Excellent article. But now what can I as an individual do? I've already written congressmen, the president, etc. I'm on Medicare; my wife is younger, healthy, unemployed and uninsured, so our problem is not as onerous as many other Americans'. What can I do to avoid writing a check to a private healthcare provider?
What method of tax resistance can I practice? What mode of civil disobedience would be effective? I've already clashed with many "authorities" who are part of what Amster points out as the American modus operandi:
"it is beyond peradventure that you cannot force people to be free, or liberate them at the point of a smart bomb, or impose democracy upon them. You can't turn people good by deploying practices of torture and punishment as a matter of standing policy. Enlightenment doesn't come from enslavement, and "arbeit macht frei" is nothing more than a cruel joke. Likewise, the health of the people will not be improved by forcing us to work for insurance companies that will continue their essential monopoly over our access to medical treatment."
The short list of suggestions doesn't take into account the tremendous effort I and people like me have already done in the way of community organization, street demonstrations, letter writing, etc. Amster's list, community-building, local organizing, people power, self-sufficiency, civil disobedience, nonviolent praxis, opting out, do-it-yourself ethics, mutual aid, positive thinking, holding a vision, creative interruption, highlighting exemplars, is all about difficult, time-consuming efforts. What can an individual do?
UNITY PROGRESS COMMENTS
An individual can't do squat in my honest opinion. That's why I keep wishing that non-right wing people can "un-niche" themselves from a zillion web sites and movements and organizations and unify into an umbrella political party / organization that could be marketed on a level playing field with the Democrats and Republicans. Like Solidarity in Poland or like New Democratic Party in Canada and so on and so forth.
In Europe, everyone knows it's all about unity, but not so in the US.
I mean, you can still be into those individual sites and organizations and little parties, you can still be that big fish in a small pond, but if you don't also unify with the millions of others, you aren't going to get very far at all in the big picture.
To oversimplify a little, the unification process is that an umbrella organization is founded and then the call goes out for the zillions of existing and futile organizations to pledge allegiance and support to the umbrella.
Unity equals progress, thus the name of my micro spec on the net:
The above guest comment and Unity Progress comment was in response to this excellent article.
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