As you probably already know, the Advocacy Center encourages citizens to take charge of our society’s future and take responsibility for the consequences of their actions/inactions. We have focused so much on voting during the 2012 election for three reasons: (1) It does not receive much attention; (2) it is hard to see how progressive changes could realistically be achieved without transforming our political system through elections; and (3) it is an election year. Of course, people have the power to reject aspects of our unjust society in many ways besides voting for better politicians. We should always look for ways to embrace that power.
For inspiration, we could look to the people of Spain. An article in the Washington Post describes how many Spaniards have responded to the “financial crisis” by adopting alternative currencies to the Euro, and/or barter systems. Elites caused the crisis that Spain’s citizens are paying for. It is a shameful situation (one that is familiar to Americans). As a result, roughly one quarter of the Spanish population is unemployed, some of the employed do not receive wages (because employers withhold them), and the safety net continues to fray. To limit the suffering that is being imposed on them, many communities in Spain stopped using the Euro, at least for some local transactions. In the words of Josefina Altes, who coordinates the Spanish Time Bank Network, the alternative currency systems are “a way for people who are on the fringes of the economy to participate again.”
Elite economic policies marginalize people by creating “crisis” and inequality, and imposing harsh cutbacks in austerity regimes. The Euro is used as a tool to implement this by its scarcity, forcing governments to accept austerity to receive bailouts. Spaniards cannot completely escape the need for the Euro in the short term, but alternative currencies at least mitigate the harsh elitist policies.
One important takeaways of the article is that people can to some degree reject the values of unjust regimes if they act creatively and collaboratively. For example, in the labor exchange in Barcelona, people value time equally regardless of the job done. Thus, if a seamstress spends one hour sewing scrubs for a doctor, she earns the same as the doctor who spends an hour examining a patient. Referring to the equality within the time banking system, Barcelona doctor Angels Corcoles said, “We have to bend our minds to understand time banks because they change the relationships between people.” In a society as unequal as our own, learning to see wealth disparity a matter of taste rather than logical and benign social organization may, indeed, require some serious mind bending (probably too much for many). Income is a value statement, not of the individual earner, but of the society. Our country values the time of the highest paid financiers, executives, etc. literally thousands of times more than it does teachers and teachers, among others. It is also a political statement of who has the power. It is hard to say how Americans should go about rejecting this value system, or if people should work toward creating a parallel economy; but we can at least look to Spain for inspiration, and proof that incremental steps can be very meaningful.
Along those lines, the Occupy Student Debt Campaign formed “to end the debt financing of higher education” by building a critical mass of student debtors and supporters. Once that threshold is reached (1 million debtors), participating debtors will stop paying back their student loans. It is a “collective strategy” aimed at eliminating the need for students to incur significant to massive levels of debt to get an education. It is a worthy cause that you can pledge your support to here.
Citizen action for progressive change can be quite mundane, such as boycotting certain products at the grocery store to protest apartheid, or simply driving less to reduce one’s carbon footprint. It is true that just one person cannot make a difference alone, but it is also true that one person’s actions greatly increases the likelihood that another and then others will follow.
In other circumstances, however, an individual’s actions can be decisive. One instance is as juror. The United States imprisons more people than any other country, and holds about 1/4 of the world’s total incarcerated population even though we have only 5% of the world’s population. That statistic alone should give pause and cause concern. But we do not just lock people up (especially poor men, and most especially poor men of color), we put them in terrible places and dehumanize them. Lisa Guenther’s article in the New York Times about the psychological havoc suffered by the over 80,000 inmates in solitary confinement in the United States, as well as those formerly in solitary who continue to to experience its repercussions, reveals one aspect of our immoral carceral system (it also touches on another fact – the people tortured are sometimes innocent). The jurors in criminal trials should take into account not just the evidence and the law, but the place where the defendant will be sent. Acquitting defendants in the face of evidence protests the deplorable conditions of our prison system, and the unjust criminal laws under which many prisoners were convicted.
In short, there are many opportunities for people to impact the world around them through creative, collaborative action. As another blogger put it earlier today, if we do not embrace those opportunities, average Americans will “remain divided and easily exploited.”
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