2020: The Beginning of the End
No matter which corporate candidate wins the U.S. presidential contest or how many progressives make it to Congress, the people and our planet have lost.
Thousands of committed activists in the Green Party risked their lives this summer during a global pandemic to protect our democracy. Pennsylvania Greens across the commonwealth gathered the required petition signatures to ensure Howie Hawkins and Angela Walker would appear on the ballot as presidential and vice presidential candidates. The Democrats’ recent successful attempt to strip the citizenry of a progressive option is a reflection of our diminished democracy and the fascism that has violated our civics.
In previous articles and videos, I’ve discussed the multiple crises facing our society and societies around the world. I’ve made the argument that progressives of all shapes and sizes must come together in solidarity as a democratic firewall to block the further destruction of our people and planet. If we truly want to build a more just and equitable world, it is the job of leftists to hold the line on a slate of civil, economic, health, and environmental issues.
However, as a global pandemic threatens the housing and health security of countless citizens, the working classes are vacuumed into poverty. A significant percentage of U.S. citizens are becoming beggars and easy targets for extermination by the growing carceral state. Without a legitimate electoral option on the ballot to achieve a 5% minority status that gives progressives a moral voice in the national debate, the citizens are gagged and bound as captives. We are forced to silently bear witness at the greed that’s ushering in the coming human and ecological collapse.
As wildfires, droughts, floods, and hurricanes devastate the lands and materials that define our last grasps on middle-class power, the people are being funneled into a new form of serfdom. As fracking and other fossil fuels industries push our planet’s temperature past the 1.5C and 2C set by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2018, all we have left are our bodies that must be [figuratively and literally] thrown upon the machines of death that destroy life on Earth.
In this election season, U.S. citizens have already lost three times in the span of a few months. We lost when the DNC rigged the Iowa caucuses against Bernie Sanders, arguably the people’s champion. We lost when bribes and promises were offered to the other corporate-sponsored Democratic candidates to coalesce around the rapist author of the carceral state, Joe Biden. We lost the third time last week when PA Democrats (pro-fracking mafia) convinced a judge to throw Hawkins/Walker off the ballot and again bludgeoned the most basic pursuit of democracy.
No matter the electoral outcomes in November, the solutions people need the most to sustain life will not come to pass. The forever wars will continue. The cops will not face accountability for their continuously escalating murder sprees. Fracking and oil drilling will increase and race us to the precipice of ecological collapse. Wall Street will not be brought under democratic control. Our health will spiral as life expectancy continues to decline. Prisons will continue to be filled with slave labor for profitable ancillary companies.
In the end, our people will suffer more than ever before in our nation’s short history, and there is simply no national electoral option to address these matters. In a just cultural and political landscape, the people would be able to choose an eco-socialist direction to solve most inequities. However, the growing power of fascism in the hands of financiers and their political courtiers in both mainstream parties use propaganda to diminish our mutual aid. In the Greater Pittsburgh region alone, neighbors have turned on each other for a sliver of the gluttonous splendors of order that regularly destroys our liberties.
Powerless, voiceless, and under constant threat of the armed state, we must continue to fight on with a deep love for one another. While corporate liberals and conservatives hide behind the walls of gated communities, guarded office complexes, and overpriced restaurants — it is we who must press on for a glimmer of justice. Such a pursuit may seem pointless to many, but it is the only moral choice. Arms locked and feet on pavement, we must fight fascism until our lungs no longer fill and our hearts forever stop.
In the struggle for life we are free.
Solidarity forever!
