Back in the early 1980s I was what you'd call politically active — you know, taking part in demonstrations against things like Cruise Missile Testing in Canada and apartheid in South Africa. After a while I pretty much stopped, except for once in the late '90s when I took part in a demonstration against the government of Ontario, as the infighting between the factions just started to get on my nerves. All I have to show for those days is a file somewhere in Ottawa classifying me as a security risk, and a healthy respect for the organizational abilities of the right wing.
In retrospect I realize that the real problem with political action on the left is that we were always reacting to what someone else was doing. We're against this and against that, but it's not often we say what we are for. On the few occasions when that has occurred (Henry Morgenthaler's fight for a woman's right to an abortion and the fight to legalize same sex marriages in Canada), when we have stood up and said we are for this, we have won.
Instead of ever starting a campaign and mobilizing forces to propose a new way of doing something in line with our way of thinking, the left continues to let the right set the agenda all over North America on any of the issues we consider important. It never used to be that way; the left used to set goals for social change and work to meet them, from the labour movements of the early twentieth century that secured fair pay and safe working conditions to the voter registration drives of the early 1960s and the ensuing civil rights campaigns in the Southern United States.
Watching the DVD version of the documentary Ballot Measure 9, a filmed record of an attempt in 1992 to pass a ballot measure in Oregon that would have stripped homosexuals of basic civil rights, brought that all home to me again. It was the same basic story that is played out across the United States every election year, where conservative Christian "citizens" groups work to pass anti-homosexual or anti-affirmative action measures in the hopes of imposing their will on a community.
In 1992 the United States were coming off twelve years of ultra-conservative government and the religious right was feeling its oats after having their puppet Ronald Reagan in power for eight years, and his milksop successor George Bush Sr. for four. In that time they had been able to promote an agenda claiming AIDS was just retribution against gays, women were subservient to men, that the church and state shouldn't be separate, and all the other rigamarole we've come to associate with their fascistic mind set . (Fascism is the imposition, by a central authority, of a single belief system that all must adhere to.)
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