Are you sick of it yet? Sick of what you ask? Doesn’t matter, are you sick of it yet? If you are then perhaps you are ready to be an agent of change. Real change only comes with change at the top. And that means changing government. Some of you maybe thinking changing who you vote for or staging a revolution, unfortunately those actions most often create, to quote my military brother SOSDP!
OK I digress here, I have never, and I mean never searched something on the internet and gotten no relevant responses. Not Google, not Bing, not even DuckDuckGo. Almost makes me proud. SOSDP means Same Old Shit Different Pile. As in new commander same KP duty.
So if voting, protest, rioting, and even revolution have little impact on real change what are we to do. I read this article about how Ireland attacked difficult change and it was like getting hit by Lightning! Basically they create a citizen assembly where 99 people + 1 a chair person are selected at random out of the population to hash out thorny issues and then make recommendations to government. Now you might scoff at the weakness of “recommendation” but when you look at it in more detail its stronger than it seems.
Ireland has a population of about 5 million, so the size of a reasonable US state. So we should look at the US as 50 Irelands for this conversation. In the US we would need every state to have an assembly and then we will have an assembly of assemblies. That would mean we would start with 500 randomly selected people from across the united states building consensus on what action to take on issues such as police racial bias and violence. This consensus recommendation would be made in public so everyone would know what was agreed as effective action.
OK, so maybe you like this change in government, maybe not, regardless this is an example of how real change happens not SOSDP. If you want real change you have to change how the government works. Things like Campaign Finance Reform, Electoral college changes, eliminating gerrymandering, this is the shit that affects change.
Government fights any change that shifts power. Politicians are basically interviewing for their jobs every day and they like to know who is actually interviewing them. A change like this completely upends their current understanding and shifts it to unknown constituents. Worse yet, it takes power away from key donors who will now be less incented to donate to their campaigns as politicians will have to follow the consensus more often than not. What really makes this powerful, we can simply decide to make this change ourselves and give a equal voice to all, no permission needed. Any one of us can start a citizens’ assembly. Randomly select participants in your district from the voter role, assemble by connecting everyone through slack or discord, pick an issue, build consensus, document your discussions and consensus and then make a public recommendation. What ever you do, do not pick your assembly based on like minded people, it has to be random or your assembly will be invalidated by its bias.
The Tao of Todd 