In the wake of the recent presidential election, I hear people talking about building a movement to end the electoral college. They say it dates back to the slave days and gives small rural states too much power. If you are looking for the next stupid, waste-of-time money and effort to throw your life at, here it is. You can join those folks at “Move to Amend,” working for a constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United decision, on that treadmill of futility.
Just face facts. The US government works the way it was intended to work, for the people it was intended to work for. You are not among those people. You are just another amber shaft of grain in their vast plantation. Your life, measured in rent checks, mortgage payments, health insurance premiums, student loan remittances and credit card payments, is their harvest. You are just livestock to them, and the planet is your overgrazed pasture. Your job is to devour the world and turn it into their money. That’s why we have a government, and that’s why we have the government we have.
When you think about it that way, Trump is the perfect president. He’s exactly what we deserve. Trump reflects our national character, because Trump is the kind of guy our culture rewards. Because we reward people like Trump, Trump is exactly the kind of guy our culture produces: greedy, small-minded, egotistical monsters with no respect for the truth, the law, or anyone but himself. Trump is what we’ve become, because Trump is what we produce.
It’s deeper than politics and bigger than the Constitution. It’s about things we believe so deeply that we don’t even realize we believe them, but everything we do reflects it. We inhabit a culture that destroys the environment and enslaves humanity to produce Trumps. That’s what we do here. We rape the land for its resources, wipe out its biodiversity, foul the air, pollute the water and enslave the people, to produce Trumps, and Bushes, and Clintons. Even if Clinton had won the election, we’d still be producing Trumps.
Making Trumps consumes our lives. Millions of people die, and millions more suffer in poverty and slavery to produce a single Trump. Who needs more Trumps? We already have more Trump than we ever wanted and Trump doesn’t do anything for anyone but Trump. In 500 years, our American culture has brought global ecosystems to the brink of collapse, while it enslaved and impoverished people all over the world, for the sole purpose of producing Trumps.
This culture leaves a trail of dead bodies, environmental devastation and poverty in its wake, while it produces Trumps, Clintons and Bushes. You won’t change that by ending the Electoral College. You won’t change that by overturning “Citizens United.” The whole system is corrupt and bankrupt to its core. The whole culture, our whole way of looking at things and of thinking about things and of doing things, has collapsed into Trump. So take a good look at him.
Does Trump make you proud? Is Trump worth sacrificing the planet for? Is Trump worth enslaving your children for? Do you want Trump to be your legacy? Or do you want to Dump Trump? If you want to save the planet, and if you want to save humanity from Trump and monsters like Trump, then Dump Trump, and dump the system that produces Trumps. Stand with the people standing against that corrupt system right now.
Stand with the culture that has endured, and continues to function for its members, without needing major reform. Stand with the culture that doesn’t produce Trumps, Clintons or Bushes. Stand with the people standing against the machine. Indigenous cultures have endured here for aeons without destroying the environment, and without the oppression, and violence that we’ve come to accept as normal in a culture dominated by Trumps, Clintons and Bushes.
Stand with the people who treat the Earth as sacred. Stand with the people who treat the fish as brethren, and the forest as family. Stand with the people who protect the water. Stand-up for indigenous people and indigenous sovereignty, and stand with the people of Standing Rock against the Dakota Access Pipeline.
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Postscript: Obviously I wrote this piece before the Army Corps of Engineers announced their decision to deny the permit necessary to complete the Dakota Access Pipeline. The decision is an enormous relief for the the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, but there will be more pipelines and other projects that threaten water supplies and indigenous sovereignty. Despite this historic victory, the social, political and cultural landscape remains the same, except for one thing. This time, the good guys won one for a change.
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John Hardin writes at Like You’ve Got Something Better to Do.