I’ve never actually made a New Year’s Resolution. Those resolutions I have made only had a habit of fluttering out of bar-room windows on ensuing Saturday nights during that magical time between midnight and three in the morning when indulgences can be purchased for the price of a beer, a wink, or a basket of wings. And most resolutions are woefully narcissistic anyway: I’ll quit smoking, I’ll lose the spare tire, and, per the Commandments, I’ll do my darnedest to stop coveting my neighbor’s goods, wife, and ass. But by and large, I’ve never really been much interested in a New, Improved Me. And at my age, I’m basically a greased pig doing 180s on the frozen downward slope to the grave anyway.

But I am very interested indeed in a new, improved state, country, and globe, because-despite the rose-tinted images that trawled across your TV screen on New Year’s Eve-we’re rapidly turning all three into godforsaken shitholes….

So while scanning Facebook, brimming over with the usual resolutions, I was cheered by what my comrade Adam wrote on his page: “Let’s make a New Year’s Resolution to collectively address our corruption crisis in Massachusetts.” Which brings to my mind images of the guillotine on Beacon Street, the winecasks of Newbury Street liberated and free love on the Common-but I think he has something else in mind, in advocating that we all start by educating ourselves about the legal morass we’re funding. And I’m down with that. For now.  

Because I think what he’s getting at is that we can resolve to stop being played for fools. That’s been a common refrain since the Republic was whelped, but the stakes are getting Jack-and-the-beanstalk high: shrinking polar ice caps, mass extinction, stuff like that. The legislator with her metaphorical hand in the till (or,in post-millenial Boston, stuffing wads of cash into her bra) is one thing, and apparently something of a tradition in Massachusetts politics (I’m from New Jersey, so I wouldn’t know about stuff like that); but there’s  another form of corruption that’s far more insiduous, far more dangerous-and perfectly legal. And it’s the reason why, as this dismal year ends, progressives are wringing their hands and shaking their heads and wondering, gee-what the hell happened to healthcare reform, to ending the wars, to gay marriage, to a reduced military budget-oh, and, by the way, to all our goddamn money? What happened to hope? What happened to change? To “yes, we can?”  

What happened was, of course … nothing. Cuz there ain’t nothin gonna change within a system that allows corporations access where the citizenry has none, both in and beyond the Commonwealth. Remember: the lobbyists for the mega-corporations are equal-opportunity campaign donors, rendering elections nothing but cosmetic contests waged over culture war issues: the NRA  and Focus on the Family throw money at the GOP, NARAL and the People for the American Way give to Obama. God, guns, gays and abortion become the centerpiece of national campaigns. But the fact is, no matter how fervent your position on any of the above issues, the fate of the Republic doesn’t hinge on any of them.  But to whom do the pharma lobby and the insurance lobby and the agricultural lobby and the defense lobbyists and the investment firms give their support?  Right: both parties and both candidates. Meaning that they can’t fucking lose . And public citizens can’t win in that environment. And trillion-dollar bailouts and feverish defense spending and bombing the living hell out of third-world countries and carbon emissions and soil depletion-those are the kinds of things that will destroy states. Destroy cultures. Destroy civilizations.

Now I’m hoping that each and every one of you personally had a healthy, prosperous, merry old year. And I do hope that next year you all go to the gym regularly and eat organic spaghetti and earn oodles of righteous money and make love at least once daily. But looking beyond our own tangled, sweaty, bedsheets, this was another ugly boil of a year-we’ve seen ourselves sold down the river on healthcare, finance reform, energy, climate justice, and, of course, the God-damned wars. Here in Massachusetts, we’re treated to the same dreary parade of corrupt lawmakers, cuts to essential services, and an administration that wants to rescusitate the state economy via … casinos. And next year promises to be even uglier, more dismal. Unless.

Now, the web site CommonDreams sent me a fundraising plea on the final week of December. (They were hardly alone). Their conclusions regarding the past decade really struck me because it was startlingly obvious that that none of the “slow motion trends” they describe are going to be reversed-or even slowed down-by the current Democratic regime:

“But even more disturbing were the slow-motion trends [of the past decade]: Global warming. Foreign policies driven by fear. Too-big-to-fail corporations increasingly dominating our political system. Growing disparity between rich and poor. The privatization of our schools, prisons and military.”

There’s much more to add, of course, but you get the gist of it. So much for change. None of this goes away when the Democrats take control of Congress and the White House. At all. It’s the same old shit. And it’s bankrupting your country, your state, and your schools and threatening to make vast swaths of your planet unlivable. And pulling the sheets back up over you’re head isn’t going to make any of it go away.

Watching the documentary Manufacturing Consent two nights ago, I heard Noam Chomsky discussing the fact that otherwise goodhearted, decent Americans typically refuse to take responsibility for the actions of their government. That’s one thing when the Bushies were running the show-but quite another when the very people you voted into office are freewheelin’ down the very same highway to hell. It’s a truism that Americans seem to feel that showing up at the polls for a few minutes once every fours years is about as far as their duties as a citizen extends. Then it’s back to the trance state of fantasy football, American Idol, videogames, and the myriad other forms of escapism that keep us firmly in our places.

But I’ll admit–it’s hard to ask people to do more. Looking over my Facebook “friends” list, I’m struck by how many on there have eschewed highly profitable careers in lieu of working on the side of the angels: I see schoolteachers, documentarians, alternative medicine practitioners, theatre troupers, news analysts, disability rights activists, small farmers-most of whom struggle to make ends meet, who don’t get a whole lotta respect-but who are proud to operate outside the mainstream. They have dignity. And others, who may not have the opportunity to work in non-profit environments, but who spend their evenings and weekend tutoring immigrants, working in soup kitchens, joining  CSAs, and otherwise making their own communities more just and healthy places in which to live.

But-and here’s the big but-these efforts aren’t gonna be worth jackshit without the systemic changes needed to get back on the rails, and that ain’t gonna happen without your active involvement in the political arena. I don’t necessarily mean storming the statehouse with pitchforks, torches, and barrels of boiling pitch … though a man may dream, no?

Now, admittedly, the personal is indeed the political. When you turn off the mainstream media, when you buy locally-grown foods, when you deposit your paycheck in a co-op bank, when you buy union-made, when you smoke homegrown, you’re acting as a critical moral agent. You’re a better person for having done so, and your example is going to be transformative as well. But on the other hand, the political requires a degree of personal re-investment that goes beyond changing our damn “lifestyles.”  To take one example-if each and every one of us changes all our lightbulbs, inflates all of our tires, and installs solar panels on our homes-we aren’t gonna reverse global warming trends. As in at all. That change can only come by exerting the political pressure which, to date, we have shown ourselves either uninterested in or incapable of.

Or, perhaps …  afraid of. In some progressive circles, “power” has a bad rap. We’ve become such a polite, deferential society that proselytizing is considered bad manners, and any attempt to wrest and exercise power is considered anathema. “I don’t want anyone telling me what to do, so how can I tell others what to do?” Screw that. The fact is that, like nature, power abhors a vacuum, and will gravitate towards whoever can seize it. And someone will.

Chomsky’s remarks, and our situation today reminds me of the preface G. B. Shaw appended to his magnificent play Heartbreak House, damning the literary class, the artistic class-the enlightened class whom he labels with the play’s title-for eschewing the dismal, dreary, dirty work of politicking (which is, actually, nothing of the sort):

“The nice people could read; some of them could write; and they were the sole repositories of culture who had social opportunities of contact with our politicians, administrators, and newspaper proprietors, or any chance of sharing or influencing their activities. But they shrank from that contact. They hated politics. They did not wish to realize Utopia for the common people: they wished to realize their favorite fictions and poems in their own lives…. Heartbreak House was quite familiar with revolutionary ideas on paper. It aimed at being advanced and freethinking, and hardly ever went to church or kept the Sabbath except by a little extra fun at weekends.”

The upshot? “In short, power and culture were in separate compartments. The barbarians were not only literally in the saddle, but on the front bench in the House of commons, with nobody to correct their incredible ignorance of modern thought and political.”  And that meant the horrowshow that was World War I: mass slaughter on a scale never seen before or since, to no discernable purpose.

Our forbears in the sixties had no compunction about their goals. Think “Black Power.” “Power to the People.”  Either we grab it it, or someone else will, and the powers-that-be sure aren’t going to dispense with it out of the goodness of their hearts. There’s a war going on-no joke. And we may be out-moneyed, and we may be out-lobbied; but as Jim Morrison used to growl, “they got the guns, but we got the numbers.”  

So make your New Year’s resolutions to quit smoking, stop drinking bottled water, to get a bicycle, go the gym, buy local, to improve yourself and your community. But consider, too, the importance-the incredible, profound importance-of involving yourself in the political arena. In other words, don’t delude yourself into thinking your lonely efforts will save the world-it takes organization. But don’t delude yourself into thinking that existing organizations will take care of the problems facing us, either-it takes individuals to make a movement. And don’t delude yourself into thinking you won’t make a difference-don’t make a mockery of those who marched in the streets of Selma, and, decades later, Seattle. They overcame. We can too.

Twentieth-century paradigms have failed us. As we Americans sit at the pinnacle of civilization, surrounded by our mountains of accumulated stuff, armed to the teeth, we sit too at the very edge of a precipice. 2001 hinted at how truly vulnerable we are; 2008 and ’09 drove home that lesson with a vengeance. The security state isn’t; the wealthiest nation on earth isn’t-and it certainly isn’t the healthiest, best-educated, or happiest, either. The land of the free and home of the brave is neither. And our two-party, corporate-owned democracy … isn’t either.

Resolve, then, to stop settling. Stop settling for lies. Stop settling for “reform” that is nothing of the sort. Stop voting for the lesser of two evils–you’re AMERICANS, for godssake–demand your freaking birthright.

Resolve to join with those whose vision may still be a bit misty, whose strategies aren’t wholly defined, whose actions aren’t always effectual-because we need your vision, we need your strategic input, and we need your bodies in action. The last century … it didn’t really turn out as planned, no? We’re ten years into this one, and it ain’t shapin’ up too well. Resolve to play your part in shaping in it. Resolve to put your SELF on the goddamn back burner for a year and to-quite bluntly-save the world. Because if you don’t, your world, your country and yourself are gonna be looking mighty raggedy-ass come New Years 2020.

I started by saying that I haven’t ever made a New Year’s resolution. But some things, they’re worth committing too, and maybe the start of a new year isn’t such a bad time to make those kind of commitments. So I was thinking–and damn if I don’t feel all nervous, just like my high school self asking the girl of my dreams to the prom… but I was thinking, that, well … maybe you’d join me in resolving that this year, together, we’ll dedicate ourselves to transforming the political landscape of our state-and our nation. To fostering the green movement we espouse not merely in our homes and our communities, but in our statehouses and executive offices. To seizing the power that’s been traditionally been withheld from the people, not in order to wield it, but in order to disperse it. Whaddya say?  

For me, the most logical place to start has been joining the Green-Rainbow Party, and playing an active role in it. We all need to continue working on the critical projects we are, but uniting under a single banner that serves as the electoral arm of our movement strikes me as the most viable way to access the political power that’s a corollary to our personal work, so I hope you’ll at least consider that possibility yourself.

My own resolution, then: to work much harder, much smarter, much longer on behalf of the Party that to my mind best represents the Green movement and stands the single best chance of establishing our movement politically.  To give it no less than everything I can.

Peace, friends, and let’s earn ourselves a happy new year.

–Michael Horan