Ten years ago, Green Mass Group issued a writing challenge based on Rosa Clemente’s powerful yet unconvincing quote, that “the Green Party is no longer the alternative, the Green Party is the imperative.”
“IS the Green Party indeed the imperative? Is it fundamentally or uniquely important? Why or why not?” That was the question we put to our dear readers, but only a couple of folks took the bait.
One short response was “it’s imperative to have an alternative in the USA, to have a vision of a different way of organizing ourselves politically and economically and ecologically. I’ve seen too many people suffer under our current system, too many left out. I want to see a system, a vision, a proposal where everyone is included, healthcare for everyone, housing and education for everyone, clean water and healthy food for everyone.”
I answered it here, in the affirmative, as part of my case for why voting for Jill Stein in 2016 was an important vote, consequences be damned.
“As we enter more deeply into the Anthropocene — the geological epoch defined by the devastating human footprint on the planet — the increasingly global struggle to preserve and restore the living systems that we co-evolved with calls for a global political movement that is up to the task,” I argued. “That movement is represented most convincingly by the global green movement and Green Parties throughout the world. This international coalition for a unified people’s globalization is the single best hope there is for democratically taking the reins of power away from the politically corrupt and morally bankrupt ruling class dominating our shared planet.“
Back then, Jill was warning U.S. voters that “we’re not just deciding what kind of world we’ll have, but whether we’ll have a world or not, going forward.”
Ten years later, it is haunting how much truer those words feel.
A lot has changed since 2016, including an unprecedented political awakening in this country in significant part due to a powerful surge of democratic socialist or social democrat politics as part of Bernie Sanders’ “political revolution”. The one he checked at the door not once, but twice, never to go back for it. Socialism has overtaken capitalism in popularity with young Americans. And the world is on fire, with ugly U.S. imperialism lashing out in increasingly grotesque and desperate ways. The Green New Deal was briefly stolen from the Greens, and then placed gently and quietly under some bills on a messy desk, perhaps close to where Bernie left his political revolution.
Despite the Democratic Party’s sheer worthlessness, the question remains—is the Green Party indeed an imperative for our times?
I believe that our ability to answer that question lucidly and definitively, whether you believe so or not, will help all of us figure out where to best put our energies and turn our visions and values into lived realities.
As Bayo Akomolafe says, “the times are urgent: let’s slow down.” We are living in interesting times, where time is of the essence, so we must slow down. We cannot waste more time. Which means we must stop spending precious time and energy on the wrong things, and start getting things right.
I invite you, dear reader, to consider this writing challenge as an opportunity for you to develop your own clarity on why, how, when, and where to develop the collective agency we need to break through to a society aligned with life itself, while we still can.
As we put it in 2016:
Green Mass Group wants YOU to rise to this challenge. We encourage writing submissions of all types – from naysayers to diehard Greens, from one sentence answers to 5,000 word essays. We will publish the best submissions as standalone pieces. Feel free to create an account here so you can create your own post and comment on others. Or simply email us with your submission. We may lightly edit for grammar and other corrections.