John Rachel

On July 20th, I created The “I’ll vote for Jill if you will” Pledge Campaign.  This included setting up petitions at four reputable petition campaign sites to keep track of the number of participants.  Off to an encouraging start, I got signatures on the very first day.

This whole effort addresses what I consider to be the primary obstacle to Jill Stein getting elected.  That is, it offers a mechanism to work around the predictable fears that most voters have that if they vote third-party, they will “throw their vote away” and even worse, end up electing one of the major party candidates who they abhor.  Those who voted for Ralph Nader — I was one of them — were wrongly accused of throwing the election to George W. Bush.  Though this is easily established as false, the idea of the “spoiler vote” continues to persist and serve the agenda of the two-party monopoly, preventing any real challenge from either the progressive left, the libertarian right, or any party for that matter functioning outside the narrow, tightly choreographed corporate mainstream.

The success of my campaign to unite potential Jill Stein voters into a bloc, essentially by “pre-polling” the voting public, was predicated on ascertaining in advance that there were sufficient voters to elect her.  Ascertaining that meant voters could comfortably vote for her without fear of wasting their votes, perhaps inadvertently electing Donald or Hillary, whichever might be judged worse — though in my book it’s a toss-up. 

The target was 50 million or more voter signatures, which I determined would be enough, if distributed appropriately in important swing states, to put her in the White House.

The key to getting that many signatures was the power of an exponential multiplier, or as I euphemistically dubbed it, the power of numbers.  If each person who signed the petition — and in doing so agreed to participate in the program — told only two others, instructing them to each likewise tell two others, in less than 30 days we could have over 67 million people signed up, more than enough to eradicate all anxiety about voting for Jill Stein.

So how did we do?

On September 9th, we finally hit 5,000 signatures across all four petition sites.

That is, we managed to get 5,000 well-meaning folks — and judging from the comments very passionate supporters of Jill Stein — to jump on board, and it only took 52 days.

Mind you, I didn’t just sit back and twiddle my thumbs.  In fact from the day I started the campaign till now, I’ve sent out over a thousand tweets, posted it on over ninety Facebook pages, posted it as comments on some fifty plus political media sites, posted it on Google+, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Stumbleupon, Reddit, Blogger, Delicious, and Live Journal.

Which suggests that assuming I don’t suffer from dwindling returns for my effort — highly doubtful since the “low-hanging fruit” gets used up quickly — in order to get to 50 million signature, I would only need to keep doing what I’ve been doing for the next 1,424 years. 

What do you think?  Should I keep going?

Alright . . . what happened?

That is perhaps the easiest question in the world.

People didn’t recruit anyone else.  Despite their personal enthusiasm for Jill Stein, despite many of them — judging from the enthusiastic praise I got for the idea — thinking it was a highly ingenious way to make her a viable candidate in the eyes of a fearful voting public, despite them making a firm pledge when they signed the petition which committed them to the action which was the critical core of the strategy . . .

“I will now contact two other people who I respect and trust, let them know there is a real alternative to the Clinton vs. Trump political spectacle, explain that if we frustrated voters join together, we don’t have to throw our votes away, we can elect a great president, America’s first female president no less.”

. . . they just couldn’t bring themselves to talk to and convince others that this was a necessary and worthwhile project.

Am I surprised?  Of course not.  Disappointed but not surprised.

As citizens we have become paralyzed by our own timidity and fear of failure, intimidated and rendered dysfunctional by the dysfunction all around us.  We’ve become disengaged and numb from the constant trumpeting of counter-productive memes, false narratives, the insultingly banal media coverage of politics, the disinformation and propaganda that bombards us 24/7/365.  We have been made cynical and immersed in despair by endless violations of the public trust by our leaders, by the condescending and cavalier lies we are constantly told by our politicians and other puppet-masters in the pulpits of power.  Most tragically, we have become afraid, afraid of the police, afraid of the government, afraid of one another, afraid to act.  We’re just too afraid to turn to a couple other people and say:  “Hey, look at this.  I think it’s a great idea!”

But here is the problem . . .

No matter how hopeless and difficult it seems, we must act.  We must get involved.  Time is running out on democracy.  There still remains some small hope that we as citizens can make a difference.  But that hope is shrinking fast.

What probably the majority of citizens apparently fail to understand — or if possible avoid thinking about — is that in our current social and political environment, under the “rules of the game”, we have no choice but to participate.  Just being a citizen means you are intrinsically a functional “activist” in a system which determines everything that is happening now and will happen in the future.

There is widespread reluctance to recognize and embrace a simple fact:  The future is still ours for the taking.

The numbers are with us across the board — on many key issues, on outrage and contempt for Congress, on collective revulsion for the choice we are being waterboarded with via the two major party presidential candidates.

What is lacking?

Courage.  The courage to just reach out to others and say:

“I’ve had it!  I’m not playing this game anymore.”

Yes, many are saying this but only to themselves.  Until the American public hears a loud roar and a thunderous chant, and each and all realize they are not alone, they individually will again buckle to their fear, and be afraid of a simple act like reaching out to just two others — even two others of like mind and thinking — and talking, just being open and honest about issues that confront all of us but from which we retreat like cowards.

Recognize this . . .

Being paralyzed by fear and hopelessness is a form of “citizen participation”.

As is surrender or any other form of capitulation or acknowledging defeat.

It’s self-sabotaging but participation no less.

To not act is counter-intuitively an act.

Because to not act is a choice.

And all choices have their consequences.

We will live or die by what those consequences look like.