Thank you Marilyn Langlois for commenting on my last post and sharing this optimistic Substack piece by Diane Perlman. God knows it benefits us to focus on the positive!
Within Diane’s post there is a 25 minute video of four “Baby Boomer, lifelong activist women" (Diane, Carol, Marilyn and Alanna) sharing their experiences and perspectives on the rally organized by the anti-war coalition, Rage Against The War Machine.
The rally was spearheaded by the Libertarian Party and the People’s Party, a relatively new party whose mission statement is below:
The goal of a people’s party is to represent the interests of the wide majority of us and create a system to sustainably maximize well-being for ALL.
We believe we deserve a system that honors everyone for the content of their character, not the color of their skin, the land where they happened to be born, or the numbers in their bank account. One that brings powerful law-breakers to justice. One that makes sure the planet and its magnificent beings are cared for before any corporation exec’s profit margins. One where the power of our nation’s wealth serves all of us, not just failed banks or masters of war.
So many of us realize Congress currently does the bidding of Wall Street, corporations and billionaires — no matter which party is in power. That’s left most of us behind. The result is all our hard work and sacrifice has made the rich much richer, but not ourselves. It’s not our energy or work ethic that’s the problem. It’s the system.
The elites have escaped justice for major financial crimes, and continue to lock into place an abusive unsustainable system threatening our lives and the planet. Things must change — dramatically, and fast.
I deeply care about “We, the People”… what’s not to love in the above?
And as you might perhaps have realized by now, I’m also heavily for personal freedom, thus for those who do not know what the Libertarians are about:
The Libertarian Party (LP) is your representative in American politics. It is the only political organization which respects you as a unique and responsible individual.
Our slogan is that we are “The Party of Principle”, because we stand firmly on our principles.
Libertarians strongly oppose any government interference into their personal, family, and business decisions. Essentially, we believe all Americans should be free to live their lives and pursue their interests as they see fit as long as they do no harm to another.
Founded in 1971, we run many hundreds of candidates every election cycle. These candidates seek positions ranging from City Council to President of the United States. Each of these candidates helps to give liberty a voice.
Sounds like a smart merger to me!
Of the rally, Diane reports in her video:
“I didn’t really know what to expect from this rally but I know that it got a lot of smearing and negativity and controversy beforehand… and people were opposing it, and saying ‘you shouldn’t go because there’s going to be people on this side and people on that side’ and ‘people on the left shouldn’t go and listen to people on the right’ and ‘people on the right shouldn’t go and listen to people on the left.’”
None of that will surprise anyone who has been observing, particularly these last 3 years, how humanity has been played (has always been played).
Diane continues:
I felt like it was a sign of political evolution… that we were evolving past the archaic, stale, boring, monotonous, ‘left-right’, ‘Democrat-Republican’ that are ‘fighting against each other’ but also secretly they’re working together to keep each other in power and they’re both supporting the war machine.”
You can watch the full 25 minute video here.
Personal note: I’ve been astonished to see so many of my leftie friends (those who marched against Bush’s war on Iraq 20 years ago (see this microfillum I made of the protests in SF then and forgive the low quality, it was my very first foray into “film-making”…) support the “Ukraine war”. It became the latest “thing” one had to virtue-signal about. Everywhere you went in San Francisco you saw the yellow and blue.
Confession: I actually don’t blame most of them for I used to be like this too. In my past life — three years ago — I too would sometimes take strong positions without understanding anything of what they meant.
However, once you come to understand — through learning the actual history of our world and unlearning the story that’s been spun by those who control the narratives — namely, that every war was created by the entities — manufacturers of arms, robbers of resources, orchestrators of chaos — who stand to profit most from it, it seems so obvious, for any of us who want a grand total of zero innocents to be killed (no matter which region or country), that we must reject the left-right binary and unite.