[fgp-chat] Fwd: OPEN LETTER TO GPVA FROM THE OUT-GOING CO-CHAIR

Tue Jan 16 00:47:16 EST 2018

Dear Virginia Greens,

As I prepare to step down from my role as GPVA co-chair I would like to 
take a few minutes to thank all of the members of the party for the many 
ways they have supported me during the last four years. This has been 
one of the most rewarding and most educational experiences of my many 
years of adventuring. I wish especially to thank Audrey Clement and 
Tamar Yager, the co-chairs who served with me; Audrey during my first 
year was an indispenable resource, as I came to the job with virtually 
no idea of what it entailed and relied on her guidance almost 
constantly; Tamar in the last three years has been a font both of wisdom 
and of encouragement, one that I could scarcely have survived without.

I would also like to take this opportunity to reflect on what has been 
achieved and on what challenges lie ahead. It has been especially 
gratifying to see the state party grow during the last four years, from 
six active locals in January 2014 to eleven now. We have run many state 
and local candidates, elected a school board member in Appomattox, put 
our presidential candidate on the ballot, updated our bylaws, offices, 
and procedures, and welcomed many new members ready to take up positions 
of leadership.

It hasn't all been wine and roses. As you know, two of our newest locals 
left us after the election, taking with them people we will greatly 
miss. And as always happens during the quadrennial political cycle, many 
of the people who were inspired to build the party—when the presidential 
election made politics seem exciting—found when the election was over 
that their interest waned and their energy dissipated. It did not help 
that a concerted effort has been sustained since the election to 
scapegoat the Green Party and its people for the rise of the great 
bug-bear, Trump. The vote-shaming this time around was vicious, and 
well-organized by the so-called liberal media. I and other can attest 
that Greens paid a genuine social price for their commitment to fighting 
the duopoly.

It has been perhaps most painful to watch the incessant, almost 
reflexive tendency of Greens to turn their fire upon one-another. The 
national party in particular has been riven by open warfare among 
factions who have placed their own vision and ambitions ahead of the 
unity and mission of the Green Party. Here in Virginia too we have seen 
the circular firing-squad formation all too often.

It is not just disappointing to see would-be comrades fall apart when 
they ought to be holding each other up—it is simply intolerable given 
the situation we are in. People in a burning building don't have the 
luxury of disputatious behavior. I beg every member of GPVA to step back 
and review with me the trajectory we are on:

AGRICULTURAL COLLAPSE: The so-called Green Revolution that doubled food 
production to match the doubling of human population in my lifetime was 
built on resources now dwindling, resources that cannot be readily 
renewed or replaced: soil, aquifers, and oil. Corporate agriculture has 
literally killed our food system, and without a rapid shift to 
regenerative agriculture the entire globe will soon re-enact Syria's 
drought-and-famine-induced social upheaval and civil war.[1][2]

ECOSYSTEM COLLAPSE: The planet has lost roughly half of its animals, 
large and small, and the numbers are declining at an exponentially 
increasing rate. In agriculturally-developed parts of the world the 
insect population has declined by 80%. The oceans are poisoned, 
acidifying, warming, saturated with plastic; ocean life is dying. 
Deadzones have quadrupled in size.[3] Marine life, halved.[4] 
Phytoplankton, the foundation of the ocean food-web and source of half 
the world's breathable oxygen, has declined by 40% since 1950.[5]

GLOBAL WAR: Not just U.S. but world spending on war has increased every 
year for the last 25 years.[6] A destabilizing world is awash in 
weapons, including nuclear weapons. The U.S. global military operation 
has steadily expanded to every continent, in dozens of countries, from a 
thousand overseas bases.[7] War has cost our country $trillions since 
the turn of the century, bankrupting the real economy.[8] Under both 
duopoly parties the U.S. has pursued confrontation and intervention 
rather than peace-making, to the point we now find ourselves once more 
on the precipice of global nuclear annihilation and an east-west 
cold-war.[9]

CLIMATE DISRUPTION: The above crises threaten destruction _before_ 
climate change is factored in, and that is only just beginning. It is 
now clear the worst-case projections of just a few years ago were too 
optimistic; we are all but certain to see a 4C rise in this century—that 
is the new "optimistic" scenario; it could be much worse.[10] A rise of 
4C is by itself sufficient to cause mass extinction and global 
eco-system collapse.[11]

FAILED DEMOCRACY: The United States is a democracy in name only, for 
only the wealthiest citizens have any meaningful influence on 
government.[12] Citizens are presented with elections, especially for 
president, as meaningless as in any banana republic; essentially the 
same domestic and foreign policy is continued regardless of the "party" 
nominally in power.[13][14] For this reason and because it is 
effectively discouraged, most people don't vote.[15] Those that do are 
generally misinformed about the policies of the people for whom they 
vote. This is deliberate.[16] The inevitable consequence of 
disenfranchisement of the electorate is their general loss of faith 
in—and commitment to—our democratic institutions. When democracy fails 
and crises compound, people welcome authoritarianism, and we are seeing 
an unprecedented rise of authoritarian political movements on both the 
right and the left, leading to the inexorable erosion of our civil 
rights and the undermining of our Constitution.[17][18]

DESPERATE AMERICANS: The oligarchs who are running the country have not 
just disenfranchised but dispossessed most Americans. Half are now in 
poverty or in the "precariat," lacking material security and 
predicability, one paycheck away from desperation.[19] Wall Street hums 
along while most Americans remain stuck in the Great Recession that 
began in 2008, financial security out of reach, their future 
increasingly without hope of improvement. Unable to have any meaningful 
control over their lives or to escape relentless anxiety, Americans are 
susceptible to addiction, alcoholism, racism and bigotry, and 
ideological extremism. The suicide rate has exploded, especially among 
the middle-aged.[20] The loss of social cohesion is a grave threat to 
our collective future.

IN SHORT: We live in a time of general institutional, social, and 
ecological collapse, under circumstances that call into question the 
prospects for the continuation of any decent human existence. The 
situation is dire.

WHY BE A GREEN?

Anyone who understands and can face the reality of our situation has 
only two choices. One, a rational one, is to make for oneself the best 
of a bad situation, securing the best personal circumstances one can to 
await the end—in effect, to become a survivalist, working on one's own 
bunker.

The other choice is to commit to the possibility of a decent future for 
the whole human community, and to work as one can with others to make 
that future possible and real. But the work to be done is of a 
particular kind: it is political work. Moreover, under the circumstances 
it must be radical political work.

This is not news to people. All around us people are founding 
organizations and formulating initiatives to fix what they know is 
broken. Formerly middle-class whites become Tea Partiers or worse 
because they know they have been robbed by—someone; they aren't terribly 
clear about who and are easily deceived about it, but they are not alone 
in that respect. Millenials too understand that they have been robbed, 
and they are infusing socialist, anti-fascist, and other movements with 
an urgent energy. Libertarians have a clear vision of the machinery of 
totalitarian governmental authority that has been building for a 
generation, while Whigs and others focus on the deep and abiding 
corruption that passes for business-as-usual with our elected officials.

Some of these groups are, like the Green Party, committed to our 
Constitution and our democratic institutions, and some are not. This is 
a real dividing line. But what is most important, what is indeed unique 
about the Green Party is that it is founded, like our Constitutional 
system, not on this or that program, policy, or "ism," but on an 
integrated philosophy and vision of good self-government, one capable of 
encompassing the full spectrum of challenges we face. The Four Pillars 
of Grassroots Democracy, Social Justice, Non-Violence, and Ecological 
Wisdom are the roots from which the solutions we must have can actually 
grow.

Most people see the same problems, but not the same solutions. This is 
as true inside the Green Party as outside it. If hope for the future 
rests on everyone agreeing beforehand to the same solutions, then hope 
is lost. We cannot rationally suppose that socialists and libertarians, 
vegans and ethical omnivores, urbanites and farmers, business people and 
artists, atheists and religious, will somehow find the magic formula 
that fits every vision so well that there is nothing left to fall out 
over. Never going to happen. Nor should it.

We must recognize that ideological diversity is also a value—a 
strength—and that the future belongs to those who can come together 
around an _institutional_ commitment to core values. The future belongs 
to those who can muster the strength of character to place their losses 
alongside their victories on the same shelf, as trophies of a career 
spent fighting the good fight. The future belongs to those who carry the 
petitions on the street-corners, who write and answer the emails, who 
schlepp to meetings and cast a thoughtful vote. The future belongs to 
those who argue their case with passion, but who, after the vote is 
taken, set their passion aside and link arms in comradeship and equality.

The future belongs to those who commit to their humanity—and to everyone 
else's. I am a Green because I like to look in the mirror occasionally, 
without being ashamed of what I see. It doesn't then matter whether, on 
that day, I have won or lost.

Although the Green movement is global, and we are affiliated with the 
Green Party of the United States, our work is near at hand, in Virginia, 
and in our locals. At our summit in August we affirmed that our focus 
should be on building our locals as robust organizations in their own 
right, and I believe this is the most important work we can do. When a 
Fredericksburg or a Blacksburg or a Richmond or a Virginia Beach begin 
to see Greens among their elected officials, among their fellow citizens 
at local government meetings, and to hear what Greens have to say and 
how they view the future for their communities, then we will begin to 
achieve the future we seek. From that foundation we will assert 
meaningful influence on the state and on the nation.

The strength of the GPUS is in its constituent state parties and 
caucuses, the strength of the state party is in its locals, and the 
strength of the local is in its people. My take on the troubles that 
have riven the national party and, to a much lesser extent, caused 
turmoil in our state party, is that they result from a failure to 
remember this principle. It is precisely the Pillar of Grassroots 
Democracy. When people are in positions of leadership at the state or 
national level for very long, they inevitably tend to embody the 
institution in themselves. It is from this vantage that some begin to 
feel entitled to maintain a disputatious posture, and before long the 
poison of discord and factionalism begins to spread.

For this reason, my primary focus as co-chair has been, first, to reform 
our party to its original shape, as a federation of locals, with each 
local having an equal voice in the state organization. The locals cannot 
thrive when the state party becomes the province of a handful of strong 
personalities perennially running the show. Second, I have sought to 
support and elevate new voices in the party, so that our cadre of 
leaders and committed contributors is as large and diverse as possible.

I anticipate that at our meeting in two weeks we will elect outstanding 
new people to key positions both in our state offices and as delegates 
to our national party.

I'm not going anywhere, mind you. I'll be working in Lynchburg on our 
own local, and as well lending my experience and knowledge to the 
running of the state and national parties. But in the future I envision 
for the Green Party of Virginia, I am a bit player at most.

And so I want to end with thanking most of all every new member of our 
party, and to say that in you our real hope now rests. Us oldsters will 
be marching right alongside you, but the reins are in your hands now. 
May the wind be at your back.

Sincerely,

Sid

************

NOTES

1. 
http://www.dailyimpact.net/2013/02/08/usda-foresees-collapse-of-agriculture/
2. 
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/society-will-collapse-by-2040-due-to-catastrophic-food-shortages-says-study-10336406.html
3. 
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jan/04/oceans-suffocating-dead-zones-oxygen-starved
4. 
https://www.wwf.org.uk/updates/crisis-global-oceans-populations-marine-species-halve-size-1970
5. http://www.dw.com/en/plankton-decline-hits-marine-food-chain/a-19162596
6. http://www.globalissues.org/article/75/world-military-spending
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_deployments
8. 
http://thehill.com/policy/defense/359501-overseas-wars-have-cost-us-43-trillion-since-2001-report
9. 
https://www.thenation.com/article/the-new-cold-war-is-already-more-dangerous-than-was-its-predecessor/
10 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature24672
11. 
http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2012/11/18/Climate-change-report-warns-dramatically-warmer-world-this-century
12. https://act.represent.us/sign/the-problem
13. 
https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/trump-isnt-another-hitler-he-s-another-obama-51ea7db498b4
14. 
http://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/352929-trump-and-obama-have-plenty-in-common-on-american-foreign-policy
15. 
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/05/15/u-s-voter-turnout-trails-most-developed-countries/
16. 
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-supporters-appear-to-be-misinformed-not-uninformed/
17. 
https://www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/john-weeks/rising-authoritarian-wave
18. 
http://www.occupy.com/article/letter-american-left-antifa-not-your-friend
19. 
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/80-percent-of-us-adults-face-near-poverty-unemployment-survey-finds/
20. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-36116166

********************
B. Sidney Smith
GPVA, Co-chair
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