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August 2004 Guest Editorial: Filling the Buckets: Election 2004 By Mia MacDonald

 

Who Wants to Run for President? Showtime’s American Candidate Who’s it going to be? PETA’s Vegan Campaign Director? An African-American gay rights activist? A gun-slinging sheriff? A Fenton Communications’ Veep? Dick Gephardt’s daughter? Ten opinionated Americans spanning the racial, economic, geo-political spectrums are running for president in Showtime’s newest spin on reality TV, American Candidate. You’ve got an anti-choice Social Studies teacher, a multi-racial voter registration youth activist, a Gulf War nurse stumping for veterans’ rights, a handsome black gay rights activist, a gun-rights enthusiast, a VP from a progressive communications powerhouse, and an animal rights activist. Over ten weeks, each candidate and her or his campaign manager will have to overcome certain obstacles until the numbers are reduced to one. The show’s kickoff was a competition to see who could get the most people to attend a rally to announce their candidacy—in just 36 hours. Surprisingly, Park Gillespie, the Social Studies teacher from North Carolina, led the pack. The first lesson is that political royalty isn’t enough to get you in the running even for a reality TV show, as candidate Chrissy Gephardt learned the hard way. Yep, that’s right, openly lesbian progressive daughter of House Representative and former presidential candidate Dick Gephardt is the first one to lose out. For the campaign rally, PETA’s Vegan Campaign guru and Satya Contributor Bruce Friedrich came in second. Says Bruce, “The reason I did the show was to have the opportunity to talk about human rights and animal rights issues, and to dispel the very odd concept that animal rights people are single-issue.” Any dirt on his competition? “The thing I was most impressed by was what integrity all of them have.” Ah well, we’ll just have to watch to see what happens next. The next challenge is to rustle up support in New Hampshire. Watch on Sundays at 9 p.m. (E/P) on Showtime. —C.C.

I’m doing it for the marine biology student I met in Kenya, who sees the effects of climate change on Indian Ocean ecosystems. I’m doing it for the young woman in Ethiopia—a teenager—who doesn’t have access to reproducve health care, and may well die from an unplanned pregnancy or a back alley abortion. I haven’t met her, but I know she and thousands like her exist. I’m also doing it for the elephants still living wild in Asia’s dwindling forests and for the frogs getting sunburn and worse throughout the southern hemisphere as the ozone layer shrinks.

What I’ve done, so far, hasn’t been much: a matter of clearing up clutter in my apartment, making black bean dip, and getting out the cloth napkins for a house party I co-hosted for John Kerry. A few thousand other people in the U.S. hosted parties, too, in late June. It wasn’t a fundraiser. It was an awareness-raiser, a “we need to get focused on this election and do what we can to make sure Bush II is neither elected (for the first time) nor selected (again) in November.”

About 15 of us gathered, ate and then crowded around a speakerphone to hear Kerry—relatively unscripted and energetic—tell us some of what’s at stake. He asked for our help to get the word out in swing states, and to get out the vote among those around us. Two nights later, Michael Moore, fresh from the history-making first weekend box office of Fahrenheit 9/11, told about 30 of us, this time at a friend’s house, how we can mobilize the 62 percent of the U.S. vote he says is female or African-American or Hispanic. Moore’s plea, more anti-Bush than pro-Kerry: that we go to a swing state and mobilize there, and that we get lots of people to the polls.

Last time around I was a Ralph Nader supporter, gleeful at the energy generated by the super rallies and Nader’s quiet, passionate truth-telling about the state of our country and the world. This time, I just don’t believe the planet, the people on it—especially women—and other species can stand another four years of Bush-assault. I mean it literally: thousands, if not millions, of women may not be standing if the Bush crowd’s restrictions on abortion and access to family planning, and heavy disdain for reproductive rights at home and abroad, aren’t stopped.

The “global gag rule” is a disaster, a McCarthy-ite pledge recipients of U.S. foreign aid are required to sign, or funds are cut off. The gag rule says that no U.S. grantee can even counsel a pregnant woman, let’s say a teenager who’s been raped, on the availability of a safe abortion, even in countries where such an abortion is a woman’s right. Many providers of reproductive healthcare have refused to sign. The consequences: in Kenya, Ethiopia and other countries, health clinics have closed or sharply curtailed services. Maternal health services and contraception have become less available (in Ethiopia only six percent of married women even use it) and condoms, critical to AIDS prevention, harder to come by. Not satisfied with this havoc, the U.S. has also denied all funding to the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) since Bush II came to power—due to a phony charge of UNFPA complicity in coerced abortion in China. The bottom line: women’s rights and lives are being bartered in a tawdry exchange for the votes of the religious right.

I want it to stop and the best way I can think of achieving that is by helping to elect John Kerry and John Edwards. It’s not an overstatement to say that millions of women around the world are counting on us to turn Bush out. I feel counted on. So, I may host another house party for Kerry/Edwards. I’m also going to give money, something I’ve been loath to do in the past because I don’t see money and democracy mixing well. I’m planning to go to Pennsylvania, the closest swing state (rich in electoral votes) to do outreach, probably more than once.

Another reason: People I’ve met around the world say the climate is changing. Something’s got to give. Bush has got to go. There are millions of women and men, like Lionel, the student I met on the Kenyan coast, who know the truth about global warming and the U.S.’ role in it. He knows that Americans, about 4.5 percent of the world’s population, emit 25 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases. He also knows that millions of Americans choose—choose—to drive hulking SUVs that literally slurp gas, spewing pollution in accord with their bulk. And he’s aware of how this drives U.S. adventurism overseas: Iraq, anyone? Placating Saudi Arabia, nurturing new petro-tyrrannies in West and Southern Africa? Around the world, these are not secrets.

Over the past 100 years, sea levels have risen an estimated 10 to 20 centimeters, largely as a result of melting ice masses and ocean expansion linked to regional and global warming. Small island nations and low-lying cities and farming areas face risks of severe floods or engulfment. Carbon dioxide levels today are 18 percent higher than they were in 1960. Until the U.S. gets a sensible energy policy, the climate on Kenya’s coast (and myriad other coasts) isn’t going to stabilize. Coral is going to continue to be bleached, fish populations displaced and the lives of ocean species and livelihoods of rural fishing communities annihilated.

In their new book, You Have the Power: Choosing Courage in a Culture of Fear, Frances Moore Lappé and Jeffrey Perkins write, “…the drop-in-the bucket mind-set, leading so many to despair of ever making real change in the world, is even more debilitating than we might think…we feel more like drops in the Sahara.” They continue, but “to flip our fear of insignificance into surging power, we must be able to perceive that bucket: the wider pattern of positive change that our efforts help bring to life. The fact is, buckets fill up pretty fast…”

This election, I’m signing up to try and get Kerry into the White House. I still don’t like the corporate-friendly policies of the Democrats, the way the skyboxes at conventions get filled with business titans, while young, idealistic and very smart activists are left outside. But I haven’t quite given up on the political system—and a belief, terrifying at times, that it is up to us. If we are part of it and bring our concerns for social justice, the environment, animals, both local and global, to the table inside and outside the power centers, we can, we must have an effect. The bucket will fill.

But to do it, we’ve got to show up and speak up and be, of all things, entitled to our piece of the party. We’ve got to be engaged, tenacious and successful. There’s too much at stake, for us and the planet, to go away and cultivate our gardens (and I don’t have much of a green thumb). I still believe, despite all that’s happened and is happening, that, as Gandhi said, we have to be the change we want to see in the world. But the world—in this case the U.S. political process—has got to see us. We have to be in it…for the Kenyan student, for the coral reefs, for the Ethiopian woman, for the elephants that may be captured for U.S. circuses if the Bush “revisions” to the Endangered Species Act become law.

I’m also trying to be in it because of something Wangari Maathai [see interview in June/July 2004], founder of Kenya’s Green Belt Movement and indefatigable defender of human rights, women and the environment said on a recent visit to New York: “Those of us who understand—the so-called activists—those of us who feel strongly, must not tire, must not give up, must persist.” Maathai worked within civil society for nearly 30 years to protect and replenish Kenya’s forest cover and watersheds. In late 2002, she was elected to Parliament and now serves as assistant minister for the environment, natural resources and wildlife. “I always say the burden is on those of us who know. Those who don’t know are at peace,” she said. “It’s those of us who know…[who] are forced to take action.”

I’m not at peace, and for the next three months (and beyond, I hope), I’ll be looking for all the buckets I can find.

Mia MacDonald is a policy analyst and writer in Brooklyn. During the 2003-04 academic year she served as co-director and adjunct lecturer in the human rights program at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.

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