Activism Across America

The results of the American Religious Identification Survey of 2008 are in, and it seems that Vermont is the most godless state in the union. 34 percent of Vermont residents answering the survey reported having no religion.

Some people will assume that’s a bad thing, but if you look at the facts, it seems that Vermont’s godlessness serves it well. Vermont residents are among the most educated in all the USA. Vermont crime rates are among the lowest in the nation. Vermonters also feel more trust in their neighbors than people in other state. Whereas the level of stated trust of other people in the nation as a whole has declined to just 34 percent, the level of trust in other people among people living in Vermont is at 71 percent.

Maybe the rest of the nation ought to try going godless, as Vermont has done.

Barack Obama shocked his supporters last summer by voting for the FISA Amendments Act, which provided retroactive legal immunity to corporations who helped George W. Bush spy on the private lives of millions of Americans. The law also legalized such spy operations against Americans going into the future.

Now, as President of the United States, Barack Obama hasn’t done one thing to stop this Big Brother spying against Americans. He hasn’t even reformed it. George W. Bush’s warrantless wiretapping against Americans is continuing on under Barack Obama.

At least one American remembers this, and was there to confront Barack Obama when he arrived in Columbus, Ohio last week:

One sign on a sidewalk on a windy day for Barack Obama to see as he drives by in his limousine: Does it make a difference?

Well, it makes more of a difference than if no signs on the Bush-Obama spying were there at all.

The people at the Green Party of Delaware have gone to the trouble of setting up an online soapbox. Why aren’t they bothering to use it?

The latest news item from the Delaware Greens appears to be from March, 2006 - back when the Republicans still controlled Congress, and people were not yet sure whether Barack Obama would really run for President. The most recent news before then was from June, 2005.

The Green Party in Delaware can complain all it wants to about having unequal access to corporate media, but if it isn’t even using its own media to speak in a compelling way to the public, it can’t expect to do better on a larger scale.

There’s a bigger lesson for activists: Making progress requires persistence.

Continuing torture, government spying against us, huge bailouts for corrupt Wall Street firms and to inept Detroit, inaction on climate change, the ocean ecological crisis, the fraud of “clean coal”… there are plenty of serious issues that people might take action to protest about (see yesterday’s Capitol Climate Action protest for an example).

But what did Rick Allison and his buddies in New Haven, Connecticut decide to protest? The cancellation of a radio show on WPLR - of everything that’s going wrong in the world. That show’s importance? It gave air time to local music bands - people who are playing quite often in local venues.

WPLR management even offered Rick Allison the chance to host a show through the radio station’s web site. Yet, Allison refused, on some kind of principle, perhaps the principle of some kind of inherent right of people to play the tunes they want to play on a commercial radio station.

Forgive my irritation, but I find it difficult to be patient when people who have failed to protest on the significant issues of our day finally decide to act just because a radio station does not share their opinion about what kind of music is worth broadcasting. It is a frivolous act for a trivial cause in very serious times.