this takes like 5 minutes and unlike most petitions and stuff circulating around your www inbox, this might actually work.

• read.
• act.

You can now send emails, faxes and print to congresspeople and world leaders, automatically from amnesty international USA’s online action center. You need to enter your address, and it will automatically determine who your senators and representatives are and send it to them.

I sent a bunch in the last few days supporting Amnesty’s recent report on Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, against making John Bolton UN ambassador, and some others to representatives and senators and I actually got replies back. At least one of the replies was not completely automatically generated, as it responded to the topic of the email (John Bolton). It may have been replied to by some intern or something, but generally when congresspeople reply with a specific topic it means they are keeping track of how many letter they got on these issues in their constituencies.

I voted today. While most of the country is still counting the ballots, in the state I voted in, Illinois, Kerry has already won by a fairly large majority (61.7% and) and Barack Obama won the Senate seat by a landslide (75%). Same thing last time I voted for president in NJ. No matter how it turns out, I’m still gonna feel jaded. The electoral college, that wonderful system designed specifically as a failsafe, keeping one degree of separation between the ignorant masses and the important decisions they are supposed to make as citizens in a democracy, has once again done the opposite. I will now proceed with a short diatribe of the electoral college.

Whether or not we want to admit it, the voting power of millions, the majority of the country, is rendered impotent by the predilection of our “elected leaders” to stick with our founding fathers’ foresight and count the vote using a weighted equation. As I’m sure you know, each state gets one for each member of Congress - that’s two for each Senator, a number which is negligible and might as well just be subtracted off because it’s the same for every state, plus the the number of Representatives. There are a fixed number of seats in the House, and the number of Reps is determined by a ratio of population to the number of seats, plus or minus one (determined by subtracting the integer part of the quotient from the geometric mean of this integer and the next consecutive integer. x - y = bullshit. pfffft).

The weighting is partially designed to give a voice to states whose concerns would otherwise go unheard, i.e. farmers and country-folk with supposedly very different concerns and needs would get drowned out by city-folk. This assumes that farmers and country-folk all have the same “concerns”, and likewise for city-folk. It kind of looks that way if you look at these wonderful (asinine) red and blue maps you see everywhere, but if you actually look at the percentages of the popular vote in these states, even W could see that it’s clearly not that way. People in farm states are split. They don’t have the same concerns. In the states Bush has already won, you see 38% in Texas for Kerry, and over 40% in most of the South. And Flordia. Florida, a state with 27 electoral votes, the percentages are almost equal.

This idea that the South or the hearland is full of gun-toting, bible-bearing yokels is a farce! Bill J. Clinton, the living embodiment of the Democratic party, is from Arkansas for chuck’s sake. It’s just not true. It’s an illusion, a distortion, and it’s screwing up the country. The fact is that millions of people all over the supposed Republican strongholds do not feel that their concerns are represented by the Republican party. To be fair, the exact same hold true for the Democratic party — those big percentages are there in all the “metro” states also. That retro vs metro rhetoric that I thought was interesting the other day — I’ve given it some though and the numbers show it’s bullshit. Religious people in Alabama like Kerry and middle-class soccer moms in Jersey like Bush, this whole thing is way messier than the red and blue map shows, and I believe it’s close to the heart of why this country feels so divided.

Why am I getting so incensed? If you read my blog, I know that you know that the system is screwed. But in case you’ve just consumed the sound bite that the electoral college is screwed, hopefully, now I’ve utterly convinced you that it’s FUBAR. Until it’s fixed, we don’t live in a democracy (by even the wildest strech of the imagination). If the terrorists we’re waging war against hate democracy, the joke is clearly on them. The two party system and the lack of differences amongst the candidates aside, most of this country is, to use the popular term, “disenfranchised”; that is, “dispossessed of the rights of a citizen, or of a particular privilege, as of voting, holding office, etc.” It’s a mathematical fact.

So as usual, when faced with seemingly insurmountable odds against the forces of Truth and Justice, we must ask: what are we to do? Not voting clearly isn’t an option, you gotta do it “just in case.” If there’s any issue that matters in this country right now, it’s this one. I need to write some letters.

There’s a really great op ed on the nytimes right now call ‘A Promise Unkept‘ - (click the first link there to the oped, I can’t get the javascript to make it pop-up in this blog thing). The title refers to the international community’s promise of never again, with reference to genocide, despite the fact that genocide’s happened in the plain sight of the community many times since the holocaust.

Anyway, I’m finding that most of the Darfur coverage is watered-down rhetoric. Words like ‘genocide’, ’suffering’ and ‘Africa’ cause most people to immediately turn the blinders on, because it can be depressing and it’s hard for most people to make the connection between them and this invisible problem. Part of this, is because these sound bites and buzz words are all we get in the news, when what people need to hear are the real stories from the people going through it. This piece is short, pretty balanced and well put together and it will ground all of the rhetoric you’re seeing on TV, news, etc. It reminded me of a documentary I saw about the Rwandan genocide at an Amnesty Int’l regional convention not long after it had taken place. While it was difficult to watch, we all need to hear these stories.

If anything exposing yourself to this will put it in your head, make you think about it, and make you talk about it. I like to think that I’ve learned a few little things through 10 years of activism. One of them is that it’s very very easy to feel like there are all these huge problems that you can’t do anything about, that the real power is wielded by corporations and governments and such, and that the people are powerless. But the only reason Bush and Kerry had to address the issue in the debates is precisely because people are talking about it. The “special interests”, i.e. corporations who fund their campaigns, don’t give a shit about genocide (not because they’re run buy demons, but because the people running them feel like they can’t, it won’t make the corporation money). They addressed the problems because people are voting for them, and they’re polling people have told them that some people are concerned about it — that is, people are talking about it and maybe even writing letters.Which brings me to another thing I learned about activism.

Talking about something to people who normally wouldn’t think about that thing is activism, possibly the most powerful activism you can engage in. Debating with like-minded friends is useful to get your beliefs and assumptions clear. Talking non-likeminded people is sometimes more useful. If they are people who’ve thought about it already a lot, it’s probably not worth the time — you usually can’t change people’s base assumptions. There are a lot of friends of mine who I just don’t bother debating with anymore about a lot of things, because I know their assumptions and I know that I don’t have much chance of changing them. Challenging peoples values is like challenging them - their ’self’ - the collection of values that allows them to distinguish themselves from other people — (I know this is someone else’s philosophy, but I can’t think of who… George Herber Mead maybe?) — it’s actually threatening to them at a very deep level (cf. ‘face’ threats, Brown & Yule, etc…).

Luckily, most people, conservative, democrat, liberal, libertarian, crazy, dumb, ugly, smart, whatever, believe that human rights are a good thing and killing innocent people is generally a bad thing. And luckily, this is all you really need to get stuff done in cases like Darfur. ‘So watch this feature, let it sit in your brain, and then tell some people about it. It’s not okay that the government of Sudan decided that the best option to deal with some political problems was the cheapest option - where the cheapest option was to hire psychotic mercenaries to butcher thousands of little kids, women and men, and to cause thousands of others to be so scared that they left their homes and died of thirst, hunger or heat. It wouldn’t be okay if it happened in the US, and it’s not okay that it’s happening in Africa.

(If people are worried about terrorism, it’s often people living in conditions like this that lose their minds and go become terrorists. But that’s a side point.)

Get involved in the “Darfur Day of Action”, Sept. 21!
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