mks wrote:Doing nothing changes nothing.
Strongly disagree. I believe doing nothing is the last rational step before taking up arms.
In this day and age, how can people affect political change? Anytime a party is formed that represents the will of the people, it is co-opted. See the tea party in the US. If you can't be co-opted, you'll be infiltrated and destroyed from within, see Occupy.
So protesting is out, even new age leaderless protesting is in effective, it only serves as practice exercises for our paramilitary police forces to practice troop movement, the use of high tech pain devices, etc.
The protests are censored by the media, either outright or through extreme misrepresentation.
Just cross protesting off the list of ways to affect change.
So what then?
Write in campaigns? Yeah, no.
Get out the vote? Yeah, no - vote between 2 or 3 candidates that have been chosen to represent you. Yeah, that isn't even really democracy in of itself. All of the 2 or 3 candidates differ little on any of the core issues - which seems to be how to increase taxes on the middle class, how to privatize national/governmental entities, how to withdraw healthcare except for the wealthy, how to defund education, how to reduce regulation on corporations... I'm just going to stop there, its just a primer. So why would you vote for either of those two candidates? The only vote that you can cast is no confidence/none of the above. Here the only way to cast that vote is to not vote.
So what is left? Civil disobedience? Chaining ourselves to the freeways? So we can be arrested and processed into privatized jails that the government is contractually bound to keep almost at max occupancy? Whereupon we can be forced to work by armed men for a dollar a day, producing goods and services for the corporations? I'm going to take a pass on this approach.
Then what? I'm fairly out of thoughts, except for the do nothing approach.
If everybody in this (and your) country who thinks the political system is completely broken, and that we have turned way to far from the will of the people, just stayed home, didn't go to work, didn't produce goods and services for the corporate owners... I believe changes would ensue. Maybe not to our benefit, but shit would have to change.
Our economy takes a hit when there is a big sporting event and everybody stops buying shit to watch the game, imagine a month of nonessential people, all across the country, not showing up for work, producing nothing. It would disable these illegitimate governments. Perhaps, outside of the scripted media prescribed corporate funded election cycle, we could sweep in actual representatives, ie a class of people who work for the benefit of all of our countrymen.
Or the military would be called up, and anybody not going to work would then be given the opportunity to work for a dollar a day.
