Real Democracy Requires Real Participation, Real Knowledge

I missed this the first time, but Diana at Democracy for California points us to Nick Lewis at Net Politik's posting of a truly important piece by Howard Zinn on democracy and what we need to do as Americans.

Notably:

The political culture of the United States is obsessed with and dominated by voting. Every election year is accompanied by the media's and the politicians' obsession with persuading Americans that voting for one candidate or another (and only if they are Democrat or Republican, of course) is the most important act of citizenship.

We get high on voting and forget that whether presidents have been Republican or Democrat, impotent or oversexed, they have followed the same basic policies. Whether crooks or Boy Scouts, handsome or homely, agile or clumsy, they have taxed the poor; subsidized the rich; squandered the nation's commonwealth (our minerals, airwaves, water and forests); wasted our taxes on bombers, missiles, ships and other corporate welfare; ignored the decay of the cities; and done so little for poor minority kids that for every Afro-American in college, five are now in prison, and for every Latino in college, three are in prison...

Voting Day 2000 has again come and gone. Sure, one of the presidential candidates is better than the other. But we will go a long way from spectator democracy to real democracy when we understand that the future of this country doesn't depend, mainly, on who is our next president. It depends on whether the American citizen, fed up with the buying off of our Congress and president by the billionaires; fed up with the murderous greed of our health care system and the pharmaceutical companies; fed up with the planetary self-destructive path of our energy, auto, lumber, agribusiness and chemical companies; will organize all over the country a clamor for change even greater than the labor uprisings of the '30s or the black rebellion of the '60s and shake this country out of old paths and falsehood into new paths and the truth.

Read it for yourself, read it for your children, read it for your country and world.