Guest AuthorThanks to modern pharmacology, to the eternal relief of couples everywhere, his erectile dysfunction may be due to decreased blood flow, not age, and treatable — or so the advertising claims.
And, happily, with judicious pill-popping they may be back in the sack to marital (or whatever) bliss, their only major fear being that an erection will last for more than four hours. (They should be so lucky!)
If only “electoral dysfunction” were so benign and easy to overcome.
Florida suffers from repeated perversions of the political process, guaranteed to persist for four years — or longer. Partly, it’s because of pervasive, never-ending, draconian political manipulations in Tallahassee, like gerrymandering districts, scrubbing voter rolls, reducing voting times, making it hard to get a voter I.D., keeping felons who served their time from voting.
As a result, radical candidates are routinely elected by overzealous, ideological minorities who impose agendas denying or curtailing the rights and benefits of significant segments of the population.
For example, Florida legislators have consistently reduced the rights of women. Since 1998, there has been a “war” on women’s health and reproductive rights through increased restrictions on abortion providers and the expansion of protections of a fetus, no matter how the mother may be harmed.
The state’s poor are always shafted, most recently because of Gov. Rick Scott and the Legislature. Now, 800,000 Floridians have been denied health insurance through Medicaid expansion.
The LGBT community has been treated as less than second-class. Former Gov. Jeb Bush did nothing to stop the passage of a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. And now, Attorney General Pam Bondi is fighting the recent challenge to it.
Florida seniors and retirees are routinely betrayed by their members of Congress who want to end their Social Security and Medicare benefits as we know them.
But the truth is, Tallahassee is only partly to blame. It may be a bitter pill to swallow, but, in Pogo’s words, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
Spineless, possibly self-hating, passive, silent, complacent, or just plain lazy and inept, Floridians seem to suffer from self-inflicted political impotence. To date, none of the affected groups has figured out how to take back their rights.
And yet, the cure is a simple prescription: boycotts. Fight capitalism-gone-bad with the only thing that matters in capitalism: money, specifically withholding it. The Florida economy would collapse without tourist dollars.
So, Florida’s women, and those men who feel their pain, should ask women not to spend their money in the state until it ends its war on them. The same goes for the LGBT community, the economically disadvantaged, seniors and retirees, and any number of others.
With the first successful boycott, watch elected officials fall all over themselves to right the wrongs they’ve enacted.
Stephen L. Goldstein is the author of “The Dictionary of American Political Bullshit” and “Atlas Drugged: Ayn Rand Be Damned.” He lives in Fort Lauderdale. Column courtesy of Context Florida.
One comment
Andrew Markoff
June 26, 2014 at 2:15 pm
You should perhaps focus more on the left than on the right. From what I’ve observed and from my own involvement in political activism, the left is continually determined to formulate circular firing squads. American consumers, let alone Floridians, are far more concerned with their own consuming and engaging in Twitter wars than in taking on the powerful in any legislature and those who fund political campaigns for their own benefit.
Some of the left never realizes that they think and act much more like American consumers than they do political activists. It’s just been so drilled into them throughout their lives that they don’t see it. I call them “Walmart Shoppers,” the irony being that they mostly hate Walmart and yet they perceive politics like they’re shopping in Walmart and believing that they can just choose the shiniest object off of the shelf rather than acting strategically and pragmatically towards incremental progress.
Just look at the Nan Rich situation, as a perfect example. Nan’s most vocal supporters appear to spend much of their time insulting and attacking other Democrats, and they can’t perceive how they’re just being destructive in a situation in which we are facing an extraordinarily rich and far-right incumbent who CANNOT be unseated because of leftist values and beliefs alone.
We have idealists on the left who are never willing to acknowledge how bad our situation really is politically (and legislatively) because they think like consumers and want to believe that nothing and nobody can corner them and strip them of their dignity and their ability to effect rapid and dramatic change. But, the situation is much worse than they want to believe it is.
Consumers won’t boycott. The left won’t strategize. Too many Americans and especially Floridians- who have now a long enough history as a right-to-work state scrambling for scraps and feeling not much allegiance at all to any community- think not like citizens but like consumers, so organized and sustained boycotting is, I think, pretty much impossible. What people should focus on is just getting anybody and everybody eligible to vote to just vote Democrat no matter what. That’s one basic, not particularly satisfying but very crucial first step. The left, however, insists on not perceiving voting Democrat as a means of getting a foot in the door of progress. To too many leftists activists, simply getting Democrats elected over Republicans is just too impure and too unsatisfying and too reliant on giving politicians political power.
This is all basically what happens when you have massive income disparities. The masses are left fighting one another for scraps of dignity and discount goods and the rest of us are too effete and removed to take the situation seriously enough to effect real and lasting change for a more genuine democracy and a more viable economy.
Comments are closed.