A Green Rhizome
As this appears in e-print the GPoWS will have approved amendment #1, survived a week tacked to a bulletin board, and be ready for diversion. But all you’re going to get here is a root canal job.
With #1 passed, the state party will be an aggregation of locals, GPoWS becoming GPsoWS. How the locals will operate will be new, but their goal will still be to put good people into office. The wisdom of that should be questioned, because it so far has gotten us nowhere: us, the Party, nowhere. Findings are listed, and then a different goal offered.
Electioneering at the national level will continue to fail because the two-party system was designed by professionals to keep a third party out.
Electioneering by labor movements in the past has eviscerated them, eg the Workingmen’s Party faded after it diverted energy into electioneering. We are smarter?
Corporate control of national offices has severely limited options for good works.
It’s the money, right? The higher the level of office the lower the ethics; and here we are, all ethics and no money trying to put our people into high office. I’m reminded of that cartoon of vultures in a dead tree where one says, patience my ass, I’m gonna kill something. Menwomen, let’s get some clout, and it better come from the ten values ‘cause it’s never gonna come from the five percent. Which presents a small problem in that precious little in the ten values tells the vulture where to kill what. The closest is Decentralization, which, stretched a lot, might mean do it to your neighbor. Regardless, let’s march off at ninety degrees from our present course. Don’t worry, Gary and Howard, you’ll get more votes this way.
Granted that explicit instructions are not included in the ten values, what we should do is set to work creating nuclei of wholeness. Enough preaching, enough “elect himerher because heershe will do good”. Time now for us, the erstwhile Green voters, to do good works, and that means make our communities whole. Most are not whole, instead have lost the roots they used to have in the common turf of a walking, face to face, old fashioned town. Rootless, we have been conned into complicity with the heinous acts of a lawless administration. To show how this might develop, here’s an example.
The town is a bedroom community in rural XYZ county and is unincorporated. The rich are gaining ascendance, gentrifying the shops and putting up huge stick-built homes. It has defeated hospital and public utility district proposals then proposed no alternates. It has no solar retrofit program and its groundwater management is meddled with in Olympia. It has a low level vandalism problem. Its real estate taxes subsidize an already rich county. It has no town hall meetings, and its County-chartered Council restricts itself to a list of cold-button issues. It votes overwhelmingly Democratic and has not participated as a community in State or National issues. Now apply the ten values. The town would:
Hold regular Town Hall meetings of which the first would address priorities of survival. What will it do if its banks fail, when food prices become a widespread hardship, and when its police turn on it? Should it hold referendums in order to make its collective will known up the line? Does it have a collective will? How important is it to change its commuting?
Have its Council promote collective action on affordable solar hot water retrofit,
on increased agrarian production (used to have large berry and chicken farms), on remote water use readouts, on electric trams, on a teen center.
Eliminate political party presence. Substitute town hall meetings for those yard signs.
You get the drift. By dropping the trappings of Party, local Greens could blend into their community distinguished only by their common values, and known by their deeds. Membership in the Green Party would be earned by working to put its values into effect.
Some such radical change in the party is needed fast. Our Party has become a pariah. I hope that many of you are as tired as I am of getting grass stains on my knees.
A rhizome is a root growing sideways looking for sunlight.
PS, a somewhat similar idea will be found at
http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_14979.cfm