Letter from Slim Wolfe
Politics – November 2005 – Colorado Central Magazine
Editor:
There comes a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick, that you can no longer even tacitly take part – and you put your bodies on the gears, on the wheels and levers….
More or less verbatim, these were the words which sparked the first major student sit-in at an American University, back in 1964. The speaker was a 21-year-old philosophy major whose name is hardly remembered these days.
Those words led to 800 arrests which galvanized student bodies across the nation into actions in defense of civil rights workers and against the Vietnam War. So it’s rather ironic to read in these pages that George Sibley, who in the folly of his youth withheld the war portion of his taxes, now in the wisdom of his age and institutional tenure lines up with Martha Quillen and no doubt the majority out there who now believe in the vote-and-pay-taxes approach. Pie in the sky when you die, if you ask me.
If vote-and-pay-taxes was the solution, it would have been solved long ago, whatever it is. People have been voting and paying taxes all over the world and pretending it’s democracy for quite some time. Representative constituent assemblies failed to prevent the rise of Hitler, Stalin, Mugabe … or the massacres of My Lai and Fallujah. Nor will they prevent the melting of the polar ice caps, if Americans have their way.
On the other hand, a recent editorial call for revolution which appeared in the Crestone Eagle seemed a little bit specious to me. Editor Kizzen Laki, for whom I have great respect, framed her call based on loss of constitutional civil rights, for the most part, when it’s painfully obvious that the only right Americans give a damn about is the right to more buttons on their remotes, and more petrol for their ATV’s so they can bring home their yearly elk without ever getting off their duffs.
The idea that Nigerians might have a right to protect their farmlands from the ravages of Shell Oil, for example, will never come up for a vote here. Most Americans will never have full information on which to base either a vote or a revolution.
If the news did ever get out, for example, about five hundred New Orleans jail detainees still missing out of several thousand locked up amidst the rising waters, most people would just change the channel. Radical actions nowadays seem to consist of would-be revolutionaries dashing around after consulting the most recent text message on their cellphones, and they don’t seem to be having much impact.
So it gives me great satisfaction to withhold most of my would-be involvement with our so-called democracy. Like Sibley in his younger days, I don’t make enough to owe taxes anyway, nor have I paid in enough to reap Social Security when I hit 62, in less than four years.
If I still have enough backbone and a little gas can still be found, I may still be able to drag in enough firewood from our federal forests to keep warm through the winters. If they still allow farmers to sell wheat to non-corporate entities I may still be able to bake bread. If I think I can stand the humidity and lower elevation, however, I might just buy a one-way ticket to Venezuela and be part of their revolution. Seems like their elected officials may be much more responsive to society’s needs, which may be because their society is poor enough to have its priorities straight.
Moreover, their politicians are sharp enough to have pulled off the best bits of international grandstanding in recent memory: first, the offers of planeloads of doctors, generators, etc. in the wake of Katrina, and second, the offer of free fuel for school buses and furnaces in the poorer neighborhoods of Chicago and Boston. Bite the bullet, mah feller Americans, our great banana republic society is in dire straits and in need of a handout from some pinko dark-skinned south-of-the-border tyrant to keep our working-classes warm this winter, and we better hope Pat Robinson doesn’t assassinate him first.
Here in the San Luis Valley after a decade of citizen agitation we still get nerve-rattling Air Force training overflights – not seeming to avoid disturbing Moffat School, as duly requested through painstakingly democratic channels. So am I some sort of gloomy prophet? Nah, call me a gloomy chronicler. Maybe there’s pie somewhere up in the sky, but there sure ain’t much intelligent life down below.
Slim Wolfe
Villa Grove
