It took this campaign cycle to get the message through my thick head that I am a political animal of the type who took up arms against the British in 1776. I haven't always been this way. The founding fathers weren't born looking for a fight, either. They grew up in privilege, as I did. They knew the real radicals were the colonists who fled from tyranny to carve a new world out of the wilderness.
Independence from European monarchs had simply spoiled them for anything else. Growing up in the relatively decent and prosperous postwar era, I can relate. So can Jill Stein. I'll get back to her in a minute.
Something else was threatening the colonists' idyllic continent. Britain was tightening its grip. The mother country needed America to help fund its imperialist wars in other far-flung lands. Americans didn't need Britain. The colonists didn't even need world trade. They knew they could get by without the British export market. The slave trade had been banned by Britain itself. Abolitionists were pushing for transformative change in the U.S., and within several decades the slaves would be free. While it would take another century for the South to adjust, most Southerners no longer regret losing the Civil War.
I like to think that we've come full circle, back to our revolutionary roots. We parted company with the founders as industrialization moved people to factories and U.S. products overseas. Teddy Roosevelt in particular relished Britain's decline and declared a new world order with us on top, exporting our values along with our manufactured goods.
Instead, we took over where Britain left off. We expanded our sphere of influence. We rationalized that expansion by insisting that economic and political objectives would go hand in hand. This thinking allowed us to quash communism at home and overthrow "leftist" governments whose leaders only sought the same independence for their citizens that Americans now took for granted. We got into the habit of promoting democracy at home and fascism abroad. We began to behave the way Britain did at the height of its power. Regime change hasn't worked out any better for us than the White Man's Burden did for them.
It's interesting that Britain's own citizens are now pushing back. Those who supported Brexit were not ignorant conservatives nostalgic for the Empire, as they've been portrayed. On the contrary, they don't like globalization. They see enormous potential in a world that is more decentralized economically, with laws that support rather than destroy small, self-sufficient communities whose residents don't depend on apolitical, profit-driven global conglomerates for their job security.
People around the world are seeing that "raising all boats" has actually grown the gap between rich and poor to the point where soon the balance will be so heavily weighted on the side of the rich that rising up in protest won't be possible without risking a nuclear holocaust.
Who will hold the keys to the room with the button in it? Not the rebels.
The founders risked everything on a gut instinct: They thought a distracted Great Britain would put up a fight that a scrappy bunch of guys in blue coats could win. I see myself as making a similar bet by voting for a woman so vastly outgunned by both major parties as to be the laughing stock of the global elites — just as the patriots were the butt of jokes in stately homes all across England in the 18th century. Just as then, the new elites have more in common in terms of vested interests than the rest of us average Americans put together.
Unlike the rebels in 1776, I have no illusions that the Green Party will win this time around. Unlike the American patriots, I'm not suggesting a bloody overthrow of the 1 percent. (Nonviolent revolutions take time. Just ask Martin Luther King.) I do see America at a crossroads not all that different from the one they saw, and while we Green Party supporters are outgunned now, enough votes for Jill Stein will send a message to the next president. Hillary Clinton will take note.
To those who remind me that Ralph Nader cost Al Gore the election in 2000, I say that was then. I did not vote for Nader. I will vote for Jill Stein.
Stein is exactly my age. Just like Bernie Sanders, whose support for Hillary I commend (he will have more clout in the Senate as a Hillary loyalist than he would as a defector to a party too weak even to earn a spot on the debate stages), she's lived a long time with her eyes and ears open to history as it has unfolded over the course of her lifetime of 66 years. When she talks about being hopeful, she means it. She remembers when times were better, a lot better, than they are now. That experience and her exceptional intellectual acuity are why she understands the dangers we face as a nation and as a planet.
She understands that people are people, and that the Democrats' current obsession with race is a ruse to distract us from the issues that are causing all Americans, or rather the lower 99 percent of them, to feel afraid and oppressed. We no longer own our nation's vast productivity, ingenuity and optimism. Those assets have been bought by the elites who are now poised to run not just the U.S. but also the world.
Stein understands that it's the planet, stupid. The daily reports of record floods and fires are about as shocking to her as that Americans won more gold medals in Rio than anybody else. Winning medals is business as usual for Americans. But achieving excellence is not the business that either candidate is interested in. Both prefer to pander to special-interest groups, mostly poor Americans who are told that their problems are racists or atheists or gays or women, as this is how you win elections. Radical change, as Obama found out after he reneged on his promise to bring it on, will be more difficult than ever in our history to effect.
Yet radicalism is our heritage. "Question authority" should be on every car bumper. We are still Americans. And we are still free. We can unite behind the one subgroup whose collective voice should matter the most — our children. That millennials overwhelmingly supported Sanders should matter to the rest of us: For them, climate change and the increasingly oppressive and nonremunerative workplace they are forced to accept because of their enormous student loan debt is more important than racial inequity, gay marriage or women's reproductive rights because these battles have been won. We don't need to incessantly replay them in our political dialogue. We do need to examine the root causes of why they dominate political discussion.
Only a fair economic system will fix our racial divide. Only a healthy planet will sustain humans into the next millennium. And only radical change — laws with teeth that will turn our priorities upside down, putting the health of our air, water and soil before profits; putting people back on the land to reclaim the farms their ancestors lost to corporate ownership; putting people to work creating a renewable energy system once burning fossil fuels for energy is banned, just as enslaving blacks for energy was banned in the 17th century; putting wealth into the hands of those who deserve it and need it most through a return to the equitable tax structure of the 1950s; putting quality back into our public schools, putting health care in the hands of our citizens through a single-payer system predicated on quality and not on profits; and, finally, turning our backs on the world if that's required to stop the mindless movement of cheap goods around the globe at incalculable cost to defenseless organisms — only a nonviolent revolution enabled by the election of a candidate who treasures the values she was taught as a child and has been fighting for her whole life, offers the chance, albeit it slim, to save humanity from itself.
Bonnie Blodgett is a writer in St. Paul. Reach her at bonnieblodgett@gmail.com.
