This post originally appeared on TomDispatch.  

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As in 2004 and 2008, Rebecca Solnit and her blue-state henchwomen and men will probably invade northern Nevada on election week to swing with one of the most swinging states in the union. She is, however, much more excited about 350.org’s anti-oil-company campaign and the ten thousand faces of Occupy now changing the world. Rebecca Solnit is the author of 15 books, including two due out next year, and a regular contributor to TomDispatch.com . She lives in San Francisco, is from kindergarten to graduate school a product of the once-robust California public educational system, and her book A Paradise Built in Hell is the One City/One Book choice of the San Francisco Public Library this fall. She was named an Utne Visionary in 2010  

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Dear Allies,

Forgive me if I briefly take my eyes off the prize to brush away some flies, but the buzzing has gone on for some time. I have a grand goal, and that is to counter the Republican right with its deep desire to annihilate everything I love and to move toward far more radical goals than the Democrats ever truly support. In the course of pursuing that, however, I’ve come up against the habits of my presumed allies again and again.

O rancid sector of the far left, please stop your grousing! Compared to you, Eeyore sounds like a Teletubby. If I gave you a pony, you would not only be furious that not everyone has a pony, but you would pick on the pony for not being radical enough until it wept big, sad, hot pony tears. Because what we’re talking about here is not an analysis, a strategy, or a cosmology, but an attitude, and one that is poisoning us. Not just me, but you, us, and our possibilities.

Leftists Explain Things to Me 

The poison often emerges around electoral politics. Look, Obama does bad things and I deplore them, though not with a lot of fuss, since they’re hardly a surprise. He sometimes also does not-bad things, and I sometimes mention them in passing, and mentioning them does not negate the reality of the bad things.

The same has been true of other politicians: the recent governor of my state, Arnold Schwarzenegger, was in some respects quite good on climate change. Yet it was impossible for me to say so to a radical without receiving an earful about all the other ways in which Schwarzenegger was terrible, as if the speaker had a news scoop, as if he or she thought I had been living under a rock, as if the presence of bad things made the existence of good ones irrelevant. As a result, it was impossible to discuss what Schwarzenegger was doing on climate change (and unnecessary for my interlocutors to know about it, no less figure out how to use it).

So here I want to lay out an insanely obvious principle that apparently needs clarification. There are bad things and they are bad. There are good things and they are good, even though the bad things are bad. The mentioning of something good does not require the automatic assertion of a bad thing. The good thing might be an interesting avenue to pursue in itself if you want to get anywhere. In that context, the bad thing has all the safety of a dead end. And yes, much in the realm of electoral politics is hideous, but since it also shapes quite a bit of the world, if you want to be political or even informed you have to pay attention to it and maybe even work with it.

Instead, I constantly encounter a response that presumes the job at hand is to figure out what’s wrong, even when dealing with an actual victory, or a constructive development. Recently, I mentioned that California’s current attorney general, Kamala Harris, is anti-death penalty and also acting in good ways to defend people against foreclosure. A snarky Berkeley professor’s immediate response began, “Excuse me, she's anti-death penalty, but let the record show that her office condoned the illegal purchase of lethal injection drugs.”

Apparently, we are not allowed to celebrate the fact that the attorney general for 12% of all Americans is pretty cool in a few key ways or figure out where that could take us. My respondent was attempting to crush my ebullience and wither the discussion, and what purpose exactly does that serve?

This kind of response often has an air of punishing or condemning those who are less radical, and it is exactly the opposite of movement- or alliance-building. Those who don’t simply exit the premises will be that much more cautious about opening their mouths. Except to bitch, the acceptable currency of the realm.

My friend Jaime Cortez, a magnificent person and writer, sent this my way: “At a dinner party recently, I expressed my pleasure that some parts of Obamacare passed, and starting 2014, the picture would be improved. I was regaled with reminders of the horrors of the drone program that Obama supports, and reminded how inadequate Obamacare was. I responded that it is not perfect, but it was an incremental improvement, and I was glad for it. But really, I felt dumb and flat-footed for being grateful.”

The Emperor Is Naked and Uninteresting  

Maybe it’s part of our country’s Puritan heritage, of demonstrating one’s own purity and superiority rather than focusing on fixing problems or being compassionate. Maybe it comes from people who grew up in the mainstream and felt like the kid who pointed out that the emperor had no clothes, that there were naked lies, hypocrisies, and corruptions in the system.

Believe me, a lot of us already know most of the dimples on the imperial derriere by now, and there are other things worth discussing. Often, it’s not the emperor that’s the important news anyway, but the peasants in their revolts and even their triumphs, while this mindset I’m trying to describe remains locked on the emperor, in fury and maybe in self-affirmation.

When you’re a hammer everything looks like a nail, but that’s not a good reason to continue to pound down anything in the vicinity. Consider what needs to be raised up as well. Consider our powers, our victories, our possibilities; ask yourself just what you’re contributing, what kind of story you’re telling, and what kind you want to be telling.

Sitting around with the first occupiers of Zuccotti Park on the first anniversary of Occupy, I listened to one lovely young man talking about the rage his peers, particularly his gender, often have. But, he added, fury is not a tactic or a strategy, though it might sometimes provide the necessary energy for getting things done.

There are so many ways to imagine this mindset -- or maybe its many mindsets with many origins -- in which so many are mired. Perhaps one version devolves from academic debate, which at its best is a constructive, collaborative building of an argument through testing and challenge, but at its worst represents the habitual tearing down of everything, and encourages a subculture of sourness that couldn’t be less productive.

Can you imagine how far the Civil Rights Movement would have gotten, had it been run entirely by complainers for whom nothing was ever good enough? To hell with integrating the Montgomery public transit system when the problem was so much larger!

Picture Gandhi’s salt marchers bitching all the way to the sea, or the Zapatistas, if Subcomandante Marcos was merely the master kvetcher of the Lacandon jungle, or an Aung San Suu Kyi who conducted herself like a caustic American pundit. Why did the Egyptian revolutionary who told me about being tortured repeatedly seem so much less bitter than many of those I run into here who have never suffered such harm?

There is idealism somewhere under this pile of bile, the pernicious idealism that wants the world to be perfect and is disgruntled that it isn’t -- and that it never will be. That’s why the perfect is the enemy of the good. Because, really, people, part of how we are going to thrive in this imperfect moment is through élan, esprit du corps, fierce hope, and generous hearts.

We talk about prefigurative politics, the idea that you can embody your goal. This is often discussed as doing your political organizing through direct-democratic means, but not as being heroic in your spirit or generous in your gestures.

Left-Wing Vote Suppression 

One manifestation of this indiscriminate biliousness is the statement that gets aired every four years: that in presidential elections we are asked to choose the lesser of two evils. Now, this is not an analysis or an insight; it is a cliché, and a very tired one, and it often comes in the same package as the insistence that there is no difference between the candidates. You can reframe it, however, by saying: we get a choice, and not choosing at all can be tantamount in its consequences to choosing the greater of two evils.

But having marriage rights or discrimination protection or access to health care is not the lesser of two evils. If I vote for a Democrat, I do so in the hopes that fewer people will suffer, not in the belief that that option will eliminate suffering or bring us to anywhere near my goals or represent my values perfectly. Yet people are willing to use this “evils” slogan to wrap up all the infinite complexity of the fate of the Earth and everything living on it and throw it away.

I don’t love electoral politics, particularly the national variety. I generally find such elections depressing and look for real hope to the people-powered movements around the globe and subtler social and imaginative shifts toward more compassion and more creativity. Still, every four years we are asked if we want to have our foot trod upon or sawed off at the ankle without anesthetic. The usual reply on the left is that there’s no difference between the two experiences and they prefer that Che Guevara give them a spa pedicure. Now, the Che pedicure is not actually one of the available options, though surely in heaven we will all have our toenails painted camo green by El Jefe.

Before that transpires, there’s something to be said for actually examining the differences. In some cases not choosing the trod foot may bring us all closer to that unbearable amputation. Or maybe it’s that the people in question won’t be the ones to suffer, because their finances, health care, educational access, and so forth are not at stake.

An undocumented immigrant writes me, “The Democratic Party is not our friend: it is the only party we can negotiate with.” Or as a Nevada activist friend put it, “Oh my God, go be sanctimonious in California and don't vote or whatever, but those bitching radicals are basically suppressing the vote in states where it matters.”

Presidential electoral politics is as riddled with corporate money and lobbyists as a long-dead dog with maggots, and deeply mired in the manure of the status quo -- and everyone knows it. (So stop those news bulletins, please.) People who told me back in 2000 that there was no difference between Bush and Gore never got back to me afterward.

I didn’t like Gore, the ex-NAFTA-advocate and pro-WTO shill, but I knew that the differences did matter, especially to the most vulnerable among us, whether to people in Africa dying from the early impacts of climate change or to the shift since 2000 that has turned our nation from a place where more than two-thirds of women had abortion rights in their states to one where less than half of them have those rights. Liberals often concentrate on domestic policy, where education, health care, and economic justice matter more and where Democrats are sometimes decent, even lifesaving, while radicals are often obsessed with foreign policy to the exclusion of all else.

I’m with those who are horrified by Obama’s presidential drone wars, his dismal inaction on global climate treaties, and his administration’s soaring numbers of deportations of undocumented immigrants. That some of you find his actions so repugnant you may not vote for him, or that you find the whole electoral political system poisonous, I also understand.

At a demonstration in support of Bradley Manning this month, I was handed a postcard of a dead child with the caption "Tell this child the Democrats are the lesser of two evils." It behooves us not to use the dead for our own devices, but that child did die thanks to an Obama Administration policy. Others live because of the way that same administration has provided health insurance for millions of poor children or, for example, reinstated environmental regulations that save thousands of lives.

You could argue that to vote for Obama is to vote for the killing of children, or that to vote for him is to vote for the protection for other children or even killing fewer children. Virtually all U.S. presidents have called down death upon their fellow human beings. It is an immoral system.

You don’t have to participate in this system, but you do have to describe it and its complexities and contradictions accurately, and you do have to understand that when you choose not to participate, it better be for reasons more interesting than the cultivation of your own moral superiority, which is so often also the cultivation of recreational bitterness.

Bitterness poisons you and it poisons the people you feed it to, and with it you drive away a lot of people who don’t like poison. You don’t have to punish those who do choose to participate. Actually, you don’t have to punish anyone, period.

We Could Be Heroes 

We are facing a radical right that has abandoned all interest in truth and fact. We face not only their specific policies, but a kind of cultural decay that comes from not valuing truth, not trying to understand the complexities and nuances of our situation, and not making empathy a force with which to act. To oppose them requires us to be different from them, and that begins with both empathy and intelligence, which are not as separate as we have often been told.

Being different means celebrating what you have in common with potential allies, not punishing them for often-minor differences. It means developing a more complex understanding of the matters under consideration than the cartoonish black and white that both left and the right tend to fall back on.

Dismissiveness is a way of disengaging from both the facts on the ground and the obligations those facts bring to bear on your life. As Michael Eric Dyson recently put it, “What is not good are ideals and rhetorics that don’t have the possibility of changing the condition that you analyze. Otherwise, you’re engaging in a form of rhetorical narcissism and ideological self-preoccupation that has no consequence on the material conditions of actually existing poor people.”

Nine years ago I began writing about hope, and I eventually began to refer to my project as “snatching the teddy bear of despair from the loving arms of the left.” All that complaining is a form of defeatism, a premature surrender, or an excuse for not really doing much. Despair is also a form of dismissiveness, a way of saying that you already know what will happen and nothing can be done, or that the differences don’t matter, or that nothing but the impossibly perfect is acceptable. If you’re privileged you can then go home and watch bad TV or reinforce your grumpiness with equally grumpy friends.

The desperate are often much more hopeful than that -- the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, that amazingly effective immigrant farmworkers’ rights group, is hopeful because quitting for them would mean surrendering to modern-day slavery, dire poverty, hunger, or death, not cable-TV reruns. They’re hopeful and they’re powerful, and they went up against Taco Bell, McDonald’s, Safeway, Whole Foods, and Trader Joe’s, and they won.

The great human-rights activist Harvey Milk was hopeful, even though when he was assassinated gays and lesbians had almost no rights (but had just won two major victories in which he played a role). He famously said, “You have to give people hope.”

In terms of the rights since won by gays and lesbians, where we are now would undoubtedly amaze Milk, and we got there step by step, one pragmatic and imperfect victory at a time -- with so many more yet to be won. To be hopeful means to be uncertain about the future, to be tender toward possibilities, to be dedicated to change all the way down to the bottom of your heart.

There are really only two questions for activists: What do you want to achieve? And who do you want to be? And those two questions are deeply entwined. Every minute of every hour of every day you are making the world, just as you are making yourself, and you might as do it with generosity and kindness and style.

That is the small ongoing victory on which great victories can be built, and you do want victories, don’t you? Make sure you’re clear on the answer to that, and think about what they would look like.

Love,

Rebecca

Copyright 2012 Rebecca Solnit

Image by Vox Efx, licensed under Creative Commons.   

  

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Dr. David Korten (livingeconomiesforum.org) is the author of Agenda for a New Economy, The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, and the international best seller When Corporations Rule the World.  He was recognized as an Utne Reader Visionary in 2011. 

Editor’s note: This post was originally published by YES! Magazine, and is licensed under Creative Commons.To repost, follow these steps. 

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The current political debate in America hints at an unspoken, but profoundly important choice between two radically different visions of the path to prosperity for all.

• One vision holds that inequality is an essential and beneficial precondition to unleash the economic growth needed to end poverty and heal the environment. Freeing the rich from taxes and cumbersome regulation will unleash a wave of productive investment, job creation, and prosperity that eventually will trickle down to enrich us all.
• The other vision holds that inequality bears a primary responsibility for the political, economic, social, and environmental failures that threaten the future of America and the world. America already has the world’s largest economy and one of the world’s highest per capita income levels. Further growth for growth’s sake is not the answer. Our priority need is to reallocate and redistribute our economic resources to get the outcomes we really want.

 

Equality: The Evidence

British epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson has done an exhaustive review of the evidence on the relationship between the distribution of wealth and indicators of physical, mental, and social health across and within countries. His research demonstrates that on  virtually every indicator, more equal societies enjoy more positive outcomes than less equal societies.  

Figure 1, below, graphs the results for the world’s high-income countries. By a substantial margin, the United States ranks first in inequality and has the worst outcomes on a range of indicators of physical, mental, and social health (see also Wilkinson’s TED talk).

In relatively equal societies, modest differences in wealth and privilege based on differences in real competence and contribution are easy to accept as fair and justified. When, however, the differences become extreme and the winners distinguish themselves primarily by their willingness to engage in morally corrupt behavior for personal advantage, there is an inevitable deterioration of the trust, institutional legitimacy, and moral fabric essential to the healthy function of individuals, communities, and society. That creates a social deficit, from which it takes generations to recover.

Health and Social Problems are Worse in More Unequal Countries 

Index: Life expectancy; math and literacy; infant mortality; homicide; imprisonment; teenage births; trust; obesity; mental illness, incl. drug and alcohol addiction; social mobility. 

 

Source: Wilkinson & Pickett, The Spirit Level (2009), www.equalitytrust.org.uk 

Figure 1: Equality and National Health 

More Sucking Up Than Trickle Down

Wall Street interests would have us believe that the best way to deal with the plight of the poor is to bring up the bottom by growing the economy from the top down—the classic claim of trickle-down economics. When wealth and power are concentrated at the top, however, the result is not trickle down. It is a sucking up. Those on the top suck up the wealth and gorge on a spending spree. Those on the bottom suck in their guts, tighten their belts, and fight for survival

From 1983 to 2008, total U.S. GDP grew from $6.1 trillion to $13.2 trillion in constant 2005 dollars. Figure 2, below, shows the distribution of the total wealth gain during this period. The wealthiest 5 percent of American households captured 81.7 percent of the gain. The bottom 60 percent of households not only failed to share in the overall increase, they suffered a 7.5 percent loss.

Figure 2: Who Captures the Wealth Gain from Growth?
 

 

 

Current U.S. per capita GDP is $48,100 for every man, woman, and child in the United States. This places us somewhere around seventh in the world, depending on who is counting. We are bested only by countries with comparatively tiny populations (Qatar, Luxembourg, Singapore, Norway, Kuwait, Brunei)—four of them with a lot of oil.

If distributed equally, U.S. per capita GDP would translate into $192,400 for a family of four. Our economy is already far larger than necessary to provide for needs of all and provide a fair reward for those who make distinctive contributions.

Contrary to the incessant mantra of economists, politicians, and media pundits, economic growth is not the solution to what ails us. In fact, sheer economic growth drives the need to chew up ever more of our living Earth, creating an environmental deficit that compromises Earth’s living systems to feed an economic system that fails to meet our most basic needs because of an egregious misallocation of resources. Our prime need is for a more intelligent distribution of the wealth we have—giving social and environmental returns priority over financial returns.

When Wall Street Interests Make the Rules

The sucking-up economy is no accident. More than 30 years ago, Wall Street interests mobilized in the name of deregulation and market “freedom” to rewrite the rules of finance in order to break the link between contribution and reward; and to favor the bankers, big corporations, private equity firms, and others in the business of playing financial games to make money from money. They suppressed wages and benefits for working people, reduced taxes paid by the rich, and stripped away constraints on speculation and other financial games by which those at the top increase their financial wealth without contributing to the real wealth of society.

Wall Streeters now pride themselves on generating eye-popping profits and bonuses through financial manipulation, deception, and extortion while producing nothing of real value. As the wealth gap grows, so too does the relative political power of the elites and thereby their ability to rig the rules in the favor of yet greater wealth concentration.

Economic structures institutionalized by policies that favor growth for the rich now virtually guarantee that the benefits of growth flow to the top. There will be no economic recovery for the rest of us so long as these institutions control our economy and our politics.

To understand how it works, we must recognize that in a corrupted financial system it is possible to make a great deal of money without contributing to the production of real wealth. Money itself is not wealth. It is a system of accounts by which modern societies record and balance our obligations to one another and allocate access to marketable goods and services. When the money system allocates money fairly in proportion to our individual contribution to the health and well-being of our community, it is a beneficial mechanism essential to the function of a complex modern society.

When access to the essentials of living—for example, food, water, shelter, education, and medical care—depends on our individual access to money, those who control the creation and allocation of money hold tremendous power. The more corrupt the money system, the greater the opportunity and incentive to abuse that power. The greater the abuse, the faster the wealth/power gap spirals out of control.

The greater the power of those at the top and the greater the desperation of those at the bottom, the more intense the competition to improve one’s position on the wealth pyramid by any means—no matter what the cost to the society. The financial logic of profit maximization becomes the only logic. Concern for others and Earth’s living systems is off the table.

The moral calculation is clear and simple: Be a winner or be a loser. Experience the unbounded power and privilege of the winners or bear the burden of desperate servitude to the winners’ arbitrary whims.

A Positive Federal Deficit Reduction Plan

To put ourselves on the path to a more egalitarian society will take time and effort on many fronts. One immediate opportunity lies in the debate about reducing the federal deficit. It provides one example of how a high visibility debate can be reframed to raise public awareness that we are in trouble not for lack of growth, but because of a massive misallocation of economic resources.
 

A recent report of the Institute for Policy Studies identifies 24 sensible fiscal reforms that would eliminate the deficit, increase equality, deny the Wall Street gamers their ill-gotten gains, and move us toward a balanced relationship with Earth’s biosphere. These include new taxes on Wall Street corporations, wealthy individuals, and pollution, and the elimination of subsidies for environmentally harmful activities. Together these recommendations would eliminate more than $572 billion a year from the deficit and simultaneously increase equality, reduce reckless financial speculation, and improve human and environmental health.

The report also identifies cuts in military spending that would save another $252 billion and make us more secure. All together, the 24 reforms could make a win-win contribution of $824 billion every year toward balancing our federal budget. In the process, we would take a first step toward the larger goal of creating a New Economy based on ecological balance, equitable distribution, and living democracy.  

Citizen Leadership

For more than 30 years, Republicans have made their commitment to the Wall Street vision abundantly clear. They are quick to condemn anyone who hints at a need for redistribution toward greater equality as a socialist looking for a free ride—ignoring the fact that those who profit from unproductive financial games are the ultimate free riders.

Democrats are rather more inclined toward an equality agenda, but are restrained by dependence on Wall Street donors and an obsolete national ideology that says growth is the path to prosperity and the success of the “wealth creators” benefits us all.

It falls to civil society to expose the nature, cause, and consequences of the wealth gap and to define a policy agenda to achieve financial integrity, close the gap, and resolve the financial, social and environmental deficits that threaten our national and human future. The goal is not to give anyone a free ride. It is to secure and expand the middle class and to assure everyone an opportunity to contribute to our national prosperity and to share in the benefits.

We must assure that the winners in the next election are politicians receptive to this agenda. Regardless of who wins, however, our task remains to build irresistible public support behind a framing vision and agenda for a nation that lives up to its promise of providing a secure and prosperous life for all who are willing work hard and play by the rules.

The Wall Street elites will push relentlessly for more growth for the 1 percent and will back their demands with enormous financial power. We must be prepared to counter with the even more powerful force of an aware and engaged citizenry committed to creating an America that works for all.

Photo by Yasin Hassan, licensed under Creative Commons. 

 

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Scott Harrison is the founder and CEO of charity: water. Scott spent 10 years as a nightclub promoter in New York City before leaving to volunteer on a hospital ship off the coast of Liberia, Africa as a volunteer photojournalist. Returning home to New York City two years later, he founded the non-profit organization charity: water in 2006. Turning his full attention to the global water crisis and the one billion people without clean water to drink, he created public installations and innovative online fundraising platforms to spread international awareness of the issue. In five years, with the help of more than 250,000 donors worldwide, charity: water has raised over $60 million and funded 6,185 water projects in 19 developing nations. Those projects will provide over 2.5 million people with clean, safe drinking water. Scott was named an Utne Reader Visionary in 2009.  

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“charity: water began with a birthday party. On September 7, 2006, founder Scott Harrison asked friends to give $20 at the door and, in one foot-loose night, they funded life-saving water projects in Uganda,” begins a recent post in the charity: water log.   

Since then, the nonprofit has drilled and dug wells, installed rainwater catchments, and supplied filtration systems in 17 countries. Donors—including children, celebrities, and churches—have financed projects from Cambodia to Honduras to Sierra Leone. This September, charity: water celebrates six successful years by raising the stakes. At this year’s “birthday party” in Manhattan, each $65 ticket purchased meant clean water for one more person living in Rwanda’s Rulindo District, the area of focus in the organization’s September Campaign. Harrison and his staff chose Rwanda because they saw clean water as a logical next step in a country that has come a long way on its own, setting an example for grace, forgiveness, and reconciliation following the genocide of 1994. "Although they could have spent decades stuck in tragedy, Rwandans have decided to invest in their future instead," says Viktoria Harrison in the video above.

To date, charity: water has raised nearly $700,000 toward the $1.7 million goal. Scott Harrison and his team are already in Rwanda (see video, below), working with contractors to plan the installation of large water systems. When finished, these systems will supply 26,000 people with clean water, improving health and freeing time for people who spend hours carrying water each day. For more videos of the project and a peek into how they get made, visit charity: water.