Apology?Re: [Peace-discussion] Re: Coalition with Libertarians Unless they Are Openly...

[David Strand]

For those who don't know me, I am co-chair of the
Lavender Greens in Minnesota and alternate delegate to
the GPUS from Lavender Greens.

As someone who has spent much of my life energy
working on issues of lgbtiq liberation and equality,
which are disparate but both necessary things,  
if I can sit down with members of the Constitution
Party here in Minnesota to work together for
legislation and public policy to support different
treatment of so called "third" parties in our state
under our state's electoral laws when the Constitution
Party in MN includes mandatory capital punishment for
the "crime" of homosexuality in their state party
platform, I don't think I am a narrow partisan
unwilling to work with others from other parties to
achieve common goals.

I have been attacked by many local glbtiq activists
for my strong advocacy of resident alien voting rights
because they fear that most immigrants to Minnesota,
and particularly our cities, are far more
"conservative" than the rest of the local population
when it comes to glbtiq rights but I find their
arguments that others rights should stop at the point
where they disagree with me as well as their
stereotyping basely antidemocratic and in opposition
to grassroots democracy and respect for diversity.

Conversely, I have been attacked by some Greens as
perhaps disloyal because I carpooled and shared rides
to Pride Festivals in disparate parts of Minnesota
with the chairs of the Stonewall DFL(as democrats are
called here) and/or Log Cabin Republicans.  We were
able to talk in all cases about stuff we could work on
together and set aside our differences in interest of
reducing our collective carbon footprint and saving a
little of our individual and collective financial
resources.

LGBTQ Dems and Reps have asked me at times to come to
events within their parties and raise the questions
they were afraid to ask for fear of intraparty
political fallout and it's generally worked to Green
advantage for me to oblige as well as to the benefit
of the cause of lgbtiq equality.

I believe partially as a result of simply being
cordial, Greens are included in all the nonpartisan
glbtiq groups candidate surveys here in Minnesota
which deal with state and local politics.  We are
included in caucus and get out the vote efforts in the
glbtiq community and our candidates are given equal
access to trainings, etc. and these groups have
generally moved away from endorsing candidates to
dispersing information on the candidates positions in
which case we generally come out smelling like a rose.


So Libertarians, Socialist, Communists, Republicans,
Democrats, Independence party, Constitution Party,
I've worked with 'em all on common goals and
maintained my integrity as a Green and committment as
a Green partisan.   If anything, these experiences
have reinforced and matured and secured my committment
to Greens,the Green Party, and the 10 key values we
hold to and I believe in turn strengthened the party.

I know all politics are to some extent local.  Here it
would be great to work with Libertarians to the extent
they still exist as such but they've mostly been
absorbed into the ideological free for all called the
Independence Party which seems a collective for
candidates in search of a vehicle with little coherent
ideology of their own.

In Minneapolis and several other cities, Greens are
the party that the Dems compete against for elected
office.  There isn't a single elected Republican in
the 5th congressional district for example, but there
are a fair number of Greens including the top vote
getter in a citywide election in the history of the
city of Minneapolis, Annie Young.

I wouldn't kick anyone out of a genuine effort towards
peace regardless of party and would have no qualms
about working about people toward a common goal just
because their politics or difference.

BUT that doesn't mean eliding the political
differences on many other issues as if they are
unimportant as I felt John was appearing to want to do
in this situation.

As he was merely speaking of working and reaching out
to antiwar activists including Libertarians who have
become fans of Ron Paul, that's no problem and I
apologize to John, as it appears that is his intent.

A deeper political alliance, I have my doubts and
concerns which may be oft repeated, but are oft
repeated because frankly they are true to the ideology
of the other.

As far as nonviolence, I understand that state
violence can come from the imposition of radical
change for ideological purposes by the state without
regard for the impact on real human beings.

I lived in a very diverse community that was a
wonderful place in Michigan when then Gov. Enlger
decide to cut more than 90,000 people, mostly adults
without dependent children, off the state's welfare
rolls with the stroke of a pen.  There was no
forewarning, no transition plan, no tapering of
assistance to enable people to transition, just an
abrupt renting apart of that part of the state's
social safety net.

The University of Michigan began a study to track what
happened to these people over the following 5 years
and it soon became apparent that a shockingly high
number of these people, having overwhelmed all private
charity sources avialable as the need was greater than
they could provide even in good times let alone
without warning that the wave was coming at a time
when they were already overtaxed, these people were
literally dying due to lack of food or shelter to the
tune of several thousand people over the course of the
study above and beyond the numbers who would have died
without the change.

The policy change, and particularly the callous way it
was implemented killed more americans than did 9-11 or
the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have done to date
within just one state!

But of course they were mostly people invisible to our
society most of the time anyway.

My low income neighborhood saw a dramatic spike in the
crime rate and homelessness.

Being in W. Michigan, the regions faith communities
tend to be highly along the lines of christian
calvinists with an emphasis on preordination of a
particular brand who believed if you were wealthy, God
had foreordained it to be so and if you were poor,
likewise.  So even most letters in the local paper
from clergy, people who are often turned to elswhere
in times of need, said thing like "this is good
because the "good" book says -He who shall not work
shall not eat."

Whether your beliefs where theistic at all, let alone
if they were ro were not christian or of that brand of
christianity, that influence was so culturally
pervasive as to shape the social and political
realities of the area.

So making peace and creating a nonviolent world to me
is about more than war but also about how ideology is
implemented into policy including social and economic
policy  AND addressing and preventing the inevitable
violence inherent in both regulated and unregulated
capitalism particularly when practiced without a
safety net.  On that note I find Greens aligned with
some, but not all, of the beliefs of the socialists.

As per the comments about Petra Kelly in Germany in
the 70's in the excellent piece Aimee forwarded, I do
think there is some particular resonance with Green
thinking in Minnesota culture and I find it
interesting that Petra Kelly spent time working with
the Minnesota congressional delegation in DC as well
as in Minnesota working on campaigns before she moved
to Germany where she eventually to founded Die
Gruenen.  But who knows, maybe that is just the large
number of residents here of German and Scandinavian
descent who keep in touch with what's current in the
"old country", I don't know.

Joseph Beuys and other German modern and contemporary
artists who happen to be Greens often have major
exhibits here more than elsewhere in the U.S. due
largely to that historic connection and most Greens
here have been unaware of the wealth of political art
by artists who are european Greens at local museums
and in collections locally until a local green who was
an artist started making us more aware.

I've also lost jobs, including a union job, for public
opposing the first Iraq war and refusing to where a
yellow ribbon on the job as I felt it implied support
of the war.

We all have our "war" stories or stories of struggle
or wouldn't be here.

SO, if simply working together to end the war in
certain ways is what your talking about, of course!

As far as deeper political alliances with
Libertarians, I think there might be more there to be
worked out though there certainly are other areas of
public policy we might want to work on together.


David Strand


--- a.gronowicz@att.net wrote:

> Obviously.  I support this and always have practiced
> this.  But the issue is the pushing of Republican
> Ron Paul on this list and the lame defense of his
> politics offered.
> 
> David offered a very convincing and thorough
> refutation.
> 
> Tony 



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