Between Barack and a Hard Place

They say: “I’m voting for Obama, because things will be worse under Romney.”

Perhaps that is true. It may even be likely. I don’t have a problem with folks voting for Obama, though I’m electing not to vote for him.

Most of my friends are voting for Obama. Most of these friends are frustrated with Obama’s militarism and erosion of civil liberties and more. Drone attacks and dead children and human rights violations are bad, but it always can be worse.

This may be uncharitable, but I am suspicious that folks aren’t really that offended by the violence and oppression perpetrated by the president, his regime, and our system. I suspect that these things reside merely as abstractions in the imagination. Until people are willing to take to the streets to protest or begin to entertain revolution (preferably nonviolent), then I assume that most folks who vote are pretty content with how things are, and merely prefer one president to the other.

If people truly believed that drone strikes and assaults on civil liberties and increased corporatocracy are bad, then they should do something about it. Not just give lip service to those realities, shrug, and then just vote, as though that is discharging their primary political duty.

So vote. It may avert a deeper disaster. But it isn’t your primary political duty. Your duty is to stand against injustice and foster justice in its place. It is to share all good things rather than accepting consumer capitalism as “the best we can do.” It is to confront violence, build community, and cut ties with those things that you enjoy at the expense of others. It is to sow, in small ways, seeds of a new world…seeds of revolution. Our obligation is to reject evil, not simply to choose the least evil.