[Sosfbay-discuss] California Peace and Freedom Party GoesNational

[Caroline Yacoub]

 I liked your sentence "Nobody has any exclusive monopoly over good intentions, positive ideas, and sound political instincts." I believe that, too. I think that what is wrong with American politics today is that too many "major party" politicians have sold themselves to the highest bidders and are not operating on sound political instincts. I believe the greatest thing the Green Party, and hopefully, the PFP and other "minor parties" could do for this country would be to band together and work for public funding of elections.
Caroline

--- On Sun, 6/7/09, Mark A. Lause <MLause at cinci.rr.com> wrote:


From: Mark A. Lause <MLause at cinci.rr.com>
Subject: Re: [Sosfbay-discuss] California Peace and Freedom Party GoesNational
To: "Edward" <the_alliance47 at yahoo.com>, sosfbay-discuss at cagreens.org
Date: Sunday, June 7, 2009, 1:55 AM





My own predisposition is to avoid building another tiny inward-looking clubhouse in a movement that already has dozens of them.  
I don't understand what the PFP sees as so special about itself.  We should suspect top-down announcement that a new group is starting with the right approach.  After all, it had the right approach, people not involved with them would naturally have replicated that approach at some point in the 40-year history of the PFP.  Nor do I understand Cynthia McKinney's launching of Dignity (a subject one would think would stir more discussion among Greens).   Members of existing or aspiring groups justify their own separate existence with a kind of specialized language to distinguish their own understanding from those not in the group.  
 
What is needed is a current defined by activity rather than dogmatic talk...one that doesn't have to remind themselves continually about their values because they are evident in how they functions.   The best thing about the Green Party was that it did not pretend to have a full-blown dogma that made it regard the rest of the movement as something like business rivals and competitors.  What we did most distinctively and well was to point towards the ballot box as a means for getting the change we all wanted.  
 
What I'm reading here doesn't reflect that older sensibility.  People might have a clear idea in their own heads about what they mean when they use terms like "New Left," "socialism," "radical," "working within the democratic process," or "the Millennials," but it usually isn't at all the same thing that others have.  The implicit understanding smacks of that same kind of specialized language that reassures ourselves rather than communicate clearly to others.
 
Nobody has any exclusive monopoly over good intentions, positive ideas, and sound political instincts.  None are keepers of the True Flame...as opposed to the deluded Others shivering in the darkness around us.  Giving in to this tendency to build our own little treehouses keeps the Cheneys and their ilk sleeping easily at night.
 
ML

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