death way), is all a sort of ‘natural’ education, that can not be taught in schools, and once you tap into that, you question things, you read and get the critical scalpel slicing, and try and have fun in the process.

On this page (Demockery, that is), over the last 9 years, I have disgorged the ills of global society, culture, and economy, called attention to injustices, inhumanities and suffering, and attacked the institutionalized servility that is our global economy, detesting the reduction of human social relations to things, objects and money. I have damned the fact that we have erased our most basic human connections, and commodified them under unrestricted capitalism, thus turning so many of our most fundamental human relations into cold, economic relations, resulting in a culture of the absurd- where for example we don’t give health care to dying people unless they can “pay” for it! This is simply insane, and the fact that its “normal” here is what makes it even more surreal.

But the goal is to surpass this system (we are not at the end of history, or at the end of anything), and despite how impossible it seems- to just ‘know’ we can do better. Beauty, real beauty is everywhere around us, it’s a connection with nature and those we care about, and anytime you look up at the stars, the sunset, the birds, the smile of a child – there is real and substantial harmony with and among men and nature (when we are not ravaging it), and it’s the reason we go through each day, and even when you have the worst day and life is seemingly horrible, there is always another day to balance it out (sometimes you have to fight for it)…its natural to be miserable as it is natural to be joyful, they come in strange cycles, but its the balance of the spiritual order. So therefore, its very disconcerting and frustrating when you see the dark side of man come out and take over so often in the media, where the human spirit and its potential are suffocated with such cold calculation. So, in response to the elite legions of the negative approach, lets keep standing in defiance of “their story,” and lets champion our own story of what is good in man- and likewise, and with equal measure, continue to destroy the the forces that enslave man (and laugh along the way!).

If my complete indifference to the bipartisan, status-quo reinforcing political system in the United States is indicative of anything, it’s that the system is fundamentally non-representative and flawed.

And so, with apologies to Jason Netherton, who doesn’t know who I am, I implore you to reevaluate whether a two party state can really be considered democratic, when both of those parties have obvious biases in favour of preserving the status-quo.